My recollection (and it has been a long time, so I may be way off) is that originally they were marketed simply as 'VHS'. This was to distinguish these types of machines from the other format, Beta. The VHS at that time stood for Vertical Helical Scan, but they were not 'marketed' using Vertical Helical Scan. I guess when people started asking what the heck VHS meant they came up with the 'Video Home System' name, probably because it made a lot more sense to most people than 'Vertical Helical Scan'. I don't remember a whole lot of marketing with the Video Home System name either, it always seemed to be just VHS.
The real problem with polls like this is that people such as youself take the results seriously. These polls do not show that people are dumb and getting dumber. There is no incentive at all to answering correctly, or punishment for answering incorrectly. Therefore, many people who get these polls are going to answer incorrectly because they think the purpose of the poll is to datamine them, or the poll has no useful purpose at all, or the poll is just clickbait. Many other people will answer randomly because they simply don't care. Now, supposing the 'poll' said 'you will get 10 free MP3s if you can identify what an MP3 is'. Now how many people do you supposed will know the 'correct' answer (or, even more importantly, how to find the correct answer)?
I believe that in the very next sentence I clarified that the FDIC is, in fact, a federal agency (unlike FedEx).
Odd that you don't post any opinion polls on people's trust of insurance companies to 'do the right thing'. I wonder why that is?
Nice PDF you linked to. Too bad it does not support your case in the slightest. After they talk about the sharesholders and unsecured creditors (which you count depositors among) losing all of their money when a large institution fails, they have this statement "Similarly, because the group remains solvent, retail or corporate depositors should not have an incentive to “run” from the firm under resolution insofar as their banking arrangements, transacted at the operating company level, remain unaffected. In order to achieve this, the authorities recognize the need for effective communication to depositors, making it clear that their deposits will be protected" (emphasis mine). Oops.
You seem to be missing something very important. The purpose of the FDIC is to give people confidence in the banks - they know their money is safe. The reason it gives people confidence is because it is the FEDERAL Depositors Insurance Corporation. It is a US goverment agency.
You say the bitcoin exchanges could set up the same kind of system, but why should anyone trust something set up by them? What, exactly, makes this insurance company any more reliable or trustworthy than the exchanges themselves?
'Bite' usually means an acidic or sour taste. That is not something most people are looking for in hamburger. Add in the fact that it has an 'intense' flavor and I don't see how you could say it was good.
Strange, it has been my experience that the ones swerving to make an exit are almost always the ones with a GPS mounted on the dash. Why? Well, my guess is that these idiots are so busy looking at their GPS that they don't even notice things like road signs that tell them the exit is approaching.
I see you know nothing about defensive driving. I'll make it easy for you: a driver is supposed to be AWARE of what is happening around him at all times. That means what is happening immediately in front of you, what is happening way down the road, what is happening to your rear, what is happening to your sides, what is happening with your vehicle. To do that, your eyes should be in motion at almost all times. What you should NEVER do is focus your gaze on any one spot, whether that spot is your phone, the rear of the car in front of you, a supposed 'heads up display', or anywhere else.
No, they don't. OVERALL accidents have decreased. Accidents from distracted driving have INCREASED. From 2011 to 2012 there was a 9% INCREASE in distracted driving injuries (to 421,000 people).
Your eyes are SUPPOSED to be taken off the road briefly and frequently. It is amazing the number of people who don't understand this simple rule. You are not supposed to sit there like a zombie looking at the same thing all the time.
No, it is not hard at all to see how these things are causing a problem. People are being killed and injured, property is being damaged by distracted drivers. A simple reading of the news would show you that. Just because OTHER causes of accidents are being removed does not in any way imply that THIS cause of accidents is 'not a problem'.
Not really that hard to figure out. Here is what the US copyright law gives copyright holders:
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
And here is the definition of 'publicly' from the US copyright law:
To perform or display a work “publicly” means—
(1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered
So, the right that is being infringed is 'perfom the work publicly'. A bar clearly falls under the definition of 'publicly', while it would be very difficult to claim that an interrogation room falls under that definition.
Most of the people I know who watch Jeopary! (including myself) do so because they like to 'play along'. The normal method of playing lets you do this - the low-value questions let you see what they mean by the categories, etc. This guy's style of play (prevent others from winning) effectively takes the audience out of the game also. At that point, it just becomes another sit-and-watch game show, and I have as much interest in watching that as any other game show - none.
I love this idea that municipal ownership would magically fix everything. What, exactly, are you smoking?
In my area the electric, gas, cable, internet, and telephone utilities are private. The water, sewer, and streets are municipal.
So what are the track records of each? Well, we do get an occasional power outage, mostly from falling tree limbs during storms. However, the electric company is constanly out trimming trees to try and avoid that. There is an occasional gas leak. When that happens the gas company is there and fixes the problem very quickly. I have way more channels and options available on cable than I ever had before - seems the cable company must have been improving its infrastructure. My internet connection is faster and more reliable than it ever has been, and I can't remember the last time there was an outage. Don't use POTS anymore, but can't recall ever having an outage when I did.
On the other hand, in my small town there is a water main break at least once a month. Their excuse? 'The system is very old and needs to be updated.' Are there any plans to do such an update? Nope.
A city near me had a 100 year old sanitary sewer main break which flooded several houses with raw sewage. The houses had to be torn down. They also have a collapsed sewer line that caused a sinkhole in the middle of a busy residential street. The street has been closed for 2 YEARS. So what are they doing? 'Deciding how to proceed'. They also have a major street with a lot of traffic lights. At one point the lights were pretty well synchronized so traffic moved smoothly. Something happened and they got out of sync - traffic is a nightmare. After a few months of this people were complaining rather loudly. The citys response? 'It would take the city electrician A WHOLE DAY to retime the lights - we can't afford that'. Been like that for about 5 years now.
Where I live (upstate NY) they have started putting brine on the roads well before a snow event, and it works great. For one thing, the first one or two inches that you shrug off are exactly when all the accidents occur. People are out doing their normal stuff, it starts to snow, and they try to get home. Prevent that first one or two inches from causing a problem and you have made an enormous difference.
Also, preventing the first one or two inches from sticking (when people are actually out driving) PREVENTS that 'great ice/slush base' from forming and makes it much easier for the plows to do a thorough job of removing the remaining snow. Then you don't have that base of compacted snow that needs salt dumped on it.
There was recently an article in the local paper that said pretreating with $200 of brine saved almost $2500 of salt per event, AND the roads are safer during the snow and get cleared quicker after the snow.
There are no 'fakes'. Every decryption produces a number that could be a credit card number (ie has the right format and passes the tests for number correctness). This is not a pre-generated 'fake', it is just the result of running the decryption algorithm with the wrong key.
As an example I gave elsewhere - generate a random block of data (/dev/random or whatever). Encrypt it with whatever algorithm you want. Now decrypt it with the wrong key. Can you tell (without looking at the cleartext) that the decryption used the wrong key? No, of course not, random data looks like random data. That is because no matter what key you use valid-looking data will be returned. Now use an algorithm that can only encrypt/decrypt credit card numbers, and you have the same thing. Every decryption will look like a credit card number.
Note that some of the generated numbers may actually BE valid credit card numbers. That does not matter as long as it is not the credit card number associated with the name on the card, etc.
That is not the point though. The point is that domain-specific encryption could be harder to brute-force than generic encryption that can produce results which are obviously false. So a credit card isn't just 16 random digits - so what? What is not random - the issuer ID and the check digit (there well be more, it does not matter). So treat those 'non-random' parts differently. Don't even bother storing the checksum, recalculate it when returing the result. The checksum will always be right then. There are more issuer IDs than issuers? So store the issuer ID as something other than the actual number.
As for passwords, this is not to prevent poor password choices. If good passwords are enforced, then the 'likely to resemble a word or phrase' doesn't apply.
Yes, I understand that an easy to guess password is weak. What I don't understand is the assertion that a randomly appearing password indicates that the password is weak. A randomly appearing password has equal chance of coming up 'd$a8%zyq' as it does 'password'. If my password was in fact 'd$a8%zyq' why would it be considered weak?
The decrypter is not generating 'plausible' passwords, it is generating 'possible' passwords. If someone is trying to break in using weak passwords they are not going to be randomly generating strings and looking for weak ones and trying them. However, if someone is trying to crack encryption by brute forcing all of the possible keys, then a whole bunch of results can be discarded immediately not because the results don't look plausible, but because the results are not possible (ie they contain things that can not be in a password). That is what this is trying to fix. This is not trying to fix 'weak' passwords, it is trying to make it harder to decrypt a database of passwords, regardless of how strong the passwords in it are.
Help me understand this. If the 'wrong' results are truly random data that happens to look correct (as decrypting with the wrong key should be), then how does a match imply that a chosen password was weak? If the data is random isn't it equally as likely that any string would come up as a possible password? Why would a 'weak' password be more likely to come up than a 'strong' password?
Also, what would be the problem if the random password does match some elses? If your password is 'xyz', and I try password 'xyz' on my userid, it doesn't magically give me access to your account.
No. Consider this: today encryption algorithms work on binary data (bytes). Suppose I generate a random block of binary data, and encrypt is using whatever well-known algorithm you tell me to use. I give you the encrypted output. Can you tell what key was used to perform the encryption, or tell me what the original data was? No, because no matter what key you use you will always get back a random block of data, so which is the 'correct' data?
Now suppose, instead of using an algorithm that can encrypt (and thus decrypt) and random binary data I use an algorithm that can only encrypt/decrypt a credit card number or a password. No matter what key you try to use to decode, you will always get something that looks like a credit card number or password. You can know the algoritm, and you can have the encrypted data, and you still have no way of knowing which key is correct because all the results look the same.
Slashdot Mirror
My recollection (and it has been a long time, so I may be way off) is that originally they were marketed simply as 'VHS'. This was to distinguish these types of machines from the other format, Beta. The VHS at that time stood for Vertical Helical Scan, but they were not 'marketed' using Vertical Helical Scan. I guess when people started asking what the heck VHS meant they came up with the 'Video Home System' name, probably because it made a lot more sense to most people than 'Vertical Helical Scan'. I don't remember a whole lot of marketing with the Video Home System name either, it always seemed to be just VHS.
So, your assertion is that people who save money buy using coupon sites are automatically on the low end of the IQ scale? Interesting.
The real problem with polls like this is that people such as youself take the results seriously. These polls do not show that people are dumb and getting dumber. There is no incentive at all to answering correctly, or punishment for answering incorrectly. Therefore, many people who get these polls are going to answer incorrectly because they think the purpose of the poll is to datamine them, or the poll has no useful purpose at all, or the poll is just clickbait. Many other people will answer randomly because they simply don't care. Now, supposing the 'poll' said 'you will get 10 free MP3s if you can identify what an MP3 is'. Now how many people do you supposed will know the 'correct' answer (or, even more importantly, how to find the correct answer)?
VHS originally meant Vertical Helical Scan.
I believe that in the very next sentence I clarified that the FDIC is, in fact, a federal agency (unlike FedEx).
Odd that you don't post any opinion polls on people's trust of insurance companies to 'do the right thing'. I wonder why that is?
Nice PDF you linked to. Too bad it does not support your case in the slightest. After they talk about the sharesholders and unsecured creditors (which you count depositors among) losing all of their money when a large institution fails, they have this statement "Similarly, because the group remains solvent, retail or corporate depositors should not have an incentive to “run” from the firm under resolution insofar as their banking arrangements, transacted at the operating company level, remain unaffected. In order to achieve this, the authorities recognize the need for effective communication to depositors, making it clear that their deposits will be protected" (emphasis mine). Oops.
You seem to be missing something very important. The purpose of the FDIC is to give people confidence in the banks - they know their money is safe. The reason it gives people confidence is because it is the FEDERAL Depositors Insurance Corporation. It is a US goverment agency.
You say the bitcoin exchanges could set up the same kind of system, but why should anyone trust something set up by them? What, exactly, makes this insurance company any more reliable or trustworthy than the exchanges themselves?
'Bite' usually means an acidic or sour taste. That is not something most people are looking for in hamburger. Add in the fact that it has an 'intense' flavor and I don't see how you could say it was good.
Strange, it has been my experience that the ones swerving to make an exit are almost always the ones with a GPS mounted on the dash. Why? Well, my guess is that these idiots are so busy looking at their GPS that they don't even notice things like road signs that tell them the exit is approaching.
I see you know nothing about defensive driving. I'll make it easy for you: a driver is supposed to be AWARE of what is happening around him at all times. That means what is happening immediately in front of you, what is happening way down the road, what is happening to your rear, what is happening to your sides, what is happening with your vehicle. To do that, your eyes should be in motion at almost all times. What you should NEVER do is focus your gaze on any one spot, whether that spot is your phone, the rear of the car in front of you, a supposed 'heads up display', or anywhere else.
No, they don't. OVERALL accidents have decreased. Accidents from distracted driving have INCREASED. From 2011 to 2012 there was a 9% INCREASE in distracted driving injuries (to 421,000 people).
Your eyes are SUPPOSED to be taken off the road briefly and frequently. It is amazing the number of people who don't understand this simple rule. You are not supposed to sit there like a zombie looking at the same thing all the time.
Is that supposed to be a bad thing?
No, it is not hard at all to see how these things are causing a problem. People are being killed and injured, property is being damaged by distracted drivers. A simple reading of the news would show you that. Just because OTHER causes of accidents are being removed does not in any way imply that THIS cause of accidents is 'not a problem'.
Sure, if you go to court and get the debt discharged. If you just don't bother returning borrowed property it is just theft.
This wasn't owing a debt, it was plain old theft.
Not really that hard to figure out. Here is what the US copyright law gives copyright holders:
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
And here is the definition of 'publicly' from the US copyright law:
To perform or display a work “publicly” means—
(1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered
So, the right that is being infringed is 'perfom the work publicly'. A bar clearly falls under the definition of 'publicly', while it would be very difficult to claim that an interrogation room falls under that definition.
The shows are taped months in advance. None of what you said applies.
Most of the people I know who watch Jeopary! (including myself) do so because they like to 'play along'. The normal method of playing lets you do this - the low-value questions let you see what they mean by the categories, etc. This guy's style of play (prevent others from winning) effectively takes the audience out of the game also. At that point, it just becomes another sit-and-watch game show, and I have as much interest in watching that as any other game show - none.
I love this idea that municipal ownership would magically fix everything. What, exactly, are you smoking?
In my area the electric, gas, cable, internet, and telephone utilities are private. The water, sewer, and streets are municipal.
So what are the track records of each? Well, we do get an occasional power outage, mostly from falling tree limbs during storms. However, the electric company is constanly out trimming trees to try and avoid that. There is an occasional gas leak. When that happens the gas company is there and fixes the problem very quickly. I have way more channels and options available on cable than I ever had before - seems the cable company must have been improving its infrastructure. My internet connection is faster and more reliable than it ever has been, and I can't remember the last time there was an outage. Don't use POTS anymore, but can't recall ever having an outage when I did.
On the other hand, in my small town there is a water main break at least once a month. Their excuse? 'The system is very old and needs to be updated.' Are there any plans to do such an update? Nope.
A city near me had a 100 year old sanitary sewer main break which flooded several houses with raw sewage. The houses had to be torn down. They also have a collapsed sewer line that caused a sinkhole in the middle of a busy residential street. The street has been closed for 2 YEARS. So what are they doing? 'Deciding how to proceed'. They also have a major street with a lot of traffic lights. At one point the lights were pretty well synchronized so traffic moved smoothly. Something happened and they got out of sync - traffic is a nightmare. After a few months of this people were complaining rather loudly. The citys response? 'It would take the city electrician A WHOLE DAY to retime the lights - we can't afford that'. Been like that for about 5 years now.
Yeah, municipal ownership sure is a magic bullet.
Where I live (upstate NY) they have started putting brine on the roads well before a snow event, and it works great. For one thing, the first one or two inches that you shrug off are exactly when all the accidents occur. People are out doing their normal stuff, it starts to snow, and they try to get home. Prevent that first one or two inches from causing a problem and you have made an enormous difference.
Also, preventing the first one or two inches from sticking (when people are actually out driving) PREVENTS that 'great ice/slush base' from forming and makes it much easier for the plows to do a thorough job of removing the remaining snow. Then you don't have that base of compacted snow that needs salt dumped on it.
There was recently an article in the local paper that said pretreating with $200 of brine saved almost $2500 of salt per event, AND the roads are safer during the snow and get cleared quicker after the snow.
There are no 'fakes'. Every decryption produces a number that could be a credit card number (ie has the right format and passes the tests for number correctness). This is not a pre-generated 'fake', it is just the result of running the decryption algorithm with the wrong key.
As an example I gave elsewhere - generate a random block of data (/dev/random or whatever). Encrypt it with whatever algorithm you want. Now decrypt it with the wrong key. Can you tell (without looking at the cleartext) that the decryption used the wrong key? No, of course not, random data looks like random data. That is because no matter what key you use valid-looking data will be returned. Now use an algorithm that can only encrypt/decrypt credit card numbers, and you have the same thing. Every decryption will look like a credit card number.
Note that some of the generated numbers may actually BE valid credit card numbers. That does not matter as long as it is not the credit card number associated with the name on the card, etc.
That is not the point though. The point is that domain-specific encryption could be harder to brute-force than generic encryption that can produce results which are obviously false. So a credit card isn't just 16 random digits - so what? What is not random - the issuer ID and the check digit (there well be more, it does not matter). So treat those 'non-random' parts differently. Don't even bother storing the checksum, recalculate it when returing the result. The checksum will always be right then. There are more issuer IDs than issuers? So store the issuer ID as something other than the actual number.
As for passwords, this is not to prevent poor password choices. If good passwords are enforced, then the 'likely to resemble a word or phrase' doesn't apply.
Yes, I understand that an easy to guess password is weak. What I don't understand is the assertion that a randomly appearing password indicates that the password is weak. A randomly appearing password has equal chance of coming up 'd$a8%zyq' as it does 'password'. If my password was in fact 'd$a8%zyq' why would it be considered weak?
The decrypter is not generating 'plausible' passwords, it is generating 'possible' passwords. If someone is trying to break in using weak passwords they are not going to be randomly generating strings and looking for weak ones and trying them. However, if someone is trying to crack encryption by brute forcing all of the possible keys, then a whole bunch of results can be discarded immediately not because the results don't look plausible, but because the results are not possible (ie they contain things that can not be in a password). That is what this is trying to fix. This is not trying to fix 'weak' passwords, it is trying to make it harder to decrypt a database of passwords, regardless of how strong the passwords in it are.
Help me understand this. If the 'wrong' results are truly random data that happens to look correct (as decrypting with the wrong key should be), then how does a match imply that a chosen password was weak? If the data is random isn't it equally as likely that any string would come up as a possible password? Why would a 'weak' password be more likely to come up than a 'strong' password?
Also, what would be the problem if the random password does match some elses? If your password is 'xyz', and I try password 'xyz' on my userid, it doesn't magically give me access to your account.
No. Consider this: today encryption algorithms work on binary data (bytes). Suppose I generate a random block of binary data, and encrypt is using whatever well-known algorithm you tell me to use. I give you the encrypted output. Can you tell what key was used to perform the encryption, or tell me what the original data was? No, because no matter what key you use you will always get back a random block of data, so which is the 'correct' data?
Now suppose, instead of using an algorithm that can encrypt (and thus decrypt) and random binary data I use an algorithm that can only encrypt/decrypt a credit card number or a password. No matter what key you try to use to decode, you will always get something that looks like a credit card number or password. You can know the algoritm, and you can have the encrypted data, and you still have no way of knowing which key is correct because all the results look the same.