The summary is calling it "Industrial action by union employees". Most news outlets are just calling it a "strike". The needlessly long and obtuse description used here on the front page could be read to mean intentional equipment sabotage instead...
And funnily enough, in this case it's neither. As the sibling posters have indicated, industrial action is just another term for what is commonly referred to as a 'strike'. However, both generally refer to action taken by or on behalf of the employees and/or unions.
Qantas management have decided to lock out the employees and ground the airline. This is like a backwards 'strike' - and is called a 'lockout'.
Any device without a keyboard you're going to swipe something to do everything include unlock function. I used to be fairly pro-patient (I just thought they lasted too long), but BS like this is moving me anti-patient.
Please let me never be admitted to whatever hospital you work at.
The problem is patents being granted on relatively obvious/trivial things.
If something is so clever/original that a patent is required, then it should not be instantly obvious how it works the moment you see the device. And if a couple of third party engineers can spend 5 minutes 'brainstorming' the pertinent methods of the patent without ever reading it, then it is by definition obvious to someone 'skilled in the art'.
Patents need to be curtailed to the point where it is pretty much impossible to 'accidentally' infringe without a copy of the patent in front of you. In that event, I suspect you'd see far fewer patents being granted than happens now.
The only difference between defamation/ libel and false reporting, is that a false report doesn't really target anyone (so no 'victim' per se beyond the public trust).
IMO, news reports should be held to the same generic standard of verifiability as a direct accusation. This crap where Fox news gets Legal protection to make up any garbage they want as long as it doesn't defame anyone, and 'report' it like it's real, is a scourge on the name of the press.
The same should apply to any type of high profile blog or rumour mill.
This is true, people do want to work. But, not necessarily on the same things that someone else wants to pay them for.
Historically, automation has mostly replaced unskilled (i.e.. highly mobile) labour, now it is replacing labour that takes years of training (ie. low mobility). This leads to a much higher duration of unemployment for a person every time a job is eradicated.
It's not much good having a new job every few years that on average lasts for a few months.
Sometimes is this kick in the pants that forces people to innovate. It's not the first time it happens and people are forced to adapt. Sort of what is happening in the us economy right now...
Yeah, but for example my capability to innovate will likely take away a couple of dozen (or hundreds) of existing jobs. Those hundred people will be far less capable to do the same, and for some amount of time (hopefully finite, maybe only lasting a few years?) will remain without jobs.
Eventually, my ability to innovate will be outpaced by an automated process.
You would greatly increase the job market (and raise the median income significantly) in this country with every one burger flipper replaced by technology.
The receptionist is already automated, engineers get paid to design said robot once, after that it's manufacturing costs which are now outsourced to a mostly automated factory. Profits go to the investors that own the robots.
So, a thousand temporary jobs are created to replace 100000 long term jobs. A few years later, those thousand jobs are whittled down to a few hundred.
Maintenance you say? Well, while the burger flipping bots were being designed and built by the first team, a second team was designing and building the robots to maintain them.
Step, repeat. Massive job shrinkage. Extreme consolidation of wealth.
I'm convinced that they did this because they found that the sort of education offered by universities did a better job of preparing people to be effective technologists, businessmen and administrators.
Actually, I think it is because of the self selecting sieve effect that it appears this way.
By the time people graduate from university, they are already edging towards the top of the self selection pool. The less successful candidates have already dropped out or changed majors. From there, if I try to hire from within the graduate pool, the odds of getting someone that will succeed in the position is much higher than if I selected from within the initial group of first years and pushed my chosen candidate through (or trained them myself).
When interviewing, there really isn't much of a difference between skilled university educated and _skilled_ non-university educated candidates when both meet all the true requirements. However, since most HR departments are lazy and/or don't really know what they're looking for, it's easier to just hire the one with the degree.
I've seen many many more appropriate applicants turned aside because a HR person has decided to 'play it safe' and hire the degreed applicant over a more experienced non-degreed applicant (at equal wages).
I think it comes down to the old adage, "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM".
I couldn't care less about "just works". Half of the fun of running Linux laptops is the challenge to set them up to do all those things you want.
I couldn't agree more.
The other half is to see the Apple funboys fiddling with their Macbooks to make projectors display their stuff (that is when they find someone who actually has the right widget to plug it in).
ROFL
Huh? I'm with the sibling poster on this one.
I've seen many a PC BIOS boot screen scrolling up the auditorium projector screen, and presentations aborted/crashed due to "This computer hasn't been backed up in 7 days..." dialogs while running mirrored. But, I've never had an issue with my Macbook. Then again I've only had it for about 4 years, maybe the really old ones were problematic.
I used to dual boot the Macbook into Linux for dev work, but VMs are so fast these days, that I just run it full screen on the second monitor. Even that works quite well when giving presentations in the virtual OS under VMware Fusion (haven't tried Parallels).
Keep in mind that this is basically what many of the wall street stock and futures traders (gamblers?) were doing (and still are?) at the same time. Borrow money from someone else to finance your high risk buy/sell operation.
The difference being that the average 'unemployed deadbeat' was probably convinced to do this by someone in the aforementioned 'banking' industry.
He is referencing a US custom that really has no place in most other countries(doesnt mean the US shouldnt). They also try and import it here(The Netherlands) for quite some time already. It really is annoying. It would be the same as us trying to export Sinterklaas or Koninginnendag to the US.
It's double strange considering that it's summer time, usually quite warm, and daylight savings means all the trick-or-treating happens before it gets dark.
Just like Christmas in the sweltering midsummer heat with fake snow, tinsel covered pine trees, snow sleighs, and the poor bastards who end up with heat stroke while dressing up as Santa - all while Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer are piped through the shopping centre music systems.
I'd like to see the Patent Office held liable for granting such ridiculous patents in the first place. The lawyers are just playing the game that they've been trained to play, and corporations being corporations are doing the same.
At least this is two big companies that can afford the legal costs to fight. Smaller players don't stand a chance. The real enemy here is the game that's being played.
Yeah, but they state in their press release that the cards will be backwards-compatible.
This is true, but if the keys have been compromised then they'll need to re-key the new cards. The old cards will still need to be usable for some period of time until all have been recalled/reimbursed. Keeping in mind that these implementations are symmetric key systems with common master keys, so the new cards will need new keys and the readers will need to handle both cards.
For systems designed while considering this failure mode, the problem should be correctable by using pre-stored secondary keys in the reader for all new card issues, and a recall/reissue of all cards over a few months. For systems that didn't consider this, the readers may all need to be physically visited so they can be reloaded with new firmware and master keys.
Interestingly, when consulting for a transport company around 10 years ago, we implemented a system that used the DESFire engine in the card to provide an extra layer of protection on top of existing cryptographic security. So both needed to be compromised to successfully attack the card. This was done by letting the reader perform a set of cryptographic MAC calculations and store the digest signed transactions on the card in the form of a log. To mitigate replay/reset style attacks the system provided transaction checks at the database whenever the readers were synchronised (daily or continuously depending on the installation location), and black-lists that are sent out on the next sync whenever an attack was detected.
Offline nodes with daily (or shift-worker clock on/off) based database synchronisation were limited to small amounts (eg. a bus fare). Nodes that allowed larger amounts (eg. supermarkets) were required to be online to authorise the transaction. This made card duplication a high risk, low gain endeavour.
The sad thing is that 'security' systems are a dime-a-dozen, and many fail in so many areas that a cracked DESFire card is the least of their problems. As any engineer experienced in this area can attest, security implementation is a minefield of potential failure modes.
The encryption algorithm used in these cards is Triple DES. The 64 bit block cipher has not been cracked and still maintains approximately 80 equivalent bits of effective security with its 112 bit key.
However, the crack involves using a side chain attack and card profiling and allows the key to be retrieved within 3 to 7 hours. The attack is complicated, but has always generally suspected to be possible. Until now, no one had demonstrated and shown a detailed method to actually crack this type of card.
This is less of an immediate issue for security installations, as the systems are probably already backed with secondary verifiers (eg. biometrics, codes, etc) for high security requirements, and the access areas are probably counted in the low double digits. Not to mention that most 'security systems' seem to be composed mostly of security theatre anyway.
But, some systems using those cards are MUCH harder to retrofit (eg. electronic money/credit equivalents like metro systems, etc) where the infrastructure is highly diverse. And replacement would involve a massive process of card/reader swap outs, most likely with both systems operating in parallel for a time. Those systems also provide the most financial gain and lowest risk for criminal organisations if they can crack the security of the cards.
...a shiny new beige Macintosh 512K with a wide-carriage Imagewriter and external floppy drive. Using it felt like you were using something from Star Trek. I learned how to touch type doing papers on that thing.
Yes, and trade secrets like those your company is holding are certainly one valid way to protect your company's IP.
The downside, however, is that both you and your competitors are wasting thousands of hours inventing the same new compositions. The pace of innovation throughout the industry is slowed, since there is so much duplication of effort. This shows that the existence of the patent system is just as important as ever, but that we need reform on the litigation side.
Interestingly, there are very few if any important discoveries / inventions that are lost to time, or effort wasted due to keeping something a trade secret versus publishing or patenting it. Most patents cover already very established principles with small variations that are generally easily reverse-engineered or are quite intuitive to anyone 'skilled in the art' trying to solve the same problem.
A large amount of duplicated work is inevitable even when the idea is publicly released, because most companies still need to go through an implementation cycle to be able to produce / develop their own version of the patented 'idea'. In most cases the 'key' patentable innovation is really about something quite obvious to anyone working on the problem. The fact that in the current development climate there are many companies working in parallel, unable to see the published patents until years after they submitted means that duplication of work is unavoidable - even if you're happy to try and license every patent out there that might even be tangentially related to your product.
In fact most venture capitalists tell people that it's more important to develop a product and 'get it out there' than to try and innovate around (or use) existing patents (and risk never ending up releasing the product).
Patents are being granted at a rate so high (and with such doubtful content) that it's a full time job for a team of patent lawyers to keep up with anyway, let alone a small engineering team who are focused on developing a product. The majority of the cost of litigation (whether researching, defending or attacking) is paying the legal fees, and that is not something that is a worthwhile expenditure (or future legal risk due to documented liability for intentional infringement) during the high technical risk of failure R&D phase of a new product development.
So in this way, patents do nothing to stop competitors from wasting thousands of hours/dollars re-inventing the same things. In fact, they end up costing more as the lawyers still need to eat too.
Apple sued Samsung because their product looked almost exactly like an iPad. If you were far enough away not to be able to read the logo, or it was covered by a finger, you'd probably think both products were the same. This is not something that can happen 'accidentally' and not something that slows innovation when stopped.
Then, in retaliation, Samsung sues Apple over broad brushed 'technical' patents that are dubious at best (along with I'd estimate 98% of granted technical patents that hardly meet the obviousness test to even someone unskilled in the relevant art, let alone someone skilled in it). This is where the problem with the patent system surfaces. Yes, Apple can be evil here too, but in this particular example, Samsung is playing games with the patent system after it was caught blatantly copying the outward appearance of Apple's product.
This isn't about a company in its final 'death throes' firing off the first desperate salvo, but of one company stopping another from confusing the market by outright copying the look of a product. I say this because I was trying to convince a friend that Apple i-devices are not actually rebadged Samsung devices (even though Samsung sells Apple some of the parts). He seemed to think it was like car manufacturers who just rebadge a third party car with their own brand to fill in a market segment where they don't have their own model. And everyone 'knows' that Samsung makes some of the major parts inside the iPhone/iPad, and by extension probably the whole device. The latest releases from Samsung are starting to look so much like Apple's products that this conclusion was inevitable.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary is calling it "Industrial action by union employees". Most news outlets are just calling it a "strike". The needlessly long and obtuse description used here on the front page could be read to mean intentional equipment sabotage instead...
And funnily enough, in this case it's neither. As the sibling posters have indicated, industrial action is just another term for what is commonly referred to as a 'strike'. However, both generally refer to action taken by or on behalf of the employees and/or unions.
Qantas management have decided to lock out the employees and ground the airline. This is like a backwards 'strike' - and is called a 'lockout'.
Any device without a keyboard you're going to swipe something to do everything include unlock function. I used to be fairly pro-patient (I just thought they lasted too long), but BS like this is moving me anti-patient.
Please let me never be admitted to whatever hospital you work at.
The problem is patents being granted on relatively obvious/trivial things.
If something is so clever/original that a patent is required, then it should not be instantly obvious how it works the moment you see the device. And if a couple of third party engineers can spend 5 minutes 'brainstorming' the pertinent methods of the patent without ever reading it, then it is by definition obvious to someone 'skilled in the art'.
Patents need to be curtailed to the point where it is pretty much impossible to 'accidentally' infringe without a copy of the patent in front of you. In that event, I suspect you'd see far fewer patents being granted than happens now.
The only difference between defamation/ libel and false reporting, is that a false report doesn't really target anyone (so no 'victim' per se beyond the public trust).
IMO, news reports should be held to the same generic standard of verifiability as a direct accusation. This crap where Fox news gets Legal protection to make up any garbage they want as long as it doesn't defame anyone, and 'report' it like it's real, is a scourge on the name of the press.
The same should apply to any type of high profile blog or rumour mill.
Tuberculosis?
> So then I should be allowed to spread disease if I want?
You'd only be spreading disease to the unvaccinated, wouldn't you?
Like my 3 week old son?
This is true, people do want to work. But, not necessarily on the same things that someone else wants to pay them for.
Historically, automation has mostly replaced unskilled (i.e.. highly mobile) labour, now it is replacing labour that takes years of training (ie. low mobility). This leads to a much higher duration of unemployment for a person every time a job is eradicated.
It's not much good having a new job every few years that on average lasts for a few months.
Sometimes is this kick in the pants that forces people to innovate. It's not the first time it happens and people are forced to adapt. Sort of what is happening in the us economy right now...
Yeah, but for example my capability to innovate will likely take away a couple of dozen (or hundreds) of existing jobs. Those hundred people will be far less capable to do the same, and for some amount of time (hopefully finite, maybe only lasting a few years?) will remain without jobs.
Eventually, my ability to innovate will be outpaced by an automated process.
You would greatly increase the job market (and raise the median income significantly) in this country with every one burger flipper replaced by technology.
The receptionist is already automated, engineers get paid to design said robot once, after that it's manufacturing costs which are now outsourced to a mostly automated factory. Profits go to the investors that own the robots.
So, a thousand temporary jobs are created to replace 100000 long term jobs. A few years later, those thousand jobs are whittled down to a few hundred.
Maintenance you say? Well, while the burger flipping bots were being designed and built by the first team, a second team was designing and building the robots to maintain them.
Step, repeat. Massive job shrinkage. Extreme consolidation of wealth.
I'm convinced that they did this because they found that the sort of education offered by universities did a better job of preparing people to be effective technologists, businessmen and administrators.
Actually, I think it is because of the self selecting sieve effect that it appears this way.
By the time people graduate from university, they are already edging towards the top of the self selection pool. The less successful candidates have already dropped out or changed majors. From there, if I try to hire from within the graduate pool, the odds of getting someone that will succeed in the position is much higher than if I selected from within the initial group of first years and pushed my chosen candidate through (or trained them myself).
When interviewing, there really isn't much of a difference between skilled university educated and _skilled_ non-university educated candidates when both meet all the true requirements. However, since most HR departments are lazy and/or don't really know what they're looking for, it's easier to just hire the one with the degree.
I've seen many many more appropriate applicants turned aside because a HR person has decided to 'play it safe' and hire the degreed applicant over a more experienced non-degreed applicant (at equal wages).
I think it comes down to the old adage, "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM".
I couldn't care less about "just works". Half of the fun of running Linux laptops is the challenge to set them up to do all those things you want.
I couldn't agree more.
The other half is to see the Apple funboys fiddling with their Macbooks to make projectors display their stuff (that is when they find someone who actually has the right widget to plug it in).
ROFL
Huh? I'm with the sibling poster on this one.
I've seen many a PC BIOS boot screen scrolling up the auditorium projector screen, and presentations aborted/crashed due to "This computer hasn't been backed up in 7 days..." dialogs while running mirrored. But, I've never had an issue with my Macbook. Then again I've only had it for about 4 years, maybe the really old ones were problematic.
I used to dual boot the Macbook into Linux for dev work, but VMs are so fast these days, that I just run it full screen on the second monitor. Even that works quite well when giving presentations in the virtual OS under VMware Fusion (haven't tried Parallels).
If you haven't check out GITS before, do so now it's grrrrrrrrreat!
Is it best enjoyed while downing a bowl of Frosted Flakes?
Keep in mind that this is basically what many of the wall street stock and futures traders (gamblers?) were doing (and still are?) at the same time. Borrow money from someone else to finance your high risk buy/sell operation.
The difference being that the average 'unemployed deadbeat' was probably convinced to do this by someone in the aforementioned 'banking' industry.
Especially when the definition of 'porn' seems to include general nudity and pictures of clothed children.
Oh crap, does that mean I'm now guilty of not turning in all the parents I know that might have taken a few bathtub shots of their toddlers.
He is referencing a US custom that really has no place in most other countries(doesnt mean the US shouldnt). They also try and import it here(The Netherlands) for quite some time already. It really is annoying. It would be the same as us trying to export Sinterklaas or Koninginnendag to the US.
It's double strange considering that it's summer time, usually quite warm, and daylight savings means all the trick-or-treating happens before it gets dark.
Just like Christmas in the sweltering midsummer heat with fake snow, tinsel covered pine trees, snow sleighs, and the poor bastards who end up with heat stroke while dressing up as Santa - all while Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer are piped through the shopping centre music systems.
So Bob and Susan have an opportunity to add a comment to the photo like: "LOL! You never should have put your hand into that beehive!"
They only ever made one Matrix film... and I don't remember any Architect.
I saw the "I'm drunk" example ... Siri suggests a cab.
What happens if you say, "I'm horny!"? ...or, even more important: "I'm broke!"
What is a Rhinoceros?
What is the USA?
I'd like to see the Patent Office held liable for granting such ridiculous patents in the first place. The lawyers are just playing the game that they've been trained to play, and corporations being corporations are doing the same.
At least this is two big companies that can afford the legal costs to fight. Smaller players don't stand a chance. The real enemy here is the game that's being played.
Yeah, but they state in their press release that the cards will be backwards-compatible.
This is true, but if the keys have been compromised then they'll need to re-key the new cards. The old cards will still need to be usable for some period of time until all have been recalled/reimbursed. Keeping in mind that these implementations are symmetric key systems with common master keys, so the new cards will need new keys and the readers will need to handle both cards.
For systems designed while considering this failure mode, the problem should be correctable by using pre-stored secondary keys in the reader for all new card issues, and a recall/reissue of all cards over a few months. For systems that didn't consider this, the readers may all need to be physically visited so they can be reloaded with new firmware and master keys.
Interestingly, when consulting for a transport company around 10 years ago, we implemented a system that used the DESFire engine in the card to provide an extra layer of protection on top of existing cryptographic security. So both needed to be compromised to successfully attack the card. This was done by letting the reader perform a set of cryptographic MAC calculations and store the digest signed transactions on the card in the form of a log. To mitigate replay/reset style attacks the system provided transaction checks at the database whenever the readers were synchronised (daily or continuously depending on the installation location), and black-lists that are sent out on the next sync whenever an attack was detected.
Offline nodes with daily (or shift-worker clock on/off) based database synchronisation were limited to small amounts (eg. a bus fare). Nodes that allowed larger amounts (eg. supermarkets) were required to be online to authorise the transaction. This made card duplication a high risk, low gain endeavour.
The sad thing is that 'security' systems are a dime-a-dozen, and many fail in so many areas that a cracked DESFire card is the least of their problems. As any engineer experienced in this area can attest, security implementation is a minefield of potential failure modes.
The summary poorly describes the real issue.
The encryption algorithm used in these cards is Triple DES. The 64 bit block cipher has not been cracked and still maintains approximately 80 equivalent bits of effective security with its 112 bit key.
However, the crack involves using a side chain attack and card profiling and allows the key to be retrieved within 3 to 7 hours. The attack is complicated, but has always generally suspected to be possible. Until now, no one had demonstrated and shown a detailed method to actually crack this type of card.
This is less of an immediate issue for security installations, as the systems are probably already backed with secondary verifiers (eg. biometrics, codes, etc) for high security requirements, and the access areas are probably counted in the low double digits. Not to mention that most 'security systems' seem to be composed mostly of security theatre anyway.
But, some systems using those cards are MUCH harder to retrofit (eg. electronic money/credit equivalents like metro systems, etc) where the infrastructure is highly diverse. And replacement would involve a massive process of card/reader swap outs, most likely with both systems operating in parallel for a time. Those systems also provide the most financial gain and lowest risk for criminal organisations if they can crack the security of the cards.
...a shiny new beige Macintosh 512K with a wide-carriage Imagewriter and external floppy drive. Using it felt like you were using something from Star Trek. I learned how to touch type doing papers on that thing.
On the keyboard? How quaint.
Yes, and trade secrets like those your company is holding are certainly one valid way to protect your company's IP.
The downside, however, is that both you and your competitors are wasting thousands of hours inventing the same new compositions. The pace of innovation throughout the industry is slowed, since there is so much duplication of effort. This shows that the existence of the patent system is just as important as ever, but that we need reform on the litigation side.
Interestingly, there are very few if any important discoveries / inventions that are lost to time, or effort wasted due to keeping something a trade secret versus publishing or patenting it. Most patents cover already very established principles with small variations that are generally easily reverse-engineered or are quite intuitive to anyone 'skilled in the art' trying to solve the same problem.
A large amount of duplicated work is inevitable even when the idea is publicly released, because most companies still need to go through an implementation cycle to be able to produce / develop their own version of the patented 'idea'. In most cases the 'key' patentable innovation is really about something quite obvious to anyone working on the problem. The fact that in the current development climate there are many companies working in parallel, unable to see the published patents until years after they submitted means that duplication of work is unavoidable - even if you're happy to try and license every patent out there that might even be tangentially related to your product.
In fact most venture capitalists tell people that it's more important to develop a product and 'get it out there' than to try and innovate around (or use) existing patents (and risk never ending up releasing the product).
Patents are being granted at a rate so high (and with such doubtful content) that it's a full time job for a team of patent lawyers to keep up with anyway, let alone a small engineering team who are focused on developing a product. The majority of the cost of litigation (whether researching, defending or attacking) is paying the legal fees, and that is not something that is a worthwhile expenditure (or future legal risk due to documented liability for intentional infringement) during the high technical risk of failure R&D phase of a new product development.
So in this way, patents do nothing to stop competitors from wasting thousands of hours/dollars re-inventing the same things. In fact, they end up costing more as the lawyers still need to eat too.
Apple sued Samsung because their product looked almost exactly like an iPad. If you were far enough away not to be able to read the logo, or it was covered by a finger, you'd probably think both products were the same. This is not something that can happen 'accidentally' and not something that slows innovation when stopped.
Then, in retaliation, Samsung sues Apple over broad brushed 'technical' patents that are dubious at best (along with I'd estimate 98% of granted technical patents that hardly meet the obviousness test to even someone unskilled in the relevant art, let alone someone skilled in it). This is where the problem with the patent system surfaces. Yes, Apple can be evil here too, but in this particular example, Samsung is playing games with the patent system after it was caught blatantly copying the outward appearance of Apple's product.
This isn't about a company in its final 'death throes' firing off the first desperate salvo, but of one company stopping another from confusing the market by outright copying the look of a product. I say this because I was trying to convince a friend that Apple i-devices are not actually rebadged Samsung devices (even though Samsung sells Apple some of the parts). He seemed to think it was like car manufacturers who just rebadge a third party car with their own brand to fill in a market segment where they don't have their own model. And everyone 'knows' that Samsung makes some of the major parts inside the iPhone/iPad, and by extension probably the whole device. The latest releases from Samsung are starting to look so much like Apple's products that this conclusion was inevitable.
I use lynx. Does this make me a God?
Only if you'd first downloaded lynx using a direct HTTP/HTML incantation into netcat, followed by a hand scripted decode to an executable file.