Wake on LAN is a local protocol because it has to be sent as a broadcast packet if the router doesn't know the MAC address of the target network card.
Uh... you can't WOL at all if you don't know the MAC address.
The reason you must broadcast is because the NIC doesn't have an IP address when it is shut down, unless it has an option to hard code one. Ordinarily the NIC is IP-less until a manual IP is set in the OS or it receives one via DHCP.
I'm a bit curious as to why this justifies any particular coverage.
Because without it a PC can't power down completely and still maintain a network presence. Current Wake on LAN wakes the machine for literally everything, which means it isn't all that asleep. With sleep proxy you can actually leave the machine powered down for extended periods of time without losing your network presence.
See how special that is?
The idea is an external machine acts as a proxy while the other machine is in power-save (hibernation) mode. Simple things like pings and such are handled by the proxy while the other machine is powered down. A wake request is processed by the proxy, determined to be legit, and sends a wake request to the machine.
It's like super-WOL, basically, and I bet you couldn't do it without hitting up Apple's mDNSResponder source code.;)
Reinventing something that's been available for years is not 'coming up with good technologies'.
You'd have a point if Microsoft claimed to have invented anything new here.
Since they didn't, you're just a dumbass.
They've done some research into implementing sleep proxy in a Windows network environment, and wrote a paper on their findings. How the fuck is that claiming to have invented anything?
It would be nice if people could read the fucking article.
It's not new, it's new to Microsoft. Microsoft says so in the article. They don't claim to have invented it, they've simply done research on implementing it in a Windows environment. I don't know if you know this, but 90+% of computers run Windows, so it's definitely news.
Apple owns the patent on the technology, and they've open sourced it.
I'd demo'ed multi-threading systems to a bunch of Windows developers years ago and they were unimpressed.
Uh, multi-threading wasn't available for the PC until the Pentium 4 was released. Prior to that, x86 processors were incapable of it in anything but multitasking and non-simultaneous multi-threading (same thing, really). If it can't be done simultaneously, there isn't much point to multi-threading.
That was a full year after Windows XP was released, which came with support for simultaneous multi-threading.
So I'm not sure what systems you were running with multi-threading, but they for damn sure weren't x86, so there was absolutely no point for a Windows developer to pay any attention to you. It's like saying "my sailboat does 50 knots" to someone who races motorcycles. That may be extremely impressive to a sailor, but to a biker won't be impressive in the slightest.
See, you get this novel thing called a license from the patent owner and you get to use the patent under the terms of that license. Hey look! Apple gave an open source distribution license for it! It's even designed specifically so you can sell it if you want. They even give you source code for it, ooooh, nifty.
When a for profit corporation engenders more trust than our supposedly representative government. Anyone else see a problem with this?
Actually, I trust all corporations far more than any government.
Know why? Corporations motives are well known and very basic: they want as much money as they can possibly get. This makes them extremely predictable. Give me a news article of some nefarious new act by some corporation and I can pretty accurately predict what they are going to do and why they will do it.
The government, however, is multi-faced and schizophrenic. Sometimes it just wants to protect you and keep you safe and take care of you, sometimes it wants to drive you under its thumb and control you. Sometimes it thinks it is doing right by you when in reality it is doing you harm. Sometimes it pretends to do right by you in order to increase its control. Sometimes increasing its control actually is doing right by you. Much of this is done without your consent. This makes predicting the Government's actions, motives, and effects nearly impossible.
Which is worse? It's hard to say, and the point can be argued for both. But even if corporations are worse, I'd still take them over the government for the simple fact that their motives are very easily understood, and they are very predictable, which makes them much easier to deal with.
"Google Tells Congress Its Disclosed Wi-Fi Sniffing" (read it as this)
Is grammatically incorrect, and if taken literally has no sensible meaning. You seem to be trying to use "its" in place of "it has", which is completely wrong. "Its" is the possessive form of "it". What you want is "it's", which means "it is" or "it has". Still, in doing so you've changed the meaning of the sentence, so it is still incorrect.
This:
"Google Tells Congress It Disclosed Wi-Fi Sniffing" (original)
Is grammatically correct - "that" is implied before "it". Adding "that" would make the sentence slightly easier to read, but it is not incorrect to leave it out, nor does removing "that" change the meaning of the sentence in any way.
I don't accept your premise that retaining publicly available data (i.e. you walked into X store) is somehow worse than the initial acquisition of that data.
To say "it's public information that you are broadcasting" misses the point and wastes time affirming a fact that is not in question (which is in fact is a clear sign that the point has been missed).
The fact that it is public is the entire point, it misses nothing. If you do not wish it to be known, do not share it with the world - that goes for online or offline activities. Why do you think celebrities drive around in inconspicuous cars with blacked out windows and avoid the paparazzi when they don't wish their whereabouts to be known?
In both cases, you're still skimming (though one a bit deeper than the other, it's still surface).
Basically Carr is pissing and moaning that nobody really contemplates life, the universe, and existence any more. What the dumbass misses is the fact that historically, almost nobody contemplated life, the universe, and existence. It's the reason that when we think of the great thinkers in history, we go back to about a handful of guys, and half their ideas turned out to be half-cocked.
He makes the typical mistake of assuming things were better in the past, when in fact they weren't. Thinking is great, but it is literally worthless if everything you think about is completely wrong. Free access to information allows thinkers to build on the past with accurate information, instead of being doomed to waste time repeating someone else's mistakes.
There has been no great proportional shift against deep thinkers, they have always been few and far between. If it seems like their are more shallow thinkers today, it's because there are: there are significantly more people today. There are also more deep thinkers, but they have never gotten the attention they deserved in their lifetime. To see few lauded thinkers today is nothing new, the lauded thinkers are always those of yesteryear, who's ideas have had time to come to fruition and have proven their value. The internet, in fact, makes it easier to find and build on modern thinkers today, if one is so inclined, instead of waiting decades for the information to eek out.
Slashdot is here to provide tepidly intellectual nerds some dick grabbing space so they can pretend to be more knowledgeable than Harvard professors on topics outside of their expertise.
The fundamental argument they are having is whether or not deep thinkers learn to be deep thinkers or if they are born to be deep thinkers. If thinking deeply is a learned behavior, then Carr may have a good argument. Then you move on to the specifics of whether or not the Internet promotes skimming or thinking deeply (my opinion is it depends greatly on where you go on the internet). If deep thinkers are born that way, then it doesn't matter.
My personal opinion is that it is a bit of both - some people are naturally deep thinkers, most people aren't, and there are varying degrees of that trait. The trait can be encouraged or discouraged through life experience, but I don't think it can ever be eliminated where it has always existed nor created where it has not. The internet is simply a tool that can be used by both skimmers to skim more information faster, and deep thinkers to connect and share with other deep thinkers. It is very useful for both cases, but I don't think by itself it promotes anything. A skimmer will use it to find what a skimmer is interested in, and a deep thinker will use it for what a deep thinker is interested in. They aren't mutually exclusive.
This is based on nothing more than an amature interest in psychology, so take it as you will.
Which is exactly why we have NASA engineers and some of IT's top minds making posts and comment submissions, amongst many others. I'd say slashdot's average post quality is a lot more informed than, say, 4Chan.
Why just dandy, it will unlock for both of them! And anybody who has a decent photo of either of them too!
Seriously, the current state of biometrics are laughably insecure. A simple non-dictionary password, even a 6-8 digit PIN, beats a biometric lock any day of the week.
Basically, when you see a machine or door with a biometric lock, it's like securing your wireless network with WEP. All you are doing is saying "Please don't break in - thanks!" You aren't actually protecting anything.
Until they can reliably tell the difference between a photo and a live image (they can barely recognize dark faces, let alone discriminate against a photo) this is less than worthless. The same is true for all biometrics - fingerprint scanners can often be beaten with dust and tape, and if not a transparency of the print works as well as the original.
Finger print readers are about the easiest of the biometrics to crack. The press-and-hold type of scanners you can usually just use fingerprint dust and clear tape to fool them, and you can get a good print right off the scanner. For the slide-type readers, you have to lift the finger print then make a transparency to break in. Not exactly difficult.
Seriously, Mythbusters did an episode on it, and it was shockingly easy to break into a fingerprint locked computer or door.
Stick with a password if you care anything at all about your data. If you don't want anybody to get your data ever, encrypt and lock your machine with a passphrase. If you just want to nominally lock the machine (like setting the little chain lock on an apartment door or using WEP for your wireless router), then biometrics are fine.
The facial recognition has been circumvented on these with a photo of moderate quality. Since the camera doing the recognition is a 1.3mp camera, the absolute most you'll need to beat it is a 2mp photo, and likely a lot less than that will work. A new/clean driver's license photos might work, but a worn one probably wouldn't.
The only way I see them preventing a simple photograph from circumventing this is using two cameras, scanning at different angles, and making sure the two images are slightly different but still match. In that case you would need a fairly complicated rig to get the cameras to look at two photos at once in order to fool them. Much better, but not exactly secure.
As it is now, these are even less secure than fingerprint readers, which can be beaten with a lifted fingerprint (laptop readers require a transparency, but doors can be done with black dust and tape).
The reality is biometrics never work like the movies. An image of your face can be recorded in high enough quality to fool a scanner, your voice can be recorded in high enough quality to fool a scanner, a good camera (around $1k or so) can even get a high quality copy of your retina from a long enough distance that you'd never know it happened, which could then fool a scanner. Fingerprints have always been a joke to bypass. In many cases you can lift the necessary print right off the scanner - you might as well have a sticky note on the screen with your password on it.
All of them are easier to bypass than a simple non-dictionary password. A pass-phrase is several orders of magnitude more secure than the lot, and the easiest to remember. It's only when you want to make passwords super secure that people start writing them on stickies and slapping them on their monitors (note that I have actually experienced this in secure government facilities - it's extremely common when very complex passwords are required). You might as well just use biometrics then, for all the good it is doing you.
All the brilliant engineering in the world won't fix laziness, apathy, or corruption.
Blowout Preventors of the type installed on the DeepWater rig are proven fail safe when properly tested and installed. However, when the company testing and installing the fail-safe equipment doesn't bother to finish all the tests or properly install the fail-safe and the Federal agency responsible for ensuring that all equipment was properly tested and installed signs off on the equipment even though the tests have not been completed and the installations haven't been verified, well, it's just a matter of time before a disaster happens. What's worse is there is no telling how many other BOP's are in exactly the same shape as the ones on the DeepWater rig.
The GoM spill is 100% the fault of TransOcean (the rig operator) and Haliburton (who installed the BOP), and BP and Anadarko (the two owners) are ultimately responsible, but if the MMS had been doing its job instead of whatever the hell they were doing there would not have been a spill at all. In fact, more than likely the 11 people who died would not have, and the rig would still be operational - there would simply be a cut pipe at that particular well and a small slick of residual oil.
I'll say that again in clearer terms: the Federal government was in a position to completely prevent the Gulf spill in its entirety, but due to laziness, apathy, corruption, or all three they failed to do so. The required tests were not completed, yet the equipment was signed off on by the Federal agency responsible. All of the corporations were also in a position to prevent this spill, don't mistake me, but it required laziness, apathy, and/or corruption from all parties involved to create the spill.
The technology itself is foolproof when properly installed.
If it is basing a lot of its decisions on news about the company, though, it is at least to some degree based on perceived value of the company.
It's intelligent gambling, in other words, more like playing poker than playing black jack, and nothing at all like playing roulette or craps.
I'd still call it gambling, but if it actually works well it shouldn't have any detrimental affect on the market, because it will be largely based on the actual value of the company being traded. In other words it's gambling on whether or not X piece of news is going to have a negative or positive effect on a stock, instead of just watching trends and gambling on whether a trend will continue or reverse.
Unfortunately I cannot believe in the current system where on a bad day swings can be over 50% down and back up
That's the key, if the company's actual value does not justify the 50% down swing it will swing back up. Case in point is the 1000 point drop that happened recently. Within 10 minutes it was back up 700 points and right in line with the downward trend for the day, finishing down 3%. Down 3% is a bad day, but not unusual or alarming in any way. It is a relatively accurate reflection of the value of the market for that day. Every single stock that plummeted in that short few minutes regained its value a few minutes later. The initial trigger was caused by a misprint of P&G's stock price, which have nothing to do with bots.
Historically, fully automated bots never work for more than a few weeks anyway.
Stock market needs to go back to the basics where you own a company rather than zero sum lottery tickets.
You do realize day trading has always existed, right? It has simply gone from people shouting on the floor of the NYSE to people making the exact same trades on their computers. There is no difference other than speed, and people who don't know what they are doing quickly loose money and go out of business, which has always been true.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I was thinking: I get to sleep yet appear to remain awake. When something truly requires my attention, my proxy wakes me up. Perfect!
Wake on LAN is a local protocol because it has to be sent as a broadcast packet if the router doesn't know the MAC address of the target network card.
Uh... you can't WOL at all if you don't know the MAC address.
The reason you must broadcast is because the NIC doesn't have an IP address when it is shut down, unless it has an option to hard code one. Ordinarily the NIC is IP-less until a manual IP is set in the OS or it receives one via DHCP.
I'm a bit curious as to why this justifies any particular coverage.
Because without it a PC can't power down completely and still maintain a network presence. Current Wake on LAN wakes the machine for literally everything, which means it isn't all that asleep. With sleep proxy you can actually leave the machine powered down for extended periods of time without losing your network presence.
See how special that is?
The idea is an external machine acts as a proxy while the other machine is in power-save (hibernation) mode. Simple things like pings and such are handled by the proxy while the other machine is powered down. A wake request is processed by the proxy, determined to be legit, and sends a wake request to the machine.
It's like super-WOL, basically, and I bet you couldn't do it without hitting up Apple's mDNSResponder source code. ;)
Reinventing something that's been available for years is not 'coming up with good technologies'.
You'd have a point if Microsoft claimed to have invented anything new here.
Since they didn't, you're just a dumbass.
They've done some research into implementing sleep proxy in a Windows network environment, and wrote a paper on their findings. How the fuck is that claiming to have invented anything?
It would be nice if people could read the fucking article.
It's not new, it's new to Microsoft. Microsoft says so in the article. They don't claim to have invented it, they've simply done research on implementing it in a Windows environment. I don't know if you know this, but 90+% of computers run Windows, so it's definitely news.
Apple owns the patent on the technology, and they've open sourced it.
Seriously, fucking read people.
I'd demo'ed multi-threading systems to a bunch of Windows developers years ago and they were unimpressed.
Uh, multi-threading wasn't available for the PC until the Pentium 4 was released. Prior to that, x86 processors were incapable of it in anything but multitasking and non-simultaneous multi-threading (same thing, really). If it can't be done simultaneously, there isn't much point to multi-threading.
That was a full year after Windows XP was released, which came with support for simultaneous multi-threading.
So I'm not sure what systems you were running with multi-threading, but they for damn sure weren't x86, so there was absolutely no point for a Windows developer to pay any attention to you. It's like saying "my sailboat does 50 knots" to someone who races motorcycles. That may be extremely impressive to a sailor, but to a biker won't be impressive in the slightest.
Know how patents work?
See, you get this novel thing called a license from the patent owner and you get to use the patent under the terms of that license. Hey look! Apple gave an open source distribution license for it! It's even designed specifically so you can sell it if you want. They even give you source code for it, ooooh, nifty.
Oh. My. God. What, a concept.
Now STFU.
When a for profit corporation engenders more trust than our supposedly representative government. Anyone else see a problem with this?
Actually, I trust all corporations far more than any government.
Know why? Corporations motives are well known and very basic: they want as much money as they can possibly get. This makes them extremely predictable. Give me a news article of some nefarious new act by some corporation and I can pretty accurately predict what they are going to do and why they will do it.
The government, however, is multi-faced and schizophrenic. Sometimes it just wants to protect you and keep you safe and take care of you, sometimes it wants to drive you under its thumb and control you. Sometimes it thinks it is doing right by you when in reality it is doing you harm. Sometimes it pretends to do right by you in order to increase its control. Sometimes increasing its control actually is doing right by you. Much of this is done without your consent. This makes predicting the Government's actions, motives, and effects nearly impossible.
Which is worse? It's hard to say, and the point can be argued for both. But even if corporations are worse, I'd still take them over the government for the simple fact that their motives are very easily understood, and they are very predictable, which makes them much easier to deal with.
I'm sorry you have a problem with grammar.
This:
"Google Tells Congress Its Disclosed Wi-Fi Sniffing" (read it as this)
Is grammatically incorrect, and if taken literally has no sensible meaning. You seem to be trying to use "its" in place of "it has", which is completely wrong. "Its" is the possessive form of "it". What you want is "it's", which means "it is" or "it has". Still, in doing so you've changed the meaning of the sentence, so it is still incorrect.
This:
"Google Tells Congress It Disclosed Wi-Fi Sniffing" (original)
Is grammatically correct - "that" is implied before "it". Adding "that" would make the sentence slightly easier to read, but it is not incorrect to leave it out, nor does removing "that" change the meaning of the sentence in any way.
I don't accept your premise that retaining publicly available data (i.e. you walked into X store) is somehow worse than the initial acquisition of that data.
To say "it's public information that you are broadcasting" misses the point and wastes time affirming a fact that is not in question (which is in fact is a clear sign that the point has been missed).
The fact that it is public is the entire point, it misses nothing. If you do not wish it to be known, do not share it with the world - that goes for online or offline activities. Why do you think celebrities drive around in inconspicuous cars with blacked out windows and avoid the paparazzi when they don't wish their whereabouts to be known?
They don't have to be writing it down, just hearing it records it in their brain.
Not really all that creepy or abnormal. It is a bit rude if you are in a situation where you can avoid it.
We generally call it gossip if you then share the conversation with others.
In both cases, you're still skimming (though one a bit deeper than the other, it's still surface).
Basically Carr is pissing and moaning that nobody really contemplates life, the universe, and existence any more. What the dumbass misses is the fact that historically, almost nobody contemplated life, the universe, and existence. It's the reason that when we think of the great thinkers in history, we go back to about a handful of guys, and half their ideas turned out to be half-cocked.
He makes the typical mistake of assuming things were better in the past, when in fact they weren't. Thinking is great, but it is literally worthless if everything you think about is completely wrong. Free access to information allows thinkers to build on the past with accurate information, instead of being doomed to waste time repeating someone else's mistakes.
There has been no great proportional shift against deep thinkers, they have always been few and far between. If it seems like their are more shallow thinkers today, it's because there are: there are significantly more people today. There are also more deep thinkers, but they have never gotten the attention they deserved in their lifetime. To see few lauded thinkers today is nothing new, the lauded thinkers are always those of yesteryear, who's ideas have had time to come to fruition and have proven their value. The internet, in fact, makes it easier to find and build on modern thinkers today, if one is so inclined, instead of waiting decades for the information to eek out.
You actually just sorta proved his point there.
Shoulda just kept your mouth shut.
Slashdot is here to provide tepidly intellectual nerds some dick grabbing space so they can pretend to be more knowledgeable than Harvard professors on topics outside of their expertise.
Nailed it! *highfive*
The fundamental argument they are having is whether or not deep thinkers learn to be deep thinkers or if they are born to be deep thinkers. If thinking deeply is a learned behavior, then Carr may have a good argument. Then you move on to the specifics of whether or not the Internet promotes skimming or thinking deeply (my opinion is it depends greatly on where you go on the internet). If deep thinkers are born that way, then it doesn't matter.
My personal opinion is that it is a bit of both - some people are naturally deep thinkers, most people aren't, and there are varying degrees of that trait. The trait can be encouraged or discouraged through life experience, but I don't think it can ever be eliminated where it has always existed nor created where it has not. The internet is simply a tool that can be used by both skimmers to skim more information faster, and deep thinkers to connect and share with other deep thinkers. It is very useful for both cases, but I don't think by itself it promotes anything. A skimmer will use it to find what a skimmer is interested in, and a deep thinker will use it for what a deep thinker is interested in. They aren't mutually exclusive.
This is based on nothing more than an amature interest in psychology, so take it as you will.
Case in point:
Which is exactly why we have NASA engineers and some of IT's top minds making posts and comment submissions, amongst many others. I'd say slashdot's average post quality is a lot more informed than, say, 4Chan.
I kid!
But seriously...
Not to mention the fact that it is orders of magnitude less secure than a simple password (it can be beaten with a photo).
It's cool and all, but completely worthless until the technology makes some serious leaps and bounds.
Why just dandy, it will unlock for both of them! And anybody who has a decent photo of either of them too!
Seriously, the current state of biometrics are laughably insecure. A simple non-dictionary password, even a 6-8 digit PIN, beats a biometric lock any day of the week.
Basically, when you see a machine or door with a biometric lock, it's like securing your wireless network with WEP. All you are doing is saying "Please don't break in - thanks!" You aren't actually protecting anything.
Until they can reliably tell the difference between a photo and a live image (they can barely recognize dark faces, let alone discriminate against a photo) this is less than worthless. The same is true for all biometrics - fingerprint scanners can often be beaten with dust and tape, and if not a transparency of the print works as well as the original.
Finger print readers are about the easiest of the biometrics to crack. The press-and-hold type of scanners you can usually just use fingerprint dust and clear tape to fool them, and you can get a good print right off the scanner. For the slide-type readers, you have to lift the finger print then make a transparency to break in. Not exactly difficult.
Seriously, Mythbusters did an episode on it, and it was shockingly easy to break into a fingerprint locked computer or door.
Stick with a password if you care anything at all about your data. If you don't want anybody to get your data ever, encrypt and lock your machine with a passphrase. If you just want to nominally lock the machine (like setting the little chain lock on an apartment door or using WEP for your wireless router), then biometrics are fine.
...will holding a picture of the laptop's owner in front of the camera unlock the machine?
Yes.
They can barely handle people with dark, especially black, skin. They cannot tell the difference between a photo and a live image.
The two-camera idea would be my suggestion, which would make it harder but not impossible.
In any case, it's more finicky and less secure than a passphrase, so why not use a passphrase?
The facial recognition has been circumvented on these with a photo of moderate quality. Since the camera doing the recognition is a 1.3mp camera, the absolute most you'll need to beat it is a 2mp photo, and likely a lot less than that will work. A new/clean driver's license photos might work, but a worn one probably wouldn't.
The only way I see them preventing a simple photograph from circumventing this is using two cameras, scanning at different angles, and making sure the two images are slightly different but still match. In that case you would need a fairly complicated rig to get the cameras to look at two photos at once in order to fool them. Much better, but not exactly secure.
As it is now, these are even less secure than fingerprint readers, which can be beaten with a lifted fingerprint (laptop readers require a transparency, but doors can be done with black dust and tape).
The reality is biometrics never work like the movies. An image of your face can be recorded in high enough quality to fool a scanner, your voice can be recorded in high enough quality to fool a scanner, a good camera (around $1k or so) can even get a high quality copy of your retina from a long enough distance that you'd never know it happened, which could then fool a scanner. Fingerprints have always been a joke to bypass. In many cases you can lift the necessary print right off the scanner - you might as well have a sticky note on the screen with your password on it.
All of them are easier to bypass than a simple non-dictionary password. A pass-phrase is several orders of magnitude more secure than the lot, and the easiest to remember. It's only when you want to make passwords super secure that people start writing them on stickies and slapping them on their monitors (note that I have actually experienced this in secure government facilities - it's extremely common when very complex passwords are required). You might as well just use biometrics then, for all the good it is doing you.
Existension, not Extension. The Existension is an Existential particle of matter.
All the brilliant engineering in the world won't fix laziness, apathy, or corruption.
Blowout Preventors of the type installed on the DeepWater rig are proven fail safe when properly tested and installed. However, when the company testing and installing the fail-safe equipment doesn't bother to finish all the tests or properly install the fail-safe and the Federal agency responsible for ensuring that all equipment was properly tested and installed signs off on the equipment even though the tests have not been completed and the installations haven't been verified, well, it's just a matter of time before a disaster happens. What's worse is there is no telling how many other BOP's are in exactly the same shape as the ones on the DeepWater rig.
The GoM spill is 100% the fault of TransOcean (the rig operator) and Haliburton (who installed the BOP), and BP and Anadarko (the two owners) are ultimately responsible, but if the MMS had been doing its job instead of whatever the hell they were doing there would not have been a spill at all. In fact, more than likely the 11 people who died would not have, and the rig would still be operational - there would simply be a cut pipe at that particular well and a small slick of residual oil.
I'll say that again in clearer terms: the Federal government was in a position to completely prevent the Gulf spill in its entirety, but due to laziness, apathy, corruption, or all three they failed to do so. The required tests were not completed, yet the equipment was signed off on by the Federal agency responsible. All of the corporations were also in a position to prevent this spill, don't mistake me, but it required laziness, apathy, and/or corruption from all parties involved to create the spill.
The technology itself is foolproof when properly installed.
If it is basing a lot of its decisions on news about the company, though, it is at least to some degree based on perceived value of the company.
It's intelligent gambling, in other words, more like playing poker than playing black jack, and nothing at all like playing roulette or craps.
I'd still call it gambling, but if it actually works well it shouldn't have any detrimental affect on the market, because it will be largely based on the actual value of the company being traded. In other words it's gambling on whether or not X piece of news is going to have a negative or positive effect on a stock, instead of just watching trends and gambling on whether a trend will continue or reverse.
Unfortunately I cannot believe in the current system where on a bad day swings can be over 50% down and back up
That's the key, if the company's actual value does not justify the 50% down swing it will swing back up. Case in point is the 1000 point drop that happened recently. Within 10 minutes it was back up 700 points and right in line with the downward trend for the day, finishing down 3%. Down 3% is a bad day, but not unusual or alarming in any way. It is a relatively accurate reflection of the value of the market for that day. Every single stock that plummeted in that short few minutes regained its value a few minutes later. The initial trigger was caused by a misprint of P&G's stock price, which have nothing to do with bots.
Historically, fully automated bots never work for more than a few weeks anyway.
Stock market needs to go back to the basics where you own a company rather than zero sum lottery tickets.
You do realize day trading has always existed, right? It has simply gone from people shouting on the floor of the NYSE to people making the exact same trades on their computers. There is no difference other than speed, and people who don't know what they are doing quickly loose money and go out of business, which has always been true.