Now is really the time to get encrypted, decentralized networks with Onion routing working at a practical level and not just for academic enjoyment. I've had great expectations in GNUnet, but apparently it is pretty hard to port. Freenet has also never convinced me whenever I tried it. Are the technical obstacles really so hard to overcome? What about pervasive email encryption with automatic installation and more widespread use of SSL? What is holding all these technologies back?
My guess is that in many countries it is completely illegal to make an unauthorized photo of someone (possibly under "delicate circumstances") even if this person has stolen something. Just because someone is a thief doesn't mean that he looses all of his rights -- in Europe at least, I don't know about the US.
Even if you do it on paper, or imagine a theoretical Turing machine, a court cannot place an injunction on you to stop you from thinking or imagining. However, an inventor can get claims for a process that require, as a limitation of the claims, that the process be performed by a specific machine.
That's exactly what I've meant: lawmakers and jurisdiction do not understand the issue. A computer is not a specific machine, it is a universal computing device (apart from its resource boundedness, which it shares with humans). With the appropriate software, e.g. Plt's redex sandbox, it can evaluate (rewrite) any formula of the lambda calculus just as a very patient mathematician can. So what you say is that the mathematician may evaluate the formula of the lambda calculus without infringing the patent, he may also use a sheet of paper and a pencil as an aid when doing this (I suppose), but when he uses a computer as an aid he might infringe the patent, even though both the computer and the mathematician could very well be nothing else than universal computing devices with slightly different resource constraints. If that is so, as incoherent as it is, I can't wait to see what judges will decide when people start to implant microchips into their brains and reprogram them to their needs. I guess then we will all pay royalties to Google and Microsoft for literally getting brainfucked by them.
But that's not the main point. I wasn't disputing that the status quo is such that you can patent math, I was rather pointing out the patent absurdity of it. The same, by the way, for the free software movement: They are well aware that you can patent math and that this doesn't mean that you're not allowed to think about it. The fact that you can patent math is exactly what they are criticizing. The whole idea that I am not allowed to compute what I want on a universal computing device owned by me, perhaps even built on my own by myself, is absurd. It is about as absurd as if someone would say that you are not allowed to write certain phrases by a typewriter, whereas you are allowed to think the same phrases or write them down in your own handwriting.
This is a problem with the patent system, not with software patents themselves.
That is not true at all. It is a problem with software patents. They are a scandal. Hardware patents have worked well in the past, because hardware development is completely different from software development. By the Curry-Howard isomorphism a large part of mathematics is software and can nowadays be patented. This fact alone speaks rigorously against software patents, but has been ignored with pretty lame excuses by lawmakers and jurisdiction since attention was drawn to it. In fact, various parts of mathematics already already have been patented as we speak. Moreover, writing software mostly consists in assembling together various pieces, subroutines, and algorithms to achieve some goal, as Richard Stallman rightly said it is a bit like building with Lego bricks. When there are thousands of software patents covering all aspects of an application it becomes completely impossible to write and publish even a non-innovative program, not to speak of a true innovation, without potentially violating hundreds of patents. If the current trend is not reversed, the idea of having a universally programmable device at home will become obsolete in future, because it will simply be illegal to write your own software.
The funny, or perhaps better to say ironic, aspect of software patents is that even the big players cannot have an interest in them in the long run. Right now, they can innovate and use software patents to ensure mutual destruction and for patent trolling. But if the number of software patents keeps growing even the big players will have their possibilities for innovation blocked entirely within a few decades. Software patents are a time bomb that is going to explode not within the next few years but within a foreseeable future. Unfortunately, neither politicians nor many end-consumers (=voters) are able to get this into their brains, because it takes a (small but significant) amount of experience with software engineering and knowledge about the foundations of computer science to understand the issue.
For a shareware author like me the situation is already devastating today. As long as I do not have success, I can sell whatever I like. However, having success would invariably mean that I'd get sued for infringement of *some* patent I have never heard of and subsequently loose everything. The same applies to any and all individual software authors, FOSS projects, and small companies, because existing software patents already cover many aspects of programming (GUIs in particular). It is an absolute scandal that software patents have been allowed in the first place, and the process has to be reversed by all means. The vast majority of people that argue for them are forced to do so, because they are on the payroll of a large company that holds software patents. It's as simple as that.
So-called 'dynamic' languages suck. Now if I could only get a good static language, that would be nice. It doesn't need to be based on.Net, though, in fact, I'd personally pefer if it wasn't.
Wikileaks publishes whatever they can get after redacting it and checking it briefly. Perhaps you should direct your complaint to the people in Sudan, Burma,Russia, Iran, North Korea, the Palestinian Authority, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or Israel who don't contribute to Wikileaks as much as people from the US.
Encryption + online storage. You can use openssl, truecrypt or whatever you like for encryption and, say, Jungledisk for online storage. Problem solved. Unless you think your colleagues will mount a 1 trillion entry dictionary attack against the file that they illegally recovered from your personal online storage after your death. In case of which you should perhaps look for new colleagues.
There is no reason why 3-D can't be a good thing. Arguing it's bad because some people have made bad movies with it is stupid. I loom forward to a young generation of filmmakers to be tinker with this technology.
There are in fact various reasons why 3D can't be a good thing. First, 3D movies were already out in the 50ies and, frankly speaking, apart from being black & white due to the use of colored glasses they didn't look particularly better or worse than the current 3D movies with polarized light. Why did they never catch on? Because the movies made for 3D cinema were purely made for stupid effects. 3D techniques are available for 50-60 years and have never been used for anything valuable. What makes you think this will change now? But secondly and more importantly, real 3D cinema is impossible without individual projection to each viewer's eye and keeping track of head/body movement, because in real 3D space your head movements change the viewing angle. What you see in the cinemas under the label "3D" is a cheap effect that has no correlate in reality -- as opposed to 2 dimensional pictures, that do exist in reality. It's about as realistic as the "motion blur" or "depth of view" that some game makers put in their title recently. Zero realism and entirely unnatural. Third, all 3D movies I've seen so far have troubles with realistic depth of field. I don't know if this is a technical limitation or due to the directors. Anyway, in real 3D you can focus wherever you want and it will be sharp whereas in 3D cinema you almost always see an out-of-focus, blurry picture when there shouldn't be one. Having everything in the 3D space sharp would be better but I haven't seen it yet. Fourth, fast-cut moving 3D scenes confuse the body up to getting sick, ecause the sensory inputs from the organ of equilibrium do not match the sensory input from the eyes. This is not the case (or at least much more harmless) with moving 2D pictures.
Of course, there are many good uses for 3D especially for animation movies and sci-fi themes. But for the above reasons I don't think that 3D cinema will ever replace 2D cinema. If on the other hand you're one of those persons that watch movies on DVD or streaming from the Net at home (or prefer to sit in the last row of the cinema) then you're lost for real cinema anyway. In that case, 3D cinema might just be the right thing for you. My 2 cents.
A: The same way as a techie. Long answer: Learn C, Haskell, Scheme, or whatever suits your needs by writing a lot of small to mid-sized programs. Learn about data structures and how they are internally represented on your machine. Sit down and actually do something instead of messing around with drag & drop RAD tools. That's how you learn it. (In my opinion, at least.)
Oh and use the CTRL and ALT keys and not some stupid Windows or Apple key to do stuff.
Principally I agree with you but the problem is that on 99.9 percent of all keyboards the control key is in the wrong place for no apparent reasons except historical ones. Even worse, I've seen keyboards on which the left shift key is smaller than the capslock key, which just doesn't make sense unless you're a Modula-3 programmer who lacks a decent text editor. To make a long story short, I'd like UI designers to think about alternative keyboard layouts from time to time and not just accept the status quo.
I totally agree with the above poster. Everything is classified into convenient genres and too much money is spent on replicating the exact same experience over and over nowadays. Game producers need to learn to take risks again. Studios need to spend much more efforts on creating something unique, not necessarily in terms of gameplay mechanics but in terms of intelligent plots that are compelling for the primary target group (=adults) and stories that really allow for immersion. Procedural content generation and randomized missions/campaigns would be the way to go, yet most studios choose to go the easy and secure but ultimately boring path of creating short, cinematic games that do not offer anything new except better graphics.
Java and C++ are bloated piles of crap, anyone with more than a decade of programming experience knows that. (I'm currently using C++ as my main development language so don't get me wrong.) He's also right about scripting languages, their performance mostly is shit. ("B..b..but Python with the new JIT compiler..." I hear them say. My reply is: "Oh yeah, well, I'd say it's a SHIT compiler, not a JIT compiler!")
Anyway, from time to time I enjoy checking out a programming languages I didn't use before. And like many people over the years I've used many and taken a look at even more of them. So I thought I'd share my opinions in a good old Usenet-style fashion, starting an immediate programming language flamewar. For a start, I still haven't found one that I really like, although most of the time the problem is not the language itself but the (lack of) support libraries anyway. Functional programming languages like Haskell or ML are nice and fast, but sometimes you just need mutable data structure for efficiency. They also far too often rely on arcane and overly complicated concepts. (Monads anyone? Why not program directly in category theory instead?) Lisp and Scheme are also nice but too dynamic - even with test suites you miss too many bugs. I haven't tried typed Racket yet, but knowing the traditional Racket (formerly Plt Scheme) quite well I suspect the typed version is just too much of an `addition' on top of the untyped language.
Now here is the language that I'd like to see but just doesn't seem to exist:
modern: all common datatypes (mutable and immutable), call/cc, extensible, cross-platform, higher-order functions, iteration and accumulators over sequences, reasonable exception system, pre- and postconditions, sequences,...
strongly typed: I want it as strongly typed as possible, no implicit conversions and I don't care about hancy-fancy stuff like polymorphic types or type inference (although it doesn't necessarily harm)
fast: within the dimension of speed of C, Haskell, Ada, Fortran (doesn't need to be the fastest one, but not as slow as for example Python)
low and high level: ability for low-level programming in special unsafe
batteries included: sure, it takes a while to make all those libraries, but at least the language community should have the right attitude
rock-solid module system: a simple module system that just works - with no exceptions or quirks; there is a language core and the rest are modules and I can import everything, rename imported symbols, etc.
extremely simple: the language must be as straightforward as possible, no weird syntax, no overintellectualized programming constructs, just plain old imperative programming
parallel programming enabled: doesn't need to be the most advanced parallel programming implementation but there should be good support for parallelism within the core language
syntax: irrelevant (personally I prefer sexpressions but in the end it really doesn't matter, does it?)
That's it. I know that a new language is not strictly speaking needed but I'd surely like to see one with the above features. Any volunteers?:*)
And yet the haven't found Osama bin Laden or the Anthrax killer and still don't seem to have any clue who really killed JFK! Obviously, more money has to be spent on national security in order to solve these mysteries!
they also realize that at least their work is good enough for someone to consider to pirate and that it keeps them in the public view
I wholeheartedly agree with this. When I wrote a little Macintosh shareware program 10 years ago I used to check the latest serial number list (I think it was called MacSerial Box) every month to see whether my app was in there. I was always very disappointed when I found out that it wasn't considered significant enough to be included.
By the way it was always my impression that most of the pirate groups and serial number submitters are in a sense pretty fair / have their own moral code. It is obvious that applications or games that are clearly not worth their money get pirated and distributed more aggressively and in larger numbers than those that have an acceptable pricing scheme. Especially regarding games without a demo, I personally consider pirating sort of a customer protection. Even when I buy the game, I usually first check on TPB or Demonoid for commentaries, because the feedback by the people there is much more honest than the paid reviews at corrupt sites like "inside game news".
Fairness of the "crackers" might also be the reason why no serials for my app were ever published. My app never ceases to work and is fully usable even if you don't enter the reg code. (It occasionally pops up a nag screen, though.) And I have the suspicion that many of my paying customers were people that used my app for a long, long time before deciding to register.
Sorry to spoil your day dreams but the kind of darknet you describe would not work well in practise.
First, the security of steganography is very limited. Research has shown that even very sophisticated steganographic methods -- those that take into account the statistical properties of their transmission channel -- can easily be detected as soon as a significant amount of information is transmitted over the steganographic channel. Using tools like freenet might help, as they make traffic analysis harder, but I'd remain skeptical.
Second, the trust model you describe doesn't seem to work against your adversary: las enforcement, political police, and secret agencies of totalitarian countries. If friends can invite friends, your darknet will soon be subverted by undercover informants as become as public and open as the public internet.
Finally, a problem with your idea and the one in the original article is that there is no plausible deniability for its users. In court, steganographic tools and special software against censorship will count as spy tools, likely making the final sentence more severe than it could have been without the use of special software. Instead of developing tools for totalitarian countries, we should develop censorship-resistent software for all countries and make their use as mainstream as possible. Pervasive email encryption and massive use of SSL encryption for websites would be a start, but apparently there are strong forces against this in many society including the supposedly free ones.
Listen, who cares for these marginal speed differences. All I want is a way to watch videos for free without having to install malware, a way to publish my videos commercially or non-commercially without having to pay license fees to stupid lawyers now or later, and a way to check and modify the source code and implement video playing and streaming abilities in my software as I like. I know this is a bit off topic, but this is really starting to make me angry. I just can't understand why media companies and software patent holders, who have already made billions of money by using and taking advantage of the originally free and open internet and in many cases owe their existence to it, keep trying to destroy it with patents, licensing schemes, DRM, and malware. Is it not possible for mankind to agree on one single FUCKING video codec that is not encumbered by patents and will remain free to use and modify forever and for anyone?
Here is my suggestion: Pressure your politicians to create a commercial internet that is completely separate from the non-commercial one. On the commercial one people can sell whatever they like with whatever proprietary software they like. On the non-commercial one, on the other hand, non-free, non-open source is banned and since it is non-commercial and for the benefit of everyone special laws should permit the use of any technology on the non-commercial internet even if it is protected in other contexts. I want my good old internet back...:-(
That's not true. As a German freelancer working on your own you only need to learn one simple book keeping method (called "doppelte Buchfuehrung"). You can learn it within 3 days from books and there are also plenty of programs to automatize it. I don't claim that German bureaucracy doesn't suck, it does, but it by far does not amount to what the Ukranian government wants to introduce.
Tor was always one huge honey pot built on the US telco network with all exit nodes collectable to the NSA.
Perhaps the NSA has the power to surveille exit nodes in foreign countries but even if so describing Tor as a honey pot is misleading. As others have pointed out, anyone with rudimentary knowledge of how Tor works can easily figure out that you either just use it for surfing the web with Javascript and Java disabled and without giving away any personal information or you have to use an encrypted connection. The Tor docs made that clear from the beginning. However, securing a web browser not to leak information is admittedly not so easy.
Not only the media. Many empirical studies in social sciences you read about in the newspapers are simply flawed: the sample space is too small and not chosen randomly. Researchers want to get a paper out disguise the study as a 'case study' (more or less a synonym for 'insignificant study') or study with mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology. Sometimes they know that in reality their study shows absolutely nothing, other times they just lack statistics skills and hack a few numbers into SPSS.
It is no wonder when even people with a decent scientific background distrust many so-called scientific results. I personally more or less ignore studies reported in newspapers and magazines unless they at least hint at some halfway sound methodology---I'm really not interested in the opinions of 20 students someone happened to have interviewed for his or her diploma thesis.
By the way, natural scientists often confuse political and moral issues with scientific ones or are dishonest about their hidden political motives. Science can perhaps tell you that your preference relation should be transitive (even that is questionable), but it can't tell you whether you should choose chocolate or vanilla ice cream.
Slashdot Mirror
Now is really the time to get encrypted, decentralized networks with Onion routing working at a practical level and not just for academic enjoyment. I've had great expectations in GNUnet, but apparently it is pretty hard to port. Freenet has also never convinced me whenever I tried it. Are the technical obstacles really so hard to overcome? What about pervasive email encryption with automatic installation and more widespread use of SSL? What is holding all these technologies back?
WTF is "Google Buzz", something to drink? Nevermind. I guess Google can afford it.
My guess is that in many countries it is completely illegal to make an unauthorized photo of someone (possibly under "delicate circumstances") even if this person has stolen something. Just because someone is a thief doesn't mean that he looses all of his rights -- in Europe at least, I don't know about the US.
Even if you do it on paper, or imagine a theoretical Turing machine, a court cannot place an injunction on you to stop you from thinking or imagining. However, an inventor can get claims for a process that require, as a limitation of the claims, that the process be performed by a specific machine.
That's exactly what I've meant: lawmakers and jurisdiction do not understand the issue. A computer is not a specific machine, it is a universal computing device (apart from its resource boundedness, which it shares with humans). With the appropriate software, e.g. Plt's redex sandbox, it can evaluate (rewrite) any formula of the lambda calculus just as a very patient mathematician can. So what you say is that the mathematician may evaluate the formula of the lambda calculus without infringing the patent, he may also use a sheet of paper and a pencil as an aid when doing this (I suppose), but when he uses a computer as an aid he might infringe the patent, even though both the computer and the mathematician could very well be nothing else than universal computing devices with slightly different resource constraints. If that is so, as incoherent as it is, I can't wait to see what judges will decide when people start to implant microchips into their brains and reprogram them to their needs. I guess then we will all pay royalties to Google and Microsoft for literally getting brainfucked by them.
But that's not the main point. I wasn't disputing that the status quo is such that you can patent math, I was rather pointing out the patent absurdity of it. The same, by the way, for the free software movement: They are well aware that you can patent math and that this doesn't mean that you're not allowed to think about it. The fact that you can patent math is exactly what they are criticizing. The whole idea that I am not allowed to compute what I want on a universal computing device owned by me, perhaps even built on my own by myself, is absurd. It is about as absurd as if someone would say that you are not allowed to write certain phrases by a typewriter, whereas you are allowed to think the same phrases or write them down in your own handwriting.
This is a problem with the patent system, not with software patents themselves.
That is not true at all. It is a problem with software patents. They are a scandal. Hardware patents have worked well in the past, because hardware development is completely different from software development. By the Curry-Howard isomorphism a large part of mathematics is software and can nowadays be patented. This fact alone speaks rigorously against software patents, but has been ignored with pretty lame excuses by lawmakers and jurisdiction since attention was drawn to it. In fact, various parts of mathematics already already have been patented as we speak. Moreover, writing software mostly consists in assembling together various pieces, subroutines, and algorithms to achieve some goal, as Richard Stallman rightly said it is a bit like building with Lego bricks. When there are thousands of software patents covering all aspects of an application it becomes completely impossible to write and publish even a non-innovative program, not to speak of a true innovation, without potentially violating hundreds of patents. If the current trend is not reversed, the idea of having a universally programmable device at home will become obsolete in future, because it will simply be illegal to write your own software.
The funny, or perhaps better to say ironic, aspect of software patents is that even the big players cannot have an interest in them in the long run. Right now, they can innovate and use software patents to ensure mutual destruction and for patent trolling. But if the number of software patents keeps growing even the big players will have their possibilities for innovation blocked entirely within a few decades. Software patents are a time bomb that is going to explode not within the next few years but within a foreseeable future. Unfortunately, neither politicians nor many end-consumers (=voters) are able to get this into their brains, because it takes a (small but significant) amount of experience with software engineering and knowledge about the foundations of computer science to understand the issue.
For a shareware author like me the situation is already devastating today. As long as I do not have success, I can sell whatever I like. However, having success would invariably mean that I'd get sued for infringement of *some* patent I have never heard of and subsequently loose everything. The same applies to any and all individual software authors, FOSS projects, and small companies, because existing software patents already cover many aspects of programming (GUIs in particular). It is an absolute scandal that software patents have been allowed in the first place, and the process has to be reversed by all means. The vast majority of people that argue for them are forced to do so, because they are on the payroll of a large company that holds software patents. It's as simple as that.
So-called 'dynamic' languages suck. Now if I could only get a good static language, that would be nice. It doesn't need to be based on .Net, though, in fact, I'd personally pefer if it wasn't.
Wikileaks publishes whatever they can get after redacting it and checking it briefly. Perhaps you should direct your complaint to the people in Sudan, Burma,Russia, Iran, North Korea, the Palestinian Authority, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or Israel who don't contribute to Wikileaks as much as people from the US.
Encryption + online storage. You can use openssl, truecrypt or whatever you like for encryption and, say, Jungledisk for online storage. Problem solved. Unless you think your colleagues will mount a 1 trillion entry dictionary attack against the file that they illegally recovered from your personal online storage after your death. In case of which you should perhaps look for new colleagues.
There is no reason why 3-D can't be a good thing. Arguing it's bad because some people have made bad movies with it is stupid. I loom forward to a young generation of filmmakers to be tinker with this technology.
There are in fact various reasons why 3D can't be a good thing. First, 3D movies were already out in the 50ies and, frankly speaking, apart from being black & white due to the use of colored glasses they didn't look particularly better or worse than the current 3D movies with polarized light. Why did they never catch on? Because the movies made for 3D cinema were purely made for stupid effects. 3D techniques are available for 50-60 years and have never been used for anything valuable. What makes you think this will change now? But secondly and more importantly, real 3D cinema is impossible without individual projection to each viewer's eye and keeping track of head/body movement, because in real 3D space your head movements change the viewing angle. What you see in the cinemas under the label "3D" is a cheap effect that has no correlate in reality -- as opposed to 2 dimensional pictures, that do exist in reality. It's about as realistic as the "motion blur" or "depth of view" that some game makers put in their title recently. Zero realism and entirely unnatural. Third, all 3D movies I've seen so far have troubles with realistic depth of field. I don't know if this is a technical limitation or due to the directors. Anyway, in real 3D you can focus wherever you want and it will be sharp whereas in 3D cinema you almost always see an out-of-focus, blurry picture when there shouldn't be one. Having everything in the 3D space sharp would be better but I haven't seen it yet. Fourth, fast-cut moving 3D scenes confuse the body up to getting sick, ecause the sensory inputs from the organ of equilibrium do not match the sensory input from the eyes. This is not the case (or at least much more harmless) with moving 2D pictures.
Of course, there are many good uses for 3D especially for animation movies and sci-fi themes. But for the above reasons I don't think that 3D cinema will ever replace 2D cinema. If on the other hand you're one of those persons that watch movies on DVD or streaming from the Net at home (or prefer to sit in the last row of the cinema) then you're lost for real cinema anyway. In that case, 3D cinema might just be the right thing for you. My 2 cents.
That law of economics would work if the movie industry wasn't one huge kartell with price agreements and total market dominance.
A: The same way as a techie. Long answer: Learn C, Haskell, Scheme, or whatever suits your needs by writing a lot of small to mid-sized programs. Learn about data structures and how they are internally represented on your machine. Sit down and actually do something instead of messing around with drag & drop RAD tools. That's how you learn it. (In my opinion, at least.)
Oh and use the CTRL and ALT keys and not some stupid Windows or Apple key to do stuff.
Principally I agree with you but the problem is that on 99.9 percent of all keyboards the control key is in the wrong place for no apparent reasons except historical ones. Even worse, I've seen keyboards on which the left shift key is smaller than the capslock key, which just doesn't make sense unless you're a Modula-3 programmer who lacks a decent text editor. To make a long story short, I'd like UI designers to think about alternative keyboard layouts from time to time and not just accept the status quo.
Well, at least zombie flash cookies are better than zombie flesh cookies...I guess
I totally agree with the above poster. Everything is classified into convenient genres and too much money is spent on replicating the exact same experience over and over nowadays. Game producers need to learn to take risks again. Studios need to spend much more efforts on creating something unique, not necessarily in terms of gameplay mechanics but in terms of intelligent plots that are compelling for the primary target group (=adults) and stories that really allow for immersion. Procedural content generation and randomized missions/campaigns would be the way to go, yet most studios choose to go the easy and secure but ultimately boring path of creating short, cinematic games that do not offer anything new except better graphics.
Java and C++ are bloated piles of crap, anyone with more than a decade of programming experience knows that. (I'm currently using C++ as my main development language so don't get me wrong.) He's also right about scripting languages, their performance mostly is shit. ("B..b..but Python with the new JIT compiler..." I hear them say. My reply is: "Oh yeah, well, I'd say it's a SHIT compiler, not a JIT compiler!")
Anyway, from time to time I enjoy checking out a programming languages I didn't use before. And like many people over the years I've used many and taken a look at even more of them. So I thought I'd share my opinions in a good old Usenet-style fashion, starting an immediate programming language flamewar. For a start, I still haven't found one that I really like, although most of the time the problem is not the language itself but the (lack of) support libraries anyway. Functional programming languages like Haskell or ML are nice and fast, but sometimes you just need mutable data structure for efficiency. They also far too often rely on arcane and overly complicated concepts. (Monads anyone? Why not program directly in category theory instead?) Lisp and Scheme are also nice but too dynamic - even with test suites you miss too many bugs. I haven't tried typed Racket yet, but knowing the traditional Racket (formerly Plt Scheme) quite well I suspect the typed version is just too much of an `addition' on top of the untyped language.
Now here is the language that I'd like to see but just doesn't seem to exist:
That's it. I know that a new language is not strictly speaking needed but I'd surely like to see one with the above features. Any volunteers? :*)
And yet the haven't found Osama bin Laden or the Anthrax killer and still don't seem to have any clue who really killed JFK! Obviously, more money has to be spent on national security in order to solve these mysteries!
they also realize that at least their work is good enough for someone to consider to pirate and that it keeps them in the public view
I wholeheartedly agree with this. When I wrote a little Macintosh shareware program 10 years ago I used to check the latest serial number list (I think it was called MacSerial Box) every month to see whether my app was in there. I was always very disappointed when I found out that it wasn't considered significant enough to be included.
By the way it was always my impression that most of the pirate groups and serial number submitters are in a sense pretty fair / have their own moral code. It is obvious that applications or games that are clearly not worth their money get pirated and distributed more aggressively and in larger numbers than those that have an acceptable pricing scheme. Especially regarding games without a demo, I personally consider pirating sort of a customer protection. Even when I buy the game, I usually first check on TPB or Demonoid for commentaries, because the feedback by the people there is much more honest than the paid reviews at corrupt sites like "inside game news".
Fairness of the "crackers" might also be the reason why no serials for my app were ever published. My app never ceases to work and is fully usable even if you don't enter the reg code. (It occasionally pops up a nag screen, though.) And I have the suspicion that many of my paying customers were people that used my app for a long, long time before deciding to register.
Sorry to spoil your day dreams but the kind of darknet you describe would not work well in practise.
First, the security of steganography is very limited. Research has shown that even very sophisticated steganographic methods -- those that take into account the statistical properties of their transmission channel -- can easily be detected as soon as a significant amount of information is transmitted over the steganographic channel. Using tools like freenet might help, as they make traffic analysis harder, but I'd remain skeptical.
Second, the trust model you describe doesn't seem to work against your adversary: las enforcement, political police, and secret agencies of totalitarian countries. If friends can invite friends, your darknet will soon be subverted by undercover informants as become as public and open as the public internet.
Finally, a problem with your idea and the one in the original article is that there is no plausible deniability for its users. In court, steganographic tools and special software against censorship will count as spy tools, likely making the final sentence more severe than it could have been without the use of special software. Instead of developing tools for totalitarian countries, we should develop censorship-resistent software for all countries and make their use as mainstream as possible. Pervasive email encryption and massive use of SSL encryption for websites would be a start, but apparently there are strong forces against this in many society including the supposedly free ones.
Just my 2 cents...
Listen, who cares for these marginal speed differences. All I want is a way to watch videos for free without having to install malware, a way to publish my videos commercially or non-commercially without having to pay license fees to stupid lawyers now or later, and a way to check and modify the source code and implement video playing and streaming abilities in my software as I like. I know this is a bit off topic, but this is really starting to make me angry. I just can't understand why media companies and software patent holders, who have already made billions of money by using and taking advantage of the originally free and open internet and in many cases owe their existence to it, keep trying to destroy it with patents, licensing schemes, DRM, and malware. Is it not possible for mankind to agree on one single FUCKING video codec that is not encumbered by patents and will remain free to use and modify forever and for anyone?
Here is my suggestion: Pressure your politicians to create a commercial internet that is completely separate from the non-commercial one. On the commercial one people can sell whatever they like with whatever proprietary software they like. On the non-commercial one, on the other hand, non-free, non-open source is banned and since it is non-commercial and for the benefit of everyone special laws should permit the use of any technology on the non-commercial internet even if it is protected in other contexts. I want my good old internet back... :-(
It's one of those launching pads for flying sourcers. They just forgot to put a cover on this one, or perhaps the capping mechanism jammed.
I wouldn't call that a bug. :-)
Unfortunately, the FBI's expert system was written in VB...
If contains(mail, "threat") or (contains(mail, "blow") and contains(mail, "up")) then
putOnAutomaticNoFlyList(author(mail))
End If
They could have used regexps but after long committee meetings decided against it for safety.
That's not true. As a German freelancer working on your own you only need to learn one simple book keeping method (called "doppelte Buchfuehrung"). You can learn it within 3 days from books and there are also plenty of programs to automatize it. I don't claim that German bureaucracy doesn't suck, it does, but it by far does not amount to what the Ukranian government wants to introduce.
Tor was always one huge honey pot built on the US telco network with all exit nodes collectable to the NSA.
Perhaps the NSA has the power to surveille exit nodes in foreign countries but even if so describing Tor as a honey pot is misleading. As others have pointed out, anyone with rudimentary knowledge of how Tor works can easily figure out that you either just use it for surfing the web with Javascript and Java disabled and without giving away any personal information or you have to use an encrypted connection. The Tor docs made that clear from the beginning. However, securing a web browser not to leak information is admittedly not so easy.
Not only the media. Many empirical studies in social sciences you read about in the newspapers are simply flawed: the sample space is too small and not chosen randomly. Researchers want to get a paper out disguise the study as a 'case study' (more or less a synonym for 'insignificant study') or study with mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology. Sometimes they know that in reality their study shows absolutely nothing, other times they just lack statistics skills and hack a few numbers into SPSS.
It is no wonder when even people with a decent scientific background distrust many so-called scientific results. I personally more or less ignore studies reported in newspapers and magazines unless they at least hint at some halfway sound methodology---I'm really not interested in the opinions of 20 students someone happened to have interviewed for his or her diploma thesis.
By the way, natural scientists often confuse political and moral issues with scientific ones or are dishonest about their hidden political motives. Science can perhaps tell you that your preference relation should be transitive (even that is questionable), but it can't tell you whether you should choose chocolate or vanilla ice cream.