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http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

And will you be completely screwed if you have a Pentium D and a motherboard with a 945 (or 955) chipset?

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx? NewsId=13912
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121027,0 0.asp

I admire your fight, writing so much in reply to posts like this... But it's pretty much senseless, or maybe not since it probably gives those who read it more arguments to fight the senseless banther we are all used to hear about...

This has reminded me of this joke :)

My theory is - let's keep advancing science, let's get out of Earth in order for our species to be safe from some random cataclysm happening at this planet, and one day, if a god exists, maybe we'll know about him... Or maybe not. For all we know, we could be sentient beings in the newest game that god's playing :) Oh btw, if this guy is right, maybe some of us here will be able to witness this with some luck ;)

Of course, e.g. http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~eva/nethack/ways_to _die.html.

-without using some crappy 'BabelFish' layer

Ask any government that supports multiple official languages (Canada, Switzerland, ...). You translate into the other language(s) using professional translators. Period. You can give them the most powerful automatic translation tools available, and multiple language dictionarys (e.g. English-French) but in the end you need a human professional translator to make translations worth reading.

-without having to write a complete localized version for each language.

You need to make the content management system (CMS) language aware, and you need to localize all your templates. Then you need to add a key to your article database for language, so the user can retrieve article 101 in either english or french. (think a long the lines of http://localhost/cms/display.php?article=101&lang= en ).

I know nothing about PHP programming, so I cannot comment on that, or MySQL (main gotcha I expect is datatype, UTF-8, iso8859-1, vs. windowspage1574). Two articles I found useful in general about internationalization are

UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux by Markus Kahn
How do I have to modify my software?
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#mod

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.htm l

If you were Apple, you would not fight this in court. Settling out of court, paying a patent license fee, or cross-licensing are all far less expensive than fighting this in court and, therefore, much more attractive ways to deal with this nuisance. Each of these outcomes individually or collectively are more likely to occur than seeing this through to the end in court.

Remember one of the examples we learned about in RMS' discussion of the problem with software patents (transcript): Briefly, Paul Heckel threatened to sue Apple over a patent he held which covered something in Hypercard; Apple initially brushed him off but when he threatened to sue Apple's users for patent infringement Apple listened up and paid him off.

It has to be pointed out that this is just another reason to not do business with Apple. /. readers bend over backwards to not find fault with Apple but Apple's actions harm users because Apple wields the same patent power that Contois Music Technology is using against Apple here -- Apple holds patents which cover font hinting which adversely impact free software users who want smooth fonts on the screen. Apple also claims patents on the "Enterprise Object Framework" which adversely impacts the GNUStep work and thus serves as another obstruction to free software users.

Here, here and here is more info on paper size standards. Especially the second one is interesting. According to it, the systems have been in use from more or less the same time. The american system is quite new, 20th century thing, first reference in 1921 (but not with today's size then). The A? was first proposed already during the 18th century, and legalized in France, although not very widely used and forgotten again. It was reproposed in Germany 1922, and rapidly spread to many other countries. (of course in Germany - it's a very orderly made system - in Deutschland muß ja Ordnung sein!). So the answer is - it was the americans who made the second system...

According to the sources, Letter/Legal is only used in Mexico, USA and Canada, whereas the A?-system is used more or less in the rest of the world, and the A?-system also has certain positive technical sides - as the aspect ratio is constant from size to size, and an A4 can be parted in two A5 pieces easily, scaling documents up or down can be done without any white edges, giving an easy possibility for thumbnails, copying two A4 pages onto a single one (saving paper) etc...

It's still not perfect though. Even though the paper format is standardized all over the world (almost), the binder hole format is not. That leads to binders and documents possibly being totally incompatible (which has been a problem for me - as a swede in Germany)...

But Stallman is incorrect as well. By drafting 'literary claims' he insinuates that something like this would ever exist. That will never be the case.

Perhaps you should read up a little on the subject before you start declaring your views as absolute truths.

And yes, patents do cover ideas. That's the whole point with them. As opposed to copyright, which covers the expression of ideas.

Please feel free to Google for more background information before making you next post. Perhaps you will want to start with something that Dr. Stallman has written. He appears to be considerably more well informed on the subject than you.

Quoting the AC:
" how about an adaptive keyboard?

Sorta like a radial cqntext menu. It has a dictionary, and learns which words are common from you... and gives you the next letter for various words in a radial context menu. Depending on how fast it can generate the menus, you could muscle-memorize words. It could potentially be faster than traditional keyboards."

Mm.. A bit like http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ ? I guess you could at least crib the predictive part of the engine. The problem I see with that is that it makes planning impossible, and, from my experience, that's how our muscle memorizes stuff: by going through sequences of movements very quickly and repetitively. Going drag - hunt - drag, etc likely won't make learning as fast. Modes and dynamism can be annoying

Yeah, I'm an input device nerd :)

"Two very proud countries had been involved in a long and drawn out war, neither side able to win. When at last the war ended, they both declared themselves the victors."

The irony here is in the countries declaring themselves the victors when in reality they both lost. It is only ironic if you believe they both lost, if you think they both reached a compromise or that they reached some no-win no-lose middle ground, it isn't ironic. In that case, it would be simple allegory.

Irony is actually a lot simpler then most people think - strictly, it is a subset of allegory in which you are saying one thing and meaning its opposite. So, "Nice weather." during a hailstorm is irony.

The confusion comes, largely, when people try to decide wether an event was 'ironic'. If you put special snow tires on your car to prevent it skidding, but they turned out to skid worse then your old tires - that would be ironic. However, if you put special snow tires on your car to prevent it skidding, but one of them burst running over a bit of ice - that wouldn't qualify.

Hope that sorta cleared things up.

(The U of Cambridge English Department has a definition.)

If you're ignorant like me, and don't know what Xen is... its VM software that allows you to run multiple operating systems concurrently with close to native performance.

"The kernel will be running on the Cell, and multiple OSes will be running on top of that as applications."

The use of a copiable token is stupid, as you point out. Visa and MasterCard agreed on a protocol called "Secure Electronic Transaction" that does indeed use PK cryptography, in 1996. Apparently they decided it was cheaper to let their customers bear the cost and hassle of dealing with the fraud in the existing system.

I currently go to Cambridge Uni, Trinity college. The entire population here, practically, is student. In central Cambridge there are virtually no houses, and yet a massive collegiate university. Putting these here during the end of the exam season, when we're all incredibly drunk is NOT the best time or place to put expensive bins around.

I can smell numerous end of year scavenger hunts.

There is a recent paper by George Danezis and Steven Murdoch about attacks on Tor. (IEEE Security and Privacy)

I think you're referring to "Low-Cost Traffic Analysis of Tor" (PDF).

Or, you could get Dasher and get rid of your keyboard.

Because they don't use a moving print head, the width of the paper is of no consequence. By placing two A6-heads side by side, they could get DIN A4 at 150ppm (A4 = 210x297 mm which is 8.27x11.7 in for you non-metric types)

Drying the stuff is another matter and they don't go into detail, but I'm ready to assume that they're not stupid.

1. There are open-source Xen and well-tested vmware already.
2. In order to decrease feature duplication modern hypervisors hand out many crucial tasks to main OS so the solution inherits weaknesses of the OS.
3. Even if MS hypervision tech would not inherit insecurities of Windows, there would be justified fear that their software development methodology introduces more security bugs into hypervisor code.

VMWare creates a virtual machine for your OS to run in.
Advantage: provided it's simulation is good, everything that runs on the real hardware runs in the virtual machine
Disadvantage: that compatability comes at a significant runtime cost, which makes VMWare mainly used only for testing purposes, not for running multiple OSes for general work.

Hypervisors (like Xen) and what MS is claiming (I will believe this when we see it given the list of things they've dropped) use a technique called paravirtualisation to vastly reduce the speed problems. However, this requires support from the host OS. The Xen performance page (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/pe rformance.html) describes this better than I could.

Mr. Stallman's science fiction short story isn't the only depiction of what could happen in a full "Trusted" Computing paradigm. I linked to it as an accessible description of the consequences of Treacherous Computing. Here are some more factual descriptions: #1 #2 #3. Please read them and compare TCG's platform as described to what could enable the situation depicted in the story.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/cocaine.pdf Read this (The cocaine auction protocol). [pdf]

Dasher is pretty cool.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/

Like god's reward to Jesus, after demonstrating his passion? Your chance to be immortalized in Windows!

I'm a bit rusty from my thermodynamic courses, but I'll try: it's in transition state where both liquid and solid exists. So up to 6.5 it's solid, from 6.5 to 7.6 it's in transition and 7.5 and above its liquid. Can anyone refute or back this up? I'm not a chemical engineer, I only took courses way back when...
This might help. Or This (pdf) or This (pdf)

This may be of some use:

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/X11R6.8.2/doc/fonts.ht ml

These may help with your next question ;-)

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/utf-8.xml

If you RTFA on the 'Xen' kernel, you'd see what's news. The Xen kernel supports some Nifty Virtual Machine Stuff which you won't find in a standard kernel

"Since 1972, VM has been providing the capabilities to "virtualize" the complete S/370, S/390, and zSeries architecture allowing a single physical processor to run multiple guest operating system [sic] simultaneously with each guest thinking it has complete control of the system. Historically, MVS and VSE the operating systems most likely to be run as VM guests, but now with the increasing role of Linux in the data center, it is becoming a popular VM guest system as well."

If you RTFA on the 'Xen' kernel, you'd see what's news. The Xen kernel supports some Nifty Virtual Machine Stuff which you won't find in a standard kernel

"Since 1972, VM has been providing the capabilities to "virtualize" the complete S/370, S/390, and zSeries architecture allowing a single physical processor to run multiple guest operating system [sic] simultaneously with each guest thinking it has complete control of the system. Historically, MVS and VSE the operating systems most likely to be run as VM guests, but now with the increasing role of Linux in the data center, it is becoming a popular VM guest system as well."

"futurist cheerleaders, like inventor Ray Kurzweil, who takes hundreds of nutritional supplements daily as part of his plan for living forever,"

This is exactly what it's all about. It's like accepting having to adhere to a stringent diet and rigorous exercise for the rest of your 'natural' life instead of a small genetic modification that will allow you to just sit around and eat all you like and not gain a gram of fat like some other people you know.

As for "living forever", I think Aubrey de Grey's work is more promising: http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/AdGbio.htm

Of course, in our generation, this will not be perfected yet, but perhaps it will buy enough time.

The paper from the talk has now been released, I've mirrored it in case the site gets hit.

Not necessarily military, however, this sort of idea can be used for surveillance of CRT displays...

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/TechReports/UCAM-CL-TR-577 .html

More can be found here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Optical+Time-Domain +Eavesdropping+Risks+of+CRT+Displays.+&sourceid=mo zilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&cli ent=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

> extrapolate what someone is watching/reading/viewing on screen?

Something like this?

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/optical-faq.h tml

Voltara

My school offers ICT, not Computing. I do not want to take Computing at A Level.

I will be taking (for your interest) Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Further Mathematics, and Geography. This should set me off to a good start for Computer Science at a super-geeky university. [1] [2] Perhaps due to a low supply of Computing courses, neither of these pages mention A Level Computing.

Additionally, I read Wikipedia, I program basic Scheme and some C++ and I'm an expert in PHP (although I'm moving away as it isn't a computer-science-style-language). Worry not about my prospects. ;)

[1] http://www.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/cour ses/compsci/factfile.html
[2] http://www.admissions.ox.ac.uk/courses/enreq.shtml #tab

I'm surprised that this article doesn't mention Ivan Sutherland's inspirational Sketchpad, from his 1963 dissertation.

Dasher would be a much better choice than a keyboard.

I forgot one more, where specific faces were automatically retrieved from feature-length movies and Fawlty Towers:

Automatic Face Recognition for Film Character Retrieval in Feature-Length Films (Arandjelovic & Zisserman, 2005)

The objective of this work is to recognize all the frontal faces of a character in the closed world of a movie or situation comedy, given a small number of query faces. This is challenging because faces in a feature-length film are relatively uncontrolled with a wide variability of scale, pose, illumination, and expressions, and also may be partially occluded. We develop a recognition method based on a cascade of processing steps that normalize for the effects of the changing imaging environment. In particular there are three areas of novelty: (i) we suppress the background surrounding the face, enabling the maximum area of the face to be retained for recognition rather than a subset; (ii) we include a pose refinement step to optimize the registration between the test image and face exemplar; and (iii) we use robust distance to a sub-space to allow for partial occlusion and expression change. The method is applied and evaluated on several feature length films. It is demonstrated that high recall rates (over 92%) can be achieved whilst maintaining good precision (over 93%).

Thats some really expensive material.

The element itself is rather common; over .5% of the mass of the Earth is titanium. The high cost is due to the chemically intensive refining process. Due to incremental improvements titanium prices are relatively low and stable. Titanium has only been available in commercial quantity for about 60 years. Our ability to produce it has improved rapidly.

As such, it is no longer thought of as an exotic SR-71 class material by engineers. The A380 is 9% titanium by weight; that's just under 30 short tons of titanium per aircraft.

New processes are being developed that should help drive the cost of processing ores down substantially. There also happens to be large titanium content in moon rocks.

My fear is that knee-jerk reactions to incident like this someday could be as extreme as invoking the DMCA against copy and paste. That, and further control from MS for information in the government due to the inherent "security" of MS stuff. It's unimaginable that a corporation can be more powerful than the government, but more incidents like this and this will happen.

Too bad you're still down on 3 and not 5. Came in late I guess. I wish there was a way to flag a post as a reply to 5-10 different erroneous messages at once.

That is really the sole point of genuine contention - whether an owner can know his own master key.

Looking at the other messages on this topic, there is a ton of delusion circulating on that point. The corporate PR departments are earning their paychecks.

It would probably be wise for the various anti-TCPA websites to emphasize this one fact more strongly. The Trusted Computing boosters have been quite effective at diverting the conversation to assorted side bonuses like preventing worms and keyloggers, and often well-meaning people who just want to see better designed desktop OSes (more granular permissions, sandboxing, etc) defend TCPA of of ignorance of the fundamental fact that users don't get the key.

If I remember correctly, Trusted Computing is baaad, at least as far as we /.'ers are concerned.

Why is everyone bashing Microsoft for dropping it?

Rejoyce!

Ross Anderson's Critique

IBM's Rebuttal

Trusted Gentoo

IBM's rebuttal does a decent job of allaying some of the fears - for example, it states that it will not prevent you from running any OS & programs you wish to on your own computer (which, for the record, I believe - witness the Trusted Gentoo project and e.g. this this link). They state that their approach to Trusted Computing is not particularly well-suited to DRM, and on the face of it, I agree - there seems to be little attempt at restricting the user of a computer with the TPM from doing what they want. However, in my opinion, as a base for an utterly crippling DRM regime, distributors simply could not ask for a better setup, as I'll argue a little later.

So to re-cap, it seems that if you are running Trusted hardware, there are no restrictions on what you can do on your computer in isolation; you can install Linux, run any number of Open Source apps, etc. But the keyword here is in isolation, and it is here that the dangers of Trusted Computing are revealed. For you see, Trusted Computing enables the usage of remote attestation wherein a server may request a hash of all software currently running on your computer. This hash is, for all intents and purposes, unforgeable, and if you disable your TPM (as IBM stress that you can, and again for the record, I see no reason to disbelieve them), no hash will be sent. The server may then assess this hash of software (or note that no hash has been provided, in which case it may well treat your computer as Untrusted) and decide, based on what software you are running, to simply not serve you with whatever material you requested - for example, it may decide that it will not deliver MP3's to your computer unless it knows for a fact that the receiving application is one that is known to encrypt the content as soon as it is received (so that e.g. it simply cannot be viewed while not running in Trusted mode) and which will take every step to ensure that once received, the unencrypted content never leaves your machine (e.g. by being written to CD, e-mailed , etc.). As you can imagine, the above scenario is not at all far-fetched as the **AA/ other media distributors are positively *creaming* themselves at the thought of stamping out casual file-sharing or even making backups for your own use in some of your other devices.

So we are left with the situation where someone who does not use Trusted hardware (and is thus unable to respond to attestation requests) or those who do run Trusted hardware but whose software fingerprint is not deemed acceptable by the server will simply not be granted access to certain material, rendering such people at a big disadvantage. And it's no good buying hardware free from Trust chips from China or such places on the "black market"; this offers no advantage at all as Trusted hardware, as mentioned, does not stop you using your computer the way you want in isolation; the problem only occurs when you try to interact with other computers.

So far, this sounds unpleasant but not too bad (although I would urge you to read Anderson's linked essay for some more imaginative and serious abuses), but if we allow ourselves to follow the slippery-slope, we end up at the state where ISPs will not allow your computer to access the internet at all (for surfing, e-mailing, anything) unless you are running Trusted hardware and software. Obviously, the social, political and legal barriers to this occurence are non-trivial, but we've all seen ridiculous Acts qu

Zones for Linux? Try Xen.

I'm currently running a forum for people who do maths at my uni (and any others if you wanna drop by). One of the things that we want to do with it is start putting up lecture notes. The problem is the same one: at what point do said notes cease to be property of the lecturer?

If we recorded the lectures and posted the audio files, that would definitely be copyright breach. As would a complete transcript of whatever the lecturer wrote on the board. If we abstract it, does that mean it's a new work or is it still derivative? What if we need to stick a proof up? Without putting appreciable time into finding a new proof (not likely to happen) we're stuck with using whatever the lecturer put up on the board.

The fundamental problem is that copyright is a very hazy concept in academia. Works tend to be on the very limit of what is copyrightable - you can't copyright truth. Students copy from postgrads who copy from PhDs who copy from Professors who copied from other students when they were undergrads.

You can't copyright truth, but you can copyright layout. If we put lecture notes up online which, due to the fact that they were written down in the Statistics lecture course, are identical in layout to the lecturing Professor's new book, is that plagiarism? It's very hard to draw the line, and I know that our university maths society has taken down its lecture notes due to just these issues.

So, to summarise, the uncertainty is screwing us over.

It is true, euro notes have patterns of yellow circles that the machines look for:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/eurion.pdf

It is: http://www-building.arct.cam.ac.uk/westc/cl/cl.htm l The new computer laboratory at the University of Cambridge is mostly heated by waste heat from computers. Of course, they have quite a few there...

Lobbyists. Well-paid lobbyists. Oh, and well-greased congresscritters.

To continue my analogy above (ISPs=highways, users=drivers) ... if the highway dept. is made responsible for catching people who are driving home from a bank robbery, then EVERY driver will have to be stopped at the roadblock, because one of 'em MIGHT be a bank robber, and woe unto the highway dept. that accidentally lets one through.

Of course, the flip side of the lawsuit is when a truck carrying emergency supplies (legitimate media or software, especially timebound business stuff) is delayed or confiscated by the roadblock. Then who do you sue -- the highway department? the business partners in the roadblock agreement?? the manufacturer of the roadblock???

What's the roadblock's cyberspace analog? most likely it'll be a part of "Trusted Computing" http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html.

Mandatory flex-time does not work in all industries. All stores/bars/clubs/airlines/etc. would grind to a halt during peak hours. The same is true for more white collar businesses as well. Who wants to work on a Friday afternoon during the summer? Who would answer the phone at the corporate offices at Verizon or Dell when the plant explodes? How would Apple spring to life when someone releases an iPod killer? Most industries would be crippled by mandatory flex time.

SUV/Car exclusionary zones do not stop wind, which distributes ozone hole problems around the world in distinct patterns we are only now beginning to observe. There is a hole in the ozone above the Antartic. There are clearly no cars there. People would not drive to those areas, but transit systems in most areas where this would be useful would be OVERWHELMED. Another valuable target for biowarfare would spring up in the form of crammed train stations in downtown cities all across America. All resulting in lower production and contributing mildly to our hurting economy.

Gasoline prices drive the economy. Every single thing you use required oil & hydrocarbon combustion directly or indirectly unless you live in a wooden house built by hand with ZERO metal, plastic, electricity, cell phone, printed money, and belongings not bought from any store that uses trucks to supply it. Raising gasoline prices, even slightly, has a dramatic, and rapid (in economic terms) impact on inflation. Greens NEVER seem to get that simple point.
We are currently experiencing some of the effects of this inflation because of speculators in the oil market. The oil supply is fine for the SHORT term. Of course we should get off oil to help loosen our dependance on the Middle East and generally boost our economy generally.

Actually there's at least two ways.

The HOL group treats proofs as a data type. New instances of this type can only be constructed using a small set of inference rules. Therefore, if the system creates a proof, then you know that it has been created only by using these inference rules. Hence, trusting the inference rules is sufficient to trust whatever proofs are offered.

A second way is the use of "reflection". That is, suppose that you had a "tautology checker" program which, given some proposition, returns true only if that statement is a mathematical tautology. And, suppose that you prove this program works correctly. Then, you can always trust the results of this program, and so any time it says that something is a tautology, you can believe it becuase of the proof you have done.

There is an excellent paper by John Harrison that discusses these issues, which you can read here:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/jrh/papers/reflect.h tml

Note that Cambridge is one of the leading places for computer-aided proofs.

Lots of molecular biologists would say the same thing (perhaps not in the way you meant it). Francis Crick apparently thought genomics was way overhyped.

Seriously though, I sometimes wonder why anyone bothers writing another bioinformatics howto book when Durbin et al (apologies for amazon link) is still unrivalled. Maybe also Felsenstein for phylogeny, MacKay for general probabilistic modeling... anyone recommend anything for the coalescent? Microarrays? Image analysis? I could post book refs for these, but I'm not as fluent in those areas.

Dasher (or something like it?) might be helpful.

He he, and you think your LCD will provide better protection, think again geek! Time to rewallpaper your walls with tin foil! I should know, I did a study based on the initial research done by Markus Kuhn.

Have a read for the interested:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/pet2004-fpd.pdf