While, of course, I'd like all that and a pony, I recognize that ours is not exactly a perfect world. Big SSDs are expensive and big HDDs are (comparatively) slow.
What would be nice, though, and arguably rather more reasonable(it's only a matter of software, and across millions of users the unit cost should be approximately fuck all), would be seeing the tech for transparently dividing workloads across two or more disks with heterogenous characteristics descend from its present position in expensive SANs and comparatively esoteric server FSes.
Sure, the manual "OS+applications on SSD, porn and torrents on HDD" tactic works more or less alright; but having humans wasting their time doing a (lousy) attempt at a machine's job seems like such a pity. Handling the messy details of physical storage location, in order to achieve best apparent performance with lowest burden on the operator, is exactly the sort of abstraction that our computers should be handling for us.
I'm almost surprised at how Sony managed to go from being among the most interesting players in the dedicated e-reader business to a pathetic, overpriced, also-ran in such a relatively short span of time. They were practically the only people making e-ink readers of any size and quality, back when 'ebook' still usually meant "Project Gutenberg on my Palm Pilot"(not that there's anything wrong with that, weasel reader 4 lyfe!). Now the market has all kinds of exploded and I haven't even seen a Sony display model in at least a year(in context, I see probably a dozen kindles, 2-5 nooks, a few ipads, and I-known-not-how-many assorted smartphones on my average daily commute, so it isn't a market-acceptance problem...)
My understanding is that only their pay-for books are thus DRMed. They also have that vast catalog of(often esoteric, and sometimes imperfectly scanned; but generally beats having to tromp down to the nearest university library that won't give me a nasty look) scanned public domain stuff. Also epub format; but the only restriction appears to be having to solve a CAPTCHA before downloading...
The announcement of yet-another-DRM-ebook service is a bit of a yawn, point-and-click loading over wifi of all kinds of interesting scanned articles is why I hacked the Google Books android application onto my Nook.
An excellent idea, citizen! We were actually thinking of using the Totally Unhackable(tm) biometric smartcards made by our cousin's defense contracting firm; but you get points for a good guess.
Maybe my coworkers and I are simply an anomalous use case; but I've seen exactly two third-party applications ever used on Blackberries: whatever the 'documents to go' or 'mobile documents' thing is that they bundle to give you some ability to read.doc and similar attachments, and the Citrix ICA client. All other use is either the built-in email application or the phone half of the device. How many BB developers are there?
You are not very technical, are you?
Code signing is a malware protection feature, not HDCP.
Code signing is purely a mechanism for verifying that a given binary has not been modified since it left the hands of the party that also possesses a given private key. That's all it does, allows you to mathematically verify that a given series of bits has not been modified since it left the possession of somebody who knows a particular secret. Everything else depends on the infrastructure in which it is embedded.
This capability has a number of uses:
In concert with a system for authoritatively connecting keys with IDs(whether this be a CA that isn't a fuckup, or users who are willing to web-of-trust, or an internal institutional PKI setup), it does indeed have substantial anti-tampering/anti-trojan value.
In concert with devices that forbid their users to override signature warnings, it does indeed have substantial platform-control/rent extraction value(see all current consoles and iDevices...).
In concert with a system that refuses to play certain movies if there are any unsigned components in the "protected content path", you bet it's a DRM feature...
It's sort of analogous to the conceptual confusion(or sometimes dishonesty) that causes people to talk about "security cameras". Cameras don't provide security, they collect photons and convert them into images or series' of images. That's all they do. In some contexts converting photons into images may improve security. In other contexts, it may increase risk. In others, it will have no security-related effects whatsoever, positive or negative.
While there are... other obstacles... I'm pretty sure that at recent vintage iMacs have MXM slots, and are arguably desktops. Good luck finding an MXM card that plays nice with Apple's peculiar EFI implementation; and the thermal and mechanical limits of a chassis designed with aesthetics at the forefront; but it should at least work mechanically.
How exactly is Windows 8 going to make emulating a specific triple-core PPC chip and GPU combination any more tractable on x86 hardware?
Some heavier xbox-tie-in for the generally execrable "Games for Windows Live", and encouraging publishers to make everything available cross platform? Possible. Extension of some sort of "Pay for things that you used to get for free" patch and multiplay service to the PC? Conceivable.
Would it be crass of us to rent a dingy motel, buy some horribly depressing cheap decorations, and invite Tom from Myspace and Zuckerberg from Facebook to their very own pity party?
As a horribly mediocre programmer, I am currently working in systems administration instead. If we can but seed the world with these tiny geek-attractants, carpal tunnels everywhere shall be reduced to smoldering masses of scar tissue and unalloyed agony! Then I shall be the finest programmer still capable of typing with something other than his toes!
Who could have thought that the solution to tech-sector unemployment could contain so much 80's arcade nostalgia?
Your profession also doesn't make any money, and has to be state funded. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, just that libraries are fairly meaningless in the context of this discussion.
In an ideal world, "value added" and "profitable" are identical, and the invisible hand can do its thing. In practice, the existence of both positive and negative externalities(even in the strictly economic sense, never mind potentially more important; but certainly much more arguable stuff about culture and whatnot) are empirically established realities.
It is certainly true that libraries are largely hopeless at capturing the value they add, and so depend on subsidies from(depending on library type) the state, the university, the research institute, etc.; but being incapable of capturing the value added, and thus being unprofitable, is quite dissimilar from not adding value. The inverse case is also true: thieves are extremely adroit at capturing value that they didn't add, so much so that they are profitable in spite of substantial penalties imposed by the state; but being profitable doesn't change the fact that their activities are actually negative-sum, not even zero sum.
This isn't terribly relevant to your point in the general sense; but as a historical aside, IBM's point-man in Germany loved Hitler like screaming tweens love Justin Beiber...
The German subsidiary's head, Heidinger, er, emotionally identified with his government clients:
""The physician examines the human body and determines whether...all organs are working to the benefit of the entire organism," asserted Heidinger to a crowd of Nazi officials. "We [Dehomag] are very much like the physician, in that we dissect, cell by cell, the German cultural body. We report every individual characteristic...on a little card. These are not dead cards, quite to the contrary, they prove later on that they come to life when the cards are sorted at a rate of 25,000 per hour according to certain characteristics. These characteristics are grouped like the organs of our cultural body, and they will be calculated and determined with the help of our tabulating machine.
"We are proud that we may assist in such task, a task that provides our nation's Physician [Adolf Hitler] with the material he needs for his examinations. Our Physician can then determine whether the calculated values are in harmony with the health of our people. It also means that if such is not the case, our Physician can take corrective procedures to correct the sick circumstances...Our characteristics are deeply rooted in our race. Therefore, we must cherish them like a holy shrine which we will — and must — keep pure. We have the deepest trust in our Physician and will follow his instructions in blind faith, because we know that he will lead our people to a great future. Hail to our German people and der Führer!"
Most of Heidinger's speech, along with a list of the invited Nazi Party officials, was rushed to Manhattan and immediately translated for Watson. The IBM Leader cabled Heidinger a prompt note of congratulations for a job well done and sentiments well expressed."
This doesn't, of course, preclude the existence of a bunch of punch-card geeks who were just in it for the engineering-and-not-being-sent-to-the-eastern-front benefits; but HQ practically had to change its pants every time it thought about efficiently meeting customer objectives...
Please, please, "Industries built on Intellectual Property Theft have further imperiled other sectors of the economy during the recent economic downturn."
If somebody were sufficiently motivated to risk it, sure. Though, at that point, it would probably be easier to just have the officers who seized the evidence in the first place "find" an additional flash drive that you apparently used to store your vilest kiddie porn. Or you could just die while resisting arrest. That's always tragic.
If you run up against a system that is thoroughly flyblown, you are pretty screwed one way or another, possibly during the computer forensics phase, possibly elsewhere.
It is rather curious that a company of JP Morgan's size would choose to address risk with computers rather than lobbyists. It has already been demonstrated that enterprises who matter can simply play "heads I win, tails you lose" with the public purse.
I strongly doubt that your garden variety pig will be using it to crack your pot dealer's phonebook any time soon. If, hypothetically, we investigated genuinely serious white collar crimes in the Billion+ range, I would expect a somewhat smarter, somewhat better dressed, and rather better equipped flavor...
As for knowing what is needed, computers have been around long enough that some basic beat cops probably know what a motherboardHDD connection is supposed to look like, and be able to say that yours doesn't look right. A genuinely sophisticated job, carefully concealed, would pass; but kiddo's first Arduino project would probably raise a red flag. Of course, if they freak out and call the bomb squad, and blow up your drive, that also solves your problem...
I wonder if using a DeCSS implementation, or the hex representation of a pirated song, or something of that nature as my passphrase would be enough to make revealing my passcode an act of self-incrimination?
You can't do much against an arbitrarily corrupt process, particularly if the corruption extends to the court of appeals or all you have is a narcoleptic public defender; but digital forensics cases are(for exactly the reason you described) typically handled fairly carefully.
The drive containing evidence will be cloned through a "hardware write blocker", a device designed and certified to ignore all ATA/SATA/SAS/SCSI/whatever commands that have the potential to modify data on the drive, and only allow readback. All actual forensic examination will occur on the clone or clones, and the expert witness who did the analysis would(in theory) be in deep shit if he fabricated evidence and lied about it in court(which could be detected by, say, your own expert witness calculating hashes for all the data structures on the original disk, and demanding to see the hashes for the "incriminating" material from the forensics.
Obviously, there are ways around that, and more ways if nobody is much paying attention, or somebody really wants to take you down; but it isn't as though they just turn the computer on, tell the PD tech guy "Now, don't you be copying any kiddie porn onto that computer" and then leave the room...
Depends on the sophistication of the cop: "GPS Simulators", while not inexpensive, are off-the-shelf test equipment. They can be used to convince a GPS module that it is wherever and whenever you want it to be. Sophisticated modules with sanity checking(eg. checks for excessive velocities/discontinuities in position, checks against an internal RTC for timing anomalies, checks against accelerometers and/or magnetometers for incongruous trajectory readings) are rather resistant; but basic GPS systems aren't.
If Joe "Rambo" Donut SWATs his way in, shoots your dog, and then attempts to seize the big beige "hard drive" under your desk, he'll probably trip the system. If you've pissed off somebody serious, they'll likely be a bit more careful, and either do the forensics on site, or signal-spoof the system while it is in transport and storage.
I don't know of any trolls who profess such idealistic motives; but the existence of patent trolls arguably does more to discourage the People Who Matter from supporting patents than just about anything else. Little people who try to actually make things are exactly the sort of suckers you can crush with your patent arsenal, and other titans tend to settle down into a relatively polite cross-license stalemate. Trolls are the freelance suitcase bomber extortionists of the patent world.
The closest analogy would probably be to Nikolay Chernyshevsky, reputed to have said "The worse, the better." with regard to the conditions of the poor. He was a leftist revolutionary; but was of the position that any incremental amelioration in misery would simply make the status quo stronger, while radical increases in oppression would make revolt and destruction of the old regime more likely.
In the case of patents, incremental attempts to reform the system are likely to get some of the worst patents off the table, and maybe raise the cost of rocket-docketing; but that will arguably make things worse: Incumbents will still be able to crush little guys(possibly even more easily, since the procedural expense would have increased, allowing the 'bury the little guy you just stiffed in legal fees' strategy to work better), and major patent trolls(which tend to have pretty deep pockets) would be undeterred. If, on the other hand, practically any attempt at productive activity attracts a dozen sleazy lawyers to Nowhere, Texas, baying for blood, the incumbents will finally find that the costs outweigh the benefits, and opinion will probably change in Washington with almost magical speed...
Oh, I would certainly view the pressing of serious criminal charges against as many of them as possible with the greatest pleasure. I'm just not entirely optimistic that a media empire as influential as Murdoch's will be attacked as strongly as it ought to be, and definitely sure that if a major newspaper got away with hacking high-profile phones without being noticed, much less stopped, for a period of years, Joe Blow doesn't have a chance in hell if somebody with the cash for a PI takes an interest in him.
The former problem is solvable with sufficient political will, and plenty of cells and hard labor; but the latter is really a systems security issue.
Slashdot Mirror
While, of course, I'd like all that and a pony, I recognize that ours is not exactly a perfect world. Big SSDs are expensive and big HDDs are (comparatively) slow.
What would be nice, though, and arguably rather more reasonable(it's only a matter of software, and across millions of users the unit cost should be approximately fuck all), would be seeing the tech for transparently dividing workloads across two or more disks with heterogenous characteristics descend from its present position in expensive SANs and comparatively esoteric server FSes.
Sure, the manual "OS+applications on SSD, porn and torrents on HDD" tactic works more or less alright; but having humans wasting their time doing a (lousy) attempt at a machine's job seems like such a pity. Handling the messy details of physical storage location, in order to achieve best apparent performance with lowest burden on the operator, is exactly the sort of abstraction that our computers should be handling for us.
I'm almost surprised at how Sony managed to go from being among the most interesting players in the dedicated e-reader business to a pathetic, overpriced, also-ran in such a relatively short span of time. They were practically the only people making e-ink readers of any size and quality, back when 'ebook' still usually meant "Project Gutenberg on my Palm Pilot"(not that there's anything wrong with that, weasel reader 4 lyfe!). Now the market has all kinds of exploded and I haven't even seen a Sony display model in at least a year(in context, I see probably a dozen kindles, 2-5 nooks, a few ipads, and I-known-not-how-many assorted smartphones on my average daily commute, so it isn't a market-acceptance problem...)
In the words of the great Jello Biafra:
"Want to see child porn? Join the Vice Squad."
My understanding is that only their pay-for books are thus DRMed. They also have that vast catalog of(often esoteric, and sometimes imperfectly scanned; but generally beats having to tromp down to the nearest university library that won't give me a nasty look) scanned public domain stuff. Also epub format; but the only restriction appears to be having to solve a CAPTCHA before downloading...
The announcement of yet-another-DRM-ebook service is a bit of a yawn, point-and-click loading over wifi of all kinds of interesting scanned articles is why I hacked the Google Books android application onto my Nook.
An excellent idea, citizen! We were actually thinking of using the Totally Unhackable(tm) biometric smartcards made by our cousin's defense contracting firm; but you get points for a good guess.
Anybody who questions the seriousness of child pornography is probably a baby-raper, or a communist. True fact.
Maybe my coworkers and I are simply an anomalous use case; but I've seen exactly two third-party applications ever used on Blackberries: whatever the 'documents to go' or 'mobile documents' thing is that they bundle to give you some ability to read .doc and similar attachments, and the Citrix ICA client. All other use is either the built-in email application or the phone half of the device. How many BB developers are there?
You are not very technical, are you? Code signing is a malware protection feature, not HDCP.
Code signing is purely a mechanism for verifying that a given binary has not been modified since it left the hands of the party that also possesses a given private key. That's all it does, allows you to mathematically verify that a given series of bits has not been modified since it left the possession of somebody who knows a particular secret. Everything else depends on the infrastructure in which it is embedded.
This capability has a number of uses:
In concert with a system for authoritatively connecting keys with IDs(whether this be a CA that isn't a fuckup, or users who are willing to web-of-trust, or an internal institutional PKI setup), it does indeed have substantial anti-tampering/anti-trojan value.
In concert with devices that forbid their users to override signature warnings, it does indeed have substantial platform-control/rent extraction value(see all current consoles and iDevices...).
In concert with a system that refuses to play certain movies if there are any unsigned components in the "protected content path", you bet it's a DRM feature...
It's sort of analogous to the conceptual confusion(or sometimes dishonesty) that causes people to talk about "security cameras". Cameras don't provide security, they collect photons and convert them into images or series' of images. That's all they do. In some contexts converting photons into images may improve security. In other contexts, it may increase risk. In others, it will have no security-related effects whatsoever, positive or negative.
While there are... other obstacles... I'm pretty sure that at recent vintage iMacs have MXM slots, and are arguably desktops. Good luck finding an MXM card that plays nice with Apple's peculiar EFI implementation; and the thermal and mechanical limits of a chassis designed with aesthetics at the forefront; but it should at least work mechanically.
How exactly is Windows 8 going to make emulating a specific triple-core PPC chip and GPU combination any more tractable on x86 hardware?
Some heavier xbox-tie-in for the generally execrable "Games for Windows Live", and encouraging publishers to make everything available cross platform? Possible. Extension of some sort of "Pay for things that you used to get for free" patch and multiplay service to the PC? Conceivable.
Play xbox 360 games on an x86? Srsly?
Would it be crass of us to rent a dingy motel, buy some horribly depressing cheap decorations, and invite Tom from Myspace and Zuckerberg from Facebook to their very own pity party?
As a horribly mediocre programmer, I am currently working in systems administration instead. If we can but seed the world with these tiny geek-attractants, carpal tunnels everywhere shall be reduced to smoldering masses of scar tissue and unalloyed agony! Then I shall be the finest programmer still capable of typing with something other than his toes!
Who could have thought that the solution to tech-sector unemployment could contain so much 80's arcade nostalgia?
Your profession also doesn't make any money, and has to be state funded. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, just that libraries are fairly meaningless in the context of this discussion.
In an ideal world, "value added" and "profitable" are identical, and the invisible hand can do its thing. In practice, the existence of both positive and negative externalities(even in the strictly economic sense, never mind potentially more important; but certainly much more arguable stuff about culture and whatnot) are empirically established realities.
It is certainly true that libraries are largely hopeless at capturing the value they add, and so depend on subsidies from(depending on library type) the state, the university, the research institute, etc.; but being incapable of capturing the value added, and thus being unprofitable, is quite dissimilar from not adding value. The inverse case is also true: thieves are extremely adroit at capturing value that they didn't add, so much so that they are profitable in spite of substantial penalties imposed by the state; but being profitable doesn't change the fact that their activities are actually negative-sum, not even zero sum.
This isn't terribly relevant to your point in the general sense; but as a historical aside, IBM's point-man in Germany loved Hitler like screaming tweens love Justin Beiber...
The German subsidiary's head, Heidinger, er, emotionally identified with his government clients:
""The physician examines the human body and determines whether...all organs are working to the benefit of the entire organism," asserted Heidinger to a crowd of Nazi officials. "We [Dehomag] are very much like the physician, in that we dissect, cell by cell, the German cultural body. We report every individual characteristic...on a little card. These are not dead cards, quite to the contrary, they prove later on that they come to life when the cards are sorted at a rate of 25,000 per hour according to certain characteristics. These characteristics are grouped like the organs of our cultural body, and they will be calculated and determined with the help of our tabulating machine. "We are proud that we may assist in such task, a task that provides our nation's Physician [Adolf Hitler] with the material he needs for his examinations. Our Physician can then determine whether the calculated values are in harmony with the health of our people. It also means that if such is not the case, our Physician can take corrective procedures to correct the sick circumstances...Our characteristics are deeply rooted in our race. Therefore, we must cherish them like a holy shrine which we will — and must — keep pure. We have the deepest trust in our Physician and will follow his instructions in blind faith, because we know that he will lead our people to a great future. Hail to our German people and der Führer!" Most of Heidinger's speech, along with a list of the invited Nazi Party officials, was rushed to Manhattan and immediately translated for Watson. The IBM Leader cabled Heidinger a prompt note of congratulations for a job well done and sentiments well expressed."
This doesn't, of course, preclude the existence of a bunch of punch-card geeks who were just in it for the engineering-and-not-being-sent-to-the-eastern-front benefits; but HQ practically had to change its pants every time it thought about efficiently meeting customer objectives...
Please, please, "Industries built on Intellectual Property Theft have further imperiled other sectors of the economy during the recent economic downturn."
xoxo, RIAA/MPAA.
If somebody were sufficiently motivated to risk it, sure. Though, at that point, it would probably be easier to just have the officers who seized the evidence in the first place "find" an additional flash drive that you apparently used to store your vilest kiddie porn. Or you could just die while resisting arrest. That's always tragic.
If you run up against a system that is thoroughly flyblown, you are pretty screwed one way or another, possibly during the computer forensics phase, possibly elsewhere.
It is rather curious that a company of JP Morgan's size would choose to address risk with computers rather than lobbyists. It has already been demonstrated that enterprises who matter can simply play "heads I win, tails you lose" with the public purse.
I strongly doubt that your garden variety pig will be using it to crack your pot dealer's phonebook any time soon. If, hypothetically, we investigated genuinely serious white collar crimes in the Billion+ range, I would expect a somewhat smarter, somewhat better dressed, and rather better equipped flavor...
As for knowing what is needed, computers have been around long enough that some basic beat cops probably know what a motherboardHDD connection is supposed to look like, and be able to say that yours doesn't look right. A genuinely sophisticated job, carefully concealed, would pass; but kiddo's first Arduino project would probably raise a red flag. Of course, if they freak out and call the bomb squad, and blow up your drive, that also solves your problem...
It fills the heart with inspiration to watch the best and brightest constructing advanced computers to solve the problems of mankind...
I wonder if using a DeCSS implementation, or the hex representation of a pirated song, or something of that nature as my passphrase would be enough to make revealing my passcode an act of self-incrimination?
You can't do much against an arbitrarily corrupt process, particularly if the corruption extends to the court of appeals or all you have is a narcoleptic public defender; but digital forensics cases are(for exactly the reason you described) typically handled fairly carefully.
The drive containing evidence will be cloned through a "hardware write blocker", a device designed and certified to ignore all ATA/SATA/SAS/SCSI/whatever commands that have the potential to modify data on the drive, and only allow readback. All actual forensic examination will occur on the clone or clones, and the expert witness who did the analysis would(in theory) be in deep shit if he fabricated evidence and lied about it in court(which could be detected by, say, your own expert witness calculating hashes for all the data structures on the original disk, and demanding to see the hashes for the "incriminating" material from the forensics.
Obviously, there are ways around that, and more ways if nobody is much paying attention, or somebody really wants to take you down; but it isn't as though they just turn the computer on, tell the PD tech guy "Now, don't you be copying any kiddie porn onto that computer" and then leave the room...
Depends on the sophistication of the cop: "GPS Simulators", while not inexpensive, are off-the-shelf test equipment. They can be used to convince a GPS module that it is wherever and whenever you want it to be. Sophisticated modules with sanity checking(eg. checks for excessive velocities/discontinuities in position, checks against an internal RTC for timing anomalies, checks against accelerometers and/or magnetometers for incongruous trajectory readings) are rather resistant; but basic GPS systems aren't.
If Joe "Rambo" Donut SWATs his way in, shoots your dog, and then attempts to seize the big beige "hard drive" under your desk, he'll probably trip the system. If you've pissed off somebody serious, they'll likely be a bit more careful, and either do the forensics on site, or signal-spoof the system while it is in transport and storage.
I don't know of any trolls who profess such idealistic motives; but the existence of patent trolls arguably does more to discourage the People Who Matter from supporting patents than just about anything else. Little people who try to actually make things are exactly the sort of suckers you can crush with your patent arsenal, and other titans tend to settle down into a relatively polite cross-license stalemate. Trolls are the freelance suitcase bomber extortionists of the patent world.
The closest analogy would probably be to Nikolay Chernyshevsky, reputed to have said "The worse, the better." with regard to the conditions of the poor. He was a leftist revolutionary; but was of the position that any incremental amelioration in misery would simply make the status quo stronger, while radical increases in oppression would make revolt and destruction of the old regime more likely.
In the case of patents, incremental attempts to reform the system are likely to get some of the worst patents off the table, and maybe raise the cost of rocket-docketing; but that will arguably make things worse: Incumbents will still be able to crush little guys(possibly even more easily, since the procedural expense would have increased, allowing the 'bury the little guy you just stiffed in legal fees' strategy to work better), and major patent trolls(which tend to have pretty deep pockets) would be undeterred. If, on the other hand, practically any attempt at productive activity attracts a dozen sleazy lawyers to Nowhere, Texas, baying for blood, the incumbents will finally find that the costs outweigh the benefits, and opinion will probably change in Washington with almost magical speed...
Yeah, maybe they should have hired a better web guy for that area...
Oh, I would certainly view the pressing of serious criminal charges against as many of them as possible with the greatest pleasure. I'm just not entirely optimistic that a media empire as influential as Murdoch's will be attacked as strongly as it ought to be, and definitely sure that if a major newspaper got away with hacking high-profile phones without being noticed, much less stopped, for a period of years, Joe Blow doesn't have a chance in hell if somebody with the cash for a PI takes an interest in him.
The former problem is solvable with sufficient political will, and plenty of cells and hard labor; but the latter is really a systems security issue.