Anybody else feel like this is an incursion on freedom of speech?
It'd take some fairly tortured logic-chopping to argue otherwise; but the "Won't somebody think of the Children?" card is in play, so the court may or may not be sharpening its best logic choppers as we speak...
The problem is not so much of distinguishing the true scotsmen from the false ones, they generally aren't too subtle about it; but in dealing with a large swarm of vociferous false scotsmen who insist that they are the genuine article, and anybody who stands against them is immoral scum....
Copper Man find human oxidation response pitiful. Human exhibit wasteful thrashing and screaming upon oxidation, offend bystanders with futile noises and charred remains.
Copper Man resist oxidation. Maintain readiness for duty until tasteful patina develop. Then still ready for duty. Also art object.
I'm assuming that the copper was there to speed the spread of heat around the model's surface, more closely simulating a human with a circulatory system, and making it easier to see if you had a serious localized leak without hundreds of temperature test points; but does anybody know how the rest of the thing worked?
Was it instrumented in some way(registering thermometers stuck to the surface in various places? thermocouples?) or was it heated, dressed, shoved in the freezer for a set period, and then measured on removal to see how effectively heat loss had been retarded?
I get the sense that the big copper guy was merely the most charismatic element of a more complete test system...
The Republican party did not ally itself with the "bible-thumpers". The Republican party is the most logical place for them.
Seems reasonable enough. Who doesn't remember the touching scene in the Gospel of Mises(10:12-26) where Jesus selflessly defends the moneychangers in the temple from excessive capital gains taxes? Or the section shortly thereafter when he resists the blandishments of Judas, the liberal, and upholds intellectual property rights and avoids creating an underclass dependent on handouts by refusing the pirate the loaves and fishes?
All jest aside, the only way a 'bible-thumper' could endorse contemporary Republican(or, for that matter, contemporary Democratic) policy is by making sure not to read past the old testament, and, even there, some amount of studious ignoring will be required...
It is a much bigger change in that respect, as you say.(A delight, no doubt, to everyone with a potentially-homicidal psycho ex, hypersensitive employer, or school whose admins treat it as axiomatic that every red cup contains booze...) I'm not even one of those, and I still think that the trend is not a good one. Alias stability is useful(ie. short of breaking my password, nobody can impersonate 'fuzzyfuzzyfungus' on slashdot), so it is possible to assign consistent evaluations to aliases; but the case for tying people to Real Legal Name is substantially weaker and has a much longer list of people who will definitely see a significant cost, aside from important but somewhat nebulous 'privacy' considerations.
There is also the issue, not as large as "average joe", but substantially smaller than "Google, Facebook, Acxiom, and the NSA", of the fairly substantial number of people who have some degree of greater-than-average-joe Big Brother access. There are a lot of cops, HR background-checkers, and buddies thereof out there, and (while they generally aren't supposed to, and occasionally get fired for) they often have more than usual access unless somebody catches them abusing it.
My only hope is that, by pushing the issue in people's faces, they end up raising awareness about how much privacy is on the rocks at present, with no signs of future improvement. In particular, while it doesn't take a genius to guess how Google might infer that "fuzzyfuzzyfungus" probably isn't a real name, I hope that those who tried the "I'll just sign up with a plausible sounding fake name/nickname" gambit and end up being detected spend some quality time thinking about what their detection implies.
While I deeply dislike the increasing trend(among Google, facebook, et. al.) to try to pin real IDs to users for fun and profit, I do think that there is one upside:
Historically, people have vastly overestimated the degree of anonymity they enjoy on the internet. IPs are pretty readily geolocated(and ISPs certainly don't have any trouble correlating them with CC details...), correlation of snippets of social networking information can be quite powerful, persistent tracking cookies and similar trickery do their job, and so forth.
In a way, then, the more visible, public, deployments of real-name requirements, automated facial recognition, etc. are really a public debut of what the pros have already had on virtually everybody who isn't a cypherpunk or a hermit for some time now. Hopefully public squeamishness will prove useful...
Yeah, Windows 8 would pretty much have to stick to running on consoles and/or whatever MS is calling their Palladium/NGSCB/'Trusted Computing' dystopia platform these days if they were serious about avoiding a modification of the local binary.
My point was merely that the old "FooCorp obfuscates their client/server protocol to slow creation of compatible implementation, hackers figure it out anyway" cycle is increasingly obsolete for software (and pretty much any 'appliance' not designed by morons) DRM/lock-in purposes. Obfuscation takes effort, increases the likelihood and trickiness of bugs, and can only slow a competent attacker. SSL or equivalent is comparatively easy, standard, doesn't add too much complexity, and is functionally impossible to forge. Only a client-side defeat of the phone-home mechanism will do, no matter how sane and trivially comprehensible the protocol is.
The machine generates a long-ish alphanumeric sequence and gives you the phone number of some MS call-center. You call, read the poor bastard on the other end that sequence, he reads you one back, you type it in.
Putting on my not-at-all-a-cryptoanalyst-don't-trust-me hat, I suspect that the sequences in question are a bit short to be a useful side channel; but the process is not the paragon of convenience.
According to iSuppli(whose accuracy is debateable; but should at least provide ballpark numbers), somebody is eating a major per unit loss to provide the $99/$150 price point. Frankly, unless those numbers are pretty pessimistic, I'm a little bit surprised that the units were retailed at all a little surprising. It'd almost be worth tearing the 16GB units down for the screen and battery in bulk...
Weed is, if not native to the Americas, a very well naturalized visitor, and it is pretty weed-like. According to 2005 figures, well over 95% of the plants eradicated in US law enforcement operations were just wild growing weed weeds, rather than the cultivated stuff.
While I think that this plan is sheer insanity on their part, given how utterly sucky it is compared with ITMS, Amazon, Pandora, etc. it sounds eerily like something that somebody who thinks that the historical success of BlackBerry Messenger is broadly applicable would come up with...
BBM is also BlackBerry only(to send or receive) and is pretty much just another IM service(the encryption helped sell it on the suit side; but the consumer market doesn't much care). I imagine that some of their higher-ups have been sucked into believing that they can, against all reason, build a music distribution mechanism on the same model...
What android phones or iphone have actual joysticks? I must have missed those. And which ones have quad cores and the highest-end PowerVR GPU? And 5-inch OLED screen? This is a portable game console, not a phone that can do lightweight gaming. There IS a place for dedicated hardware, even if you personally don't need or want it.
There problem is not so much competing on specs with multipurpose hardware; but whether the much larger installed bases of A)expensive smartphones that people already have, linked to impulse-buy download stores and B)cheap handheld consoles like their own now-reasonably-priced PSP and anything Nintendo that isn't a 3DS will cause their game libraries to suffer...
It is hard to deny that this device will be a technologically superior mobile gaming device; but it is much less clear that it will achieve the critical mass needed to get a good library of titles: The techheads(and, with iPhones, also the suits and the soccer moms) already have an inferior; but zero-additional-cost-because-they-already-have-it smartphone that is still pretty powerful(those that care about games may well also have a console at home and/or strong opinions on PC gaming). The impecunious and the kiddies probably aren't going to like the Sony price for a 5-inch OLED, highest-end SoC, slabs of RAM, and new-release titles. A fair few members of both will lust after this; but will they drop their smartphones/NDSes/PSPs-with-a-memory-stick-full-of-ISOs and shell out?
In an ideal world, the software wouldn't be so damn trusting; but this seems like a problem that(until the ideal world appears on the back of the world-peace pony) could be solved by a ~$1 cheapass dongle device.
Connector suitable to phone/device in question on one side, whatever tricks are needed to convince that class of device that this is an Officially Blessed Charger(usually some resister-based fuckery on the data pins or a simple USB handshake of some sort) and USB cable with only +5 and GND lines physically present on the other side.
Until phones get serious, and act like vulnerable general-purpose computers storing a fuckload of personal data that have just been plugged into an assumed-hostile network, simply air-gapping the data lines when you are charging seems like the way to go...
Unless the implementation is unbelievably braindead any crack will require modification of the local system: SSL, or any similar cryptographic mechanism, makes spoofing a remote server pretty much impossible(particularly since, unlike the general website case, where incompetent registrars can mess it up, Microsoft can simply use an in-house root CA for this purpose.) You'll have to modify the cryptographic verification parts of the local system to accept a key you control, no matter how perfect your understanding of the network interaction is...
I can only assume that they are either going to be turning the screws a bit harder with their "anytime upgrade" pitch, which will require keeping the developed world from just having that kid who knows computers install Ultimate, or they are trying to ensure that developing market pirate system-builders find it much harder to pay nothing(it will, of course, still be in their interest to price-discriminate; but there is a big difference between somebody who pays nothing because you can't stop him, and somebody who either pays or goes without, and you get to set the price...)
With 7 and 2008 they are pushing about about as hard in that direction as volume customers will put up with. You either do a one-time activation with microsoft, per computer(don't worry, if you have a high-security or airgapped network you can activate by phone!) or you set up a KMS host(modify our DNS server configuration to support your DRM? Sounds reasonable to me!) which activates with Microsoft, and then serves as a sort of activation proxy for KMS clients who phone home not less than every 180 days.
They didn't try to push a per-machine external dependency, much less a per-boot one; because that Just Wouldn't Be Happening; but your KMS host is going nowhere without external activation.
If memory serves, Debian will still still treat optical media as "repositories", so that automatic dependency handling and installation still work normally(except for the being prompted for the CD bit); but there is, indeed, no requirement that a repository be external to a machine(you can use optical media for offline machines, and there isn't anything stopping a repository mirror server from acting is its own repository); but ripping the notion of repositories out entirely puts you pretty far from most contemporary distributions and closer to embedded territory...
I ask purely out of curiosity: Given that manned rocketry basically consists of getting the engineers to keep hammering away at the problem until "Place self on top of giant cylinder of extraordinarily volatile propellant. Ignite." goes from being sheer insanity to being merely risky, why would the fact that the propellant is toxic, as well as highly volatile, be an obstacle to using it to lift humans?
Fluorine compounds are certainly a pretty horrid lot; but if propellant is making its way into the payload in any quantity you are already pretty screwed, no?
Yeah, luck. Luck is totally the only way anyone ever becomes rich. All of them are lottery winners, or something.
It really depends on what you mean by "luck". I couldn't find any good numbers for those just able to take a $150 million vacation('millionaires' includes far too many people a factor of ten or two too poor, while 'billionaires' excludes those in the 151-999 million range who could afford it if they wanted it enough. '150 millionaires' just isn't a very charismatic cut-off category...); but the 2011 Forbes list of billionaires was only 1,210 names long. With a world population around the 6.8 billion mark, that makes billionairehood a very low-probability condition(~1.8x10^-7).
The question, then, is whether you wish to define 'luck' in the fairly broad sense of "possessing a desirable and statistically improbable outcome", or whether you wish to assert that there is a usefully broad swath of things(not themselves allocated by chance) that an individual can use to skew his outcome(and whose likelihood of doing so isn't simply a matter of chance)...
Just wait until you hear what the ticket back from inevitable(if undoubtedly historic) death on the hostile airless rock costs... That is where they really get you.
Slashdot Mirror
We keep states like Missouri around to remind us that Federalism has its price...
Anybody else feel like this is an incursion on freedom of speech?
It'd take some fairly tortured logic-chopping to argue otherwise; but the "Won't somebody think of the Children?" card is in play, so the court may or may not be sharpening its best logic choppers as we speak...
The problem is not so much of distinguishing the true scotsmen from the false ones, they generally aren't too subtle about it; but in dealing with a large swarm of vociferous false scotsmen who insist that they are the genuine article, and anybody who stands against them is immoral scum....
Copper Man find human oxidation response pitiful. Human exhibit wasteful thrashing and screaming upon oxidation, offend bystanders with futile noises and charred remains.
Copper Man resist oxidation. Maintain readiness for duty until tasteful patina develop. Then still ready for duty. Also art object.
I'm assuming that the copper was there to speed the spread of heat around the model's surface, more closely simulating a human with a circulatory system, and making it easier to see if you had a serious localized leak without hundreds of temperature test points; but does anybody know how the rest of the thing worked?
Was it instrumented in some way(registering thermometers stuck to the surface in various places? thermocouples?) or was it heated, dressed, shoved in the freezer for a set period, and then measured on removal to see how effectively heat loss had been retarded?
I get the sense that the big copper guy was merely the most charismatic element of a more complete test system...
The Republican party did not ally itself with the "bible-thumpers". The Republican party is the most logical place for them.
Seems reasonable enough. Who doesn't remember the touching scene in the Gospel of Mises(10:12-26) where Jesus selflessly defends the moneychangers in the temple from excessive capital gains taxes? Or the section shortly thereafter when he resists the blandishments of Judas, the liberal, and upholds intellectual property rights and avoids creating an underclass dependent on handouts by refusing the pirate the loaves and fishes?
All jest aside, the only way a 'bible-thumper' could endorse contemporary Republican(or, for that matter, contemporary Democratic) policy is by making sure not to read past the old testament, and, even there, some amount of studious ignoring will be required...
It is a much bigger change in that respect, as you say.(A delight, no doubt, to everyone with a potentially-homicidal psycho ex, hypersensitive employer, or school whose admins treat it as axiomatic that every red cup contains booze...) I'm not even one of those, and I still think that the trend is not a good one. Alias stability is useful(ie. short of breaking my password, nobody can impersonate 'fuzzyfuzzyfungus' on slashdot), so it is possible to assign consistent evaluations to aliases; but the case for tying people to Real Legal Name is substantially weaker and has a much longer list of people who will definitely see a significant cost, aside from important but somewhat nebulous 'privacy' considerations.
There is also the issue, not as large as "average joe", but substantially smaller than "Google, Facebook, Acxiom, and the NSA", of the fairly substantial number of people who have some degree of greater-than-average-joe Big Brother access. There are a lot of cops, HR background-checkers, and buddies thereof out there, and (while they generally aren't supposed to, and occasionally get fired for) they often have more than usual access unless somebody catches them abusing it.
My only hope is that, by pushing the issue in people's faces, they end up raising awareness about how much privacy is on the rocks at present, with no signs of future improvement. In particular, while it doesn't take a genius to guess how Google might infer that "fuzzyfuzzyfungus" probably isn't a real name, I hope that those who tried the "I'll just sign up with a plausible sounding fake name/nickname" gambit and end up being detected spend some quality time thinking about what their detection implies.
While I deeply dislike the increasing trend(among Google, facebook, et. al.) to try to pin real IDs to users for fun and profit, I do think that there is one upside:
Historically, people have vastly overestimated the degree of anonymity they enjoy on the internet. IPs are pretty readily geolocated(and ISPs certainly don't have any trouble correlating them with CC details...), correlation of snippets of social networking information can be quite powerful, persistent tracking cookies and similar trickery do their job, and so forth.
In a way, then, the more visible, public, deployments of real-name requirements, automated facial recognition, etc. are really a public debut of what the pros have already had on virtually everybody who isn't a cypherpunk or a hermit for some time now. Hopefully public squeamishness will prove useful...
Yeah, Windows 8 would pretty much have to stick to running on consoles and/or whatever MS is calling their Palladium/NGSCB/'Trusted Computing' dystopia platform these days if they were serious about avoiding a modification of the local binary.
My point was merely that the old "FooCorp obfuscates their client/server protocol to slow creation of compatible implementation, hackers figure it out anyway" cycle is increasingly obsolete for software (and pretty much any 'appliance' not designed by morons) DRM/lock-in purposes. Obfuscation takes effort, increases the likelihood and trickiness of bugs, and can only slow a competent attacker. SSL or equivalent is comparatively easy, standard, doesn't add too much complexity, and is functionally impossible to forge. Only a client-side defeat of the phone-home mechanism will do, no matter how sane and trivially comprehensible the protocol is.
Quite literally.
The machine generates a long-ish alphanumeric sequence and gives you the phone number of some MS call-center. You call, read the poor bastard on the other end that sequence, he reads you one back, you type it in.
Putting on my not-at-all-a-cryptoanalyst-don't-trust-me hat, I suspect that the sequences in question are a bit short to be a useful side channel; but the process is not the paragon of convenience.
That certainly isn't going to help them. I wonder if they are shooting for sales in train-heavier parts of the world?
According to iSuppli(whose accuracy is debateable; but should at least provide ballpark numbers), somebody is eating a major per unit loss to provide the $99/$150 price point. Frankly, unless those numbers are pretty pessimistic, I'm a little bit surprised that the units were retailed at all a little surprising. It'd almost be worth tearing the 16GB units down for the screen and battery in bulk...
Pfft. I will not be satisfied until genetic engineers produce psychoactive, smokeable DEA agents!
Weed is, if not native to the Americas, a very well naturalized visitor, and it is pretty weed-like. According to 2005 figures, well over 95% of the plants eradicated in US law enforcement operations were just wild growing weed weeds, rather than the cultivated stuff.
While I think that this plan is sheer insanity on their part, given how utterly sucky it is compared with ITMS, Amazon, Pandora, etc. it sounds eerily like something that somebody who thinks that the historical success of BlackBerry Messenger is broadly applicable would come up with...
BBM is also BlackBerry only(to send or receive) and is pretty much just another IM service(the encryption helped sell it on the suit side; but the consumer market doesn't much care). I imagine that some of their higher-ups have been sucked into believing that they can, against all reason, build a music distribution mechanism on the same model...
What android phones or iphone have actual joysticks? I must have missed those. And which ones have quad cores and the highest-end PowerVR GPU? And 5-inch OLED screen? This is a portable game console, not a phone that can do lightweight gaming. There IS a place for dedicated hardware, even if you personally don't need or want it.
There problem is not so much competing on specs with multipurpose hardware; but whether the much larger installed bases of A)expensive smartphones that people already have, linked to impulse-buy download stores and B)cheap handheld consoles like their own now-reasonably-priced PSP and anything Nintendo that isn't a 3DS will cause their game libraries to suffer...
It is hard to deny that this device will be a technologically superior mobile gaming device; but it is much less clear that it will achieve the critical mass needed to get a good library of titles: The techheads(and, with iPhones, also the suits and the soccer moms) already have an inferior; but zero-additional-cost-because-they-already-have-it smartphone that is still pretty powerful(those that care about games may well also have a console at home and/or strong opinions on PC gaming). The impecunious and the kiddies probably aren't going to like the Sony price for a 5-inch OLED, highest-end SoC, slabs of RAM, and new-release titles. A fair few members of both will lust after this; but will they drop their smartphones/NDSes/PSPs-with-a-memory-stick-full-of-ISOs and shell out?
In an ideal world, the software wouldn't be so damn trusting; but this seems like a problem that(until the ideal world appears on the back of the world-peace pony) could be solved by a ~$1 cheapass dongle device.
Connector suitable to phone/device in question on one side, whatever tricks are needed to convince that class of device that this is an Officially Blessed Charger(usually some resister-based fuckery on the data pins or a simple USB handshake of some sort) and USB cable with only +5 and GND lines physically present on the other side.
Until phones get serious, and act like vulnerable general-purpose computers storing a fuckload of personal data that have just been plugged into an assumed-hostile network, simply air-gapping the data lines when you are charging seems like the way to go...
Unless the implementation is unbelievably braindead any crack will require modification of the local system: SSL, or any similar cryptographic mechanism, makes spoofing a remote server pretty much impossible(particularly since, unlike the general website case, where incompetent registrars can mess it up, Microsoft can simply use an in-house root CA for this purpose.) You'll have to modify the cryptographic verification parts of the local system to accept a key you control, no matter how perfect your understanding of the network interaction is...
I can only assume that they are either going to be turning the screws a bit harder with their "anytime upgrade" pitch, which will require keeping the developed world from just having that kid who knows computers install Ultimate, or they are trying to ensure that developing market pirate system-builders find it much harder to pay nothing(it will, of course, still be in their interest to price-discriminate; but there is a big difference between somebody who pays nothing because you can't stop him, and somebody who either pays or goes without, and you get to set the price...)
With 7 and 2008 they are pushing about about as hard in that direction as volume customers will put up with. You either do a one-time activation with microsoft, per computer(don't worry, if you have a high-security or airgapped network you can activate by phone!) or you set up a KMS host(modify our DNS server configuration to support your DRM? Sounds reasonable to me!) which activates with Microsoft, and then serves as a sort of activation proxy for KMS clients who phone home not less than every 180 days.
They didn't try to push a per-machine external dependency, much less a per-boot one; because that Just Wouldn't Be Happening; but your KMS host is going nowhere without external activation.
If memory serves, Debian will still still treat optical media as "repositories", so that automatic dependency handling and installation still work normally(except for the being prompted for the CD bit); but there is, indeed, no requirement that a repository be external to a machine(you can use optical media for offline machines, and there isn't anything stopping a repository mirror server from acting is its own repository); but ripping the notion of repositories out entirely puts you pretty far from most contemporary distributions and closer to embedded territory...
I ask purely out of curiosity: Given that manned rocketry basically consists of getting the engineers to keep hammering away at the problem until "Place self on top of giant cylinder of extraordinarily volatile propellant. Ignite." goes from being sheer insanity to being merely risky, why would the fact that the propellant is toxic, as well as highly volatile, be an obstacle to using it to lift humans?
Fluorine compounds are certainly a pretty horrid lot; but if propellant is making its way into the payload in any quantity you are already pretty screwed, no?
Yeah, luck. Luck is totally the only way anyone ever becomes rich. All of them are lottery winners, or something.
It really depends on what you mean by "luck". I couldn't find any good numbers for those just able to take a $150 million vacation('millionaires' includes far too many people a factor of ten or two too poor, while 'billionaires' excludes those in the 151-999 million range who could afford it if they wanted it enough. '150 millionaires' just isn't a very charismatic cut-off category...); but the 2011 Forbes list of billionaires was only 1,210 names long. With a world population around the 6.8 billion mark, that makes billionairehood a very low-probability condition(~1.8x10^-7).
The question, then, is whether you wish to define 'luck' in the fairly broad sense of "possessing a desirable and statistically improbable outcome", or whether you wish to assert that there is a usefully broad swath of things(not themselves allocated by chance) that an individual can use to skew his outcome(and whose likelihood of doing so isn't simply a matter of chance)...
Just wait until you hear what the ticket back from inevitable(if undoubtedly historic) death on the hostile airless rock costs... That is where they really get you.
If I recall correctly, the FCC requires that the firewire port be active; but nothing precludes its output being encrypted...