There's already a whole subfield of machine learning which concern itself with these problems. It's called "adversarial machine learning". The approaches are very different from usual software security. Instead of busying oneself with patching holes in software or setting up firewalls, adversarial machine learning re-design the algorithms completely, using game theory and other techniques. The premise is "How can we make an algorithm that works in an environment full of enemies that try to mislead it?" It's a refreshing change from the usual software-security paradigm, which is all about fencing the code into some supposedly 'safe' environment.
you want to virtualize a computer, run the program and then check that: * the computations have not been hampered with * nobody has been snooping in your computations This goal is currently out of reach. It is an open problem in computer science if it's even possible!
The exact term is "encrypted computation". Imagine if you could not only encrypt a file, but run it after it's been encrypted! You could send the file to some cloud and run it there, without revealing _what_ is being computed or what data you use. You get the result back and safely decrypt it on your own PC. Now if someone in the cloud tried to attack your computer program, with a buffer overflow say, or the hardware it ran on was faulty, the encrypted result would be garbage and you wouldn't be able to decrypt it. That's actually great, because it gives you a way to check if the program ran correctly or not. Just like how checksums assure you that a file has been transmitted correctly. If we had this capability, we could run any program on fast, cheap, but error-prone hardware. We could run anything on graphic cards, which make a mistake now and then, overclock CPUs far more than today, or maybe even run faster and cheaper hardware that nobody has yet built, because it would be too error prone.
Negroponte tried a "PC in the wall" experiment in a poor district some years ago. This is being used as an argument for the airdrop strategy, but the experiment was in fact not successfull. The kids in the neighbourhood did learn to use the PC, but to little or no use. They played games but did not learn marketable skills or otherwise improve their quality of life.
In aid and development, To airdrop aid is the very image of a failed strategy. You bring in a celebrity and a tv-team, you throw money at the village, build a well or a lavatory, then write a report and pull out. Your funders want to see results quickly, but development doesn't work that way. For someone in aid and development it is then obvious that Negroponte does not focus on actually improving things for the kids. Like many caricatured IT developers, he is focused on the product, not the user. He wants to prove that the user interface is so intuitive that you don't have to teach the kids to use it. He wants to show that the laptop is very robust and water proof so he drops it from a helicopter. He is using one of the vilest tricks in the IT-salesman's repertoire: That if you just buy my hardware, everything will be up and running with no extra cost. No running costs on training people to use it, no need to organize the use or for teachers to follow this up. No need to have anything centralized and government-like working for these villages to reap the benefits of IT.
It is a vile mix of PR stunts, naive IT optimism sold to supposedly uninformed savages and an appeal to prevailing ideologies among the western funders. All combined just to sell hardware.
If you take an old game that ran on a TV screen and emulate it in fullscreen on a modern PC, you will see every pixel clearly. You never saw those on the TV. The pixellated Super Mario character was designed with the signal to noise ratio of an old TV in mind. When a modern emulator does not blend these pixels together like old blurry TVs did, the graphics look more blocky than they ever did originally. I can still see this in emulated computer games as recent as monkey island 2, which I originally played with a CRT monitor.
AFAIK, the resolution and post-processing needed to emulate the old screens faithfully is actually a bit demanding.
Does this mean that the number of car accidents has increased by 25? If not, what improvements have cancelled out the increase in accidents caused by cellphones and other gadgets? Are there fewer accidents caused by people fiddling for CDs in the glove compartment or trying to find a good AM channel? Are there fewer accidents caused by frustrated people trying to find their way on a fold-out map?
A whistleblower who wants to make certain documents of his/her employer public faces a problem: How do I stop the leak being traced back to me? This is especially relevant when you'r employed with the government, which in theory is very capable of tracing the origin of leaks, but every whistleblower runs this risk. But isn't it a great strategy to then tip off outsiders and make them retrieve and distribute the documents instead? letting the version number of old software at the office slip, or maybe a file path or two, could be enough. Maybe a USB stick could be "stolen" ? Even if your name gets implied, you can feign innocence in the court.
Android smartphones run on linux. Android smartphones are used by office workers and integrated with the company IT system. Android smartphones are vulnerable to malicious apps
Therefore, antivirus or 'anti-malware' for linux is badly needed
Patenting software is a US thing. I'm under the impression that under most European laws, you cannot patent a software algorithm nor the code implementing it. Sure, you can work around this limitation in some cases, but the patent lawyers in the european company I work in do not push us to patent algorithms, for this very reason.
Linux and Mac users risk being victims of phishing attacks and foolishly handing out passwords, just like the rest of us. It's been a long time since corporate antivirus was just about stopping malicious software being installed on a computer.
The best minds of my generation are creating bio-tech startups in Bangalore The best minds of my generation design oil rigs for the Santos basin offshore Brazil The best minds of my generation can't afford education in Nairobi The best minds of my generation divert rivers in China to power cities not yet built The best minds of my generation uncover the workings of the brain in a town near the pole The best minds of my generation overthrew a dictator in Kairo The best minds of my generation enrolled in a militia in Afghanistan The best minds of my generation does not read businessweek.com
Intel wants to buy McAfee, HP and Microsoft cooperates. Is this hardware + software cooperation a trend? Is this because growth seems to happen on all other arenas than the traditional PC?
In the mid 90's Microsoft and Intel relied on each other to drive one another's sales, a symbiosis they formalized for a while, but "parted as friends" in the late 90's if I recall correctly.
The norwegian police was asked by the italian police to retrieve this data. The norwegian police is eager to comply with requests from foreign police, as they themselves may need that kind of help abroad later. The loophole is that apparently no norwegian court is involved in the decision and norwegian laws are not consulted.
The bottom line is that you are not protected by your own country's laws when it comes to confiscating data. It's enough that someone in one of a hundred countries can get a police officer to send a request. Charges that would never hold in your own country is no barrier. Low corruption in your own country is no barrier. Bribe an italian police officer, hire an american lawyer and you can get at anything on servers in the western world.
Just to get one thing straight: A robot balancing a pencil is not a breakthrough. Similar tasks are standard textbook material, often implemented using fuzzy logic.
But the way they have done it may or may not be cool. Hard to tell.
Symmetry in this case refers to this: If you take a particle or a diagram describing a particle interaction and "flip something", you get something new that is still valid. Take a proton and flip the charge and you get an anti-proton for instance. Because of this symmetry, matter and anti-matter behave in exactly the same way, or so we belive. your particle and your the flipped version decay in the same way for instance.
What physicicst discovered over the last century was that it's not enough to flip the charge to make this valid in all cases. You have to flip charge, direction of time and flip something called "parity". Flipping the direction of time means simply to draw a feynman diagram of a particle collision or interaction on an overhead foil so that time runs from left to right and then turn it backwards. That's the mirror-image of the interaction. But as I said you have to flip both time, parity and charge to get a valid diagram, and that's the origin of the term "an antiparticle is a particle travelling backwards in time"
I'm looking over the pros and cons listed in the article. And it strikes me that if this had been a beta of a windows version, it would have been called a scandal, a bugridden failure and a very good argument for switching over to Linux.
It seems more probable that Apple will try to buy Adobe, for two reasons: * Adobe has been central to Apple/Mac for years, with its Photoshop software. It helped create the identity of the mac and Steve Jobs want control of the whole value chain * Steve Jobs has been talking down the Adobe stock for a long time, with his complaints about the Flash software.
Multicellular life has evolved many times, even though most attempts did not result in large creatures. One need only consider that plants and animals existed as single-celled life long before multicellularity. Plants and animals must therefore have evolved multicellularity independently.
A guy at Mozilla says Firefox will sometime in the future be better than all other browsers at one of several aspects of browsing?
The really interesting question here is why 18th of August appears to be one of the slowest news days on slashdot. Are people busy starting the semester and getting back to work after the holiday?
Do the average german or US teenager today have internet friends in India, Japan or Brazil? I think not.
When you look at facebook and other ways to socialize on the net, one of the key differences between those and the internet hang-outs of the 80's and 90's is that on facebook you socialize with people you already know. On a MUD or a BBS or on newsgroups for that matter, you met likeminded people which you were geographically far away from. On facebook you meet people which you interact with in real life because you are geographically close. It is not a place to meet people with the same interests for the first time.
Roberta Williams, one of the game designers at Sierra in the 80's had a slightly different take on it. Home computers started out being rather expensive, which meant that the average computer owner was older and more educated. Maybe buying the computer as part of a college education for instance or having a well-paying job which helped one afford the computer. When PCs became affordable for the average joe, the "average gamer" changed and Sierra could no longer afford to write games that catered to an educated audience. They were just too small a part of the market.
You could imagine that a similar impact was felt in all areas related to computers.
Slashdot Mirror
There's already a whole subfield of machine learning which concern itself with these problems. It's called "adversarial machine learning".
The approaches are very different from usual software security. Instead of busying oneself with patching holes in software or setting up firewalls, adversarial machine learning re-design the algorithms completely, using game theory and other techniques. The premise is "How can we make an algorithm that works in an environment full of enemies that try to mislead it?" It's a refreshing change from the usual software-security paradigm, which is all about fencing the code into some supposedly 'safe' environment.
you want to virtualize a computer, run the program and then check that:
* the computations have not been hampered with
* nobody has been snooping in your computations
This goal is currently out of reach. It is an open problem in computer science if it's even possible!
The exact term is "encrypted computation". Imagine if you could not only encrypt a file, but run it after it's been encrypted! You could send the file to some cloud and run it there, without revealing _what_ is being computed or what data you use. You get the result back and safely decrypt it on your own PC.
Now if someone in the cloud tried to attack your computer program, with a buffer overflow say, or the hardware it ran on was faulty, the encrypted result would be garbage and you wouldn't be able to decrypt it. That's actually great, because it gives you a way to check if the program ran correctly or not. Just like how checksums assure you that a file has been transmitted correctly. If we had this capability, we could run any program on fast, cheap, but error-prone hardware. We could run anything on graphic cards, which make a mistake now and then, overclock CPUs far more than today, or maybe even run faster and cheaper hardware that nobody has yet built, because it would be too error prone.
Negroponte tried a "PC in the wall" experiment in a poor district some years ago. This is being used as an argument for the airdrop strategy, but the experiment was in fact not successfull. The kids in the neighbourhood did learn to use the PC, but to little or no use. They played games but did not learn marketable skills or otherwise improve their quality of life.
In aid and development, To airdrop aid is the very image of a failed strategy. You bring in a celebrity and a tv-team, you throw money at the village, build a well or a lavatory, then write a report and pull out. Your funders want to see results quickly, but development doesn't work that way.
For someone in aid and development it is then obvious that Negroponte does not focus on actually improving things for the kids. Like many caricatured IT developers, he is focused on the product, not the user. He wants to prove that the user interface is so intuitive that you don't have to teach the kids to use it. He wants to show that the laptop is very robust and water proof so he drops it from a helicopter. He is using one of the vilest tricks in the IT-salesman's repertoire: That if you just buy my hardware, everything will be up and running with no extra cost. No running costs on training people to use it, no need to organize the use or for teachers to follow this up. No need to have anything centralized and government-like working for these villages to reap the benefits of IT.
It is a vile mix of PR stunts, naive IT optimism sold to supposedly uninformed savages and an appeal to prevailing ideologies among the western funders. All combined just to sell hardware.
If you take an old game that ran on a TV screen and emulate it in fullscreen on a modern PC, you will see every pixel clearly.
You never saw those on the TV. The pixellated Super Mario character was designed with the signal to noise ratio of an old TV in mind. When a modern emulator does not blend these pixels together like old blurry TVs did, the graphics look more blocky than they ever did originally. I can still see this in emulated computer games as recent as monkey island 2, which I originally played with a CRT monitor.
AFAIK, the resolution and post-processing needed to emulate the old screens faithfully is actually a bit demanding.
Kudos to anyone who TFA and TFP.
Does this mean that the number of car accidents has increased by 25? If not, what improvements have cancelled out the increase in accidents caused by cellphones and other gadgets? Are there fewer accidents caused by people fiddling for CDs in the glove compartment or trying to find a good AM channel? Are there fewer accidents caused by frustrated people trying to find their way on a fold-out map?
The army has a civil case against him? I thought he was facing court martial.
A whistleblower who wants to make certain documents of his/her employer public faces a problem:
How do I stop the leak being traced back to me?
This is especially relevant when you'r employed with the government, which in theory is very capable of tracing the origin of leaks, but every whistleblower runs this risk.
But isn't it a great strategy to then tip off outsiders and make them retrieve and distribute the documents instead? letting the version number of old software at the office slip, or maybe a file path or two, could be enough. Maybe a USB stick could be "stolen" ? Even if your name gets implied, you can feign innocence in the court.
Android smartphones run on linux.
Android smartphones are used by office workers and integrated with the company IT system.
Android smartphones are vulnerable to malicious apps
Therefore, antivirus or 'anti-malware' for linux is badly needed
Patenting software is a US thing. I'm under the impression that under most European laws, you cannot patent a software algorithm nor the code implementing it. Sure, you can work around this limitation in some cases, but the patent lawyers in the european company I work in do not push us to patent algorithms, for this very reason.
Linux and Mac users risk being victims of phishing attacks and foolishly handing out passwords, just like the rest of us. It's been a long time since corporate antivirus was just about stopping malicious software being installed on a computer.
The best minds of my generation are creating bio-tech startups in Bangalore
The best minds of my generation design oil rigs for the Santos basin offshore Brazil
The best minds of my generation can't afford education in Nairobi
The best minds of my generation divert rivers in China to power cities not yet built
The best minds of my generation uncover the workings of the brain in a town near the pole
The best minds of my generation overthrew a dictator in Kairo
The best minds of my generation enrolled in a militia in Afghanistan
The best minds of my generation does not read businessweek.com
Intel wants to buy McAfee, HP and Microsoft cooperates. Is this hardware + software cooperation a trend? Is this because growth seems to happen on all other arenas than the traditional PC?
In the mid 90's Microsoft and Intel relied on each other to drive one another's sales, a symbiosis they formalized for a while, but "parted as friends" in the late 90's if I recall correctly.
The norwegian police was asked by the italian police to retrieve this data. The norwegian police is eager to comply with requests from foreign police, as they themselves may need that kind of help abroad later. The loophole is that apparently no norwegian court is involved in the decision and norwegian laws are not consulted.
The bottom line is that you are not protected by your own country's laws when it comes to confiscating data. It's enough that someone in one of a hundred countries can get a police officer to send a request. Charges that would never hold in your own country is no barrier. Low corruption in your own country is no barrier. Bribe an italian police officer, hire an american lawyer and you can get at anything on servers in the western world.
Just to get one thing straight: A robot balancing a pencil is not a breakthrough. Similar tasks are standard textbook material, often implemented using fuzzy logic.
But the way they have done it may or may not be cool. Hard to tell.
Symmetry in this case refers to this: If you take a particle or a diagram describing a particle interaction and "flip something", you get something new that is still valid. Take a proton and flip the charge and you get an anti-proton for instance. Because of this symmetry, matter and anti-matter behave in exactly the same way, or so we belive. your particle and your the flipped version decay in the same way for instance.
What physicicst discovered over the last century was that it's not enough to flip the charge to make this valid in all cases. You have to flip charge, direction of time and flip something called "parity". Flipping the direction of time means simply to draw a feynman diagram of a particle collision or interaction on an overhead foil so that time runs from left to right and then turn it backwards. That's the mirror-image of the interaction.
But as I said you have to flip both time, parity and charge to get a valid diagram, and that's the origin of the term "an antiparticle is a particle travelling backwards in time"
I'm looking over the pros and cons listed in the article. And it strikes me that if this had been a beta of a windows version, it would have been called a scandal, a bugridden failure and a very good argument for switching over to Linux.
It seems more probable that Apple will try to buy Adobe, for two reasons:
* Adobe has been central to Apple/Mac for years, with its Photoshop software. It helped create the identity of the mac and Steve Jobs want control of the whole value chain
* Steve Jobs has been talking down the Adobe stock for a long time, with his complaints about the Flash software.
Multicellular life has evolved many times, even though most attempts did not result in large creatures. One need only consider that plants and animals existed as single-celled life long before multicellularity. Plants and animals must therefore have evolved multicellularity independently.
For a thorough overview, see:
http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/biog1101/outlines/Bonner%20-Origin%20of%20Multicellularity.pdf
A guy at Mozilla says Firefox will sometime in the future be better than all other browsers at one of several aspects of browsing?
The really interesting question here is why 18th of August appears to be one of the slowest news days on slashdot. Are people busy starting the semester and getting back to work after the holiday?
Touché! :-O You got me there.
Do the average german or US teenager today have internet friends in India, Japan or Brazil? I think not.
When you look at facebook and other ways to socialize on the net, one of the key differences between those and the internet hang-outs of the 80's and 90's is that on facebook you socialize with people you already know.
On a MUD or a BBS or on newsgroups for that matter, you met likeminded people which you were geographically far away from. On facebook you meet people which you interact with in real life because you are geographically close. It is not a place to meet people with the same interests for the first time.
At least this contrasts nicely with another of today's slashdot stories: "The Net generation isn't"
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/08/08/2139210
Roberta Williams, one of the game designers at Sierra in the 80's had a slightly different take on it. Home computers started out being rather expensive, which meant that the average computer owner was older and more educated. Maybe buying the computer as part of a college education for instance or having a well-paying job which helped one afford the computer. When PCs became affordable for the average joe, the "average gamer" changed and Sierra could no longer afford to write games that catered to an educated audience. They were just too small a part of the market.
You could imagine that a similar impact was felt in all areas related to computers.
Papers that claim to prove or disprove P=NP are a dime a dozen. Until this has been peer-reviewed, it's not even worth the effort to look at.