I don't think the problems with previous wireless security systems were with the block ciphers used.
The hard part in practical cryptography is not the block ciphers (there are plenty of those to choose from, off the shelf, that are good--AES, RC4, Twofish, Serpent, triple DES, etc). The hard part is using them properly--picking an appropriate mode, key management, padding, and stuff like that.
It's not likely that the 200MHz CPU in that thing is going to handle 54Mbit worth of traffic. AES is not the easiest to calculate...
On x86, AES can be done in under 25 clock cycles per byte, so if that is an x86, a 200 MHz CPU could handle 54 mbit/second, although it wouldn't leave much for other stuff.
Seriously, though, the model rockets we used to build were cool and all, but they are much less dangerous than the average twelve-gauge shotgun that you can by at your local Walmart
Those aren't the kind of rockets they are talking about. The kind of rockets they are talking about are huge and are very dangerous.
I've been stuck on hold for hours before, I always wished someone would have books-on-tape for being on hold. I don't care if it's even a boring book, least it's not going to be something I've heard 7000x's before like common music
That would not work well. Imagine being on hold for a long time, and hearing half of a really good story, but not knowing the title or author so you can't track it down to finish it (or when you do find it, it is expensive).
I found out we can hook up a CD player to the phone system to alleviate this, but the real question is now: what do we want to play? What's the best 'on hold' music you've heard?
That's not the real question. The real question is: what is legal to play? Getting sued over your hold music would be a real bummer.
Reading the description of their service at napster.com, they almost have it right, but not quite.
I've bought on CD most of the music I want to permanently own, so am not all that interested in Napster's options to buy music (same goes for iTunes).
Napster's "stream any of 700k tracks for a flat $10/month" plan looks nice. It would be a way to listen to all that music that I don't feel like buying, but would like to occasionally listen to, and would be a great way to find new music.
However, I want to be able to use my portable for that. So, this is what I want:
Flat rate for unlimited streaming on my PC. This covers most of my needs, since most of my listening is while working at my computer.
Something like what O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf does for books for my portable. That is, I'd be allowed to have a certain number of albums, as part of my flat monthly fee, on my portable. There would be some specified rate at which I could replace these albums.
Criticism of the mix of high tech space stuff and low tech western stuff strikes me as silly, when all you have to do is look around in the real world, and you'll see a far wider range in technology levels on just this one planet than they showed in the whole Firefly galaxy.
Even the dumbest safety check would have proven the alligation to be false because Microsoft should be able to tell from logs that zero messages were ever sent from the account, so even if that was 100% spam that's still zero spam messages!
Spammers almost never send spam from their Hotmail accounts. The Hotmail accounts are used to receive replies to the spam, such as orders.
That said, the steps necessary to convert my favorite fragging tracks to.ogg for use in UT2004 seemed unnecessarily complex (burn to cd, rip to wav, encode to ogg), and as such I am wondering if a DRM is really necessary
Have you looked at AllOfMP3?
Cheaper than iTMS, and you can get the stuff in Ogg already. (And no DRM).
By that argument, using steroids isn't cheating for an Olympic athlete, and corking a bat isn't cheating for a baseball player. Market forces drive them to do it, after all.
Market forces are irrelevant to what is cheating. Cheating is determined entirely by the rules. For many MMORPGs, it is stated right in the rules that it is cheating. Market forces might determine why someone cheats, but not whether or not what they do is cheating.
Stop posting about that which you know nothing about. Oh, wait, this is slashdot, I should be expecting this kind of thing already.
Buying and selling money is a normal aspect of SL, encouraged by the developers
Perhaps you should take your own advice. (Hint: the person who "bought" the items and didn't pay was not buying SL money. He was buying SWG and Eve Online stuff).
Quit messing around with Paypal, and call the District Attorney where the guy lives.
He has admitted he commited fraud, get him arrested and see him in court.
Good idea. District Attorneys work hard, and could use a good laugh now and then.
To get the DA interested, the seller would have to be selling something that they actually have a right to sell.
In a fit of nerdliness, I once defined a game I called Mango (Math Nerd Go), which generalizes Go. Some might find it amusing. Not feeling like slashdotting myself, I'll give the Google cache link.:-)
hehe, do what I did...buy it on iTunes and don't worry about it;)
So to avoid having the CD install DRM software on your computer, you used a DRM system you already had (iTunes) to buy the songs in AAC format with DRM?
First, without information on their methodology, that Earthlink study is worthless. If the sample consisted of people who went to Earthlink and ran Earthlink's spyware scan, then that will be heavily biased toward people who suspect that they have spyware.
Second, a large chunk of spyware does get consent already, to the extent that it asks first, and only installs if the user says it is OK. The problem here is that most users don't read dialogs. They treat any dialog that is not obviously directly related to something they are specifically trying to accomplish as an annoyance and they click on whatever it appears to take to get it to go away.
What is needed is a standardized "consent manager". Any program that wants to install, etc., would invoke the consent manager, which would tell the user what the program wishes to do, give the company's privacy policy, etc. There should also be a standardized set of items to include in privacy policies. The consent manager could be told by the program what the company policy is on each of those, and the consent manager could display those in a table or something, instead of buried in the EULA, and highlight those that differ from what the user desires.
Users might then learn that when they see a dialog from the consent manager, it is something that is important, rather than an annoyance to click through.
I use a Mac and purchased the album. No problem encoding to AAC with iTunes or transferring to an ipod. Wouldn't have even known it was copy protected without this posting
Uhm...according to CNET, it says so prominently on the cover. Don't you look at the discs you buy?
Here are some US cities with near the same (within 10%) or more annual rainfall than Seattle: Albany, Atlanta, Atlantic City, Baltimore, Baton Roughe, Birmingham, Boston, Bridgeport, Buffalo, Charleston, Charleston, Charlotte, Cleveland, Columbia, Columbus, Concord, Grand Rapids, Hartford, Houston, Indianapolis, Jackson, Jacksonville, Juneau, Knoxville, Lexinton, Little Rock, Louisville, Memphis, Miami, Mobile, Montgomery, Mt. Washington, Nashville, Newark, New Orleans, New York, Norfolk, Pliladelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland (both of them), Providence, Raleigh, Richmond, Savannah, Tampa, Tulsa, Washington, Wilmington.
Seattle does have a lot of precipitation days: 158 per year, but Buffalo has more (169) and Cleveland has 156.
A lot of the cities with more rain than Seattle (some up to 50% more) only have about 100 precipitation days a year, so they rain is much more intense. So why is Seattle the city with the rain reputation?
My guess is that because rain is about the worst thing that happens here. Sure, Buffalo gets more rain, but they also got a ton of snow and crap like that, so they problaby don't notice that they also live in a rainy place.
IANAL, but for any sort of agreement to be binding, there has to be some 'consideration'. What does the host get for hosting your blog? Nothing? Then the response - the only one that should be expected- is 'sucks to be you.'
A benefit to the offerer is only one form of consideration in contract law. Another form of consideration is a detriment to the offeree. Basically, if party A makes a promise to party B, and party B acts in reliance on that promise and will be harmed if A breaks the promise, that can serve as consideration.
There's also Promissory Estoppel, which could apply.
If we already fingerprint criminals, what's the big deal if we take a "biological footprint", if you will, of them?
The problem is that law enforcement does not understand how to use DNA. It's true that DNA uniquely identifies an individual (well, to the level of twins and such). However, that is only if you do a very extensive DNA comparison. They don't do this in law enforcement. That is expensive. They only do a comparison at a few points, and that doesn't uniquely identify a person.
What this means is that when used in a Bayesian manner, DNA evidence is very powerful, but when used independently, it sucks. So, for example, if there is a crime, and they have recovered samples from the crime scene, and then, based on other means, they have identified you, me, and a few other people as suspects, and my DNA matches the samples, then it's pretty much a lock--those are my samples. On the other hand, if they just take the samples, run them through their DNA database, and I am the only match, that is pretty much worthless.
An analogy would be if they somehow could tell from evidence at a crime scene the last two digits of the criminal's social security number and the last two digits of the criminal's phone number. If they have three suspects acquired through traditional means, and one has a matching SSN and phone number, that is pretty clearly their man. If, however, they just go to the phone book, find all matching phone numbers, and then check their SSNs and find a match, and that's all they have, they have nothing. There will be plenty of other people that match.
That's basically how DNA matches are done. They compare at a few bases, which is kind of like comparing phone and SSN numbers at a few digits.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not standing up for the crime, but isn't the punishment supposed to match it?
Movies available for theft in video stores have already been released for home video. Movies in theaters have not.
The hard part in practical cryptography is not the block ciphers (there are plenty of those to choose from, off the shelf, that are good--AES, RC4, Twofish, Serpent, triple DES, etc). The hard part is using them properly--picking an appropriate mode, key management, padding, and stuff like that.
On x86, AES can be done in under 25 clock cycles per byte, so if that is an x86, a 200 MHz CPU could handle 54 mbit/second, although it wouldn't leave much for other stuff.
Those aren't the kind of rockets they are talking about. The kind of rockets they are talking about are huge and are very dangerous.
How long have you used it? It's had buffer overflows and protocol handling bugs that have allowed remote execution of arbitrary code.
That would not work well. Imagine being on hold for a long time, and hearing half of a really good story, but not knowing the title or author so you can't track it down to finish it (or when you do find it, it is expensive).
That's not the real question. The real question is: what is legal to play? Getting sued over your hold music would be a real bummer.
I've bought on CD most of the music I want to permanently own, so am not all that interested in Napster's options to buy music (same goes for iTunes).
Napster's "stream any of 700k tracks for a flat $10/month" plan looks nice. It would be a way to listen to all that music that I don't feel like buying, but would like to occasionally listen to, and would be a great way to find new music.
However, I want to be able to use my portable for that. So, this is what I want:
Flat rate for unlimited streaming on my PC. This covers most of my needs, since most of my listening is while working at my computer.
Something like what O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf does for books for my portable. That is, I'd be allowed to have a certain number of albums, as part of my flat monthly fee, on my portable. There would be some specified rate at which I could replace these albums.
Uhm...isn't that what Napster is offering now? $10/month and you can stream any of their songs?
Criticism of the mix of high tech space stuff and low tech western stuff strikes me as silly, when all you have to do is look around in the real world, and you'll see a far wider range in technology levels on just this one planet than they showed in the whole Firefly galaxy.
Spammers almost never send spam from their Hotmail accounts. The Hotmail accounts are used to receive replies to the spam, such as orders.
What makes you think that they don't the artists?
Have you looked at AllOfMP3? Cheaper than iTMS, and you can get the stuff in Ogg already. (And no DRM).
By that argument, using steroids isn't cheating for an Olympic athlete, and corking a bat isn't cheating for a baseball player. Market forces drive them to do it, after all.
Market forces are irrelevant to what is cheating. Cheating is determined entirely by the rules. For many MMORPGs, it is stated right in the rules that it is cheating. Market forces might determine why someone cheats, but not whether or not what they do is cheating.
Perhaps you should take your own advice. (Hint: the person who "bought" the items and didn't pay was not buying SL money. He was buying SWG and Eve Online stuff).
Good idea. District Attorneys work hard, and could use a good laugh now and then.
To get the DA interested, the seller would have to be selling something that they actually have a right to sell.
Because port 587 is the one specified in the Message Submission RFC (RFC 2476).
In a fit of nerdliness, I once defined a game I called Mango (Math Nerd Go), which generalizes Go. Some might find it amusing. Not feeling like slashdotting myself, I'll give the Google cache link. :-)
So to avoid having the CD install DRM software on your computer, you used a DRM system you already had (iTunes) to buy the songs in AAC format with DRM?
Second, a large chunk of spyware does get consent already, to the extent that it asks first, and only installs if the user says it is OK. The problem here is that most users don't read dialogs. They treat any dialog that is not obviously directly related to something they are specifically trying to accomplish as an annoyance and they click on whatever it appears to take to get it to go away.
What is needed is a standardized "consent manager". Any program that wants to install, etc., would invoke the consent manager, which would tell the user what the program wishes to do, give the company's privacy policy, etc. There should also be a standardized set of items to include in privacy policies. The consent manager could be told by the program what the company policy is on each of those, and the consent manager could display those in a table or something, instead of buried in the EULA, and highlight those that differ from what the user desires.
Users might then learn that when they see a dialog from the consent manager, it is something that is important, rather than an annoyance to click through.
Uhm...according to CNET, it says so prominently on the cover. Don't you look at the discs you buy?
Why are you leaving out SCSI? Ultra320 is 3.2 times as fast as Firewire 800.
Seattle does have a lot of precipitation days: 158 per year, but Buffalo has more (169) and Cleveland has 156.
A lot of the cities with more rain than Seattle (some up to 50% more) only have about 100 precipitation days a year, so they rain is much more intense. So why is Seattle the city with the rain reputation?
My guess is that because rain is about the worst thing that happens here. Sure, Buffalo gets more rain, but they also got a ton of snow and crap like that, so they problaby don't notice that they also live in a rainy place.
A benefit to the offerer is only one form of consideration in contract law. Another form of consideration is a detriment to the offeree. Basically, if party A makes a promise to party B, and party B acts in reliance on that promise and will be harmed if A breaks the promise, that can serve as consideration.
There's also Promissory Estoppel, which could apply.
The problem is that law enforcement does not understand how to use DNA. It's true that DNA uniquely identifies an individual (well, to the level of twins and such). However, that is only if you do a very extensive DNA comparison. They don't do this in law enforcement. That is expensive. They only do a comparison at a few points, and that doesn't uniquely identify a person.
What this means is that when used in a Bayesian manner, DNA evidence is very powerful, but when used independently, it sucks. So, for example, if there is a crime, and they have recovered samples from the crime scene, and then, based on other means, they have identified you, me, and a few other people as suspects, and my DNA matches the samples, then it's pretty much a lock--those are my samples. On the other hand, if they just take the samples, run them through their DNA database, and I am the only match, that is pretty much worthless.
An analogy would be if they somehow could tell from evidence at a crime scene the last two digits of the criminal's social security number and the last two digits of the criminal's phone number. If they have three suspects acquired through traditional means, and one has a matching SSN and phone number, that is pretty clearly their man. If, however, they just go to the phone book, find all matching phone numbers, and then check their SSNs and find a match, and that's all they have, they have nothing. There will be plenty of other people that match.
That's basically how DNA matches are done. They compare at a few bases, which is kind of like comparing phone and SSN numbers at a few digits.