Re:Why not cell triangulation?
on
GPS Meets PCS
·
· Score: 2
I think the GPS precision is what they're after. After all, they're not trying to locate you in a normal emergency. Where a 100 foot or so location would be adequate.
They're trying to solve other problems. Correlate your location with other data. Anti terrorism, today. Other uses tomorrow. You got in this taxicab at 9:07 AM. See? Your gps coordinates match the cab's coordinates for 39 minutes. Then you used a pay phone at 27th and Crawford -- specifically, the third phone booth from the end. At that exact time, the phone records show you made a call to your mistress. Nine minutes later, she went to the bank, the 2nd teller window, and withdrew $200,000 in small bills. Photographic bank records coroborate this. Then 13 minutes later, she went to see a woman she is sleeping with, that you don't know about, who lives at 119 Somewhere St., and gave her half the money. etc., etc. [Filling in remainder of story, left as exercise for slashdot trolls.]
If they were just worried about "normal" emergiencies, such as fire, traffic accident, shooting, etc., 100 foot accuracy would be fine.
Re:If there is not going to be abuse of this...
on
GPS Meets PCS
·
· Score: 2
How do you define abuse?
How do I define abuse? Let me count the ways...
Any use, tracking, logging, or retention of the location information for any purpose whatsoever, other than for locating the caller when they call 911.
How's that? Probably need a lawyer to clean it up a bit, debug it, performance tune it, etc.
If I'm in my own home, in the dark, using one hand to surf to "special" web sites, in what way is what I'm doing a "public action"?
People can see them, and they are free to tell others, including police
First, people can not see them. Even if so, this is not good, as the above described actions are illegal in some states of the US. [Extra credit: so what if instead of visiting a "special" web site, you subscribe to "special" magazines delivered by postal mail? Any expectation of privacy?]
They can be asked with no warrant, and freely cooperate, or if they refuse to cooperate,....
Isn't failing to cooperate grounds for probable cause? [If not, will they will rectify this soon?]
Finally, if you want to take an extreme view, do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in anything you do? After all, the room could be bugged. The phone could be bugged. The government could have placed cameras in your home. They could be parked outside in a van watching your actions using advanced alien technology. They could be using telepaths. etc. [Better make yourself a tin foil hat.]
Give me a break. Barring extraordinary conditions, you do have a reasonable expectation of privacy in lots of things you do. Especially in your own home. Surf the web. Read e-mail. Watch TV. Use the phone. Send a fax. Have a conversation. Pull the drapes.
[Yeah, I know the whole "e-mail is a postcard" thing. But any idiot with aligator clips can listen in to your phone conversation too. The plain simple fact is that most people don't have access to the right infrastructure points to intercept your e-mail, any more than they have access to the right wires to hook up their aligator clips.]
One of my points is: your expectation of privacy has some correlation to your paranoia. A reasonably well balanced person has a certian expectation of privacy which is higher than a paranoid person.
Their defense would probably be that the intention of the CDs they are selling is to be used to play music in a standard CD music player. No where is it stated that they have to allow non-musical-playback purposes.
And my rebuttal to that defense would be that my car player or computer is a standard music player. It plays any standard CDDA red book disk.
What possible use would I be buying their CD for other than for the purpose of musical playback? I want to play it in my car. I want to play it in my computer. I want to play it in my pocket mp3 player.
Re:How is it going to be profitable?
on
Napster Clawing Back
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Possibly user-added ratings of some kind...? User commentary, something that would create a real community around the music. Or, some kind of mechanism for recommending music that you would like. For example, I like a particular style of Irish music. If Napster could come up with a way of RECOMMENDING music to me based on one particular song or set of songs, or perhaps based on the fact that I share certain likes with other people, that would be a worthwhile service. Then napster wouldn't be a file-sharing system... it would be a file-recommendation system... and with millions of files out there, a recommendation system would be worth its weight in gold. Its value would increase with every additional person in the system, too...
Possibly RIAA-added ratings of some kind. RIAA commentary, something that would create a fake community around the music. Or some kind of mechanism for recommending the music that the RIAA would like you to buy and upload. For example, I like this particular profitable music. If Napster could come up with a way of FORCING music on me based on one particular database or set of demographics, or perhaps based on surveillance of me and other people, that would be a profitable service. Then napster wouldn't be a file-sharing system... it would be a music-marketing system... and with millions of user-provided files out there, a marketing system worth its weight in gold. Its value would increase with every additional prisioner of the system too.
I haven't looked at the two sources in question, so I can't comment about how "close" they appear to be to each other.
Suppose Bob writes an open source program. Then along comes John and examines Bob's program, and learns crucial things from it. Such as how the frobulator encoder works. John then writes his own program which has a frobulator encoder, whose concepts are influenced heavily from what he learned by studying Bob's work.
At what point is John stealing Bob's work?
When he studies Bob's source? (Thus carrying away intellectual property in his head! Worse, maybe even violating copyright from inside his brain.)
When he uses Bob's concepts? Especially if Bob worked hard to come up with some novel approach. Or if a significant part of Bob's effort was laying out the structure in a particular way?
If he uses the same identifiers, or identifier structure as Bob did?
(What if John types in his own original code?)
If he simply cut&paste's a few lines from Bob's code. (How many? 1 line, 5 lines, 5000 lines?)
This is a loaded question. (Just like: When does life begin, at conception or birth, or where inbetween.) Except our question here isn't quite as emotionally charged. (Well, maybe it is for us.)
Back in 1979, I would help other students with their programs. Sometimes after making sure they understood the algorithm, and were writing the code, we would end up with what basically amounts to my design. Should I just make sure that I use different variable names? Should I introduce frivolous structural changes to the program so the instructor doesn't think someone is cheating? (Of course, I became so notorious with my instructors that this problem never came up -- they knew me well enough.) And the other student did end up actually accomplishing the learning.
Returning to my above example. Should John make sure to rename the members of the structure? Alter it stylistically? After all, Bob did the hard gruntwork. In some sense Bob should get credit. What if Bob doesn't want to license or give any permission? Can Bob withhold the know how of how the frobulator encoder works -- especially if it is embedded within open source?
Cearly, the ideal thing would be for John to contact Bob. But this takes time and effort. If John had simply renamed identifiers and altered the style, would an issue ever be raised on Slashdot in the future? (Even if Bob someday examined John's code and noticed the similarity, of concepts, if not actual cut&paste lines?)
And as I first stated, I haven't examined the sources, and this may be a very clear case of cut&past without any credit given. These questions are intended to be hypothetical. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely cooincidental and unintentional.
This just gives Microsoft no reason to fix the deeper problems.
I'm not bashing MS here. (At least, not trying to.)
They make a system that is for people who don't want to have a deep understanding of how things work. [Just as I don't care how my car works, I just want it to go.] It strikes me therefore that it is MS responsibility to fix the problem. [Just as a car cannot be a public safety problem. It won't fly to say that owners must get under their hoods and adjust the frobulator bypass.] And I don't mean a hot patch or service pack fix. I mean a deeper fix. Do it right the first time.
Your suggested approach is very nice in the short run. The ISP helps the entire Internet. Provides a very nice way for the customer to discover they're infected and fix it. But it puts a higher burden on the ISP, and takes away MS's incentive to get it right in the first place. Not a good long term trend.
Much better IMHO for operators of infected systems to serve a 5 zillion year jail term and a public flogging, thus putting pressure on MS to prevent problems like this to begin with.
[For the humor impaired moderators, I think you get my actual point here. A slight penalization of users puts pressure on MS. It's a sad state of affairs that I must add this disclaimer.]
Either the court will throw it out or uphold it. Examine each possibility for a moment.
What is the end result? Even if this licensing provision is thrown out, an MS critic (or several) have spent millions of dollars and their time in litigation. An ingenious way to drain resources from your enemy. [The Borg weapon seems to be designed merely to drain the shields.]
OTOH, if the licensing is upheld, it may mean that copyright law needs to be modified to include features that recognize licenses like this.
Just bring it on, ignore all facts, just bash, bash, bash!
How about instead, we pay attention to all the facts, and then bash, bash bash!
------
Bill Gates is my shepard.
I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down and pay more green.
He leadeth me beside still blue screens.
He rebooteth my system.
He leads me along the path where he wants me to go today, for his own sake.
Yea, though I walk through the shadow of the valley of silicon,
I will fear no innovation.
For thou art with me.
Thy monopoly and thy lawyers they comfort me.
Thou preparest a preannounced major upgrade before me in the presence of thy competitors.
Thou annointest my head with service packs and hot patches.
My hard drive runneth over.
Surely crashes and high prices will follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell under the control of Microsoft forever.
Except that an actual audio CD is a very poor choice. The pad _needs_ to be random
IANAC, but I'll put my <body part> in my mouth here...
I understand. But in practice, I'm not so sure that it needs to be truly random so much as it simply needs to be unpredictable with no repeating pattern. Audio might well have a reasonable approximation of this characteristic. Or the xor of several audio cd's, with some of them in reverse order.
The truly random one time pad is unbreakable for all time. But something that is simply unpredictable is still not easily breakable. There is no pattern to detect, as if from psuedo random generator. [Okay, well some modern RIAA fare might be nothing but a repititious droning pattern:-), but you get my point.]
Furthermore, it doesn't have to be breakable for all time. It only has to remain unbreakable until after the message no longer has any value. If terrorist A says to terrorist B, "We stroke tonight", it doesn't matter if the government is able to break the message after spending big $$ and several years.
But then, "we stroke tonight", might simply be two friendly guys arranging a meeting. Puzzles within puzzles.
But I don't know if they include source in their distro as SuSE does. Also note that Slashdot may screw up the above URL's in an attempt to add lameness to them.
IANAL, but it should be okay for you to keep personal copies of what you've recorded.
They have long term historical value.
Who knows, in a million years or so, there may no longer be any copyright issues to contend with.
And lead us not into fair use,
but deliver us from copyright infringement.
For thine is the copyright, and the patent, and the trademark
forever and ever
Amen.
>>The solution is emergency override from a remote location for all aircraft controls
>Good luck creating a communications link that is so reliable it can be used to control a landing jet, so ubiquitous that tens of thousands of aircraft and hundreds of control towers have it, and so secure and so tightly controlled that it cannot be abused.
What!?! Is this a lack of faith in Microsoft technology that I sense in you?
Slashdot Mirror
I think the GPS precision is what they're after. After all, they're not trying to locate you in a normal emergency. Where a 100 foot or so location would be adequate.
They're trying to solve other problems. Correlate your location with other data. Anti terrorism, today. Other uses tomorrow. You got in this taxicab at 9:07 AM. See? Your gps coordinates match the cab's coordinates for 39 minutes. Then you used a pay phone at 27th and Crawford -- specifically, the third phone booth from the end. At that exact time, the phone records show you made a call to your mistress. Nine minutes later, she went to the bank, the 2nd teller window, and withdrew $200,000 in small bills. Photographic bank records coroborate this. Then 13 minutes later, she went to see a woman she is sleeping with, that you don't know about, who lives at 119 Somewhere St., and gave her half the money. etc., etc. [Filling in remainder of story, left as exercise for slashdot trolls.]
If they were just worried about "normal" emergiencies, such as fire, traffic accident, shooting, etc., 100 foot accuracy would be fine.
How do I define abuse? Let me count the ways...
How's that? Probably need a lawyer to clean it up a bit, debug it, performance tune it, etc.
Devils argument: By reducing theft, they can lower prices, leading to happier real customers.
How much would you like to bet that by implementing copy protection, they will increase prices?
Didn't I read something about a $200 million per year revenue stream from this?
That's just the nature of public actions
....
If I'm in my own home, in the dark, using one hand to surf to "special" web sites, in what way is what I'm doing a "public action"?
People can see them, and they are free to tell others, including police
First, people can not see them. Even if so, this is not good, as the above described actions are illegal in some states of the US. [Extra credit: so what if instead of visiting a "special" web site, you subscribe to "special" magazines delivered by postal mail? Any expectation of privacy?]
They can be asked with no warrant, and freely cooperate, or if they refuse to cooperate,
Isn't failing to cooperate grounds for probable cause? [If not, will they will rectify this soon?]
Finally, if you want to take an extreme view, do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in anything you do? After all, the room could be bugged. The phone could be bugged. The government could have placed cameras in your home. They could be parked outside in a van watching your actions using advanced alien technology. They could be using telepaths. etc. [Better make yourself a tin foil hat.]
Give me a break. Barring extraordinary conditions, you do have a reasonable expectation of privacy in lots of things you do. Especially in your own home. Surf the web. Read e-mail. Watch TV. Use the phone. Send a fax. Have a conversation. Pull the drapes.
[Yeah, I know the whole "e-mail is a postcard" thing. But any idiot with aligator clips can listen in to your phone conversation too. The plain simple fact is that most people don't have access to the right infrastructure points to intercept your e-mail, any more than they have access to the right wires to hook up their aligator clips.]
One of my points is: your expectation of privacy has some correlation to your paranoia. A reasonably well balanced person has a certian expectation of privacy which is higher than a paranoid person.
Please mod this up as interesting.
Their defense would probably be that the intention of the CDs they are selling is to be used to play music in a standard CD music player. No where is it stated that they have to allow non-musical-playback purposes.
And my rebuttal to that defense would be that my car player or computer is a standard music player. It plays any standard CDDA red book disk.
What possible use would I be buying their CD for other than for the purpose of musical playback? I want to play it in my car. I want to play it in my computer. I want to play it in my pocket mp3 player.
Possibly user-added ratings of some kind...? User commentary, something that would create a real community around the music. Or, some kind of mechanism for recommending music that you would like. For example, I like a particular style of Irish music. If Napster could come up with a way of RECOMMENDING music to me based on one particular song or set of songs, or perhaps based on the fact that I share certain likes with other people, that would be a worthwhile service. Then napster wouldn't be a file-sharing system... it would be a file-recommendation system... and with millions of files out there, a recommendation system would be worth its weight in gold. Its value would increase with every additional person in the system, too...
Possibly RIAA-added ratings of some kind. RIAA commentary, something that would create a fake community around the music. Or some kind of mechanism for recommending the music that the RIAA would like you to buy and upload. For example, I like this particular profitable music. If Napster could come up with a way of FORCING music on me based on one particular database or set of demographics, or perhaps based on surveillance of me and other people, that would be a profitable service. Then napster wouldn't be a file-sharing system... it would be a music-marketing system... and with millions of user-provided files out there, a marketing system worth its weight in gold. Its value would increase with every additional prisioner of the system too.
Suppose Bob writes an open source program. Then along comes John and examines Bob's program, and learns crucial things from it. Such as how the frobulator encoder works. John then writes his own program which has a frobulator encoder, whose concepts are influenced heavily from what he learned by studying Bob's work.
At what point is John stealing Bob's work?
This is a loaded question. (Just like: When does life begin, at conception or birth, or where inbetween.) Except our question here isn't quite as emotionally charged. (Well, maybe it is for us.)
Back in 1979, I would help other students with their programs. Sometimes after making sure they understood the algorithm, and were writing the code, we would end up with what basically amounts to my design. Should I just make sure that I use different variable names? Should I introduce frivolous structural changes to the program so the instructor doesn't think someone is cheating? (Of course, I became so notorious with my instructors that this problem never came up -- they knew me well enough.) And the other student did end up actually accomplishing the learning.
Returning to my above example. Should John make sure to rename the members of the structure? Alter it stylistically? After all, Bob did the hard gruntwork. In some sense Bob should get credit. What if Bob doesn't want to license or give any permission? Can Bob withhold the know how of how the frobulator encoder works -- especially if it is embedded within open source?
Cearly, the ideal thing would be for John to contact Bob. But this takes time and effort. If John had simply renamed identifiers and altered the style, would an issue ever be raised on Slashdot in the future? (Even if Bob someday examined John's code and noticed the similarity, of concepts, if not actual cut&paste lines?)
And as I first stated, I haven't examined the sources, and this may be a very clear case of cut&past without any credit given. These questions are intended to be hypothetical. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely cooincidental and unintentional.
That means it will fit in your palm with little modification.
Shouldn't that be with no modification?
My cell phone fits in my palm with no modification. My dick fits....
But when I visit a public anonmyous terminal keyboard, even if I do visit a pr0n site, I don't shoot any dna samples into the keyboard.
From the article: And so, it begins.
Don't you really mean: The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
This just gives Microsoft no reason to fix the deeper problems.
I'm not bashing MS here. (At least, not trying to.)
They make a system that is for people who don't want to have a deep understanding of how things work. [Just as I don't care how my car works, I just want it to go.] It strikes me therefore that it is MS responsibility to fix the problem. [Just as a car cannot be a public safety problem. It won't fly to say that owners must get under their hoods and adjust the frobulator bypass.] And I don't mean a hot patch or service pack fix. I mean a deeper fix. Do it right the first time.
Your suggested approach is very nice in the short run. The ISP helps the entire Internet. Provides a very nice way for the customer to discover they're infected and fix it. But it puts a higher burden on the ISP, and takes away MS's incentive to get it right in the first place. Not a good long term trend.
Much better IMHO for operators of infected systems to serve a 5 zillion year jail term and a public flogging, thus putting pressure on MS to prevent problems like this to begin with.
[For the humor impaired moderators, I think you get my actual point here. A slight penalization of users puts pressure on MS. It's a sad state of affairs that I must add this disclaimer.]
What will testing it accomplish?
Either the court will throw it out or uphold it. Examine each possibility for a moment.
What is the end result? Even if this licensing provision is thrown out, an MS critic (or several) have spent millions of dollars and their time in litigation. An ingenious way to drain resources from your enemy. [The Borg weapon seems to be designed merely to drain the shields.]
OTOH, if the licensing is upheld, it may mean that copyright law needs to be modified to include features that recognize licenses like this.
Why does big corporations always want to curtail liberty? (1st pst?)
The question we should really be asking is: Is our corporations learning?
Just bring it on, ignore all facts, just bash, bash, bash!
How about instead, we pay attention to all the facts, and then bash, bash bash!
------
Bill Gates is my shepard.
I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down and pay more green.
He leadeth me beside still blue screens.
He rebooteth my system.
He leads me along the path where he wants me to go today, for his own sake.
Yea, though I walk through the shadow of the valley of silicon,
I will fear no innovation.
For thou art with me.
Thy monopoly and thy lawyers they comfort me.
Thou preparest a preannounced major upgrade before me in the presence of thy competitors.
Thou annointest my head with service packs and hot patches.
My hard drive runneth over.
Surely crashes and high prices will follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell under the control of Microsoft forever.
Intel is going to give us a choice. Our way, or the AMD way.
--
Very few animals were harmed in the creation of this message.
Useful stuff, since a lot of companies want to make sure they've got someone to call if things go wrong.
Useful stuff, since a lot of companies want to make sure they've got someone to sue if things go wrong.
Except that an actual audio CD is a very poor choice. The pad _needs_ to be random
:-), but you get my point.]
IANAC, but I'll put my <body part> in my mouth here...
I understand. But in practice, I'm not so sure that it needs to be truly random so much as it simply needs to be unpredictable with no repeating pattern. Audio might well have a reasonable approximation of this characteristic. Or the xor of several audio cd's, with some of them in reverse order.
The truly random one time pad is unbreakable for all time. But something that is simply unpredictable is still not easily breakable. There is no pattern to detect, as if from psuedo random generator. [Okay, well some modern RIAA fare might be nothing but a repititious droning pattern
Furthermore, it doesn't have to be breakable for all time. It only has to remain unbreakable until after the message no longer has any value. If terrorist A says to terrorist B, "We stroke tonight", it doesn't matter if the government is able to break the message after spending big $$ and several years.
But then, "we stroke tonight", might simply be two friendly guys arranging a meeting. Puzzles within puzzles.
Even if you intercept something like "red group to strike target beta" how much does that tell you?
What if you intercept something like...
Hi Aunt Ruth. Joey started 2nd grade today, and his worst subject is trigonometry.
Now what does this tell you? Its true meaning might be "red group to strike target beta", but this is less obvious.
Yes. Source. That's what I'm talking about.
a dcast2000.spm
/ 7.2/suse/zq1/broadcast2000.spm
I know this will get modded as a SuSE troll, but what the heck. Here goes...
You can download from SuSE's ftp site, I'm sure. Find the 7.2 distro, and then the "zq1" series.
For instance...
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/7.2/suse/zq1/bro
Or a mirror...
ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/suse/ftp.suse.com/suse/i386
Or you could try Mandrake's distro, which I'm not familiar with. (Hey, don't hit me!) But KDE has a mirror...
ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/mandrake/
But I don't know if they include source in their distro as SuSE does. Also note that Slashdot may screw up the above URL's in an attempt to add lameness to them.
IANAL, but it should be okay for you to keep personal copies of what you've recorded.
They have long term historical value.
Who knows, in a million years or so, there may no longer be any copyright issues to contend with.
And lead us not into fair use,
but deliver us from copyright infringement.
For thine is the copyright, and the patent, and the trademark
forever and ever
Amen.
>>The solution is emergency override from a remote location for all aircraft controls
>Good luck creating a communications link that is so reliable it can be used to control a landing jet, so ubiquitous that tens of thousands of aircraft and hundreds of control towers have it, and so secure and so tightly controlled that it cannot be abused.
What!?! Is this a lack of faith in Microsoft technology that I sense in you?
Heart attacks? Don't pilots responsible for hundreds of lives have some minimum physical fitness standards they must meet? Maybe not.
It's not a d/l mirror, but my SuSE 7.2 Pro CD's have it. So I guess that won't go away anytime soon.
What if it takes more than five days to download a movie?