Just like a sufficiently advanced parody can't be distinguished from a zealot, sarcasm doesn't translate. I'm sure they thought it funny and entertaining, but for completely different reasons than intended.
Yes, much like a sufficiently advanced ploy to discredit the intelect of the western world can't be distinguished from clueless Chinese reporters...
I think hackers have more to fear from the mafia underground than legal authorities.
LOL, Does your made for Hollywood vision of script kiddies getting swept up in a sea of crime star a young Angelina Jolie flying through 3D cyberspace with her trusty RISC and spray-painted Kom-Pu-Tah? If you ask me, that's a market niche worth mining.
Oi, Tony, get a load of this prick 'ere pissin' on our cyber-turf? What do you say we pay 'em a lil' visit and make 'em an offer they can't refuse?
Look, Guido, I know you flunked school -- and fuck teachers -- but this little pissant isn't worth a fuckkin' trip to Japan, you simple non-geographically inclined muther fukker. Besides, we got a deal with the Yakuza, we don't slice their sushi, and they don't bust our meatballs. Capiche?
Boss-san, my re-pourt: A skeript kehddie crahk-ed sivral of low-cal kom-pu-tah, make poust on line, distrak poulice.
IDDIOHT! What I pay yiu fo?! Not dis! Hak moh! Make money! No skeript keds! Lucky yiu un-kal my borther!
It sounds like the source of that infographic was the bogus info-farming online school site, and they wanted the links updated.
It also sounds like they produce hundreds of these infographics and expects to be backlinked.
I think it would have helped more if you had explained yourself with the help of a diagram.
I don't understand, do you have a car analogy?
It's as if your car is acting up, and you search out a solution for your problem. A friend says, "Oh, that sounds like something easy to fix yourself. Here's a simple diagram + instructions. If you have any questions just swing by this close-by shop address, but if it helps you then spread the word."
Try as you might your problem persists, and so you visit the address your friend gave you with the instructions. When you arrive all you find is a School for Mechanics and several recruiters immediately begin pressuring you to act now and enroll for A+ certification. You'd drive away but they've plastered your windshield with half attached bumperstickers so that they flap in the wind, exploiting the fact that human attention is drawn towards movement.
You then wonder how many folks the DIY pictorial had managed to help, and how many times those who were luckier than you had given out that bogus address.
So, in an attempt to raise awareness of the questionable practice which you fell victim to, you write up a letter about the whole ordeal and publish it via newsletter. To help with the costs of producing the newsletter you place a few ads betwixt yon paragraphs. As luck would have it an editor of the local gear-head talk radio show discovers your newsletter on a slow news day and mentions it on air.
Suddenly your little newsletter is in more demand than you can meet, and you literally have to turn away some folks sans article. Some enraged would-be reader slices your car's tires for causing them the fruitless journey, thus the act of running out of in-demand newsletters becomes known as the "Slash-Tire Effect".
As you reflect upon the crazy whirlwind of happenings, you realize that you've become just as bad as the infographic con perpetrators you so despised: Your newsletter's advertising revenue more than made up for the amount to pay for your trivial problem to be fixed, but it simultaneously spread generic FUD about following your friends' mechanic advice, especially if accompanied by a photocopy of pages from a Haynes manual.
Eventually you receive a few letters from your newsletter readers which your publisher automatically publishes in the new editions. One reader jokingly claims that the whole story would have been easier understood if accompanied by an illustrated mechanical tear-down of the process. As an inside joke, another reader suggests that the ordeal would better be understood by them were it conveyed via computer science analogy. A third reader, being both a mechanic and computer scientist, replies with an overly detailed computing technology related analogy.
Nope. And I'll tell you why: Stack Smashing. Anything that uses the same stack for function parameters, local variables AND code pointers is fucked. Unfortunately separating the call stack from the data stack has performance penalties considering that x86 evolved to include instructions explicity to speed up the bad practice in the first place: ENTER / LEAVE. I'm developing a secure OS too, as a hobby project. Even in user mode I can secure the call stack, a called function can not affect the return address. This also leads to dead simple Co-Routine implementations, which C is sadly lacking, thus I've abandoned it for now (since I'd have to re-implement much of the base of the compiler anyway). Eventually I'll implement C using the foundations of my security driven low level programming language.
The point is that we continually sacrifice security for speed in modern OSs. Hell, even the browser that EK loves (Chrome) downloads arbitrary code as data, compiles sadi data to machine instructions, marks the data as code and EXECUTES ARBITRARY REMOTE CODE. Instead of abandoning the horribly designed JavaScript (ECMA Script) for a language designed with efficiency in mind, we're sacrificing our security. In my OS, the OS compiles software from cross platform bytecode into machine code at install time, and cryptographically signs it. This lets you distribute applications in a cross platform manner, and allows the OS to inspect code for used features before running any of it, without the performance draw back of a VM. An embedded VM allows the OS to run less trusted code as bytecode and provides sandboxing facilities at the cost of less performance. This "evaluation mode", solves the plugin problem whereby a.DLL /.SO based malicious plugin can take full control of the host program, without resorting to separate processes and IPC. IMO, every OS needs to be integrated with its compiler, rather than relying solley on hardware for security.
In short: There is much innovation to be had, but we must ignore parts of POSIX to do so, and no, looking to the past isn't going to help much. We need a clean slate to solve the issues that those older OSs never considered. Past languages might be of interest though, eg: FORTH uses separate call and data stacks.
"It was discovered just days earlier" this means we need to stop being moronic about spending TOO MUCH on Space Programs when they're the only thing that can actually save the planet. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program... All of our eggs are in one basket. Priority #1 should be creating a self sustaining colony of humans off world. Priority #1.5 should be getting out to the asteroid belt and nudging a few into orbit around the Moon. We can mine their materials that are free of expensive gravity wells to build space platforms and do awesome science, but that's of secondary importance to being able to quickly dislodge one and use it as a pool-cue to tap an Earth ending Asteroid out of harm's way, or use them as gravity tugs to pull them off a collision course. End the fucking wars, "Private, you've just been promoted to Space Cadet."
It would be a terrible shame to have sentient life snuffed out of this corner of the Universe just because Humans suck at prioritizing.
Nothing can ever happen if everyone is always content to sit in the corner cowering in fear of what could happen. Such a society would suck ass.
Yeah.... wait, hang on -- there's a TV show about a killer asteroid on, brb.
That's not a TV show, that's the news about the nearly 3 mile wide asteroid that passed ~half way between the moon and Earth yesterday.
Similarly to being afraid of the possibility of being prosecuted for violating unjust laws about sharing your internet connection, we also need to stop being afraid to spend too much money on things like NASA. In either case: You can't spend too much money trying to ensure at least some of your eggs are in another basket.
Finally! We don't need time travel, books or movies to experience the draconian police states envisioned in Orwell's 1984 masterpiece!
Remember when we hated these practices when it was the "Damn Commies" who were doing them? ME NEITHER!
This should be an enlightening experience for all...
For the next incarnation of the government I vote we model it after something a little less dystopian, like Star Trek.
I'm sure you could write a computer program to do a better job than 99% of CEOs... and think of all the money that will be saved on the obscene costs in have a human CEO.
Run Eric, Run. The robots are coming.
Not really. The CEO's main job is to asses risk and then choose the optimal risk/reward path. You can easily write a computer program to do the optimization provided it gets accurate risk/expected reward numbers, but there does not exist an empirical method for measuring risk associated with future events.
So is what you're saying that High Frequency Trading doesn't exist or just that it's dumb?
Unfortunately the Jedi religion is being hindered by draconian copyright laws which say they must wait 70 years beyond the life of the author to be able to freely duplicate their religious media. I mean, what if Lucas gets cybernetic implants? Being a head with a robot body or uploading minds into mainframes could extend copyright law for Eons! You see, padawan, short of time travel to a long time ago or fleeing to a galaxy far away, the ways of the Jedi can only be protected by fighting the droids and their master, Darth Lucas.
This is why I make sure my devices allow 3rd party application stores. I won't buy any hardware or software that overtly allows the sellers to force obsolescence by pulling the plug on the market to make you to buy the new shiny. I learned my lesson with always-connected-to-internet DRM in games. I don't care if it's an iOS, FPS, or MMORPG. If it doesn't support private servers, I will not buy it.
See also: Closed source OSs ending support for updates, and hardware manufacturers not re-compiling drivers for a new OS (should be open sourced, we buy hardware not drivers), or even UEFI secure boot coded to only work on select OSs by name string... I think it's horrible that software creators are adopting the common engineering practice of purposefully shortening life span of the products.
I've always said CEOs and their entire families should be downstream/wind of their plants.
I've always said: If corporations are people, then the CEO is the Head. The head should be affixed to the body and depend on it to live, much the way a real person's head is. This way, when the entity is assemble you need to be careful of which head you select, because they're going to be there for a mandatory minimum timespan of say, 20 years (or death / severe illness). If a person sees their body is sick or wounded, the head tries to do everything they can to take care of the body... The head shouldn't be able to just run its body into the ground and hop onto a new body, which may or may not have benefited from the other dying. We have a name for such host hopping practices, "Parasite". Either get rid of all the Parasites or get your damn heads screwed on. Also: Aren't two heads are better than one?
Or, we just ask a simple question: Is there a CHANCE this could permanently fuck up the water supply? No? Proceed. Yes? Better Safe than Sorry. For essential things like food, water, shelter, we really shouldn't take any unnecessary risks. Let's face it, the only reason fracking is done is money, which is less important than water. We can live without natural gas, and oil, but not water. Also: Try not to over think things, it's a waste of time and energy.
If you're defining a curve, unless it's a simple geometric curve, you'll need to define the parameters of that curve and they just don't stop: they're fractal.
Not only that but then you still have to selectively light up the display's RGB picture elements AKA pixels. So, no, we won't be rid of the "pixel" anytime soon, not even if the internal storage format is vectors. Even if the display used different layers of colored phosphors excited by multiple different beams striking from different angles to create the RGB (or whatever) color space, the convergences would still be pixelated due to the rasterized placement of the overlapping picture elements (pixels). Lastly, even if the screens were uniform and magically allowed multiple wavelengths of light to pass through the other layers, the beam itself would be controlled by a computer with finite precision calculations. The curves will become vectors, and the smallest resolution attainable on the display would be a single picture element (one PIXEL).
Quantum scale "Analog" displays you say? Oh what's a Quanta? A little packet of data, eh? A FUCKING PIXEL.
I'll take "server side" as implying at least three components that are going to limit the geek's options dramatically: the always-on internet connection, the app-store and hardware that is much less physically accessible.
Less physically accessible hardware will have alternatives that are more open and respect the user's wishes. See also: Virtual Machine. Both the app store and the remote connection tethering can then be emulated or bypassed due to said open hardware. Furthermore, the software on such closed hardware is susceptible to exploits because it's made by humans and thus not perfect. Return oriented programming exploits can operate in environments where all code must be fully encrypted and signed. See also: Jail-breaking.
At some point in the Information Age the efforts to thwart the spread and use of information will cost more than the artificial scarcity is worth... Simple economics of ROI. We're at the "dumb" part of our new age, whereas in the beginning of the Electromechanical Era folks screwed light-bulbs into sockets to keep electricity from leaking out, some folks are now exhibiting equally retarded ideas about how to operate in the Information Age. I'll be glad once the adjustment phase is over, but for now, we live in retarding times.
How many times do you people need to be told client side security doesn't work?
Client-side security is like a lock on your front door. It's there to keep people honest, not to keep people out. Clearly it was not targeting people like Mr. Angel.
If the people are honest they will respect the door, locked or not. If the "security" only keeps honest people honest then it has no purpose whatsoever.
Hence the movement of reverse engineers to create etc/host files and emulate DRM servers thus transforming must-be-connected-to-internet-at-all-times-to-play into can-be-connected-to-localhost-to-play with the added benefit that if the software's protocol is fully discovered alternate remote (private) servers can be implemented.
Look, the way to end all piracy is simple: You just don't do work unless you're sure you'll get paid for it, like a mechanic or home builder or any other labor centric market. You say, "It'll cost me $X to do the $WORK", then you don't do the $WORK (music, movie, game, software, book, etc) for less than $X. Once you've been paid the price you set that will cover your labor and expenses and a bit of profit then you do the work. Once the work is done, it's done. You don't get paid again each duplication, you're not doing any work. If I make a copy of the bits, then I'm doing the work of making that copy, not you -- You shouldn't be able to charge me for doing my own work.
Stop working for peanuts or free up front, and trying to extort others once the work has been done by way of artificial scarcity: You can't sell ice to Eskimos. Instead get the required payment up front. You must realize, This is the Information age. Information is a 1 to many thing. When you create more information you can't just give it to one person without giving it to culture as a whole. So, it's all of us that you must sell to up front. See: Consignments, Contracts, Crowdsourced funding. That's a viable rational model.
What's scarce is not the 1's and 0's -- those are in near infinite supply. What's scarce is the ability to configure the bits, so that's what you market. The scarcity of the materials in your car aren't important to you once you own the car, what a mechanic primarily sells is their ability to configure those materials properly -- To create order from chaos (the very meaning of life). The same goes for floors that need sweeping, ditches that need digging, mathematics that need solving, programs that need writing, movies that need making, etc.
The problem is that most content creators already work this way, but they do so for greedy Publishers, who try to recoup their costs, but do so far and above the actual cost to produce the content. This disparity between cost to create and cost charged is what drives piracy. In the Information Age we are all publishers of information, and specialized publishing houses that only increase prices without adding any value are obsolete. DRM is the futile effort to restrict the flow of ideas and information. The only thing we have over the apes is our superior ability to share ideas and information. DRM is counter to both the meaning of life, and human nature. To any rational sentient being DRM is abhorrent.
Encryption is useful if you want to prevent reverse engineering, and not just modification. And, of course, with private key encryption, you don't have to provide the keys required to encrypt more binaries.
What you've described is Cryptographic Signing, not encryption. If the machine has the public key to decrypt the data encrypted with the private key then anyone with full access to the key can decrypt the data, but they can not "encrypt more binaries", thus the encryption is essentially equivalent to an electronic signature, minus the benefit from actually proving the data decrypted was the same as the data that was encrypted. Ergo, plaintext / unencrypted-binaries with cryptographic signatures would actually be superior.
What's actually stopping them ripping out the hum entirely and replacing it with the hum of any arbitrary period of time?
Nothing. In court the question will be, "what's the likelihood that it's been faked by sophisticated AV specialists?". It's just one point of data that will be used to determine the ultimate verdict. With enough evidence, say like some planted DNA with your fingerprint, etc. the Jury may put to bed any "reasonable doubt", and find guilty. Think of this next time you get up to leave the coffee house with a strand of your hair on the chair / floor, and toss that almost empty yet DNA laden Starbucks cup, complete with fingerprints, into the trash. Look around and see if there's someone about your height, build and skin / eye color. Perhaps they're planning to snag some evidence for planting at their next crime. They could follow you home, figure out your schedule, and time their crime such to ensure you have no alibi.
Once the detectives "like you" for a crime, they'll find more (circumstantial) evidence that you're guilty, and put less effort into tracking down the real criminal. "Oh, Come On! What are the chances of that happening?!" -- That's exactly what a smart criminal is counting on, i.e. that the jury assumes criminals are dumb.
So, if I apply a tracking notch to the doctored recordings to remove the original hum and its harmonics, and then superimpose data from the database, I'm all set? Well, thank you!
That was my fist thought too, but my 2nd thought was: So, if I use a hum generator to subtly but abruptly switch between hums then anything they record me saying can be proven fake in court? It's a poor substitute for privacy, but I'll take what I can get; Thanks!
The above poster is insightful moreso than flamebait. It's fucking serious man. "Trolling" as in "Trolling for comments with a dumb-as-fuck baited question". Please, Slashdot. We value your minimal editorial skills, and now even those are lacking now. Stop trolling us. What's next? "How to use a Linux root terminal" posted by someone who's only ever used iPhones?
Slashdot Mirror
Just like a sufficiently advanced parody can't be distinguished from a zealot, sarcasm doesn't translate. I'm sure they thought it funny and entertaining, but for completely different reasons than intended.
Yes, much like a sufficiently advanced ploy to discredit the intelect of the western world can't be distinguished from clueless Chinese reporters...
I think hackers have more to fear from the mafia underground than legal authorities.
LOL, Does your made for Hollywood vision of script kiddies getting swept up in a sea of crime star a young Angelina Jolie flying through 3D cyberspace with her trusty RISC and spray-painted Kom-Pu-Tah? If you ask me, that's a market niche worth mining.
Oi, Tony, get a load of this prick 'ere pissin' on our cyber-turf? What do you say we pay 'em a lil' visit and make 'em an offer they can't refuse?
Look, Guido, I know you flunked school -- and fuck teachers -- but this little pissant isn't worth a fuckkin' trip to Japan, you simple non-geographically inclined muther fukker. Besides, we got a deal with the Yakuza, we don't slice their sushi, and they don't bust our meatballs. Capiche?
Boss-san, my re-pourt: A skeript kehddie crahk-ed sivral of low-cal kom-pu-tah, make poust on line, distrak poulice.
IDDIOHT! What I pay yiu fo?! Not dis! Hak moh! Make money! No skeript keds! Lucky yiu un-kal my borther!
I think it would have helped more if you had explained yourself with the help of a diagram.
I don't understand, do you have a car analogy?
It's as if your car is acting up, and you search out a solution for your problem. A friend says, "Oh, that sounds like something easy to fix yourself. Here's a simple diagram + instructions. If you have any questions just swing by this close-by shop address, but if it helps you then spread the word."
Try as you might your problem persists, and so you visit the address your friend gave you with the instructions. When you arrive all you find is a School for Mechanics and several recruiters immediately begin pressuring you to act now and enroll for A+ certification. You'd drive away but they've plastered your windshield with half attached bumperstickers so that they flap in the wind, exploiting the fact that human attention is drawn towards movement.
You then wonder how many folks the DIY pictorial had managed to help, and how many times those who were luckier than you had given out that bogus address.
So, in an attempt to raise awareness of the questionable practice which you fell victim to, you write up a letter about the whole ordeal and publish it via newsletter. To help with the costs of producing the newsletter you place a few ads betwixt yon paragraphs. As luck would have it an editor of the local gear-head talk radio show discovers your newsletter on a slow news day and mentions it on air.
Suddenly your little newsletter is in more demand than you can meet, and you literally have to turn away some folks sans article. Some enraged would-be reader slices your car's tires for causing them the fruitless journey, thus the act of running out of in-demand newsletters becomes known as the "Slash-Tire Effect".
As you reflect upon the crazy whirlwind of happenings, you realize that you've become just as bad as the infographic con perpetrators you so despised: Your newsletter's advertising revenue more than made up for the amount to pay for your trivial problem to be fixed, but it simultaneously spread generic FUD about following your friends' mechanic advice, especially if accompanied by a photocopy of pages from a Haynes manual.
Eventually you receive a few letters from your newsletter readers which your publisher automatically publishes in the new editions. One reader jokingly claims that the whole story would have been easier understood if accompanied by an illustrated mechanical tear-down of the process. As an inside joke, another reader suggests that the ordeal would better be understood by them were it conveyed via computer science analogy. A third reader, being both a mechanic and computer scientist, replies with an overly detailed computing technology related analogy.
Robot maids, butlers, gardeners, etc.
OTOH, my wife refuses to replace the pool boy.
She just hasn't seen all of the attachments new robotic pool boys can have.
Nope. And I'll tell you why: Stack Smashing. Anything that uses the same stack for function parameters, local variables AND code pointers is fucked. Unfortunately separating the call stack from the data stack has performance penalties considering that x86 evolved to include instructions explicity to speed up the bad practice in the first place: ENTER / LEAVE. I'm developing a secure OS too, as a hobby project. Even in user mode I can secure the call stack, a called function can not affect the return address. This also leads to dead simple Co-Routine implementations, which C is sadly lacking, thus I've abandoned it for now (since I'd have to re-implement much of the base of the compiler anyway). Eventually I'll implement C using the foundations of my security driven low level programming language.
The point is that we continually sacrifice security for speed in modern OSs. Hell, even the browser that EK loves (Chrome) downloads arbitrary code as data, compiles sadi data to machine instructions, marks the data as code and EXECUTES ARBITRARY REMOTE CODE. Instead of abandoning the horribly designed JavaScript (ECMA Script) for a language designed with efficiency in mind, we're sacrificing our security. In my OS, the OS compiles software from cross platform bytecode into machine code at install time, and cryptographically signs it. This lets you distribute applications in a cross platform manner, and allows the OS to inspect code for used features before running any of it, without the performance draw back of a VM. An embedded VM allows the OS to run less trusted code as bytecode and provides sandboxing facilities at the cost of less performance. This "evaluation mode", solves the plugin problem whereby a .DLL / .SO based malicious plugin can take full control of the host program, without resorting to separate processes and IPC. IMO, every OS needs to be integrated with its compiler, rather than relying solley on hardware for security.
In short: There is much innovation to be had, but we must ignore parts of POSIX to do so, and no, looking to the past isn't going to help much. We need a clean slate to solve the issues that those older OSs never considered. Past languages might be of interest though, eg: FORTH uses separate call and data stacks.
You must be one of those DBAs that can't accept NULLs
So atheists worship Nothing ?
No, you're thinking Nil-lists.
"It was discovered just days earlier" this means we need to stop being moronic about spending TOO MUCH on Space Programs when they're the only thing that can actually save the planet. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program... All of our eggs are in one basket. Priority #1 should be creating a self sustaining colony of humans off world. Priority #1.5 should be getting out to the asteroid belt and nudging a few into orbit around the Moon. We can mine their materials that are free of expensive gravity wells to build space platforms and do awesome science, but that's of secondary importance to being able to quickly dislodge one and use it as a pool-cue to tap an Earth ending Asteroid out of harm's way, or use them as gravity tugs to pull them off a collision course. End the fucking wars, "Private, you've just been promoted to Space Cadet."
It would be a terrible shame to have sentient life snuffed out of this corner of the Universe just because Humans suck at prioritizing.
Nothing can ever happen if everyone is always content to sit in the corner cowering in fear of what could happen. Such a society would suck ass.
Yeah.... wait, hang on -- there's a TV show about a killer asteroid on, brb.
That's not a TV show, that's the news about the nearly 3 mile wide asteroid that passed ~half way between the moon and Earth yesterday.
Similarly to being afraid of the possibility of being prosecuted for violating unjust laws about sharing your internet connection, we also need to stop being afraid to spend too much money on things like NASA. In either case: You can't spend too much money trying to ensure at least some of your eggs are in another basket.
Finally! We don't need time travel, books or movies to experience the draconian police states envisioned in Orwell's 1984 masterpiece!
Remember when we hated these practices when it was the "Damn Commies" who were doing them? ME NEITHER!
This should be an enlightening experience for all...
For the next incarnation of the government I vote we model it after something a little less dystopian, like Star Trek.
I'm sure you could write a computer program to do a better job than 99% of CEOs... and think of all the money that will be saved on the obscene costs in have a human CEO.
Run Eric, Run. The robots are coming.
Not really. The CEO's main job is to asses risk and then choose the optimal risk/reward path. You can easily write a computer program to do the optimization provided it gets accurate risk/expected reward numbers, but there does not exist an empirical method for measuring risk associated with future events.
So is what you're saying that High Frequency Trading doesn't exist or just that it's dumb?
Unfortunately the Jedi religion is being hindered by draconian copyright laws which say they must wait 70 years beyond the life of the author to be able to freely duplicate their religious media. I mean, what if Lucas gets cybernetic implants? Being a head with a robot body or uploading minds into mainframes could extend copyright law for Eons! You see, padawan, short of time travel to a long time ago or fleeing to a galaxy far away, the ways of the Jedi can only be protected by fighting the droids and their master, Darth Lucas.
This is why I make sure my devices allow 3rd party application stores. I won't buy any hardware or software that overtly allows the sellers to force obsolescence by pulling the plug on the market to make you to buy the new shiny. I learned my lesson with always-connected-to-internet DRM in games. I don't care if it's an iOS, FPS, or MMORPG. If it doesn't support private servers, I will not buy it.
See also: Closed source OSs ending support for updates, and hardware manufacturers not re-compiling drivers for a new OS (should be open sourced, we buy hardware not drivers), or even UEFI secure boot coded to only work on select OSs by name string... I think it's horrible that software creators are adopting the common engineering practice of purposefully shortening life span of the products.
Real men run .99
No, those sort of people are "children". When you mature you stop using the term "real men".
I've always said CEOs and their entire families should be downstream/wind of their plants.
I've always said: If corporations are people, then the CEO is the Head. The head should be affixed to the body and depend on it to live, much the way a real person's head is. This way, when the entity is assemble you need to be careful of which head you select, because they're going to be there for a mandatory minimum timespan of say, 20 years (or death / severe illness). If a person sees their body is sick or wounded, the head tries to do everything they can to take care of the body... The head shouldn't be able to just run its body into the ground and hop onto a new body, which may or may not have benefited from the other dying. We have a name for such host hopping practices, "Parasite". Either get rid of all the Parasites or get your damn heads screwed on. Also: Aren't two heads are better than one?
Or, we just ask a simple question: Is there a CHANCE this could permanently fuck up the water supply? No? Proceed. Yes? Better Safe than Sorry. For essential things like food, water, shelter, we really shouldn't take any unnecessary risks. Let's face it, the only reason fracking is done is money, which is less important than water. We can live without natural gas, and oil, but not water. Also: Try not to over think things, it's a waste of time and energy.
If you're defining a curve, unless it's a simple geometric curve, you'll need to define the parameters of that curve and they just don't stop: they're fractal.
Not only that but then you still have to selectively light up the display's RGB picture elements AKA pixels. So, no, we won't be rid of the "pixel" anytime soon, not even if the internal storage format is vectors. Even if the display used different layers of colored phosphors excited by multiple different beams striking from different angles to create the RGB (or whatever) color space, the convergences would still be pixelated due to the rasterized placement of the overlapping picture elements (pixels). Lastly, even if the screens were uniform and magically allowed multiple wavelengths of light to pass through the other layers, the beam itself would be controlled by a computer with finite precision calculations. The curves will become vectors, and the smallest resolution attainable on the display would be a single picture element (one PIXEL).
Quantum scale "Analog" displays you say? Oh what's a Quanta? A little packet of data, eh? A FUCKING PIXEL.
I'll take "server side" as implying at least three components that are going to limit the geek's options dramatically: the always-on internet connection, the app-store and hardware that is much less physically accessible.
Less physically accessible hardware will have alternatives that are more open and respect the user's wishes. See also: Virtual Machine. Both the app store and the remote connection tethering can then be emulated or bypassed due to said open hardware. Furthermore, the software on such closed hardware is susceptible to exploits because it's made by humans and thus not perfect. Return oriented programming exploits can operate in environments where all code must be fully encrypted and signed. See also: Jail-breaking.
At some point in the Information Age the efforts to thwart the spread and use of information will cost more than the artificial scarcity is worth... Simple economics of ROI. We're at the "dumb" part of our new age, whereas in the beginning of the Electromechanical Era folks screwed light-bulbs into sockets to keep electricity from leaking out, some folks are now exhibiting equally retarded ideas about how to operate in the Information Age. I'll be glad once the adjustment phase is over, but for now, we live in retarding times.
How many times do you people need to be told client side security doesn't work?
Client-side security is like a lock on your front door. It's there to keep people honest, not to keep people out. Clearly it was not targeting people like Mr. Angel.
If the people are honest they will respect the door, locked or not. If the "security" only keeps honest people honest then it has no purpose whatsoever.
Hence the movement of reverse engineers to create etc/host files and emulate DRM servers thus transforming must-be-connected-to-internet-at-all-times-to-play into can-be-connected-to-localhost-to-play with the added benefit that if the software's protocol is fully discovered alternate remote (private) servers can be implemented.
Look, the way to end all piracy is simple: You just don't do work unless you're sure you'll get paid for it, like a mechanic or home builder or any other labor centric market. You say, "It'll cost me $X to do the $WORK", then you don't do the $WORK (music, movie, game, software, book, etc) for less than $X. Once you've been paid the price you set that will cover your labor and expenses and a bit of profit then you do the work. Once the work is done, it's done. You don't get paid again each duplication, you're not doing any work. If I make a copy of the bits, then I'm doing the work of making that copy, not you -- You shouldn't be able to charge me for doing my own work.
Stop working for peanuts or free up front, and trying to extort others once the work has been done by way of artificial scarcity: You can't sell ice to Eskimos. Instead get the required payment up front. You must realize, This is the Information age. Information is a 1 to many thing. When you create more information you can't just give it to one person without giving it to culture as a whole. So, it's all of us that you must sell to up front. See: Consignments, Contracts, Crowdsourced funding. That's a viable rational model.
What's scarce is not the 1's and 0's -- those are in near infinite supply. What's scarce is the ability to configure the bits, so that's what you market. The scarcity of the materials in your car aren't important to you once you own the car, what a mechanic primarily sells is their ability to configure those materials properly -- To create order from chaos (the very meaning of life). The same goes for floors that need sweeping, ditches that need digging, mathematics that need solving, programs that need writing, movies that need making, etc.
The problem is that most content creators already work this way, but they do so for greedy Publishers, who try to recoup their costs, but do so far and above the actual cost to produce the content. This disparity between cost to create and cost charged is what drives piracy. In the Information Age we are all publishers of information, and specialized publishing houses that only increase prices without adding any value are obsolete. DRM is the futile effort to restrict the flow of ideas and information. The only thing we have over the apes is our superior ability to share ideas and information. DRM is counter to both the meaning of life, and human nature. To any rational sentient being DRM is abhorrent.
Encryption is useful if you want to prevent reverse engineering, and not just modification. And, of course, with private key encryption, you don't have to provide the keys required to encrypt more binaries.
What you've described is Cryptographic Signing, not encryption. If the machine has the public key to decrypt the data encrypted with the private key then anyone with full access to the key can decrypt the data, but they can not "encrypt more binaries", thus the encryption is essentially equivalent to an electronic signature, minus the benefit from actually proving the data decrypted was the same as the data that was encrypted. Ergo, plaintext / unencrypted-binaries with cryptographic signatures would actually be superior.
What's actually stopping them ripping out the hum entirely and replacing it with the hum of any arbitrary period of time?
Nothing. In court the question will be, "what's the likelihood that it's been faked by sophisticated AV specialists?". It's just one point of data that will be used to determine the ultimate verdict. With enough evidence, say like some planted DNA with your fingerprint, etc. the Jury may put to bed any "reasonable doubt", and find guilty. Think of this next time you get up to leave the coffee house with a strand of your hair on the chair / floor, and toss that almost empty yet DNA laden Starbucks cup, complete with fingerprints, into the trash. Look around and see if there's someone about your height, build and skin / eye color. Perhaps they're planning to snag some evidence for planting at their next crime. They could follow you home, figure out your schedule, and time their crime such to ensure you have no alibi.
Once the detectives "like you" for a crime, they'll find more (circumstantial) evidence that you're guilty, and put less effort into tracking down the real criminal. "Oh, Come On! What are the chances of that happening?!" -- That's exactly what a smart criminal is counting on, i.e. that the jury assumes criminals are dumb.
So, if I apply a tracking notch to the doctored recordings to remove the original hum and its harmonics, and then superimpose data from the database, I'm all set? Well, thank you!
That was my fist thought too, but my 2nd thought was: So, if I use a hum generator to subtly but abruptly switch between hums then anything they record me saying can be proven fake in court? It's a poor substitute for privacy, but I'll take what I can get; Thanks!
Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.
I, for one, welcome our new stronger, faster, older, hungrier cybernetic overlords (made in China).
The above poster is insightful moreso than flamebait. It's fucking serious man. "Trolling" as in "Trolling for comments with a dumb-as-fuck baited question". Please, Slashdot. We value your minimal editorial skills, and now even those are lacking now. Stop trolling us. What's next? "How to use a Linux root terminal" posted by someone who's only ever used iPhones?