Domain: princeton.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to princeton.edu.
Comments · 1,515
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Read Groucho's RejoinderCheck out the link here to a letter Grouch Marx wrote to Warner Bros. in response to one they sent demanding that the Marx brothers change the title of their new film, "A Night in Casablanca".
Don't try this at home kids: apparently even Groucho's humor was lost on those dour lawyers.
BTW, does anyone know which Marx Brothers movie has something like the following exchange?
Woman: it's a gala day for you!
Groucho: well a gal a day is enough for me. I don't think I could handle any more.
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Re:I know what someone should make!
You might be able to do something like this using WordNet.
So now when I search for "Ornage" it asks me "Did you mean orange." I guess Google could extend this if it was hooked up to WordNet - "Did you mean orange the fruit, orange the color, orange the tree, or orange the river" -
Re:Autobiography
Now that you've read Nash's autobiographic blurb on the Nobel site, go read this letter on his personal web page at Princeton:
Your paper on imbedding Riemannian manifolds
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Process-saving is known, but not what you wantThe idea of saving the state of a process is very well-known. Take a look at anything from emacs dumping to the gcore(1) program. It's been used in everything from saved games of Rogue to saved states of PERL.
But isn't it overkill for a data-crunching operation? As many other people have noted, it would seem you're much better off checkpointing your data to disk, rather than relying on low-level OS process wizardry.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
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Does the CIA process this?
Random Numbers contain hidden messages by a Global Consciousness!
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Re:Not Irony
That is indeed one of the definitions of dictionary.com, but it isn't a great one since it lacks a part about the incongruity containing a somewhat "humorous/sad" taste which is present in a real ironic case (pardon me for not being able to eloquently explain it, english isn't my native language).
One case of a definition isn't great because it isn't the same as another case?
Since English isn't your native language, how about a university where it is:
The definition at Princeton's Wordnet page.
Do a little searching for "dramatic irony" and "tragic irony". BTW, most places I've seen the "humor" definition, it relies on the other definitions. For example, Merriam-Webster Collegiate defines the usage you're championing as:
"2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance"
Note that in order for humor to be ironic in this sense, it must be ironic in one of the other senses.
In general, if a person for whom English isn't their native language says something about English, and dictionaries produced by a bunch of English-speaking scholars say something different and largely agree on it, I'm afraid I'm going to have to go with the scholars. -
Re:Superficial article - author needs to read morePrimary research, but in published literature. I wish I had a cite to a famous letter in CACM in the 1970s, decrying the fact that an academic had dared to charge for software developed in academia. There was a time when it was considered improper, if not criminal, to charge for work developed in universities.
The history of user groups is important from an economic perspective. See notes on the history of SHARE, the organization for IBM scientific mainframe users. This group had considerable clout with IBM, and tried to influence where IBM was going. SHARE occasionally funded development efforts on its own, most notably the SHARE Operating System (1958-1964). This would be comparable today to USENIX funding the development of a new OS through membership dues.
A reasonable model today might be for a group of Fortune 500 companies to fund the development of something like StarOffice, on the grounds that paying for development is cheaper than buying hundreds of thousands of copies of commercial products. Open source can make sense for the big buyer.
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Re:Better License
Presumably, they can also watermark your files and know who it is that distributes the music online, and then come after you for breach of contract.
Unless they work out a system where they have a server full of non-watermarked files, and each is then tagged with a unique serial as the download is requested, it's totally unfeasible. The server space required to have so many uniquely watermarked files would be enormous. If the server watermarks each as it's requested, they can have it keep a database of the serial assigned to the file and match it up to the user that downloaded it. Mind you, we all know how secure watermarking is... -
Bah, this is old news.
See here.
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Lame story; old newsIf you want the real story on OLED technologies, the place to do research is here:
Furthermore, from 1998:
Ink-jet printing of light-emitting polymers
Ink-jet printing of light-emitting polymers onto a thin film has been demonstrated by a Princeton group (James Sturm, 609-258-5610), bringing about a new way to fabricate a light-emitting diode (LED) made of polymers. An LED is typically built by surrounding a semiconducting material with two electrodes. When an electron from one electrode and a hole from the other meet in the semiconductor, they can annihilate each other and release the energy as light. LEDs in which the semiconductor materials are polymers instead of inorganic materials such as gallium phosphide would be cheaper and easier to manufacture. To make polymer LEDs, the Princeton researchers replaced the ink cartridges of a conventional ink-jet printer with a polymer solution containing the semiconducting polymer polyvinylcarbazol (PVK) and a light-emitting dye dissolved in a chloroform solvent. The researchers printed this solution onto a thin polyester film coated with indium tin oxide (ITO), which served as one of the electrodes. Over the polymer layer they deposited a metal film, which served as the other electrode. With this technique, they produced LEDs emitting green light. In separate experiments, they used the ink-jet printer to make dot patterns of PVK mixed with either red, green, or blue dyes on the ITO-coated polyester film, although they have not yet used these patterned films to make LEDs. (T.R. Hebner et al., Applied Physics Letters, 2 February 1998.)
Update 358
11 Feb 98 http://www.ee.princeton.edu/~sturmlab/pdf/apl/ijpo -
Banning cookies might get unexpected supportBanning cookies might get unexpected support: from the law enforcement camp. After all, if cookies are no longer permitted, those interesting session IDs have to be placed in the requested URIs. And these URIs are logged all over the place: by the web server itself, by proxies along the way, by the browser (in theory, session cookies should expire when then browser is terminated). So banning cookies makes session tracing much easier for everyone but the actual web server developer.
Cookies, when used in a responsible way, can increase privacy. Of course, that is not true with those practically eternal cookies which expire some day in the year 2037 or so. On the other hand, there are other tracing methods such as exclusively dynamic URIs or even cache timing attacks (yet another interesting Felten paper, BTW).
In my opinion, you should not outlaw the tool, but the intention to gather data. Recently, we've seen so many attempts at restricting tools which have some negative potential, competely neglecting the positive possibilities such tools present. Shall we make the same mistake again?
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So what?
So? This just mean that Office XP is broken, and no one should use it. Open source needs to shove that down everyone's throat. I refuse to use broken software, which is why I stopped using Windows to begin with. I usually head for my paper thesaurus, so I don't know of any open source thesauri, but google gives me a link to WordNet.
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Disinformation on SDMI's demise?From the article:
A high-profile effort dubbed the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), intended to be a private sector version of the kind of technology effort Hollings' plan outlines, collapsed largely because of disagreements between technology and content companies.
Umm... hasn't SDMI been failing because each proposed version of the technology has been cracked in a matter of days? (And despite the RIAA threatening the researchers with litigation, at that!) Good reporting, ZDnet!
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Re:They want to tap?
Fine. Let them get a warrant. I don't care who they tap, as long as they get the appropriate warrants first.
Oh, you mean they want to be able to tap anyone at will? Sorry, but there is absolutely no justification for that.
The Feds' argument, in past legislative pushes, has been that, since the courts have acknowledged the need for wiretaps in the course of criminal investigation, they need access to the communications networks that will make taps possible when suspects are using "new technology" communications. This created a small stir about ten-fifteen years ago when they first advocated legislation of a similar sort for digital/optical telephone networks, which they claimed at the time were more difficult to tap than copper wire. If I recall properly, they eventually got what they wanted (in a less surveillance-friendly atmosphere than we have today).
"Recent and continuing advances in electronic communications technology and services challenge, and at times erode, the ability of law enforcement agencies to fully implement lawful orders to intercept communications. These advances also challenge the ability of telecommunications carriers to meet their assistance responsibilities. Thus, law enforcement agencies are finding it increasingly difficult to deal with intercepted digital communication, which might now be voice, data, images, or video, or a mixture of all of them."
That's from ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE IN A DIGITAL AGE, July 1995, OTA-BP-ITC-149, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office
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Re:Graphical pipes
Pipes seem necessarily linked to the command line.
IBM's VM/CMS mainframe interactive system has only rudimentary windows and no icons, mice or pointers at all, but it makes up for the lack in spades: It has pipes on steroids. The more complicated examples of multistream "pipelines" require at least three dimensions to render graphically, so we don't bother doing so. But years ago, Chuck Boeheim at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center wrote a two-dimensional pipeline animator called PipeDemo. Each "stage" of the pipeline (i.e. each program in a bash pipe) is displayed on a single line of the screen, and the data flows from stage to stage at a rate slow enough to observe. It's the moral equivalent of an IDE debugger, but for pipes.
The only way I could see doing similar in a GUI would be to have an "alternate view" window where each program would have however many appropriate pipe fittings on their icon where input and output pipes (hoses?) could be joined until your screen resembles a game of pipes.
Inspired by Chuck's work with PipeDemo, I've started several times on a graphical pipe builder similar to what you suggest. I've never gotten far enough though, due to time constraints. At its core lives a printed-circuit-board routing program that sees every pipeline stage as an integrated circuit with a specific pin-out. Whenever asked to, it re-rationalizes the display to make the "traces" look clean and to minimize the number of "layers" required to implement the "PCB".
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Re:Graphical pipes
Pipes seem necessarily linked to the command line.
IBM's VM/CMS mainframe interactive system has only rudimentary windows and no icons, mice or pointers at all, but it makes up for the lack in spades: It has pipes on steroids. The more complicated examples of multistream "pipelines" require at least three dimensions to render graphically, so we don't bother doing so. But years ago, Chuck Boeheim at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center wrote a two-dimensional pipeline animator called PipeDemo. Each "stage" of the pipeline (i.e. each program in a bash pipe) is displayed on a single line of the screen, and the data flows from stage to stage at a rate slow enough to observe. It's the moral equivalent of an IDE debugger, but for pipes.
The only way I could see doing similar in a GUI would be to have an "alternate view" window where each program would have however many appropriate pipe fittings on their icon where input and output pipes (hoses?) could be joined until your screen resembles a game of pipes.
Inspired by Chuck's work with PipeDemo, I've started several times on a graphical pipe builder similar to what you suggest. I've never gotten far enough though, due to time constraints. At its core lives a printed-circuit-board routing program that sees every pipeline stage as an integrated circuit with a specific pin-out. Whenever asked to, it re-rationalizes the display to make the "traces" look clean and to minimize the number of "layers" required to implement the "PCB".
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Re:FP!wow that's a lot of words wasted!
here's a one-liner that shows that muslims don't really have a monopoly on evil:
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Global Consciouness Project has an analysis
The Global Consciousness Project has an analysis of the data streams at the time of the terrorist attacks.
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Global Consciouness Project has an analysis
The Global Consciousness Project has an analysis of the data streams at the time of the terrorist attacks.
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24-Hour Streaming Video on WTC
Princeton University has links to 24-hour coverage.
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Concorde Travelling-Salesman solver
Concorde is a nice package for solving travelling salesman problem. It has a fast implementation of chained Lin-Kernighan heuristic. I've been using it extensively in the last few months and starting this morning (Australia time), it's been crashing randomly, even when applied to the same data that worked fine last week. I recompiled it on various unices (Linux, DEC) and same thing still happened. Because the program uses random number extensively to create new paths, there must be something wrong with the way it generate the seed. Luckily, it has an option to fix the random number seed, and when it automatically chooses one, it also displays it.
Looking at the numbers, it's not hard to make the connection. -
You are a fucking moronCan you name 5 contributions to science made by white trash rednecks like you?
Here's a list of celebrated African-American scientists.
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Prof. Felten's Version...If anyone is interested, Prof. Felten has kept a log of what's going on at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/
He's got the RIAA letter, the statement contradicting the RIAA letter, the agreement to the competition, and other such nifty info.
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Re:They didn't back off...
Straight from the horse's mouth... the RIAA letter
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Professor Edward W. Felten...
This guy is such an interesting person. Did other people also notice he was a key element in the DOJ vs Microsoft case? You know, this guy may be, in his own inconspicuous style, one of the best things happening to us as of late. Let's not lose trace of him.
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Professor Edward W. Felten...
This guy is such an interesting person. Did other people also notice he was a key element in the DOJ vs Microsoft case? You know, this guy may be, in his own inconspicuous style, one of the best things happening to us as of late. Let's not lose trace of him.
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Re:might be a good thing
Not that it matters, but Adam Stubblefield is an undergraduate student (CS and Math), and also part of the famous Princeton/Rice SDMI Challenge team. He also broke the mp3.com beam-it protocol. Quite an impressive start to this guy's career.
RRF!
Lovett 2000 -
Re:Don't make me laugh
One idea I've seen is to encode a fingerprint in the form of alternate (yet correct) spellings sprinkled throughout the text.
A straightforward application of this can be defeated through the collusion of two purchasers of the book. The words with the altered spelling can be identified by comparing the slightly different copies of the book. These words can then be either modified to use a standard spelling. Or for that matter, they could be modified to use a mixed set from the the two books - thereby making the new copy look like it was purchased by someone other than either of the two coluding purchasers.In fact, what you describe is essentially a form of watermarking, and the recent defeat of SDMI by a team of researchers from Princeton University shows that even sophisticated watermarking techniques can be broken.
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Bero not quite accurate about GPL and derived work
I'm sorry but I don't believe that Bero is being completely accurate when he claims that the "GPL makes no claims to data generated, processed, or stored by something covered by it." According to the text of the GPL "The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does." IANAL, but in my opinion, for a company to be completely safe about using the output of GPLed software, they must examine every line of the source code. The reason is that it is possible that the program will inject portions of itself into the output. An example is Bison whose license was modified. To quote documentation from an older version of Bison 1.20 "Bison grammars can be used only in programs that are free software. This is in contrast to what happens with the GNU C compiler and the other GNU programming tools. The reason Bison is special is that the output of the Bison utility--the Bison parser file--contains a verbatim copy of a sizable piece of Bison, which is the code for the yyparse function. As a result, the Bison parser file is covered by the same copying conditions that cover Bison itself and the rest of the GNU system: any program containing it has to be distributed under the standard GNU copying conditions." The license was later changed in version 1.24 and beyond: "As of Bison version 1.24, we have changed the distribution terms for yyparse to permit using Bison's output in non-free programs. Formerly, Bison parsers could be used only in programs that were free software."
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Re:PPPoE isn't that bad, quit cryingAnd suppose you get static IP service through your PPPoE.
And then suppose you notice that PPPoE is available for OpenBSD.
And then you notice that you can do everything you could before your got PPPoE.
Then you realise that even knowledgeable "power users" have to do their homework before they start calling people jackasses.
By the way, even though I have dynamic PPPoE, I still run ssh/pop/imap/smtp/VNC/http/etc. With static, you could even do DNS.
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Re: Owned by coporate americaCan you imagine the shit that would fly if the shoe was on the other foot and some american lecturer in russia got sent to a siberian prison?
If our government's (nonexistent) actions regarding the detention of Li Shaomin and other American citizens for "spying" by China are any indication, I'd predict that the shit wouldn't even make it off the ground.
--Fesh -
Other links
Other information on this project can be found here, here (Caltech), or here. This link to Princeton University seems to explain the project much better, at least to me.
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OpenCyc seems more interesting...
I'll try to leave all the arguing about AI and Cyc's place in it, and just say that it has great potential to be helpful for projects in expert system research and things like natural language processing. It was always really annoying to me that Cyc was closed, the little link on the end to OpenCyc seems very important to me! A big part of the knowledge source is supposed to be released soon, and that is what I am looking forward to!
Supposedly they are not releasing the source to the inference engine, but that is not that big of a deal. Plenty of research has been done on logical systems, stochastic logic, robust logics, etc. It is the data that is always hard to come by. Also according to the website, WordNet is to be included. This is when it gets interesting
... using the basic knowledge base and WordNet, pour in text and work on automatic ontology building. Let sufficient amounts of text (Guttenberg project anyone?) inform the system enough to generate its own relationships and extend its knoweledge base.Even games could use this low level knowledge base for helping to determine the actions of the game AI.
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Re:Rock on!An interesting addendum to all this is this RIAA response to the legal filing. RIAA basically says that they do not plan to sue Professor Felten, so the reasoning behind the lawsuit is "inexplicable".
IIRC, the timing of the "clarification" of the original "threat" was such that once the time slot was gone and the talk would no longer fit into the Information Hiding Workshop conference schedule, then RIAA decided to mention that they aren't really going to sue the Prof and they aren't really the enemy of scientific research.
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This lawsuit is a total setup.
If you don't think that Felten set up the RIAA, go to his web page, check out his smirking picture, and follow the link that says "Freedom of Speech". He links to the page at RIAA.com that talks about music and freedom of expression. He's a total smartass.
And this lawsuit is pretty much the kind of thing a smartass would dream up. He reminds me of the kid who grew up sitting in the front of class with his hand in the air all the time, trying to outsmart the teacher. It's not about who's right, it's all about attention.
The RIAA has been very clear in communicating to everyone that they have no intention to sue Professor Felten.
The Secure Digital Music Initiative Foundation (SDMI) does not - nor did it ever - intend to bring any legal action against Professor Felten or his co-authors.
So why is this case happening? Because Felten is suing the Attorney General of the United States! He is suing the plaintiffs using a legal construct known as a "Declaratory Judgment suit", which basically allows you to sue someone first so they can't sue you. Since the RIAA has already stated in public that they have no intention of suing Felten, it's pretty obvious to everyone that he is just picking a fight. Which, considering the people who are risking their entire professional careers to decide a real DMCA issue, paints a very accurate picture of Felten: still the annoying kid trying to get attention. If he ever got in a real fight, with real risks, like Eric Corley has - he'd run.
Don't let Felten distract you from the real DMCA issue. Newspaper headlines translate directly into departmental funding at major universities. This isn't about freedom of speech, it's about grant money. -
DMCA and "limited commercially significant purpose
Further, the DMCA says the following: No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any technology, product service, device component, or part thereof, that
... (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work; ....What if a lot of people started producing disk images or source archives or whatever that were encoded with CSS instead of ZIP? That way, DeCSS would have a "commercially significant purpose or use" that has nothing at all to do with the MPAA.
What if kernel.org started encoding everything as
.mp3? Sure would be nice to be able to find the latest kernel from a convenient desktop client, like maybe Napster, for instance.Why not produce a new email protocol that just happens to use a format that looks like an SDMI watermark? Not really useful without a reader that can remove the watermarks. Hopefully someone will do some research on this topic so we can all improve our email.
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Re:Warp drive silliness : somebody skipped math 10Not sure which scale that is, but on the real one warp 933.4 kinda doesn't exist =]
The warp scale used in TNG and beyond is exponential, where warp "1" is equivalent to light-speed (c), warp "8" is [1,024 x (c)] and warp 10 (which requires infinite energy and makes the traveller occupy all points of space at once, btw) is an infinite speed.
The 75-year timeframe either assumes a cruising-without-engine-damage speed of warp 8.x, or a higher travelling speed above warp 9 but factoring in regular maintenance stops.
Ya know, maybe I should stop those IRC startrek sims and get some real work done, lol...
::shuts off the holodeck and returns to helm duty::
BRTB -
Genetics is not the whole storyAs controversial as it is, many scientists are convinced that Genetics probably map out a morphological potential space, and that it's actually chaotic factors that resolve actual organism growth within that space.
While certain spaces are tightly constrained, others are more general. So simple things like eye color have a tightly constrained space (and are likely to be predictable by genetics), complex things like "creativity" will probably prove much more elusive.
(Begin Wild Speculation)
My personal suspicion is that genetics will prove to be a boom industry, and will be good to address certain kinds of cosmetic things, treat/prevent certain kinds of diseases, and so on. Everyone will be beautiful according the the fashion of the time of their birth, and no-one will suffer from ailments like MS or diabetes. But we'll discover that the stuff that we *really* want to change will be out of our reach -- too many variables. So we won't ever be able to have kids who can see in the IR spectrum, have ultra-fast x12 reflexes, or have 300 point IQs. Still, it'll be an interesting world (particularly for that unfortunate generation whose parents thought it was really, really cool for their kids to have a thrid eye).
(End wild speculation)(See Goodwin's How the Leopard Changed its Spots for a good and admittedly controversial intro to the "post-genetic" theory of biology).
bukra fil mish mish
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Monitor the Web, or Track your site! -
Too right!
As my copy-editor girlfriend would say, "The passive voice is to be avoided."
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No, it's not the completed paper!The paper you found (and everybody is mirroring) is not the complete paper they were to present at the conference. That paper has not been released yet. That's clear from what they have posted on their website. Sadly.
I wonder if it would be risky for them to publish it in another country. Probably.
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RTFFaq
Your claim that the researchers were just helping out the RIAA has been made to the researchers many times.
From the faq:
Q. By participating in the challenge, weren't you helping the record companies impose restrictive technology on music lovers?
and...
Q. By participating in the challenge, weren't you helping pirates steal copyrighted music, impoverishing musicians and songwriters?
We believe our success against all four watermarking technologies, and our sharing of those results with other researchers, will not help anyone impose or steal anything.
On the one hand, this information cannot be used to make restrictive technology. If anything, it suggests that all of the proposed technology is incapable of being restrictive.
On the other hand, this information cannot be used by pirates if the technologies are never deployed. This is why it is best to perform analysis on a security system before it is released.
Q. Still, wouldn't it have been better for SDMI had you not analyzed their system?
SDMI invited the public to analyze their technologies (to "crack them" said their invitation,) setting up a web site and hiring people to assist. Also, any weaknesses in SDMI's technology would have existed even if we hadn't looked for them---analysts do not create flaws, but merely detect them---and if the SDMI system had been deployed as is, pirates would have found and exploited those weaknesses, regardless of our actions.
The study of information security is based on two equally important components: the design of security systems, and the analysis of (attempts to break) those security systems. One occasionally encounters the misconception that analysis is destructive and evil, and that people performing analysis are attackers who wish to exploit those systems. Rather, analysis is a critical component of the development process. Without it, one would never know if systems were well-designed, and one would never learn how to design better systems.
Q. Still, wouldn't it have been better for opponents of SDMI if you let SDMI go ahead and deploy a flawed technology, so music lovers could teach them a lesson by copying music despite the technology?
Of course not. This is scientific research: it is not our goal to engage in tactics such as tricking the industry into choosing a flawed system. Our goal is simply to analyze security systems and share our results openly with the scientific community.
Again, researchers who crack cryptosystems and security systems are not motivated by a desire to exploit these flaws later. They are merely subjecting systems to analysis, motivated instead by a desire to increase the existing body of knowledge about security systems.
Secondly, if the technology is cracked in deployment, rather than on the drawing board, everyone loses to some extent. The recording industry obviously, device manufacturers most certainly, but even opponents of SDMI. Even pirates! To an opponent of SDMI, even a broken, circumventable SDMI system is worse than no SDMI system at all.
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-jacob -
additional clarification from scientists' FAQThis Princeton FAQ makes the scientists' position a bit clearer, before they received the SDMI letter.
Q. What about the cash prize offered by SDMI?
SDMI did offer a small cash prize to be split among everybody who defeated at least one of the six technologies. However, to be eligible for the prize, researchers had to sign a confidentiality agreement that prohibited any discussion of their findings with the public. The terms of the challenge also allowed researchers to publish their findings if they decided to forgo the cash prize. We decided from the beginning that we were more interested in publishing our results than accepting any share of the cash prize.
Q. Didn't the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) criminalize the study of these kinds of technologies in the United States?
Fortunately, the DMCA did not apply to this challenge, since SDMI granted explicit permission to study their technologies. We are not sure whether it would have been legal to study these technologies outside the context of this challenge. We think the DMCA, by criminalizing some kinds of study of important technologies, represents an "ignorance is bliss" approach to technological copyright enforcement, which will not work in the long run. We lobbied against certain aspects of the DMCA while it was before Congress, and we still consider it to be a seriously flawed law.
Above, we mentioned the important role of analysis in the design of security systems. The main problem with the DMCA is that it hinders this analysis, restricting it in order to provide an extra layer of legal protection for existing copyright systems. But this causes the scientific process to stagnate. Imagine a federal law making it illegal for anyone (including Consumer Reports) to purposefully cause an automobile collision. While this may be a well-intentioned attempt to stop road-rage, it also bans automobile crash-testing, ultimately leading to unsafe vehicles and the inability to learn how to make vehicles safe in general. The situation with the DMCA is analogous.
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Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia? -
Felten is amazing.
Edward Felten is amazing.
- This is the same guy that provided Boies with his technical ammunition in the Microsoft trial. It was while trying to prove that Felten's IE-remover program didn't work that Microsoft was devastatingly caught showing a faked video.
- Would you prefer this incident has been used as a First Amendment challenge on DMCA? Say by the ACLU? Back in January, baby!!! (See page 15, or 8 by the document's own numbering.)
- And now, just to pour salt on the wounds, his group leaks the SDMI cracks anyway. I love it!
This guy is my hero! Looks so *innocent*, doesn't he?
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I'm going to disagree for this instance
Colleges and Universities also have a time honored tradition of bending over for anyone who is or might be a contributor. If Princeton's development office has them on file as a donor, you'll be disappointed how quickly they'll act to shut up their own students and faculty.
Well...I don't know how true that is in general. But specifically regarding this case, from the FAQ (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/faq.html) on their webpage, they state that:
Fortunately, the DMCA did not apply to this challenge, since SDMI granted explicit permission to study their technologies. We are not sure whether it would have been legal to study these technologies outside the context of this challenge. We think the DMCA, by criminalizing some kinds of study of important technologies, represents an "ignorance is bliss" approach to technological copyright enforcement, which will not work in the long run. We lobbied against certain aspects of the DMCA while it was before Congress, and we still consider it to be a seriously flawed law. (my emphasis)
Above, we mentioned the important role of analysis in the design of security systems. The main problem with the DMCA is that it hinders this analysis, restricting it in order to provide an extra layer of legal protection for existing copyright systems. But this causes the scientific process to stagnate. Imagine a federal law making it illegal for anyone (including Consumer Reports) to purposefully cause an automobile collision. While this may be a well-intentioned attempt to stop road-rage, it also bans automobile crash-testing, ultimately leading to unsafe vehicles and the inability to learn how to make vehicles safe in general. The situation with the DMCA is analogous.
So this group of researchers lobbied against the DMCA. This would be the perfect opportunity for them to fight it. Seeing as how they've said that they disagree with the DMCA, it seems that it would be more likely for them NOT to fold under the RIAA's pressure.
Moller
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That post is wasteful, and the wrong direction.
I'll bite:
"A space plane like the space shuttle costs the same amount of money in terms of fuel as a jumbo jet from London to New York does."
How do you figure that? Mile-per-mile? Did you not notice the external fuel tank needed to get the Shuttle to orbit? Do you think LOX and LH are so much less expensive than jet fuel? The External Tank alone uses 526,000 gallons of fuel in the 8.5 minutes before it's jettisoned (That's 1031 gallons per second (g/s). A 747 on the other hand, has a maximum fuel capacity of 57,285 gallons, which it sips at 1.06 g/s.
Jet fuel currently costs about 77 cents/gallon, while LH costs about 75 cents and LOX costs about 35 cents, but that kind of logic is like saying it would be more economically efficient to walk to the moon.
"Wall Street would be the new mission control, and you can bet that the analysts of that city would make space trave as cheap as boarding a jumbo jet - there is no reason why it should not be."
I'd suggest you take a look at this economic analysis of the $/lb costs for the Space Shuttle under various scenarios, including daily launches. It'll never get beneath $640/lb, which is significantly more expensive than boarding a jumbo jet, unless you're a mouse. but then, mice fly free...
It would be more accurate to say that Wall Street would be able to raise enough money in an IPO to send the company's founders into space, but Wall Street itself doesn't have as much to do with the creation of economical solutions as they do the speculation of profitability of said systems.
Kevin Fox
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Re:Heard it all before.....Analog vs. Digital
"In the real world, however, environmental factors such as temperature and humidity can cause the electrical properties of a micro-circuit's resistors and capacitors to vary by as much as 20%. Such discrepancies matter far less in digital circuits, which simply have to detect whether an electrical current is more or less on or off. But such variations in analogue circuits can render them unusable. For instance, a cellular telephone will not work properly if its analogue filter allows the transmission frequency to vary by more than 1%."
from jdcook's linkMaybe we should keep our cell-phones in temperature controlled humidors and "smoke 'em" only when at peak freshness.
Saw a link awhile back on disposable paper cell-phone cards that come with pre-paid talk-miles on them. I guess you'll be able to get them out of machines at truck stops just like similar items like condoms, tampons or lottery tickets.The irony of digitizing stocks by eliminating point spreads.
"Earthman, the planet you lived on was commissioned, paid for, and run by mice. It was destroyed five minutes before the completion of the purpose for which it was built, and we've got to build another one."
Only one word registered with Arthur.
Hopfield and Brody held a "DIY" contest: The Mus silicium (sonoran desert sand mouse
;) web page.
Sort of like the old "guess what I'm thinking" magic acts or the old "send me your name and address for the Speedo Shammy cloth !""Yeah", said Ford, "they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor soul whom no one's ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae on their heads and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really." Ford leant back on the mattress with his hands behind his head and looked infuriatingly pleased with himself.
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Re:What compiler?
Basicly I hope they will try to make it compile with LCC
The LCC license is a fucked up pile of crap. The LCC license essentially says "you can't sell or use this this compiler, except under a set of conditions that we can't be bothered to clearly define. If you have any questions, talk to our publisher." I'm not a lawyer, but it's pretty clear they didn't bother to consult a decent one when they wrote up the license, and I'd be very suprised if the license they wrote didn't effectively say, "You are not allowed to use this code, ever, for anything. Go to Hell."
I'll take the restrictive and well understood Gnu license any day of the week.
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Obviously notWe must both have nothing better to do eh?
Sure. But I look at the way I'm wasting my time, and the way you're wasting your time, and I'm glad I'm me instead of you.
In other news, I'm surprised that nobody seems to have come up with a Java Filter that is smart enough to just kill multiple and recursive popups and OnClose().
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Re:Gee, I guess you don't agree with his views
For those parties interested in questioning Cass Sunstein directly, Princeton University Press , publisher of Republic.com, is hosting a open discussion forum on our web site in which Cass Sunstein is participating.
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Several schools do this (summary)I wrote an article about this for our school paper one and a half years ago.
We (Waterloo) still don't have a wireless network.
Here's who does:
- Carnegie Mellon has Wireless Andrew all over campus
- Dartmouth has it
- Drexel has it (Information Resources and Technology, Library)
- Princeton (Firestone Library and Computing & Information Technology)
- Marquette
- Richard Ivey School of Business at University of Western Ontario
Grumble, grumble. So much for us being a high tech school.
Paul