Nice rambling and it shows you didn't even read TFS (or lack comprehension).
Readers are not supposed to start giving money to Tumblr. Advertisers are who bring in the money.
The idea: some writer writes about some great album he just listened to. Reader reads it, thinks "that's cool, I want to listen to it, too". Advertiser pays tumblr to place ad at this article advertising said album, hoping that reader clicks the ad and buys the album from advertiser. Targeted advertising - back to targeting interests more than people.
So in the end everyone wins. Tumblr can stay online serving their users. Owners of Tumblr make money. Reader is happy because they have that new album they like, and they got it easily. Album vendor is happy because they made a sale. Evereyone happy - and if they do it properly, there is even no need for Facebook-style privacy invasion.
Key of the problem is that we can not know whether the cat is dead or alive without looking at it. Poor cat. But could we maybe determine the dead/alive state of the cat indirectly? For example by looking at the death rates of the mice? After all, when the cat is alive mice will die. So by just looking at the death rate of mice we can tell the cat is alive or dead, without looking at the cat directly. And as we never look at the cat directly it will remain dead and alive forever, without being forced in one of its quantum states "dead" or "alive". And in the meantime we actually know whether the cat is alive or dead, without the cat itself knowing. Meaning it can live forever.
Makes sense? No more than the submission to me... Oh well.
Why would they limit this to the US? That's only a small portion of the world's population. And not the most peaceful country in my mind, too, with all those guns around and wars they started and so.
And on top of that, both Mother Teresa and Mahatma Ghandi are not Americans either.
The story about this in The Register talks about an IRC chat with someone claiming to be AVunitAnon, after which the Twitter user with that name reacted to that, claiming that IRC user was an imposer and not the real one. That's not something a bot can do.
Just an operating system doesn't do much for the user. You still need a word processor, an image editor, an e-mail reader and a web browser to name just four very different tasks. Arguably turning the computer in a word processing device, then an image editing device, etc. In tablets or mobile phones this is even more so as there the applications tend to run full screen.
Safe, not. The site does not bring the ads themselves, some external ad broker does this. And with many well known ad companies compromised, no matter how well you trust the site and it's webmaster, I doubt there is any ad network that can really be trusted.
If I were to engage in such hacking activity, I'd not use my home/office ISP. Always use some open WiFi, an Internet cafe, Starbucks, whatever.
Maybe even an anonymous prepaid SIM (paid in cash, thethering through a phone bought second hand in cash). And after the SIM is empty/expires, buy a new one and trade in the phone for another one. And again do not use the phone at home, but always on the move, sitting in some random park, etc.
That should take care of the direct-connecting-it-to-a-person part. But in case of AVunit they don't even know which country he is from. Not even the continent. And that's pretty impressive. At least a layer of TOR and maybe more in between him and the outside world.
As a matter of fact I never directly used Bitcoin. I don't exactly trust it as a currency and for various reasons I don't think this is the future; however I find the concept very interesting from a technical pov. As you say it's a very well designed protocol, no doubt about that.
In this case it's a donation - and I for one would want to make a donation directly to the cause, not via some shady individuals (now in this case the cause itself is shady as well of course). Just to have the feeling that my donation arrives where it's supposed to arrive, and that it's used for what it's supposed to be used.
Now when this avunit guy is going to spend the coins, that's again a different matter. However the suggestion is that little to no of the donations have been spent, and that he's hoarding the bitcoins.
And even if there were many anonymous intermediaries - every single bitcoin is unique (it's basically just a big number) - and the complete transaction history is stored. That ought to be enough to trace them.
Which would imply the account is hacked. I mean, I'm assuming that the individual who set up the account is the AvunitAnon they're looking for - the LulzSec member. It is at least treated as "official" communication channel with that person in the articles. Twitter accounts require a password, in contrast to a typical IRC chatbox where anyone can log in, using any name.
Now with the skills he's shown elsewhere, I'd expect he'd secure his Twitter account as good as technically possible, and I think it being hacked very unlikely.
Another thing about bitcoin: they are trackable. Hard to track, but as I understand it's possible, as every single transaction is logged by the network, and that it is possible to track down the whereabouts of every single bitcoin at every moment in the past since it was mined.
They received some 3,000 bitcoins in donations back in the day, can't those bitcoins be traced to a certain wallet? And - related - can they (or the wallet itself) be anyhow confiscated?
Now I'm the first to admit I still don't really understand the intricacies of bitcoin - my understanding is mostly from reading about it here and on other sites. So I may be totally off, if anyone knows better I'd love to hear.
Clever guy, he should add this to his resume, should get him far in security firms. He obviously knows very well how the Internet works. Just don't apply to a job at the FBI.
Pity the article is so short on details. How did he do it? Using Tor all the time or so? At least he's using Twitter apparently - and Twitter logs IP addresses. So must be doing something about that.
Oh, and I forgot: these patterns nowadays may very well be patentable, in the form of a design patent. But then you patent the pattern itself (getting close to the copyright realm, and if your patent is (part of) your trademark, it may even fall under trademark protection).
The loom was still producing cloth. Different colour cloth maybe, still it was cloth. swapping out red for black thread is certainly "obvious" in patent lingo, as is changing a cross-pattern for a star-pattern. The fact that you can do this, would likely have been incorporated in the patent application (if it would have been patented - which 300 years ago was not possible as patents didn't exist), as I'm sure this programmability was key to the invention of that loom.
Loading new software on a general purpose computer allows it to do something totally different, something it could not perform before. And from that point of view, it is a new machine. Hardware without software (and software without hardware) is useless; it's the combination of software and hardware that makes it perform a task.
Mind that as we're talking about patents, a machine is not necessarily something with pullies and gears. A paper clip is a machine, too. As is a swing.
Don't register them as patent. Make sure you publish it somewhere, because the moment an idea is published, it can not be patented any more - with some exception for the original inventor I believe, but at least no-one else can patent this exact idea, as the publication is prior art.
If a different software makes a computer a new machine, doesn't that undermine general software patents? After all what one patents is not so much an idea, as it is an implementation of an idea. You're not able to patent "holding two piece of paper together", but you can patent (and it was patented) "a paper clip" - the piece of bent wire that allows one to easily and temporarily attach two pieces of paper together. For a patent, a paper clip is a machine.
if someone invents a different kind of paper clip, that's fine. It's a new machine.
Now software patents tend to patent the idea, not the implementation. The computer is the machine, how it is implemented suddenly becomes irrelevant. However if a different implementation of the idea on a computer means the invention of a new machine, that would mean the different implementation (different algorithm to get to the same end result) fall outside the original patent, and be patentable by itself again?
With so many (most?) people using webmail services (gmail, hotmail, etc) for personal e-mail, the e-mail even if sent encrypted will be decrypted on a third-party system just so the recipient can read it.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice rambling and it shows you didn't even read TFS (or lack comprehension).
Readers are not supposed to start giving money to Tumblr. Advertisers are who bring in the money.
The idea: some writer writes about some great album he just listened to. Reader reads it, thinks "that's cool, I want to listen to it, too". Advertiser pays tumblr to place ad at this article advertising said album, hoping that reader clicks the ad and buys the album from advertiser. Targeted advertising - back to targeting interests more than people.
So in the end everyone wins. Tumblr can stay online serving their users. Owners of Tumblr make money. Reader is happy because they have that new album they like, and they got it easily. Album vendor is happy because they made a sale. Evereyone happy - and if they do it properly, there is even no need for Facebook-style privacy invasion.
Key of the problem is that we can not know whether the cat is dead or alive without looking at it. Poor cat. But could we maybe determine the dead/alive state of the cat indirectly? For example by looking at the death rates of the mice? After all, when the cat is alive mice will die. So by just looking at the death rate of mice we can tell the cat is alive or dead, without looking at the cat directly. And as we never look at the cat directly it will remain dead and alive forever, without being forced in one of its quantum states "dead" or "alive". And in the meantime we actually know whether the cat is alive or dead, without the cat itself knowing. Meaning it can live forever.
Makes sense? No more than the submission to me... Oh well.
Why would they limit this to the US? That's only a small portion of the world's population. And not the most peaceful country in my mind, too, with all those guns around and wars they started and so.
And on top of that, both Mother Teresa and Mahatma Ghandi are not Americans either.
No real competition.
Agreed. Until just now I hadn't heard about this movie. Or maybe I did but it didn't register. Now it has.
I can't imagine those bots have evolved to replying to information on external sites.
The story about this in The Register talks about an IRC chat with someone claiming to be AVunitAnon, after which the Twitter user with that name reacted to that, claiming that IRC user was an imposer and not the real one. That's not something a bot can do.
Just an operating system doesn't do much for the user. You still need a word processor, an image editor, an e-mail reader and a web browser to name just four very different tasks. Arguably turning the computer in a word processing device, then an image editing device, etc. In tablets or mobile phones this is even more so as there the applications tend to run full screen.
Support, agree.
Safe, not. The site does not bring the ads themselves, some external ad broker does this. And with many well known ad companies compromised, no matter how well you trust the site and it's webmaster, I doubt there is any ad network that can really be trusted.
If I were to engage in such hacking activity, I'd not use my home/office ISP. Always use some open WiFi, an Internet cafe, Starbucks, whatever.
Maybe even an anonymous prepaid SIM (paid in cash, thethering through a phone bought second hand in cash). And after the SIM is empty/expires, buy a new one and trade in the phone for another one. And again do not use the phone at home, but always on the move, sitting in some random park, etc.
That should take care of the direct-connecting-it-to-a-person part. But in case of AVunit they don't even know which country he is from. Not even the continent. And that's pretty impressive. At least a layer of TOR and maybe more in between him and the outside world.
If you suggesting it's a bot, then it's a very smart one as it appears to give intelligent reactions.
As a matter of fact I never directly used Bitcoin. I don't exactly trust it as a currency and for various reasons I don't think this is the future; however I find the concept very interesting from a technical pov. As you say it's a very well designed protocol, no doubt about that.
In this case it's a donation - and I for one would want to make a donation directly to the cause, not via some shady individuals (now in this case the cause itself is shady as well of course). Just to have the feeling that my donation arrives where it's supposed to arrive, and that it's used for what it's supposed to be used.
Now when this avunit guy is going to spend the coins, that's again a different matter. However the suggestion is that little to no of the donations have been spent, and that he's hoarding the bitcoins.
And even if there were many anonymous intermediaries - every single bitcoin is unique (it's basically just a big number) - and the complete transaction history is stored. That ought to be enough to trace them.
Which would imply the account is hacked. I mean, I'm assuming that the individual who set up the account is the AvunitAnon they're looking for - the LulzSec member. It is at least treated as "official" communication channel with that person in the articles. Twitter accounts require a password, in contrast to a typical IRC chatbox where anyone can log in, using any name.
Now with the skills he's shown elsewhere, I'd expect he'd secure his Twitter account as good as technically possible, and I think it being hacked very unlikely.
Another thing about bitcoin: they are trackable. Hard to track, but as I understand it's possible, as every single transaction is logged by the network, and that it is possible to track down the whereabouts of every single bitcoin at every moment in the past since it was mined.
They received some 3,000 bitcoins in donations back in the day, can't those bitcoins be traced to a certain wallet? And - related - can they (or the wallet itself) be anyhow confiscated?
Now I'm the first to admit I still don't really understand the intricacies of bitcoin - my understanding is mostly from reading about it here and on other sites. So I may be totally off, if anyone knows better I'd love to hear.
Possible. But then, who is still using that Twitter account?
Clever guy, he should add this to his resume, should get him far in security firms. He obviously knows very well how the Internet works. Just don't apply to a job at the FBI.
Pity the article is so short on details. How did he do it? Using Tor all the time or so? At least he's using Twitter apparently - and Twitter logs IP addresses. So must be doing something about that.
What "autoplay videos" are you talking about? Other than that there is no left margin to the text, the page as a whole was good to read.
Oh, and I forgot: these patterns nowadays may very well be patentable, in the form of a design patent. But then you patent the pattern itself (getting close to the copyright realm, and if your patent is (part of) your trademark, it may even fall under trademark protection).
The loom was still producing cloth. Different colour cloth maybe, still it was cloth. swapping out red for black thread is certainly "obvious" in patent lingo, as is changing a cross-pattern for a star-pattern. The fact that you can do this, would likely have been incorporated in the patent application (if it would have been patented - which 300 years ago was not possible as patents didn't exist), as I'm sure this programmability was key to the invention of that loom.
Loading new software on a general purpose computer allows it to do something totally different, something it could not perform before. And from that point of view, it is a new machine. Hardware without software (and software without hardware) is useless; it's the combination of software and hardware that makes it perform a task.
Mind that as we're talking about patents, a machine is not necessarily something with pullies and gears. A paper clip is a machine, too. As is a swing.
Don't register them as patent. Make sure you publish it somewhere, because the moment an idea is published, it can not be patented any more - with some exception for the original inventor I believe, but at least no-one else can patent this exact idea, as the publication is prior art.
I was thinking in another direction.
If a different software makes a computer a new machine, doesn't that undermine general software patents? After all what one patents is not so much an idea, as it is an implementation of an idea. You're not able to patent "holding two piece of paper together", but you can patent (and it was patented) "a paper clip" - the piece of bent wire that allows one to easily and temporarily attach two pieces of paper together. For a patent, a paper clip is a machine.
if someone invents a different kind of paper clip, that's fine. It's a new machine.
Now software patents tend to patent the idea, not the implementation. The computer is the machine, how it is implemented suddenly becomes irrelevant. However if a different implementation of the idea on a computer means the invention of a new machine, that would mean the different implementation (different algorithm to get to the same end result) fall outside the original patent, and be patentable by itself again?
Add to this: password is (if they do it properly) one-time only, and must be changed online after entering it.
Were an attacker to comprimise your account, you'd simply reset your password again and they'd lose access.
What you forgot to add is:
With so many (most?) people using webmail services (gmail, hotmail, etc) for personal e-mail, the e-mail even if sent encrypted will be decrypted on a third-party system just so the recipient can read it.