Jesus Christ. You're a fucking moron, you realize that?
The article explicitly stated that they were connecting them to their own DSL and cable modem connections, not the school's network. (How'd they get cable modem in a dorm, anyway?)
There so much misinformation in this discussion it's insane. Thatnk you for your efforts to increase the amount of noise here.
Actual, those type rules are exactly what allows wifi, even without permission. You can set up attennas all you want. Which also means, no, they can't allow you to use wifi and not allow WAPs.
Did no one read the last story on this? The FCC has EXPLICITLY ruled on this with regard to wifi. If it's legal for you to be somewhere, it's legal for you to be there with an attenna and broadcasting on an unregulated spectrum, and God Himself can't stop you, only the FCC.
Now, with satellitte dishes, it is possible to stop them by not giving the tenant anywhere outside to place them. Obviously that doesn't apply to WAPs unless you're leasing a room that's microscopic.
Kerry deserved two Purple Hearts instead of three? Somehow I'm having troubling getting upset there. There are thousands of stupidly awarded medals in the war, and thousands of non-awarded medals that should have been awarded. And purple hearts, despite what people seem to think, are not incredibly important. You can legitimately get one by spraining your ankle while running from enemy fire. It's not a frickin congressional medal of honor, people.
Kerry might have stupidly hurt himself in the war by operating a genade launcher incorrectly? Hey, you have to give him points for operating one incorrectly and managing to live. I'd probably blow myself up. Luckily for him, we're not electing him to operate a genade launcher.
Kerry used a somewhat dubious injury to escape Vietnam early, and then spoke out against it? So...he willing went into a war zone, saw it wasn't all that he was promised, and managed to get out early? You know, I can't actually condemn that, either.
I can't even condemn draft dodgers, so I certainly have no problems with people who walked in and realized this was some heavy shit and used every means at their disposal to get out. And he didn't just walk away, either, he thought the war was wrong so he did something about it. (And, I'm rather baffled at this 'war crimes' stuff. I thought everyone knew the US did some pretty horrible things during that war? Do we really want to start rehashing the fact US soldiers raped and tortured people during that war?)
OTOH, I can't really condemn Bush from escaping into the National Guard, although I can condemn him from using his family connections to not even bother to show up.
And, of course, all this is crazy, because the assaults on Kerry's military record have almost no basis in fact.
How the hell did we get a story about Diebold without a link to blackboxvoting. There's a fucking backdoor in Diebold's tallying system where you can disconnect various tables in the database via typing a code in a secret location. And the tallying software doesn't just count Diebold votes, it normally counts all the votes.
But, let's all yammer about California suing them while ignoring the huge revelations that have happened in the last two weeks WRT Diebold.
The real problem with Florida isn't actually who won the vote.
It's that the right-wing judges in the Surpreme Court decided to throw out all their principles and the law books and any sort of states rights just to make sure Bush won.
In retrospect, it would have been very nice if Gore had won, because Bush is a power-mad secretive nutjob intent on destroying the economy and our relations with other countries, as long as his friends get rich...but that is completely seperate from the problem with the election, where a lot of the Supreme Court decided to make a wrong ruling just so their candidate would get into office.
And, yes, both Bush and Gore were doing the same thing...but they're candidates, it's expected of them. The Supreme Court should have either stayed out of it or ordered a statewide recount under exactly what the Florida law said, which IIRC was 'intent of the voter'. And it should have investigated claims of police stopping voters. (The butterfly ballot issue, sadly, was pretty much unfixable.) Saying 'Well, our candidate is currently ahead, and we don't want anyone to question the election' was rephrensible and idiotic.
Unlike some people who don't like Bush, I wouldn't have a problem with the election if there had been complete recounts and investigations into other claims, even if Bush had won. And I like it think I would have issues if the same thing had happened then, but with Gore coming out on top. Way too many people are mixing 'issues with the election process' with 'issues with winner's leadership so far'. I, personally, have both, but it's possible to just have one or the other. And almost everyone who's not an idiot should have had issues with the election process in the 2000 election.
Actually, no. Under that logic, what coud be challenged was any law saying stores are required ask for ID before selling someone alcohol.
But I don't know of any laws like that. People are punished for selling alcohol to minors, no one cares if they 'check IDs' or not. For example, you don't have to card people you know are overaged.
All this, of course, will sound silly if you work in a large store, because they will claim you're required to card people...but they're lying.
Of course, under the law, you have much less liability if you were lied to, instead of failing to check. The more you attempted to verify, the less you get punished.
All this is really besides the point, though. There's a large difference between state legistlaters making a law requiring stores to have you prove your age before they do something that would be illegal if you were underaged, and the FCC making airlines store your information in a large database, where the FCC will use the data to attempt to determine whether or not they will punish you by disallowing you to fly, without telling anyone what law requires this, or anything about what's going on.
If you're really worried about privacy, you can cover up your name and address on your driver's license and they can still see the date. And, yes, they will sell it to you, I used to check IDs, and I ran across someone who did that, he had a little cover on his photo ID where you could just see the photo and the birthday.
And the pilots laughs because they pushed it while they were still forcing their way through the cockpit doors.
And, plus...what kind of stupid-ass threat is that if the pilot thinks they're just going to fly it into the building anyway? It's a 'shoot yourself in the head or I'll kill you!' type of threat.
In reality, hijacking airplanes doesn't work anymore. There was a huge security hole with the 'cooperate with hijackers' that was exploited, once, and that's it.
The only way an airplane can be used as a weapon again is if someone manages to get themselves locked in the cockpit alone. And the terrorists manage to maintain control of the critical flight systems in the rest of the plane.
Which is, of course, why we should extend the big red button idea to putting a button under each seat, and if, say, 1/4th of them are pushed, it autolands, or at least comes under control of air traffic control.
Yeah, limiting what people can do sometimes makes sense. For example, if I was constantly hassled by beggers, I might want to have some five dollar Burger King gift certificates or whatever in my wallet.
But a Walmart gift card makes no sense at all. Don't even try to tell me how it shows thought went into the gift...who, exactly, doesn't need something they could get from Walmart every week?
I mean, if someone rents a movie every week from Blockbuster, a Blockbuster gift certicate would show thought. But everyone buys Mountain Dew or cough medicine or a pillow or a tent or a gun or a ottoman or an 12-volt inverter or one of those balls that make the static lightning dance when you touch them or...
I mean, seriously, people. A Walmart gift card shows you put no thought into it at all, because everyone can use it. And if you're giving a gift that anyone could use, you might as well give cash.
There's an easier way to trace them: Figure out who's asking for balances on unsold cards. Yes, once might be a mistake, but if someone calls in and asks for the balance on ten different cards, and seven of them haven't been sold yet, something is seriously wrong.
And you can even expand it. Forget reprogramming cards, purchase them by sticking a buck on them (or however little they allow), read the code, repaint the scratched off code, and stick them back on the shelf.
Then you copy the code onto another card and keep going in and asking if there's any money on that card.
Yes, the grandparent is a fool. I worked at Wallyworld, not in LP, but I knew someone who did. He said, basically, that other employees don't have any idea what's going on there. The management deliberately doesn't tell them anything, so basically everything's a rumor. I suspect that the management figured out that employees are probably more likely to steal from the store, and also realized they didn't want to be told this. But, hey, like I said, I don't know anything...I'm just one of the few people who worked there who realized I don't know anything.
Of course, I was a cashier, so the only thing I was even vaguely expected to do toward loss prevention was to open up coolers and tackleboxes. People who shoplift normally don't even go though the checkout. And the only things I could steal were pens and tictacs. (Well, obviously, I could have stuck a few hundred dollars in my pocket and sprinted out of the store. But not undetected.)
However, I simply can't go with the idea that all cameras are recording. There's no reason they wouldn't have told us that, and what we were supposed to do about shoplifters are predicated on altering management without letting them out of our sight, and we were told that basically nothing would be done if we did let them out of our sight.
In other words, if you shoplift in Walmart, wander quickly around the store immediately afterwards, and you'll probably get away with it. They don't want people pretending to shoplift and then sticking things back on shelves when no one's looking. Which makes no sense at all if the cameras are always rolling and have complete coverage...they could just check the tape before stopping someone. (Or, at least, before searching them.)
Like you said, we weren't told jack about how actual LP works...but I don't understand what they would have to gain by telling us that it's more important to watch the shoplifter than to alert someone, if in actuality they have tapes of everything.
That said, I couldn't care less. While I loathe Walmart, I don't plan to start shoplifting from there. I do laugh as I casually get 20 dollars cash back on a 59 cent purchase, though, secure in knowing that my bank charged them 2 dollars for that.
And if they ever talk about a schedule power outage...that's a bomb threat. Just in case anyone cares and actually wants to get out of the store.
While it sounds like an inside job, or at least someone with access to the store's systems, the cashier they're using the card at wouldn't have anything to do with it.
I don't see how you can make the impossible less or more possible. That's nonsensical.
You would not be 'more' able to pick yourself up if you weighed two pounds instead of two hundred. It's not impossible because you aren't strong enough, there are plenty of people strong enough to lift their entire body from that point, it's impossible because you have to push against something when you lift things.
First of all, it's obviously not as good an OTP as someone will get, because, duh, a real OTP is better.
As for decrypting part of it...that's exactly how you'd do it. You keep decrypting it until the whole file seems to make sense.
And I have to point out we currently have places storing petabytes of data.
That idea might make sense if we could somehow transmit at a septillion times as fast as we currently do. Right now, it would be trivial to store entire days worth of data, or more, as fast as we can possible transmit. And, no, people aren't going to use some sort of goofy encryption that makes them wait a week to decode their data. Might as well just put the OTP on a CD and fly across the country with it.
And note that the faster we transmit, the harder it is to syncronize on the signal and receive it. At some point the price and technology level is prohibitive. So you can't solve the problem by just making it faster and faster. (And even if you could make it near infinitely fast, you'd then find the time-stamp is getting rather long., so you gain nothing over using an actual OTP.)
Not to mention, even if the idea could work as of this moment, we're getting bigger and bigger hard drives, whereas we're not getting better satellite transmission. We're fitting more in via compression, but by defination you cannot compress random data. 'How much data can we send down from satellite' is limited, because there's only so many frequencies we can use. Whereas storage space show absolutely no signs of stopping.
And this, again, is not a OTP. It's a psuedo-OTP, which is a 'one time pad' generated from something else. In this case, the actual pad is easily available in stores, and you're trying to confuse the issue by making it hard to find. Well, it may, indeed, be hard to find. But it is not impossible, and thus, by defination, what you have is not a OTP.
And there's the rather goofy problem that you've now got a timestamp accurate to a millionth of a second that you have to transmit instead of a pad. Have fun reading 12 digits over the phone, and hope the line isn't tapped. Want to up it from a MB/s? Well, you just made the timestamp longer.
What's that you say? You're not going to read it over the phone, you're going to carry it in person? Why the hell don't you just carry the pad, then?
This is classic 'Let's make a OTP encryption taht doesn't involve keeping the entire pad secret and transmitting the entire pad.'. Those aren't OTPs, and thus they are not unbreakable, and thus there's already plenty of perfectly good encryption out there to use instead, ones that have been mathmatically proven to require more energy to brute-force than our sun will ever give off. No need to invent more while mumbling to ourselves 'It's like a OTP'. Just use 1024 bit symetrical encryption and God himself couldn't decode it before the sun goes out.
You've just turned a OTP into something that can, and will, be decrypted. And never, ever, ever, ever, ever talk about 'sheer amount of data...will make it prohibitive'. Haven't you paid any attention to the world? We eat sheer amounts of data for brunch.
This is another psuedo-OTP solution. Psuedo-OTPs are not OTPs. What's worse, is that's a psuedo-OTP via obscurity.
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The article explicitly stated that they were connecting them to their own DSL and cable modem connections, not the school's network. (How'd they get cable modem in a dorm, anyway?)
There so much misinformation in this discussion it's insane. Thatnk you for your efforts to increase the amount of noise here.
The student's WAPs have just as much right to be there as the school's.
Did no one read the last story on this? The FCC has EXPLICITLY ruled on this with regard to wifi. If it's legal for you to be somewhere, it's legal for you to be there with an attenna and broadcasting on an unregulated spectrum, and God Himself can't stop you, only the FCC.
Now, with satellitte dishes, it is possible to stop them by not giving the tenant anywhere outside to place them. Obviously that doesn't apply to WAPs unless you're leasing a room that's microscopic.
I know what you mean. I recently got a lava lamp, and it rocks.
Luckily, the bot didn't agree to the AUP.
I urge everyone to do exactly what the parent post suggested, go and read that entire thing.
Kerry deserved two Purple Hearts instead of three? Somehow I'm having troubling getting upset there. There are thousands of stupidly awarded medals in the war, and thousands of non-awarded medals that should have been awarded. And purple hearts, despite what people seem to think, are not incredibly important. You can legitimately get one by spraining your ankle while running from enemy fire. It's not a frickin congressional medal of honor, people.
Kerry might have stupidly hurt himself in the war by operating a genade launcher incorrectly? Hey, you have to give him points for operating one incorrectly and managing to live. I'd probably blow myself up. Luckily for him, we're not electing him to operate a genade launcher.
Kerry used a somewhat dubious injury to escape Vietnam early, and then spoke out against it? So...he willing went into a war zone, saw it wasn't all that he was promised, and managed to get out early? You know, I can't actually condemn that, either.
I can't even condemn draft dodgers, so I certainly have no problems with people who walked in and realized this was some heavy shit and used every means at their disposal to get out. And he didn't just walk away, either, he thought the war was wrong so he did something about it. (And, I'm rather baffled at this 'war crimes' stuff. I thought everyone knew the US did some pretty horrible things during that war? Do we really want to start rehashing the fact US soldiers raped and tortured people during that war?)
OTOH, I can't really condemn Bush from escaping into the National Guard, although I can condemn him from using his family connections to not even bother to show up.
And, of course, all this is crazy, because the assaults on Kerry's military record have almost no basis in fact.
But, let's all yammer about California suing them while ignoring the huge revelations that have happened in the last two weeks WRT Diebold.
It's that the right-wing judges in the Surpreme Court decided to throw out all their principles and the law books and any sort of states rights just to make sure Bush won.
In retrospect, it would have been very nice if Gore had won, because Bush is a power-mad secretive nutjob intent on destroying the economy and our relations with other countries, as long as his friends get rich...but that is completely seperate from the problem with the election, where a lot of the Supreme Court decided to make a wrong ruling just so their candidate would get into office.
And, yes, both Bush and Gore were doing the same thing...but they're candidates, it's expected of them. The Supreme Court should have either stayed out of it or ordered a statewide recount under exactly what the Florida law said, which IIRC was 'intent of the voter'. And it should have investigated claims of police stopping voters. (The butterfly ballot issue, sadly, was pretty much unfixable.) Saying 'Well, our candidate is currently ahead, and we don't want anyone to question the election' was rephrensible and idiotic.
Unlike some people who don't like Bush, I wouldn't have a problem with the election if there had been complete recounts and investigations into other claims, even if Bush had won. And I like it think I would have issues if the same thing had happened then, but with Gore coming out on top. Way too many people are mixing 'issues with the election process' with 'issues with winner's leadership so far'. I, personally, have both, but it's possible to just have one or the other. And almost everyone who's not an idiot should have had issues with the election process in the 2000 election.
But I don't know of any laws like that. People are punished for selling alcohol to minors, no one cares if they 'check IDs' or not. For example, you don't have to card people you know are overaged.
All this, of course, will sound silly if you work in a large store, because they will claim you're required to card people...but they're lying.
Of course, under the law, you have much less liability if you were lied to, instead of failing to check. The more you attempted to verify, the less you get punished.
All this is really besides the point, though. There's a large difference between state legistlaters making a law requiring stores to have you prove your age before they do something that would be illegal if you were underaged, and the FCC making airlines store your information in a large database, where the FCC will use the data to attempt to determine whether or not they will punish you by disallowing you to fly, without telling anyone what law requires this, or anything about what's going on.
If you're really worried about privacy, you can cover up your name and address on your driver's license and they can still see the date. And, yes, they will sell it to you, I used to check IDs, and I ran across someone who did that, he had a little cover on his photo ID where you could just see the photo and the birthday.
And, plus...what kind of stupid-ass threat is that if the pilot thinks they're just going to fly it into the building anyway? It's a 'shoot yourself in the head or I'll kill you!' type of threat.
In reality, hijacking airplanes doesn't work anymore. There was a huge security hole with the 'cooperate with hijackers' that was exploited, once, and that's it.
The only way an airplane can be used as a weapon again is if someone manages to get themselves locked in the cockpit alone. And the terrorists manage to maintain control of the critical flight systems in the rest of the plane.
Which is, of course, why we should extend the big red button idea to putting a button under each seat, and if, say, 1/4th of them are pushed, it autolands, or at least comes under control of air traffic control.
But a Walmart gift card makes no sense at all. Don't even try to tell me how it shows thought went into the gift...who, exactly, doesn't need something they could get from Walmart every week?
I mean, if someone rents a movie every week from Blockbuster, a Blockbuster gift certicate would show thought. But everyone buys Mountain Dew or cough medicine or a pillow or a tent or a gun or a ottoman or an 12-volt inverter or one of those balls that make the static lightning dance when you touch them or...
I mean, seriously, people. A Walmart gift card shows you put no thought into it at all, because everyone can use it. And if you're giving a gift that anyone could use, you might as well give cash.
There's an easier way to trace them: Figure out who's asking for balances on unsold cards. Yes, once might be a mistake, but if someone calls in and asks for the balance on ten different cards, and seven of them haven't been sold yet, something is seriously wrong.
Fucktards.
Gift cards are just stupid, period.
And you can even expand it. Forget reprogramming cards, purchase them by sticking a buck on them (or however little they allow), read the code, repaint the scratched off code, and stick them back on the shelf.
Then you copy the code onto another card and keep going in and asking if there's any money on that card.
Um, if you're going to do that, why would you bother with the UPC office? Just buy something cheap, copy the barcode, and stick it on expensive items.
Of course, I was a cashier, so the only thing I was even vaguely expected to do toward loss prevention was to open up coolers and tackleboxes. People who shoplift normally don't even go though the checkout. And the only things I could steal were pens and tictacs. (Well, obviously, I could have stuck a few hundred dollars in my pocket and sprinted out of the store. But not undetected.)
However, I simply can't go with the idea that all cameras are recording. There's no reason they wouldn't have told us that, and what we were supposed to do about shoplifters are predicated on altering management without letting them out of our sight, and we were told that basically nothing would be done if we did let them out of our sight.
In other words, if you shoplift in Walmart, wander quickly around the store immediately afterwards, and you'll probably get away with it. They don't want people pretending to shoplift and then sticking things back on shelves when no one's looking. Which makes no sense at all if the cameras are always rolling and have complete coverage...they could just check the tape before stopping someone. (Or, at least, before searching them.)
Like you said, we weren't told jack about how actual LP works...but I don't understand what they would have to gain by telling us that it's more important to watch the shoplifter than to alert someone, if in actuality they have tapes of everything.
That said, I couldn't care less. While I loathe Walmart, I don't plan to start shoplifting from there. I do laugh as I casually get 20 dollars cash back on a 59 cent purchase, though, secure in knowing that my bank charged them 2 dollars for that.
And if they ever talk about a schedule power outage...that's a bomb threat. Just in case anyone cares and actually wants to get out of the store.
While it sounds like an inside job, or at least someone with access to the store's systems, the cashier they're using the card at wouldn't have anything to do with it.
And why do we keep getting back to Douglas Adams no matter what we do?
You would not be 'more' able to pick yourself up if you weighed two pounds instead of two hundred. It's not impossible because you aren't strong enough, there are plenty of people strong enough to lift their entire body from that point, it's impossible because you have to push against something when you lift things.
And what's below that?
In fact, there have been proposals for trains that orbit the earth underground.
As for decrypting part of it...that's exactly how you'd do it. You keep decrypting it until the whole file seems to make sense.
And I have to point out we currently have places storing petabytes of data.
That idea might make sense if we could somehow transmit at a septillion times as fast as we currently do. Right now, it would be trivial to store entire days worth of data, or more, as fast as we can possible transmit. And, no, people aren't going to use some sort of goofy encryption that makes them wait a week to decode their data. Might as well just put the OTP on a CD and fly across the country with it.
And note that the faster we transmit, the harder it is to syncronize on the signal and receive it. At some point the price and technology level is prohibitive. So you can't solve the problem by just making it faster and faster. (And even if you could make it near infinitely fast, you'd then find the time-stamp is getting rather long., so you gain nothing over using an actual OTP.)
Not to mention, even if the idea could work as of this moment, we're getting bigger and bigger hard drives, whereas we're not getting better satellite transmission. We're fitting more in via compression, but by defination you cannot compress random data. 'How much data can we send down from satellite' is limited, because there's only so many frequencies we can use. Whereas storage space show absolutely no signs of stopping.
And this, again, is not a OTP. It's a psuedo-OTP, which is a 'one time pad' generated from something else. In this case, the actual pad is easily available in stores, and you're trying to confuse the issue by making it hard to find. Well, it may, indeed, be hard to find. But it is not impossible, and thus, by defination, what you have is not a OTP.
And there's the rather goofy problem that you've now got a timestamp accurate to a millionth of a second that you have to transmit instead of a pad. Have fun reading 12 digits over the phone, and hope the line isn't tapped. Want to up it from a MB/s? Well, you just made the timestamp longer.
What's that you say? You're not going to read it over the phone, you're going to carry it in person? Why the hell don't you just carry the pad, then?
This is classic 'Let's make a OTP encryption taht doesn't involve keeping the entire pad secret and transmitting the entire pad.'. Those aren't OTPs, and thus they are not unbreakable, and thus there's already plenty of perfectly good encryption out there to use instead, ones that have been mathmatically proven to require more energy to brute-force than our sun will ever give off. No need to invent more while mumbling to ourselves 'It's like a OTP'. Just use 1024 bit symetrical encryption and God himself couldn't decode it before the sun goes out.
If you're not being sarcastic, I don't know what the *so* was about.
This is another psuedo-OTP solution. Psuedo-OTPs are not OTPs. What's worse, is that's a psuedo-OTP via obscurity.