Here's the novel part of it: it doesn't involve any of the typical attack vectors we all know and love. Instead, it uses JavaScript...
Anybody who knows the history of security vulnerabilities in browsers knows that Javascript itself is the all-time-best attack vector. If Javascript is enabled in any browser, that browser can be immediately compromised when you visit a compromised website. There are latent epidemics of Javascript zero-day vulnerabilities in all browsers.
Want much better security in your browser? Just disable Javascript. Learn to dislike Javascript. I have yet to see any website whose information could not be equivalently usefully displayed without any Javascript. Every time Javascript's "interactivity" is celebrated, critical reading dies another death. Don't regret losing all the "interactivity" of Javascript. There are far too many bad developers who write websites that require Javascript. Turn the tide. Reject Javascript for the toxic waste of space that it is.
"payed for the rest of his life for his 6 months of light work in 1966"
Sorry to reply if you are trolling, but I think you'll find from any reliable biography that he and the rest of the group actually did a lot more than what you so dismissively describe as "light work" before, in, and after, 1966.
Non-correlation doesn't prove non-causality because there are infinitely many functions where X is causally related to Y, but X and Y have zero correlation. I think the easiest summary is that non-zero correlation implies the possibility of a causal relationship, and vice versa.
You explain some of the bureaucratic, edict-from-on-high-driven processes involving the BBC Trust that led to the 7-day limit, but of course it's still a secretive process conducted behind closed doors, with a strong bias - no surprise given the disturbing conflicts of interest of some BBC Trust members - for the interests of rightsholders, commercial confidentiality, and the exclusion of members of the public (I mean what would they know - no experience of commercial broadcasting, unclean, noisy, ask awkward questions all the time, etc!:-)
If the BBC ever dared to allow the public at large to participate directly and fairly in such debates, I am certain the public would not agree with the BBC Trust's assessment that there is insufficient "public value" in this case to extend the 7-days limit specifically for current affairs programs.
programs [sic]
"programs" - US spelling "programmes" - British spelling slashdot - a website where people from the US are in the majority, and people from Britain in the minority.
I don't understand why you have a problem with it. It was just one of the top sources via Google News. Who cares it's a British newspaper - I don't see why that makes it any more or less reliable. I'm not aware of anything wrong with the story, and you didn't mention anything wrong with the story - is there anything wrong with it? Anyway, the story is real, so we'd better deal.
And here's the IHT covering the same issue with Barney Frank, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives' Financial Services Committee, apparently strongly against the bonuses. He says he is "deeply disappointed" that a number of financial institutions are distorting the legislation, and says it would be a "violation of the terms of the Act", i.e. a criminal offence to use bailout money like that (hey, it's the same non-US media source!), e.g. to pay executives' bonuses etc.
The reason the BBC gave for why it could make its programs available on iplayer for 7 days only was that they didn't own the copyright on the content of the programs, and a period of 7 days was all they could negotiate from the copyright owners.
I can see how that would apply especially to any programs the BBC uses which were produced using subcontractors who usually put their copyright notices (not the BBC's) at the end of their shows.
However, the BBC puts its own BBC copyright notice at the end of all of its current affairs programs such as "Panorama" and "Newsnight".
Doesn't that imply the BBC owns the copyright to the programs? If so, why doesn't it release all of them on iplayer for longer than 7 days? Programs like Newsnight and Panorama which have a lot of analysis and detailed investigative journalism can remain of interest even long after they are first broadcast. There is a demand for watching those programs much beyond 7 days. So, why the 7 days limit on these programs?
The way I see it high taxes and socialism always go together. The bailout will cost $700 billion (and could be even more). That's huge. That's eventually going to be paid for by a lot of tax on the taxpayers during the period of some future administration.
I was referring to the hideous gut feeling of knowing that the government is forcibly taking $6bn from taxpayers and giving it away to a private corporation that promptly gives a large part of it as bonuses to private individuals. It seems fundamentally wrong for government to be the one supplying money that lets Goldman reward the incompetents who played a big role in getting themselves and everyone else into the credit mess. I really think we ought to hear the presidential candidates' views about what's going on, and why/whether they support it. Don't you think we ought to hear what the candidates think about it?? I really think we do.
So, let me get this straight. Taxpayers are paying $7bn to rescue Goldman, just so Goldman can pay "only" $1.5bn in bonuses as a reward for the incompetence and greed that caused the failure. Whether the bonuses total 1.5bn or whatever, the whole thing stinks of rewarding the incompetents with a taxpayer handout - socialism at its finest.
I think that's not good enough. The people surely have the right to know the presidential candidates' answers to this vital question before we decide which one to elect. If we can't or won't even try putting the question to them directly now, we might as well just stop pretending the whole thing is anything but a fancy charade. This is the only time we the people can hope to put the candidates under significant pressure, which is the threat of not being elected.
I can't check this myself at the moment - has anyone checked whether the Chinese proxy is non-transparent - does it leak the forwarded IP address (your IP address) in the http headers?
Also, I wonder who runs this Chinese proxy? Is it the Chinese government's? Is there any reason to trust the proxy for any purpose except testing?
Who said price is the most interesting issue? I'd definitely choose the versatility of an open-source microcode GPU that could be dynamically reprogrammed to have any of several different instruction sets. It would be significantly simpler than the hassle of designing with FPGAs because much of the infrastructure (floating point logic etc) would already be available hardcoded into the GPU's silicon.
A few years ago I saw a segment on network tv warning that Quebec has the world's highest concentration of white asbestos contaminated buildings in the world (with floating loose fibers too). I just wonder to what extent is that still true?
3.hell, even release the changes as open source as well
Since your subject line was "Cashing the GNU", if they didn't release the changes as open source, they'd be breaking the terms of the GNU project's General Public License, which requires source code for changes to be released whenever the modified original code is redistributed.
I don't think it's necessarily an altogether inaccurate characterization of the way some scientists can behave towards colleagues. Highly surprising new discoveries are often treated with enormous skepticism by scientists until they are independently confirmed (theory) or reproduced (experiments). The researchers behind highly surprising new results will meet all sorts of reactions that can vary from keen interest, respect, healthy skepticism, disbelief, rejection, ridicule, pillorying, to withholding of funding! The more negative reactions, though fortunately rare, can certainly hurt people just as if they were intended as a "punishment" - especially where the new results take a long time to be independently verified. Of course, if the new results are revolutionary, confirmed, and widely accepted, the researchers will eventually be well rewarded in term of professional reputation and career prospects. But sometimes the interim can be painful. Having said all that, science needs to be skeptical, otherwise it would be overwhelmed with junk; You've heard the phrase, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". The flipside of that is that for a less well known researcher, it's generally very much more difficult to get research funding to work on an area that involves extraordinary or controversial claims.
Well it seems like Prof Nocera has chosen to keep his paper off the internet, or at least his research group's publications list. His invention has already been patented, so that's not the reason. Why is that while academics in physics, maths, and engineering are busily posting copies of their papers or preprints on their websites or arxiv, chemistry academics almost never put up online copies of their papers? It seems like a poor way to go about communicating cutting edge science to me.
Beam tightness brings targetability and signal strength, brings detectability, beats divergence any day. Most directions in space go thru empty regions. You don't want to waste precious signal strength on empty regions if you can possibly avoid it. And we know exactly where we should target tight beams of light to hit ET with high probability.
Actually, the stars we see in the sky at night are generally not supernovae. While some stars are indeed obscured by interstellar matter, the light from many millions of others is clearly visible. Most of outer space is empty enough to support truly excellent light transmission. A pulsed laser can easily send many orders of magnitude greater light power than any ordinary star!
Why wouldn't ET know exactly where to point a beam? We have science projects searching the universe for solar systems similar to ours with medium-size planets at Earth-sun distances where liquid water could exist. We find a new such solar system every few months, and get a very precise location too.
ET might be running similar projects. Every time ET finds a new candidate solar system, ET just points a laser at it. At such distances, with non-zero divergence of the laser beam, all of the planets in that solar system would be simultaneously lit up without having to wiggle the beam around to try hitting each of the planets one by one.
I'd think sending something like a tight beam of intensity-modulated monochromatic light would be more obviously unnatural than a periodic binary broadband pulse, which could just be mistaken for a weird sort of pulsar emission. Or intensity modulate it to N different levels giving I(t+k_i) where the k_i are some short period sequence of small integers, and N is a prime number. If we saw a weird beam of light like that, we'd probably assume it had a an intelligent origin.
Err, in fact we can easily see the light from stars that are billions of light years away, without light absorption by "interplanetary matter" being a big problem. Of course, we can detect other types of EM too at similar distances, including radio, e.g. using radio telescopes. And, of course, all types of EM - light, radio, microwave - is absorbed and scattered to some extent by matter. But my point is, across the whole spectrum, it is light that can be most easily focussed into the tightest of beams with minimal divergence. Lasers are easy to make, easy to use, and can send beams of light of really enormous power with tiny divergence.
It's very difficult to keep radio waves from spreading out in many directions, thus weakening the signal that can be detected by a distant receiver in any particular direction. Light, on the other hand, being much easier to focus into a tight beam, tends to stay within a narrower cone of space, leaving a stronger signal in the direction of aiming.
If I wanted to send a signal across the universe, I'd use light, not radio waves.
So, why is SETI still limiting itself to searching for signals in the radio spectrum?
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody who knows the history of security vulnerabilities in browsers knows that Javascript itself is the all-time-best attack vector. If Javascript is enabled in any browser, that browser can be immediately compromised when you visit a compromised website. There are latent epidemics of Javascript zero-day vulnerabilities in all browsers.
Want much better security in your browser? Just disable Javascript. Learn to dislike Javascript. I have yet to see any website whose information could not be equivalently usefully displayed without any Javascript. Every time Javascript's "interactivity" is celebrated, critical reading dies another death. Don't regret losing all the "interactivity" of Javascript. There are far too many bad developers who write websites that require Javascript. Turn the tide. Reject Javascript for the toxic waste of space that it is.
Sorry to reply if you are trolling, but I think you'll find from any reliable biography that he and the rest of the group actually did a lot more than what you so dismissively describe as "light work" before, in, and after, 1966.
Non-correlation doesn't prove non-causality because there are infinitely many functions where X is causally related to Y, but X and Y have zero correlation. I think the easiest summary is that non-zero correlation implies the possibility of a causal relationship, and vice versa.
If the BBC ever dared to allow the public at large to participate directly and fairly in such debates, I am certain the public would not agree with the BBC Trust's assessment that there is insufficient "public value" in this case to extend the 7-days limit specifically for current affairs programs.
"programs" - US spelling
"programmes" - British spelling
slashdot - a website where people from the US are in the majority, and people from Britain in the minority.
And here's the IHT covering the same issue with Barney Frank, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives' Financial Services Committee, apparently strongly against the bonuses. He says he is "deeply disappointed" that a number of financial institutions are distorting the legislation, and says it would be a "violation of the terms of the Act", i.e. a criminal offence to use bailout money like that (hey, it's the same non-US media source!), e.g. to pay executives' bonuses etc.
I can see how that would apply especially to any programs the BBC uses which were produced using subcontractors who usually put their copyright notices (not the BBC's) at the end of their shows. However, the BBC puts its own BBC copyright notice at the end of all of its current affairs programs such as "Panorama" and "Newsnight".
Doesn't that imply the BBC owns the copyright to the programs? If so, why doesn't it release all of them on iplayer for longer than 7 days? Programs like Newsnight and Panorama which have a lot of analysis and detailed investigative journalism can remain of interest even long after they are first broadcast. There is a demand for watching those programs much beyond 7 days. So, why the 7 days limit on these programs?
The way I see it high taxes and socialism always go together. The bailout will cost $700 billion (and could be even more). That's huge. That's eventually going to be paid for by a lot of tax on the taxpayers during the period of some future administration.
I was referring to the hideous gut feeling of knowing that the government is forcibly taking $6bn from taxpayers and giving it away to a private corporation that promptly gives a large part of it as bonuses to private individuals. It seems fundamentally wrong for government to be the one supplying money that lets Goldman reward the incompetents who played a big role in getting themselves and everyone else into the credit mess. I really think we ought to hear the presidential candidates' views about what's going on, and why/whether they support it. Don't you think we ought to hear what the candidates think about it?? I really think we do.
So, let me get this straight. Taxpayers are paying $7bn to rescue Goldman, just so Goldman can pay "only" $1.5bn in bonuses as a reward for the incompetence and greed that caused the failure. Whether the bonuses total 1.5bn or whatever, the whole thing stinks of rewarding the incompetents with a taxpayer handout - socialism at its finest.
I think that's not good enough. The people surely have the right to know the presidential candidates' answers to this vital question before we decide which one to elect. If we can't or won't even try putting the question to them directly now, we might as well just stop pretending the whole thing is anything but a fancy charade. This is the only time we the people can hope to put the candidates under significant pressure, which is the threat of not being elected.
Why are Federal taxpayers forced to pay $6 billion to Goldman Sachs for a bailout to save it from failure and bankruptcy and at the same time Goldman Sachs is ready to pay its senior staff $7 billion in bonuses for Christmas??? We have failed to ask the one question that goes to the heart of what's going on. Stop this nonsense, NOW!
Also, I wonder who runs this Chinese proxy? Is it the Chinese government's? Is there any reason to trust the proxy for any purpose except testing?
That's very fast. I wonder how low the bit error rate is.
Here's the full story.
Who said price is the most interesting issue? I'd definitely choose the versatility of an open-source microcode GPU that could be dynamically reprogrammed to have any of several different instruction sets. It would be significantly simpler than the hassle of designing with FPGAs because much of the infrastructure (floating point logic etc) would already be available hardcoded into the GPU's silicon.
A few years ago I saw a segment on network tv warning that Quebec has the world's highest concentration of white asbestos contaminated buildings in the world (with floating loose fibers too). I just wonder to what extent is that still true?
Since your subject line was "Cashing the GNU", if they didn't release the changes as open source, they'd be breaking the terms of the GNU project's General Public License, which requires source code for changes to be released whenever the modified original code is redistributed.
I don't think it's necessarily an altogether inaccurate characterization of the way some scientists can behave towards colleagues. Highly surprising new discoveries are often treated with enormous skepticism by scientists until they are independently confirmed (theory) or reproduced (experiments). The researchers behind highly surprising new results will meet all sorts of reactions that can vary from keen interest, respect, healthy skepticism, disbelief, rejection, ridicule, pillorying, to withholding of funding! The more negative reactions, though fortunately rare, can certainly hurt people just as if they were intended as a "punishment" - especially where the new results take a long time to be independently verified. Of course, if the new results are revolutionary, confirmed, and widely accepted, the researchers will eventually be well rewarded in term of professional reputation and career prospects. But sometimes the interim can be painful. Having said all that, science needs to be skeptical, otherwise it would be overwhelmed with junk; You've heard the phrase, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". The flipside of that is that for a less well known researcher, it's generally very much more difficult to get research funding to work on an area that involves extraordinary or controversial claims.
Well it seems like Prof Nocera has chosen to keep his paper off the internet, or at least his research group's publications list. His invention has already been patented, so that's not the reason. Why is that while academics in physics, maths, and engineering are busily posting copies of their papers or preprints on their websites or arxiv, chemistry academics almost never put up online copies of their papers? It seems like a poor way to go about communicating cutting edge science to me.
Beam tightness brings targetability and signal strength, brings detectability, beats divergence any day. Most directions in space go thru empty regions. You don't want to waste precious signal strength on empty regions if you can possibly avoid it. And we know exactly where we should target tight beams of light to hit ET with high probability.
Actually, the stars we see in the sky at night are generally not supernovae. While some stars are indeed obscured by interstellar matter, the light from many millions of others is clearly visible. Most of outer space is empty enough to support truly excellent light transmission. A pulsed laser can easily send many orders of magnitude greater light power than any ordinary star!
ET might be running similar projects. Every time ET finds a new candidate solar system, ET just points a laser at it. At such distances, with non-zero divergence of the laser beam, all of the planets in that solar system would be simultaneously lit up without having to wiggle the beam around to try hitting each of the planets one by one.
I'd think sending something like a tight beam of intensity-modulated monochromatic light would be more obviously unnatural than a periodic binary broadband pulse, which could just be mistaken for a weird sort of pulsar emission. Or intensity modulate it to N different levels giving I(t+k_i) where the k_i are some short period sequence of small integers, and N is a prime number. If we saw a weird beam of light like that, we'd probably assume it had a an intelligent origin.
Err, in fact we can easily see the light from stars that are billions of light years away, without light absorption by "interplanetary matter" being a big problem. Of course, we can detect other types of EM too at similar distances, including radio, e.g. using radio telescopes. And, of course, all types of EM - light, radio, microwave - is absorbed and scattered to some extent by matter. But my point is, across the whole spectrum, it is light that can be most easily focussed into the tightest of beams with minimal divergence. Lasers are easy to make, easy to use, and can send beams of light of really enormous power with tiny divergence.
If I wanted to send a signal across the universe, I'd use light, not radio waves.
So, why is SETI still limiting itself to searching for signals in the radio spectrum?