I am sure that Intel must have gone to one of these awful compaies for that one, alright. Pentium itself was considered pretty dumb by most people I talked to way back half a decade ago, too.
You can pretty much see where this thought process went...:
"We need something that conveys power and greatness!" "We need something that sounds like Pentium so that the idiots... ah, users will realize they are related." "Uh... What convey's power and greatness?" "I dunno... rock?" "Nah... That sounds slow..." "Rockanium!" "... No..." "Uh... Metal!" "Yeah! Metal! Err... PentIron?" "That is truly lame." "Yeah... Wait! Remember that one ship... uh, the Titanic!" "It sank." "Yeah, but that's not the point! It had that one strong metal right? The one that sounds like the ship?" "I dunno. Uh... you mean Titanium?" "That's it! That sounds powerful and great!" "Yeah!... Wait! We might not be able to patent it!" "Damn! How about Itanium?" "That sucks." "Got a better suggestion?" "No... Let's go with it."
After much debate, and the fact that Chrystler Benz was secretly threatening to sue over the blatant theft of their Mercedes brand in Merced, they decided to go with it.
So this... is what English majors do after they finish college.
No, I've got friends who are/were English majors, and most of them are aware that the whole deeper meaning thing is usually a load of bull. Note, however, every Master's and PHD candidate I met in English showed signs of believing in it to some degree.
The problem here is that the folks who went all the way up the academic ladder, bought into every philosophy that was made up to make some OTHER academic feel important, and were generally too incompetant to actually get a job as a professor have a pretty good chance of ending up in one of these BS naming companies. ESPECIALLY the ones who want to be "Artists", have no talent, and want to make a lot of money.
My personal disgust level reached very rarely scaled heights before I had gotten halfway through that article. Heck, take the acronym approach, overdone as it is, before you make your company name mean nothing at all.
Disclaimer: I like the arts and support them, but I think you need something called talent to perform them. I include creativity under this.
First, you can always record the output. If you can use a PC to play it, you can even record the original digital audio data.
Most PC's do not record at DVD quality, as near as I can tell. I am not a big time music or movie buff, so I've never bothered to try. If you can do that, what is the point of the original CSS? *Shrug.*
Player gets information from manufacturer. Player runs information through algorithm to decrypt DVD. If you have a hacked player, you can record and reuse the information. I don't see how timestamping works in, unless the key is at the player level, not the individual DVD level.
You can do it, I just don't think it is worth the effort. The key that would go onto the DVD would be the timestamp of when the DVD was created run through some complex and nasty algorithm, plus the manufacturer serial number run through a different algorithm. You then run this new number through yet another algorithm and you have a key that nobody is going to WANT to decode.
The player then does some other funky thing and talks to the manufacturer to get the key direct from the manufacturer, (based on serial number) and decrypts the result of what the Mfg. sends. The decryption of this encrypted key could vary off two more timestamps and just get absurd.
In short the players would be hideously complex software-wise, and the key would be to crack the players, because an uncracked player wouldn't play a copied DVD. The kicker of it, is that if you can even hack a player that decodes the manufacturers message correctly, a ripped DVD might have something like the timestamp different and still not work. I haven't worked out all the details of this yet, but I am sure some crypto expert could take this idea and run with it. I have heard that some government encryption makes the complexity I have just outlined seem childishly simple.
For those who have read a fair portion of IBM product announcements in the past few months:
Not much new covered. The R&D folks announced most of this stuff a while ago. It just sounds more impressive if you talk about a bunch of advances together. This is the fundamental flaw and great success of marketing...
People sometimes seem to forget that IBM still has a lot of smart people working for it.
Heh. Thanks, from all the IBMers on/.
It's a pity that they are so big and therefore a bit less focused than other tech companies.
Actually, that is IBM's greatest strength. If you look at any of the markets that IBM plays in, you will note that we are rarely #1, but we are pretty consistently among the top players. If you look at most of those folks in the number one spot, you will note that IBM is usually providing them a fair sized chunk of the technology they use. Lou Gerstner set up the concept of "Coopetition", which is fun, because even if IBM is losing, it is winning. IBM has more patents than any other player in the industry, and the numbers keep growing. For instance, Dell uses IBM hard drives, IBM customer support, IBM... It doesn't hurt too much when Aptiva sales go down, because Dell (amongst others) picks up the slack and IBM gets a cut of the profits.
On the other hand, allocating resources is a royal pain. My manager was going home at 2 AM and coming in at 10 AM for two weeks while we were trying to set up the budget for 2000, and none of it is going to have any meaning by May... *sigh*
Someone needs to hack a DVD, figure out the disk format and all that shit...and publish enough info that independant hardware manafacturers can make DVD drives. Force the standard open!
Believe it or not, many people will disagree. It is true that the way the industries are trying to cling to closed standards are untenable, but most people are likely to say that they have the right to try.
The real problem is that these industries are VERY aware of how much more profitible closed standards are. If they can kaeep the standard closed for a while longer, their stock stays high, they make more money, they can afford to pay more for the products they create. They can afford to create fringe items once the technology continues to catch on. If the standard is forced open, that money base vanishes.
We are inclined to say that this is good, because it places power in the hands of many small competitors. The downside of this is that quality suffers dramaticly at the fringes of the industry. Brittany Spears, the boy bands, etc. would have high quality distribution right now as people fought over having the best version, but orchestral music, most alternative, hard rock, rap and anything that doesn't sit squarely in the ultra popular realm will suffer lower quality in a "forced open" market.
(I am assuming here that the power base of the music industry continues to erode.) In many ways, closed standards stink for users like the average/. person. For Joe Average, they are a way of assuring quality. You and I can find good quality by knowing the right places to look, or at least who to ask. We who are in the technological "know" are the very ones that these companies fear. If everyone was like us, forcing the standards open would be good, but for many people who do not have the time or technical inclination, it is nice to know that the high quality is available in such and such a place.
This is my opinion, because my own brother is totally computer illiterate and greatly enjoys public media. There are more consumers like him than like us. The REAL problem is that the industries need to ACCEPT this. More consumers will be happy buying a good product from a legitimate source than will actually bother with piracy. It is really rather sad.
How? It isn't, unless your wealth depends on strangle-hold monopolies of media. The record companies have already wet themselves a thousand times over on MP3's. "They NEED to have an 'absolutely secure', 'many times better' format to distribute music in, or they DIE." It is the narrow vision of an industry that is threatened for virtually the first time. If they could, some of the music companies would go back to vinyl records. Those were secure.
Video companys should actually take the fact that people can make copies of their copyrighted materials much more calmly. The only public distribution method that has caught on before was VHS and Beta cassette tapes... easily ripped.
Anyone with a brain and some thought understands that some people are going to be able to copy anything. The goal is to make it as difficult as possible, so that few will ever bother. If you want security, you give EACH DVD a random key that your player contacts the manufacturer to discover and the key is based on a timestamp algorithm or something that would prevent anyone but a crypto expert from bothering. (No, I am not one either.) But that would actually cost money and the music and video industries are based on a high initial cost, long term profit model. Just like many software companies in the entertainment industry.
In short, they will be fools in our eyes. It is hard to give up the goose that laid golden eggs, even when they have started coming out iron pyrite.
Ok... um... If I saw a network cable coming from my *DESKLAMP*, I think I'd suspect something. Especially if the base of the lamp *also* had this little red plastic filter strategically pointed right up close to and out of a window.
Actually, that might work. Keep in mind that the average/.er is not necessarily the person that would be chosen as the reciever for a scam like this. I admit it is quite far-fetched, but for every major system, there are administrators and there are USERS.
Actual users of secure systems need not be technical individuals. My boss won't even consider our little IT sub-team for anything that sounds like data entry. A lower paid contractor does that. If you knew enough to get it the building (keycard access), and hook the "lamp" up to a desk on the system you wanted, you would know enough to pick the contractor who is not a "tech", but uses the system. It provides an opening for you to start.
Once you have felt out the system using this device, you would know enough to continue. Keep in mind that a true security professional has to be the most paranoid SOB on the planet to stop somebody REALLY good. (Of course, the really good wouldn't try something quite this dumb.)
As far as the article as a whole goes, I hope the target audience is people not THAT familiar with security and hacking / cracking.
Sorry to start a new thread, but I didn't see this topic in my skimming and I have a serious question before I sign this petition.
Why do they need all of the fields filled in?
Can anyone verify that this is a serious effort on the behalf of some group to get manned exploration of Mars? It asks for a fair bit of information including requiring that we provide the email addresses of others. Similarly, Shouldn't they require some sort of mail based confirmation in order to prevent ballot stuffing at this time? I loathe pyramid scams of even the chain letter sort and want to make sure of this thing before I sign it.
Like almost all scientific articles, it is a piece of fiction that might be interesting to some subset of people. It might even contain elements of the mythical TRUTH. Barring an assumption that I choose not to make right now (making me unpopular at times), we will never know.
This particular piece of fiction makes sense in a few limited areas, and meshes with some other not too widely accepted explanations of the modern scientific religion. It touches on one of the core beliefs of the science saying that there is a concept called time that we percieve to move in one direction. Many followers of science believe or fantacize that this perceptual illusion is permeable, so stories will continue to be rise about how time is reversable or non-existant. This is because people want that to be true.
Why do I refer to science as though it were a religion? Because it is.
If you deny the fundamental set of assumptions that the scientific method is based on, it is complete fiction. One person makes up a story and meshes it with a story that already existed. A few threads of the new story doesn't mesh well with the old story, so a few details of the old story are declared wrong and a few details of the new story are plucked out and suddenly the two seem to fit. As "time" progresses, more and more people include the new story in their personal views of how the world works and move on until new stories are added and change it again.
If you don't like the theory, fine. Don't adopt it as a part of your personal doctrine of science. 90% of the population in the United States doesn't seem to actually know how science works, so it really shouldn't matter to you unless you are a practicing scientist in that field. If you are, then you will want to look at it as a potential doctrinal change. (Yes, I made up that statistic, based on extrapolation from my own experiences.)
All of that said, no, I don't believe this theory out of hand. Yes, I believe in science (as a philosophy and as a State religion). No, this is not a deliberate troll. I thought I would throw in a perspective that most people don't seem to have.
B. Elgin "Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore." B. Elgin
Like the others who have responded, I am not a true expert in this field. I was about one class short of a minor in Cognitive Science (Psychology, Linguistics, Philosophy, AI Computer Science, and Neurology). I will explain via means of an analogy. Think of muscles. If you don't use them, they atrophy and can't do much of anything. The more you use them for a particular task, the better suited they are for it. Muscle memory is a phenomenon that does exist, ask any martial artist or dancer. Once you do someting enough, your muscles specialize to do it and it becomes very natural, even if it was extremely unnatural to start with. The brain works pretty much the same way. Were you to add a sense or a limb as an adult, it would take an IMMENSE amount of work to learn to use it. Imagine trying to juggle with an atrophied hand. Complicated use would take an extremely long time, especially since the brain is more likely to adapt existing functionality than add new whenever it can. You would percieve your new sense as some wierd distortion of an existing sense, etc. Your two left arms would move together and do the same tasks, etc. With heavy use, you would begin to make the brain devote more and more neural pathways to this new sense or limb, until it came to rival other senses or limbs. Think years of WORK before it would begin to feel truly natural for most adults. People who have lost senses/limbs are likely to progress more quickly, especially if the loss is recent. Infants would not have the same level of difficulty. Their brains still have not associated muscular control, sensation, and many other things to a particularly great degree. It takes a long time to learn to walk, but not anywhere near as long as it would take an adult who had never walked to aquire the skill from scratch. In short, newborns have a large percentage of their brain as,...um, undeticated memory (pardon the analogy). The neural pathways are certainly deticated to certain tasks, but only barely compared to an adult. An infant would learn an unnatural sense at a rate that could even rival the rate of a natural sense. Limbs would be a snap as they are learning the regular ones at the same time. All of this assumes that the new senses and limbs are added flawlessly and with better technology than we currently have. B. Elgin
Slashdot Mirror
You can pretty much see where this thought process went...:
"We need something that conveys power and greatness!" ... Wait! We might not be able to patent it!"
"We need something that sounds like Pentium so that the idiots... ah, users will realize they are related."
"Uh... What convey's power and greatness?"
"I dunno... rock?"
"Nah... That sounds slow..."
"Rockanium!"
"... No..."
"Uh... Metal!"
"Yeah! Metal! Err... PentIron?"
"That is truly lame."
"Yeah... Wait! Remember that one ship... uh, the Titanic!"
"It sank."
"Yeah, but that's not the point! It had that one strong metal right? The one that sounds like the ship?"
"I dunno. Uh... you mean Titanium?"
"That's it! That sounds powerful and great!"
"Yeah!
"Damn! How about Itanium?"
"That sucks."
"Got a better suggestion?"
"No... Let's go with it."
After much debate, and the fact that Chrystler Benz was secretly threatening to sue over the blatant theft of their Mercedes brand in Merced, they decided to go with it.
B. Elgin
No, I've got friends who are/were English majors, and most of them are aware that the whole deeper meaning thing is usually a load of bull. Note, however, every Master's and PHD candidate I met in English showed signs of believing in it to some degree.
The problem here is that the folks who went all the way up the academic ladder, bought into every philosophy that was made up to make some OTHER academic feel important, and were generally too incompetant to actually get a job as a professor have a pretty good chance of ending up in one of these BS naming companies. ESPECIALLY the ones who want to be "Artists", have no talent, and want to make a lot of money.
My personal disgust level reached very rarely scaled heights before I had gotten halfway through that article. Heck, take the acronym approach, overdone as it is, before you make your company name mean nothing at all.
Disclaimer: I like the arts and support them, but I think you need something called talent to perform them. I include creativity under this.
B. Elgin
Most PC's do not record at DVD quality, as near as I can tell. I am not a big time music or movie buff, so I've never bothered to try. If you can do that, what is the point of the original CSS? *Shrug.*
Player gets information from manufacturer. Player runs information through algorithm to decrypt DVD. If you have a hacked player, you can record and reuse the information. I don't see how timestamping works in, unless the key is at the player level, not the individual DVD level.
You can do it, I just don't think it is worth the effort. The key that would go onto the DVD would be the timestamp of when the DVD was created run through some complex and nasty algorithm, plus the manufacturer serial number run through a different algorithm. You then run this new number through yet another algorithm and you have a key that nobody is going to WANT to decode.
The player then does some other funky thing and talks to the manufacturer to get the key direct from the manufacturer, (based on serial number) and decrypts the result of what the Mfg. sends. The decryption of this encrypted key could vary off two more timestamps and just get absurd.
In short the players would be hideously complex software-wise, and the key would be to crack the players, because an uncracked player wouldn't play a copied DVD. The kicker of it, is that if you can even hack a player that decodes the manufacturers message correctly, a ripped DVD might have something like the timestamp different and still not work. I haven't worked out all the details of this yet, but I am sure some crypto expert could take this idea and run with it. I have heard that some government encryption makes the complexity I have just outlined seem childishly simple.
B. Elgin
Not much new covered. The R&D folks announced most of this stuff a while ago. It just sounds more impressive if you talk about a bunch of advances together. This is the fundamental flaw and great success of marketing...
B. Elgin
Heh. Thanks, from all the IBMers on /.
It's a pity that they are so big and therefore a bit less focused than other tech companies.
Actually, that is IBM's greatest strength. If you look at any of the markets that IBM plays in, you will note that we are rarely #1, but we are pretty consistently among the top players. If you look at most of those folks in the number one spot, you will note that IBM is usually providing them a fair sized chunk of the technology they use. Lou Gerstner set up the concept of "Coopetition", which is fun, because even if IBM is losing, it is winning. IBM has more patents than any other player in the industry, and the numbers keep growing. For instance, Dell uses IBM hard drives, IBM customer support, IBM... It doesn't hurt too much when Aptiva sales go down, because Dell (amongst others) picks up the slack and IBM gets a cut of the profits.
On the other hand, allocating resources is a royal pain. My manager was going home at 2 AM and coming in at 10 AM for two weeks while we were trying to set up the budget for 2000, and none of it is going to have any meaning by May... *sigh*
B. Elgin
Believe it or not, many people will disagree. It is true that the way the industries are trying to cling to closed standards are untenable, but most people are likely to say that they have the right to try.
The real problem is that these industries are VERY aware of how much more profitible closed standards are. If they can kaeep the standard closed for a while longer, their stock stays high, they make more money, they can afford to pay more for the products they create. They can afford to create fringe items once the technology continues to catch on. If the standard is forced open, that money base vanishes.
We are inclined to say that this is good, because it places power in the hands of many small competitors. The downside of this is that quality suffers dramaticly at the fringes of the industry. Brittany Spears, the boy bands, etc. would have high quality distribution right now as people fought over having the best version, but orchestral music, most alternative, hard rock, rap and anything that doesn't sit squarely in the ultra popular realm will suffer lower quality in a "forced open" market.
(I am assuming here that the power base of the music industry continues to erode.) In many ways, closed standards stink for users like the average /. person. For Joe Average, they are a way of assuring quality. You and I can find good quality by knowing the right places to look, or at least who to ask. We who are in the technological "know" are the very ones that these companies fear. If everyone was like us, forcing the standards open would be good, but for many people who do not have the time or technical inclination, it is nice to know that the high quality is available in such and such a place.
This is my opinion, because my own brother is totally computer illiterate and greatly enjoys public media. There are more consumers like him than like us. The REAL problem is that the industries need to ACCEPT this. More consumers will be happy buying a good product from a legitimate source than will actually bother with piracy. It is really rather sad.
B. Elgin
"They NEED to have an 'absolutely secure', 'many times better' format to distribute music in, or they DIE."
It is the narrow vision of an industry that is threatened for virtually the first time. If they could, some of the music companies would go back to vinyl records. Those were secure.
Video companys should actually take the fact that people can make copies of their copyrighted materials much more calmly. The only public distribution method that has caught on before was VHS and Beta cassette tapes... easily ripped.
Anyone with a brain and some thought understands that some people are going to be able to copy anything. The goal is to make it as difficult as possible, so that few will ever bother. If you want security, you give EACH DVD a random key that your player contacts the manufacturer to discover and the key is based on a timestamp algorithm or something that would prevent anyone but a crypto expert from bothering. (No, I am not one either.) But that would actually cost money and the music and video industries are based on a high initial cost, long term profit model. Just like many software companies in the entertainment industry.
In short, they will be fools in our eyes. It is hard to give up the goose that laid golden eggs, even when they have started coming out iron pyrite.
B. Elgin
Actually, /.er is not necessarily the person that would be chosen as the reciever for a scam like this. I admit it is quite far-fetched, but for every major system, there are administrators and there are USERS.
that might work. Keep in mind that the average
Actual users of secure systems need not be technical individuals. My boss won't even consider our little IT sub-team for anything that sounds like data entry. A lower paid contractor does that. If you knew enough to get it the building (keycard access), and hook the "lamp" up to a desk on the system you wanted, you would know enough to pick the contractor who is not a "tech", but uses the system. It provides an opening for you to start.
Once you have felt out the system using this device, you would know enough to continue. Keep in mind that a true security professional has to be the most paranoid SOB on the planet to stop somebody REALLY good. (Of course, the really good wouldn't try something quite this dumb.)
As far as the article as a whole goes, I hope the target audience is people not THAT familiar with security and hacking / cracking.
B. Elgin
Why do they need all of the fields filled in?
Can anyone verify that this is a serious effort on the behalf of some group to get manned exploration of Mars? It asks for a fair bit of information including requiring that we provide the email addresses of others. Similarly, Shouldn't they require some sort of mail based confirmation in order to prevent ballot stuffing at this time? I loathe pyramid scams of even the chain letter sort and want to make sure of this thing before I sign it.
Thanks.
B. Elgin
Like almost all scientific articles, it is a piece of fiction that might be interesting to some subset of people. It might even contain elements of the mythical TRUTH. Barring an assumption that I choose not to make right now (making me unpopular at times), we will never know.
This particular piece of fiction makes sense in a few limited areas, and meshes with some other not too widely accepted explanations of the modern scientific religion. It touches on one of the core beliefs of the science saying that there is a concept called time that we percieve to move in one direction. Many followers of science believe or fantacize that this perceptual illusion is permeable, so stories will continue to be rise about how time is reversable or non-existant. This is because people want that to be true.
Why do I refer to science as though it were a religion? Because it is.
If you deny the fundamental set of assumptions that the scientific method is based on, it is complete fiction. One person makes up a story and meshes it with a story that already existed. A few threads of the new story doesn't mesh well with the old story, so a few details of the old story are declared wrong and a few details of the new story are plucked out and suddenly the two seem to fit. As "time" progresses, more and more people include the new story in their personal views of how the world works and move on until new stories are added and change it again.
If you don't like the theory, fine. Don't adopt it as a part of your personal doctrine of science. 90% of the population in the United States doesn't seem to actually know how science works, so it really shouldn't matter to you unless you are a practicing scientist in that field. If you are, then you will want to look at it as a potential doctrinal change. (Yes, I made up that statistic, based on extrapolation from my own experiences.)
All of that said, no, I don't believe this theory out of hand. Yes, I believe in science (as a philosophy and as a State religion). No, this is not a deliberate troll. I thought I would throw in a perspective that most people don't seem to have.
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
B. Elgin
Like the others who have responded, I am not a true expert in this field. I was about one class short of a minor in Cognitive Science (Psychology, Linguistics, Philosophy, AI Computer Science, and Neurology). I will explain via means of an analogy. Think of muscles. If you don't use them, they atrophy and can't do much of anything. The more you use them for a particular task, the better suited they are for it. Muscle memory is a phenomenon that does exist, ask any martial artist or dancer. Once you do someting enough, your muscles specialize to do it and it becomes very natural, even if it was extremely unnatural to start with. The brain works pretty much the same way. Were you to add a sense or a limb as an adult, it would take an IMMENSE amount of work to learn to use it. Imagine trying to juggle with an atrophied hand. Complicated use would take an extremely long time, especially since the brain is more likely to adapt existing functionality than add new whenever it can. You would percieve your new sense as some wierd distortion of an existing sense, etc. Your two left arms would move together and do the same tasks, etc. With heavy use, you would begin to make the brain devote more and more neural pathways to this new sense or limb, until it came to rival other senses or limbs. Think years of WORK before it would begin to feel truly natural for most adults. People who have lost senses/limbs are likely to progress more quickly, especially if the loss is recent. Infants would not have the same level of difficulty. Their brains still have not associated muscular control, sensation, and many other things to a particularly great degree. It takes a long time to learn to walk, but not anywhere near as long as it would take an adult who had never walked to aquire the skill from scratch. In short, newborns have a large percentage of their brain as, ...um, undeticated memory (pardon the analogy). The neural pathways are certainly deticated to certain tasks, but only barely compared to an adult. An infant would learn an unnatural sense at a rate that could even rival the rate of a natural sense. Limbs would be a snap as they are learning the regular ones at the same time. All of this assumes that the new senses and limbs are added flawlessly and with better technology than we currently have.
B. Elgin