The disturbing part about the reaction to the Orkin commercial (I.E., the idiots who are throwing things through their TVs) is this:
That roach is on the screen for about 3 seconds before the Orkin man appears.
It's during those 3 seconds that people are getting it through their heads that they need to throw something through the TV, finding something, and throwing it through the TV.
Good luck. Personally, I think the effort would be better spent trying to write an application emulation layer, instead of porting the whole OS, but it's no skin off my nose since I won't be on either project.:-)
Guys.. I know people who work/have worked for financial institutions. I'd estimate the security to be B2 or above (if it was government certified). Unlike the DoD's "NIPR" net which was/supposed/ to be physically disconnected from any/every other network, the financial institutions just plain don't transfer important info over networks. The data is too valuable.
And I have written code for small banks, and installed their networks. (I'd say designed, but in every case they overrode most of my security requirements and designed their own.)
You may very well be correct regarding large financial institutions, but little banks make do with the same resources as all other little companies; whatever they can scrounge from the cheap end of the local talent pool.
The largest bank in my home town transfers their data over an IPX LAN using Cisco routers configured and maintained by a company whose average "network engineer" is less than 21 years old.
The most competent network engineer currently at that company was once fired for running a warez site on a company PC, and it's not at all uncommon for them to snoop customer traffic including bank dialups, which I know for a fact sometimes use the same passwords as they use internally.
There is NOBODY at that bank who can check those routers to make sure they aren't doing other things, such as TCP/IP to all the dialup-connected PCs also on that LAN, or something else through the 56k leased line to Compuserve for credit verification, etc. I suspect, but can't prove, that there's nobody there who even knows the router passwords.
Said bank's employees frequently install software brought from home or downloaded off the net. Said bank has no firewall for those internet connections.
Said bank has physical security that includes a branch office with no cameras, a consumer-grade alarm, friends and family of college-age employees routinely coming and going, and an unfirewalled direct LAN connection to the main building.
Oh; and until recently, they had their System 34 and later System 36 in that branch office. Fortunately, their Unix systems and Novell servers have never been in that building.
The lock on the back door was a cheap consumer-grade door lock. Pickable with a screwdriver and a paper clip, I'd estimate. EASILY pickable with tools, and this has been demonstrated to them.
Because some of those countries that fear us would be invading/bombing/terrorizing us if they didn't fear us, and *THEY* will be developing in any aspect of military science in which we are not.
Why do so many people who assume that the US Government is composed of nasty war-mongering fascists fail to realize that the governments of other countries are more so?
Over here, they at least have the check that if they're truly off their nut, people will vote 'em out of office. That isn't true in, say, Libya, Iraq, China, etc.
Hell, even our allies are fascists. Germany today is only a hairline short of the way they were in the 1930s.
And don't get me started on where Brazil will be in 25 years. They're damned close to us geographically, and damned far away philosophically.
As for space being for scientific development; not if we suddenly wake up one day unable to get there anymore, because somebody else walled it up like a fortress and we didn't keep up.
(This is almost certainly way low, in that I'm assuming 25% of approximately 12,000 servers on the Internet. I have no real idea how many servers there are.)
I'd say you're off by a couple of orders of magnitude, right there.
Netcraft surveys nearly 10 million sites, and they have to be missing a lot.
If they can be moved, you can turn one into a time machine (giving causality the finger) by accelerating one end to relativistic speeds and taking it on a trip, as noted in the actual paper (but ignored by both the New Scientist and BBC articles).
What always amazed me about this discussion is that many scientists, who are trained to believe that nothing is automatically impossible just because it doesn't fit common sense, and who are used to dealing with quantum mechanical effects that absolutely do not match any kind of common sense mental construction, will nevertheless make the statement (which you didn't make, ckd, you just reminded me of it) that "wormholes would mean time travel, which violates causality, and therefore wormholes can't possible be used to transmit people or information in any way, ipso facto".
Bullshit; if the math says they can, then they can. If the math doesn't say they can, they can't. Period. Causality doesn't enter into it.
We don't have all the math yet to know for sure. People who try to develop that understanding shouldn't have to take the kind of crap that they get from a certain segment of the scientific community.
Remember, Einstein wasted a lot of his time denying aspects of Quantum Physics that he'd have been a lot better off working WITH, instead of against. Yes, the quest to disprove a theory is a valuable one, but when you reach a certain point you're not being thorough anymore, you're just being stubborn and depriving the world of the insights you could have made doing some real work.
How much better off would the world have been with the good work Einstein could have been doing instead? Maybe we'll never know.
In the real world, sometimes parents name their kids stupid things like Darksoul, or Feardoom, or Moon Unit, or Dweezil.
In the real world, sometimes people change their own names legally to things like Darksoul, or Feardoom, or The Artist, or Columbia University.
In fantasy fiction, sometimes characters are named things like Darksoul, or Feardoom.
It's asinine to go around changing your paying customer's choice of names because they aren't what you would have picked. Hopefully all of those affected will respond by quitting the game.
A couple of months ago, I talked to Lolita Fatjo, and she said at the time that:
1) They'd have to tell her about 18 months in advance of a new series.
2) They hadn't told her yet.
3) If they wanted to do one in fall of 2001 they'd have to start making public noises in a couple of months.
Now here we are.
Birth of the Federation was one of the ideas she mentioned as "not having been completely ruled out as too stupid" so I think we've got a pretty good chance that this thing is really gonna get off the ground.
I think you're going to be disappointed on continuity, though. Remember, they have to basically pretend like all the technology in TOS didn't really look like it did, or this one would have to look REALLY crappy.
I'd expect movie-era technology in terms of user interface, don't expect it to look even older than TOS.
As to your other point most encryptions are very easy to diffrentiate from true noise. For instance they possess headers well deliminated start and stops of messages etc..
That's not the encryption, that's the delivery system.
PGP adds headers, for instance; but PGP isn't an encryption algorithm, it's an encryption PROGRAM. IDEA is an encryption algorithm. It's largely indistinguishable from random noise.
I could modify DES by making its output 1128 bits with every other bit a 0 with no loss in its security.
Yes, it's certainly possible to modify an encryption algorithm to insert pointless data that has nothing to do with the encryption, and is there simply to make it identifiable.
But since we were talking about trying to *HIDE* information, why would anyone in his right mind do that?
I mean, you could also print the ciphertext out, and write "DES ENCRYPTED" in 3-inch purple letters across the top. To then try to stick that stack of paper into another stack and say "I hope nobody notices that part's encrypted" is asinine.
A more effective technique would be to stick a GIF header at the beginning of the data, and then claim it must have gotten corrupted. That's called "lying", and it's a very effective security technique.:-)
There seems nothing which makes it impossible to embed a signal in some predetermined sort of noise which is computationally extremly difficult to extract without the proper key (i.e. it resembles noise very very closely). If a company patented such a technique there seems to be no reason they couldn't make money on it.
Resembles noise very very closely, and can't be extracted without the proper key?
You've just described *ALL* strong encryption.
That's exactly why Steganography isn't "secure". Strongly-encrypted data looks like random. The more secure it is, the more it looks like random.
When you stick random noise into something that has patterns (which is what Stegangraphing some ciphertext is) it is easy to detect, unless the "something" is really really huge with lots of places in it where randomness can occur and be replaced easily.
Slashdot Mirror
No no no, don't think portable screen:
Think headset.
And one-handed chording keyboard in the pocket.
You'll look like a perv, with your hand moving in there, but you can live with it.
Does it run Linux? FreeBSD? InsertYourReligionHere?
To find out, I started here: the manufacturer's website
What I expected was to spend a few minutes digging around, finding what chipsets it used for various components, comparing with the hardware compatibility lists for my particular sect of Penguin Worship
What I did not expect to find was, in big bold purple letters, "Run Windows 2000/98/NT, Linux".
Not once, but twice. (Although not so big and purple the second time.)
It's also got an S-Video port, which purports to support both NTSC and PAL, and comes with an adapter for composite video output.
And 3D sound.
And 4mb of video memory, support 1280x1024x16.7M and 1600x1200x256.
Yikes. This thing is damn near perfect, considering it's not a Transmeta processor.
Hell, it's more powerful than my server. In fact, I ran an ISP once on far less box than this, serving thousands of customers.
In fact, Bruce's page allows the public to post comments.
Unless they're running Netscape 6 or Mozilla, in which case it doesn't work, but that's not the point.
The disturbing part about the reaction to the Orkin commercial (I.E., the idiots who are throwing things through their TVs) is this:
That roach is on the screen for about 3 seconds before the Orkin man appears.
It's during those 3 seconds that people are getting it through their heads that they need to throw something through the TV, finding something, and throwing it through the TV.
What the hell is wrong with people?
This would be damned unlikely. Not impossible, but orders of magnitude harder than porting it to most architectures.
:-)
See this link: comments from IBM employees to the "Linux on AS/400" project.
And, of course, the project page itself.
Good luck. Personally, I think the effort would be better spent trying to write an application emulation layer, instead of porting the whole OS, but it's no skin off my nose since I won't be on either project.
Guys.. I know people who work/have worked for financial institutions. I'd estimate the security to be B2 or above (if it was government certified). Unlike the DoD's "NIPR" net which was /supposed/ to be physically disconnected from any/every other network, the financial institutions just plain don't transfer important info over networks. The data is too valuable.
And I have written code for small banks, and installed their networks. (I'd say designed, but in every case they overrode most of my security requirements and designed their own.)
You may very well be correct regarding large financial institutions, but little banks make do with the same resources as all other little companies; whatever they can scrounge from the cheap end of the local talent pool.
The largest bank in my home town transfers their data over an IPX LAN using Cisco routers configured and maintained by a company whose average "network engineer" is less than 21 years old.
The most competent network engineer currently at that company was once fired for running a warez site on a company PC, and it's not at all uncommon for them to snoop customer traffic including bank dialups, which I know for a fact sometimes use the same passwords as they use internally.
There is NOBODY at that bank who can check those routers to make sure they aren't doing other things, such as TCP/IP to all the dialup-connected PCs also on that LAN, or something else through the 56k leased line to Compuserve for credit verification, etc. I suspect, but can't prove, that there's nobody there who even knows the router passwords.
Said bank's employees frequently install software brought from home or downloaded off the net. Said bank has no firewall for those internet connections.
Said bank has physical security that includes a branch office with no cameras, a consumer-grade alarm, friends and family of college-age employees routinely coming and going, and an unfirewalled direct LAN connection to the main building.
Oh; and until recently, they had their System 34 and later System 36 in that branch office. Fortunately, their Unix systems and Novell servers have never been in that building.
The lock on the back door was a cheap consumer-grade door lock. Pickable with a screwdriver and a paper clip, I'd estimate. EASILY pickable with tools, and this has been demonstrated to them.
Because some of those countries that fear us would be invading/bombing/terrorizing us if they didn't fear us, and *THEY* will be developing in any aspect of military science in which we are not.
Why do so many people who assume that the US Government is composed of nasty war-mongering fascists fail to realize that the governments of other countries are more so?
Over here, they at least have the check that if they're truly off their nut, people will vote 'em out of office. That isn't true in, say, Libya, Iraq, China, etc.
Hell, even our allies are fascists. Germany today is only a hairline short of the way they were in the 1930s.
And don't get me started on where Brazil will be in 25 years. They're damned close to us geographically, and damned far away philosophically.
As for space being for scientific development; not if we suddenly wake up one day unable to get there anymore, because somebody else walled it up like a fortress and we didn't keep up.
Scratch that; it's over 13 million now.
(This is almost certainly way low, in that I'm assuming 25% of approximately 12,000 servers on the Internet. I have no real idea how many servers there are.)
I'd say you're off by a couple of orders of magnitude, right there.
Netcraft surveys nearly 10 million sites, and they have to be missing a lot.
Ok, but that still doesn't explain why people don't type their query into Google or Altavista or even DejaNews before spewing it as an Ask Slashdot.
Or, for that matter, why the editors don't send the above sentence back to the submitter instead of posting the lame question.
UTFSE; Use The Freakin' Search Engines.
What is Winders?
Not trademark, that's what.
'nuff said.
And within a year, school cafeterias would be serving nothing but hot grits, poured directly into the student's pants.
Jon Katz would be Secretary of Education, but no-one in the Senate would publicly admit to having voted to confirm him.
School policy changes would be decided by poll, with the most common new policy change thus being "Hemos".
And, last but not least, there would be a naked statue of Natalie Portman outside each school.
If they can be moved, you can turn one into a time machine (giving causality the finger) by accelerating one end to relativistic speeds and taking it on a trip, as noted in the actual paper (but ignored by both the New Scientist and BBC articles).
What always amazed me about this discussion is that many scientists, who are trained to believe that nothing is automatically impossible just because it doesn't fit common sense, and who are used to dealing with quantum mechanical effects that absolutely do not match any kind of common sense mental construction, will nevertheless make the statement (which you didn't make, ckd, you just reminded me of it) that "wormholes would mean time travel, which violates causality, and therefore wormholes can't possible be used to transmit people or information in any way, ipso facto".
Bullshit; if the math says they can, then they can. If the math doesn't say they can, they can't. Period. Causality doesn't enter into it.
We don't have all the math yet to know for sure. People who try to develop that understanding shouldn't have to take the kind of crap that they get from a certain segment of the scientific community.
Remember, Einstein wasted a lot of his time denying aspects of Quantum Physics that he'd have been a lot better off working WITH, instead of against. Yes, the quest to disprove a theory is a valuable one, but when you reach a certain point you're not being thorough anymore, you're just being stubborn and depriving the world of the insights you could have made doing some real work.
How much better off would the world have been with the good work Einstein could have been doing instead? Maybe we'll never know.
In the real world, sometimes parents name their kids stupid things like Darksoul, or Feardoom, or Moon Unit, or Dweezil.
In the real world, sometimes people change their own names legally to things like Darksoul, or Feardoom, or The Artist, or Columbia University.
In fantasy fiction, sometimes characters are named things like Darksoul, or Feardoom.
It's asinine to go around changing your paying customer's choice of names because they aren't what you would have picked. Hopefully all of those affected will respond by quitting the game.
The guts were pushing out because all the actors were fat, not because of any deficiency of the uniforms.
Those uniforms look great when you don't have to accomodate a "legacy actor".
I agree with you about the sets, but those ST:TMP uniforms sucked ASS.
The ST:TWOK and later "military-style" uniforms were the best of any of the Trek series, by far.
A couple of months ago, I talked to Lolita Fatjo, and she said at the time that:
1) They'd have to tell her about 18 months in advance of a new series.
2) They hadn't told her yet.
3) If they wanted to do one in fall of 2001 they'd have to start making public noises in a couple of months.
Now here we are.
Birth of the Federation was one of the ideas she mentioned as "not having been completely ruled out as too stupid" so I think we've got a pretty good chance that this thing is really gonna get off the ground.
I think you're going to be disappointed on continuity, though. Remember, they have to basically pretend like all the technology in TOS didn't really look like it did, or this one would have to look REALLY crappy.
I'd expect movie-era technology in terms of user interface, don't expect it to look even older than TOS.
As to your other point most encryptions are very easy to diffrentiate from true noise. For instance they possess headers well deliminated start and stops of messages etc..
:-)
That's not the encryption, that's the delivery system.
PGP adds headers, for instance; but PGP isn't an encryption algorithm, it's an encryption PROGRAM. IDEA is an encryption algorithm. It's largely indistinguishable from random noise.
I could modify DES by making its output 1128 bits with every other bit a 0 with no loss in its security.
Yes, it's certainly possible to modify an encryption algorithm to insert pointless data that has nothing to do with the encryption, and is there simply to make it identifiable.
But since we were talking about trying to *HIDE* information, why would anyone in his right mind do that?
I mean, you could also print the ciphertext out, and write "DES ENCRYPTED" in 3-inch purple letters across the top. To then try to stick that stack of paper into another stack and say "I hope nobody notices that part's encrypted" is asinine.
A more effective technique would be to stick a GIF header at the beginning of the data, and then claim it must have gotten corrupted. That's called "lying", and it's a very effective security technique.
0.
On no other show would the female leads get together and host a joint web site as http://www.crusadebabes.com
There seems nothing which makes it impossible to embed a signal in some predetermined sort of noise which is computationally extremly difficult to extract without the proper key (i.e. it resembles noise very very closely). If a company patented such a technique there seems to be no reason they couldn't make money on it.
Resembles noise very very closely, and can't be extracted without the proper key?
You've just described *ALL* strong encryption.
That's exactly why Steganography isn't "secure". Strongly-encrypted data looks like random. The more secure it is, the more it looks like random.
When you stick random noise into something that has patterns (which is what Stegangraphing some ciphertext is) it is easy to detect, unless the "something" is really really huge with lots of places in it where randomness can occur and be replaced easily.
It appears to be going around. As near as I can tell, somebody is using all of their moderation points to mark random posts as trolls.
My post was Flamebait, Redundant, and Overrated, but it wasn't a Troll.
Yeah, I don't understand why anybody would say "good luck, Angelina".
This is the same stupid bitch who, when interviewed about "Hackers", was insulting geeks.
We should be hoping and/or praying she doesn't get the part, and making plans to boycott the damn movie if she does.
Besides, Lara Croft is British. For god's sake, hire a Brit actress. How about Elizabeth Hurley?
Hell, even Michael Caine would be a better choice than that stupid Jolie bitch.
When has a previously-dominant, now-defeated commercial software product ever made a comeback?
UNIX?
Not so much; they buy CDs for convenience, but generally they get their music for free from the record companies.
They send out CDs full of music every week.
No.