If you're an evil socialist (or just a planner faced with limited resources), you can also use the exponential speedup to invert detailed Leontief matrices quickly. That's pretty useful. As for expansion, well, let's just hope there's a similar speedup to be found in linear programming:)
DRM can't be about piracy. In the very best case, it's about opening day piracy; any longer and the cracks are already out, and you don't have to be a wizard to go to TPB or GameCopyWorld and download them.
Obviously if you're going to try to transfer large files over UDP you're going to need to develop some way to ensure reliable delivery - which is exactly what TCP does.
You could also forget about reliability and simply use forward error correction instead, in particular rateless erasure codes. Some UDP packets will be lost, but that's of no concern, since they'll be regained later through combinations of other packets. This could even be used to make a very simple mirroring system: request different codings of the same file from all mirrors, and when you've got enough packets to reassemble the entire thing, tell all the mirrors to stop.
What they should have done was this: Cut the provider's proverbial balls off. Then snap up the next ten or twenty domains. Connect them all to a server that instructs the bots that get there to uninstall themselves. I can see why they didn't, though; they could have been liable for any unintended effects (computers crashing, whatever), which is why that step should ideally have been done by some anonymous or pseudonymous party.
How about a decentralized Blue Frog? Hook up the system to a DHT and use cryptographic signatures with some sort of replication system. The idea would be that the "maintainers" would introduce a (properly signed) message into the network, then the computers on the net would propagate it to the other nodes. If any single node is taken down, well, the net just routes around it. So that it wouldn't be considered a DDoS, each node might have a backoff system that stops sending stuff if the target computer is unresponsive.
For bonus points, have each node host a small "web server" that just serves up an AA419/Lad Vampire type script, so anyone can join in the action. If you really want to make the Best Blue Frog Ever, connect the entire thing to a corruption-resistant trust metric, like Advogato's.
Try cancelling your government sometime. Typically, you get "cancelled" instead.
It's called emigration. You can even truly cancel your government: get a ship and travel to international waters.
That the government tries to "cancel" you when you cancel your government is no different from that corporate security would try to "cancel" you if you stayed on premises after being fired. (Well, actually they would get the police to haul you off to jail or fine; but in a cyberpunk world, there would be no police)
If market is a more true democracy than any democracy, why not cut out the middle man? Why aren't the electors up for bids, and why didn't the founding fathers set it up that way? Perhaps it's all related to what Jefferson said about "monied corporations", and perhaps the market isn't fundamentally democratic.
I'm not sure if this particular plant does this, but I remember reading a proposal a number of years ago that discussed using a similar process to "crack" garbage much the same way as cracking crude oil.
You're thinking of thermal depolymerization. The article talks about a plasma converter, which is quite different.
Because plasmafication reduces everything to component atoms, you'd be able to separate out each element and collect it - so all that evil carbon could be collected and stored.
If you have a fusion reactor (yeah, I know), you could create the true mother of all recyclers in the form of a fusion torch. Input: any waste, output: materials sorted by element. That doesn't generate power, but consumes it, however.
The botnet is fast flux, but the master servers are relatively stationary; at least that's the impression I got from the paper. But it doesn't matter if they use fast flux. Just do a DNS lookup regularly and spoof DDoS commands targeting the new IP. If the botnet supports DDoS referenced by name, you don't even have to do anything. One would expect the DDoS part to have this functionality; otherwise, the affected servers of a "regular" DDoS could just move out of the way as with Code Red and the White House.
How about turning the machines on them? As far as I understood from the scientific paper, the proxy hosts are contacted by the botmasters (through servers run on bulletproof hosting). Thus it would seem pretty easy to just substitute the send spam command (when the workers ask) with a "DDoS this target" command, where the target is the botmaster server you got the original spam command from. The stronger the botnet, the harder it falls, and while bulletproof hosting servers may scoff at threats of police action, they sure won't like being DDoSed up the wazoo.
While you can read off entangled states with the particles separated at any distance, you can't get any information out of them faster than c. The observation will mess up the result. You can get around that by transmitting classical information about the error in addition, but that classical transmission will be bounded by c.
In the experiment mentioned by New Scientist, note that the setup uses an external light source. Some of the photons hit the object, while others are captured at the same time (but through a different path). The photons naturally travel at c, and synchronization is required to get the correct result.
Re:Most humans aren't that smart
on
The State of Game AI
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sure, it's easy to make hard enemies. Just look at the Duke 3D bot. Absolutely no brains, but it moved like a rabbit on crack, and therefore it would beat you every time (unless you had a great advantage).
However, bots like that aren't any fun. It's more fun if the bots have limitations that at least somehow resemble the limitations players have; can't turn quickly, nor move too fast, know the map by instinct, etc.. Then, within those constraints, use AI and use AI well.
Put a limit on how many commands the enemy can do in a certain time for FPSes - or a limit on the rapidity it can issue commands in RTSes.. and suddenly you have a much more interesting problem. Or for that matter, let the player decide how smart the enemy should be, and whether or not it can cheat (issue a thousand orders in a second?). If he likes playing against a cheating bastard, let him play against a cheating bastard; if he wants to play against a chessmaster with no mobility and all brains, let him do so, that he'll be surprised when it still beats him.
No, because you (or rather, the exploit algorithm) picks pad1 and pad2. To quote Wikipedia,
Because the current collision-finding techniques allow the preceding hash state to be specified arbitrarily, a collision can be found for any desired prefix; that is, for any given string of characters X, two colliding files can be determined which both begin with X.
Let's take that to the pedophile example. Sure, you can make two files, evil1 and evil2 that are both kiddy pr0n pictures (as long as it's the same pr0n picture) but with different padding, and thus get a collision; i.e, you can compute pad1 and pad2 so that evil1 = evil + pad1, evil2 = evil + pad2, MD5(evil1) = MD5(evil2). But this doesn't help you!
What you want is to find pad1 so that MD5(evil + pad1) = MD5(pbrush.exe) or something. That's a preimage attack, and that's not what the MD5 vulnerability is.
What you could use the collision attack to perform would be to have an executable file, call it detX, that either runs paintbrush or a virus, depending on what padding it has. Since you can't choose the padding yourself, you'd have to make 256 variants, the first being "if the last byte is 0 run paintbrush else run virus", the next being "if the last byte is 1 run paintbrush else run virus" and so on. Then you release the paintbrush variant dx1 = detX + pad1 to have it whitelisted (or whatnot). Then later, you release the virus variant, dx2, detX + pad2, which has the same MD5, and sneak through the defenses... if the defenses were that simple.
I'm not quite sure if the MD5 attack can be used to find collisions so that MD5(x + pad1) = MD5(y + pad2), where pad1 and pad2 are computed by the exploit. If so, you could use it to get someone to sign the hash of "I give you $5" plus padding, then show others he signed the hash of "I give you $5 million" plus some other padding. But again, I'm not sure, and it wouldn't help you sneak files through the radar anyway.
No. The break against MD5 is not a preimage attack, it's a collision attack. This means you can pad two files so that MD5(a + pad1) = MD5(b + pad2). It doesn't mean that you can make a file so that MD5(a + pad) = MD5(b) - not in anything less than 2^64 expected time and space, anyway.
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of s***ch, or the right of the people peaceably to ***emble, and to pe***ion the government for a redress of grievances.
I hope quantum immortality is false, or we'll all be in for a world of pain at the end, as our organs will work just enough to keep us alive, but no more.
Freenet is too ephemeral. Content appears and disappears from popularity alone, and the routing mechanism is very slow. I2P would be better, but it's still slow (and I don't know if it provides end-to-end security, which the various Tor snooping stories have shown to be needed).
The more I read about these things, of how internet access is being limited, the more I think there should be a general encryption protocol that could be applied to data traveling on the internet. Sort of like SSL, but without the certificate authorities (webs of trust instead, perhaps? Or some magic P2P technology).
The point of such a protocol would be to make opaque all traffic going on so that it's impossible to say what it's getting (and perhaps with proxies, where it's going or where it's coming from). Then censorship would fail.
This needs to be done, because stories like these show that governments won't practice self restraint when trying to rein in the internet or tame its wilderness.
There were ideas to make sending email "expensive", would it be possible to apply this here? Use a calculation that is expensive to solve but where the solution is easy to test, such as factoring a large number. The biggest problem with the scheme is that a solver has to be added to the browser somehow.
That's proof of work. Proof of work doesn't work unless you use the equivalent of price discrimination. To do price discrimination, you'll need a trust network, so proof of work may work with mail, but not with web services unless the website is very popular.
If you're going to use proof of work, use something that's memory bound instead of CPU bound - the acceleration rate (Moore's law constant) for memory access times is longer than for CPU processing speed, so you don't hurt old computers as much.
Slashdot Mirror
Colons already have another meaning in the context of network connections - port prefix. 192.168.0.1:80 is HTTP.
What's IPv6's port prefix?
Does this make anybody else think of the "sim-stims" of Neuromancer?
If you're an evil socialist (or just a planner faced with limited resources), you can also use the exponential speedup to invert detailed Leontief matrices quickly. That's pretty useful. As for expansion, well, let's just hope there's a similar speedup to be found in linear programming :)
DRM can't be about piracy. In the very best case, it's about opening day piracy; any longer and the cracks are already out, and you don't have to be a wizard to go to TPB or GameCopyWorld and download them.
Obviously if you're going to try to transfer large files over UDP you're going to need to develop some way to ensure reliable delivery - which is exactly what TCP does.
You could also forget about reliability and simply use forward error correction instead, in particular rateless erasure codes. Some UDP packets will be lost, but that's of no concern, since they'll be regained later through combinations of other packets. This could even be used to make a very simple mirroring system: request different codings of the same file from all mirrors, and when you've got enough packets to reassemble the entire thing, tell all the mirrors to stop.
The real next step: file transfers over HTTP. Or go right out and tunnel IP over HTTP!
What they should have done was this: Cut the provider's proverbial balls off. Then snap up the next ten or twenty domains. Connect them all to a server that instructs the bots that get there to uninstall themselves. I can see why they didn't, though; they could have been liable for any unintended effects (computers crashing, whatever), which is why that step should ideally have been done by some anonymous or pseudonymous party.
How about a decentralized Blue Frog? Hook up the system to a DHT and use cryptographic signatures with some sort of replication system. The idea would be that the "maintainers" would introduce a (properly signed) message into the network, then the computers on the net would propagate it to the other nodes. If any single node is taken down, well, the net just routes around it. So that it wouldn't be considered a DDoS, each node might have a backoff system that stops sending stuff if the target computer is unresponsive.
For bonus points, have each node host a small "web server" that just serves up an AA419/Lad Vampire type script, so anyone can join in the action. If you really want to make the Best Blue Frog Ever, connect the entire thing to a corruption-resistant trust metric, like Advogato's.
Try cancelling your government sometime. Typically, you get "cancelled" instead.
It's called emigration. You can even truly cancel your government: get a ship and travel to international waters.
That the government tries to "cancel" you when you cancel your government is no different from that corporate security would try to "cancel" you if you stayed on premises after being fired. (Well, actually they would get the police to haul you off to jail or fine; but in a cyberpunk world, there would be no police)
If market is a more true democracy than any democracy, why not cut out the middle man? Why aren't the electors up for bids, and why didn't the founding fathers set it up that way? Perhaps it's all related to what Jefferson said about "monied corporations", and perhaps the market isn't fundamentally democratic.
The natural conclusion of this is, of course, to replace the Presidential election with a Presidential Auction. Yet we don't, for some reason.
You're thinking of thermal depolymerization. The article talks about a plasma converter, which is quite different.
If you have a fusion reactor (yeah, I know), you could create the true mother of all recyclers in the form of a fusion torch. Input: any waste, output: materials sorted by element. That doesn't generate power, but consumes it, however.
The botnet is fast flux, but the master servers are relatively stationary; at least that's the impression I got from the paper. But it doesn't matter if they use fast flux. Just do a DNS lookup regularly and spoof DDoS commands targeting the new IP. If the botnet supports DDoS referenced by name, you don't even have to do anything. One would expect the DDoS part to have this functionality; otherwise, the affected servers of a "regular" DDoS could just move out of the way as with Code Red and the White House.
How about turning the machines on them? As far as I understood from the scientific paper, the proxy hosts are contacted by the botmasters (through servers run on bulletproof hosting). Thus it would seem pretty easy to just substitute the send spam command (when the workers ask) with a "DDoS this target" command, where the target is the botmaster server you got the original spam command from. The stronger the botnet, the harder it falls, and while bulletproof hosting servers may scoff at threats of police action, they sure won't like being DDoSed up the wazoo.
While you can read off entangled states with the particles separated at any distance, you can't get any information out of them faster than c. The observation will mess up the result. You can get around that by transmitting classical information about the error in addition, but that classical transmission will be bounded by c.
In the experiment mentioned by New Scientist, note that the setup uses an external light source. Some of the photons hit the object, while others are captured at the same time (but through a different path). The photons naturally travel at c, and synchronization is required to get the correct result.
Sure, it's easy to make hard enemies. Just look at the Duke 3D bot. Absolutely no brains, but it moved like a rabbit on crack, and therefore it would beat you every time (unless you had a great advantage).
However, bots like that aren't any fun. It's more fun if the bots have limitations that at least somehow resemble the limitations players have; can't turn quickly, nor move too fast, know the map by instinct, etc.. Then, within those constraints, use AI and use AI well.
Put a limit on how many commands the enemy can do in a certain time for FPSes - or a limit on the rapidity it can issue commands in RTSes.. and suddenly you have a much more interesting problem. Or for that matter, let the player decide how smart the enemy should be, and whether or not it can cheat (issue a thousand orders in a second?). If he likes playing against a cheating bastard, let him play against a cheating bastard; if he wants to play against a chessmaster with no mobility and all brains, let him do so, that he'll be surprised when it still beats him.
Now they need to crack HDCP.
No, Lieutenant, your HDCP is already dead.
No, because you (or rather, the exploit algorithm) picks pad1 and pad2. To quote Wikipedia,
Because the current collision-finding techniques allow the preceding hash state to be specified arbitrarily, a collision can be found for any desired prefix; that is, for any given string of characters X, two colliding files can be determined which both begin with X.
Let's take that to the pedophile example. Sure, you can make two files, evil1 and evil2 that are both kiddy pr0n pictures (as long as it's the same pr0n picture) but with different padding, and thus get a collision; i.e, you can compute pad1 and pad2 so that evil1 = evil + pad1, evil2 = evil + pad2, MD5(evil1) = MD5(evil2). But this doesn't help you!
What you want is to find pad1 so that MD5(evil + pad1) = MD5(pbrush.exe) or something. That's a preimage attack, and that's not what the MD5 vulnerability is.
What you could use the collision attack to perform would be to have an executable file, call it detX, that either runs paintbrush or a virus, depending on what padding it has. Since you can't choose the padding yourself, you'd have to make 256 variants, the first being "if the last byte is 0 run paintbrush else run virus", the next being "if the last byte is 1 run paintbrush else run virus" and so on. Then you release the paintbrush variant dx1 = detX + pad1 to have it whitelisted (or whatnot). Then later, you release the virus variant, dx2, detX + pad2, which has the same MD5, and sneak through the defenses... if the defenses were that simple.
I'm not quite sure if the MD5 attack can be used to find collisions so that MD5(x + pad1) = MD5(y + pad2), where pad1 and pad2 are computed by the exploit. If so, you could use it to get someone to sign the hash of "I give you $5" plus padding, then show others he signed the hash of "I give you $5 million" plus some other padding. But again, I'm not sure, and it wouldn't help you sneak files through the radar anyway.
No. The break against MD5 is not a preimage attack, it's a collision attack. This means you can pad two files so that MD5(a + pad1) = MD5(b + pad2). It doesn't mean that you can make a file so that MD5(a + pad) = MD5(b) - not in anything less than 2^64 expected time and space, anyway.
I prefer this one:
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of s***ch, or the right of the people peaceably to ***emble, and to pe***ion the government for a redress of grievances.
I hope quantum immortality is false, or we'll all be in for a world of pain at the end, as our organs will work just enough to keep us alive, but no more.
Freenet is too ephemeral. Content appears and disappears from popularity alone, and the routing mechanism is very slow. I2P would be better, but it's still slow (and I don't know if it provides end-to-end security, which the various Tor snooping stories have shown to be needed).
The more I read about these things, of how internet access is being limited, the more I think there should be a general encryption protocol that could be applied to data traveling on the internet. Sort of like SSL, but without the certificate authorities (webs of trust instead, perhaps? Or some magic P2P technology).
The point of such a protocol would be to make opaque all traffic going on so that it's impossible to say what it's getting (and perhaps with proxies, where it's going or where it's coming from). Then censorship would fail.
This needs to be done, because stories like these show that governments won't practice self restraint when trying to rein in the internet or tame its wilderness.
I am not.. a machi... BOOM!
There were ideas to make sending email "expensive", would it be possible to apply this here? Use a calculation that is expensive to solve but where the solution is easy to test, such as factoring a large number. The biggest problem with the scheme is that a solver has to be added to the browser somehow.
That's proof of work. Proof of work doesn't work unless you use the equivalent of price discrimination. To do price discrimination, you'll need a trust network, so proof of work may work with mail, but not with web services unless the website is very popular.
If you're going to use proof of work, use something that's memory bound instead of CPU bound - the acceleration rate (Moore's law constant) for memory access times is longer than for CPU processing speed, so you don't hurt old computers as much.