A fairly large part of Amazon's business practice, aside from efficient JIT inventory/shipping, is customer profiling and recommendation(an extension of the classic retail upsell, only every recommendation isn't for a magazine or service plan, and beaten over your head!). Given their fair expertise in this area, and generally commanding lead in online bookselling, it seems unlikely that this is a case of "poor, poor, Amazon, haunted by the lawsuits of angry parents whose offspring's attempt to search for sparkle-ponies dumped them into the M/M Rape BDSM section". Surely they can trivially keep team pathologically sensitive from finding anything they don't search for, and wave the free speech flag to cover the rest.
Thus, one is inclined to suspect that(since books about incest, rape, or whatever are presumably sold for a profit just like any other book) somebody inside or outside the company is being pushy for reasons ideological rather than financial, and that they are being surprisingly quiet about it(unlike say, the tremulous morons at the Parent's Television Council, who are explicitly ideological; but ontologically incapable of being quiet). Who exactly that might be is rather puzzling...
Colleges and universities(unless they have reached some degenerate end state) are supposed to be collections of substantially independent faculty, chosen for their excellence in teaching and/or research in their field, and then not micro-managed thereafter. College students, similarly, are supposed to be reasonably competent young adults, capable of doing such crazy things as "choosing a major" and "signing up for classes to suit their major and schedule".
For an entire college to have some fiat position on laptops (unless it is simply a statistical product of the fact that the entire faculty feel the same way about them...) would be uneccessary and pernicious interference into the classroom.
Now, if Professor X thinks that laptops are of Satan, and ruin all learning, the college should back him/her/hypocritical positronic brain up on the matter(unless somebody has a suitably compelling ADA style case to make). Students who don't like it can choose Professor Y, who thinks that 'engaging 21st century media integration is the future of collaborative learning'(and, similarly, deserves the college's support, within their financial means, in making sure that IT in their room doesn't suck).
"Colleges" are (unless we are talking about somewhere from which you should urgently switch) collections of professors given considerable autonomy in their teaching and/or(emphasis on the or in a few cases) research, and students given considerable autonomy in choosing which classes to take, and from which professors(even core curriculum/distribution requirements, while fundamentally premised on the "we do actually know better than you do, at present, what you should have a taste of" notion, generally give you pretty broad latitude in which section of Phil101 to enroll in...).
A "College" should have an opinion on the issue measurable only statistically. Individual professors, on the other hand, should do as they see pedagogically best, and students should seek out professors whose styles suit them and whose pedagogical records are worth the $/minute they are paying...
(of course, in the small but nonzero number of cases where some neurological or musculoskeletal quirk makes typing rather than writing an ADA requirement, people should deal with the exception with good grace, and the exception should avoid abusing their good grace with distracting Farmville sessions...)
Even better, with the availability of sliding rails and matching cable management arms on the back, you could get multiple rows of what you describe, in a single 1U, if you were willing to make the user slide the device out and pop the top to replace parts that aren't in the front row(certainly not as convenient, there is a reason that HDD bays are generally mounted on the front; but not unprecedented in high-density storage applications...)
Even if you were shooting for '2 post' friendly depth you could likely get two or three rows in, while a full 4 post requiring depth might be good for 8ish. It wouldn't be cheap; but it would be dense, fast, quiet, relatively cool-running, and cheaper than some alternatives...
If mounted upright, these guys would be just a little too tall for a 1U; but a 2U could fit several hundred... With the economies of scale enjoyed by something designed to be shoved into consumer laptops, a shelf or two of these little puppies could, with the right controller, make fibre channel stuff that costs a factor of ten or two as much wet itself...
Worse, it's both. Mechanically identical to a mini PCIe connector; but electrically/logically identical to SATA. Won't work if plugged into a PCIe bus, because it isn't a PCIe device; but won't plug in to virtually any SATA connector; because it has the form factor of a mini PCIe card.
It goes back at least as far as XP, probably 2000 if you don't need the Fisher-Price skin...
Now, just to get back to the bigotry and one-upsmanship, any setup that forces the user to think about how best to allocate filesystem stuff between block devices, or forces them to commit to one inflexible configuration, is arguably underutilizing the capabilities of this sort of technology.
Machines are, unless the human really wants to, supposed to handle the grunt work(not to mention, keeping accurate track of file accesses, speed and latency of multiple devices, etc. properly is really beyond the capabilities of a human, at least in realtime).
What you really want is an FS arrangement that can seamlessly present you with a single logical volume, silently handling the details of what to commit to flash and what to platter, for optimal performance and responsiveness without the cost of going all Flash.
Until you hit the really high end(where SATA is a bottleneck), there isn't much wrong with SATA. It's more the fact that mini-PCIe slots, sometimes several, are downright standard in notebooks and similar small devices, while these strange, hybrid 'electrically SATA; but mini-PCIe connector' things are not. an SATA device isn't going to do anything useful plugged in to a conventional mini-PCIe slot, and it will require a mechanical adapter to connect to any reasonably normal SATA connector.
For the moment, unless these things really take off, this particular combination of form factor and bus type screams "OEMs only", where either PCIe or SATA are common, standard, and amenable to individual use and upgrade...
It isn't wildly impressive, since many of the larger SSDs are either smaller boards padded out with aluminum or plastic to meet 2.5inch size standards, or 2.5 inch boards taking advantage of relatively lax density requirements to save on board layers and fabrication expenses; but it is the case that most high-performing SSDs are doing somewhat RAID-esque stuff across their multiple flash chips. Thus, unless the design is severely gimped by either incompetence or cost constraints, larger device=space for more chips=more opportunity for spreading operations across multiple flash chips=higher overall apparent speed. For a very small device to hit high speeds, the maker is either doing some clever packaging, to get a competitive number of dice in that space, or implementing a nice controller that can compensate for not having substantial parallelism to play with, or using comparatively pricey flash that is high on the speed and density curves, rather than just doubling up on whatever is available at mainstream price points and taking advantage of the available board space.
Given Intel's formidable fab expertise and capital resources, it would not surprise me if two and three are at play here...
It isn't a vice exclusive to Intel; but that is indeed what you are seeing.
For reasons that I can only imagine had something to do with "somebody pinching pennies until their pecuniary ichor flows", the trend somehow started of using the mini-PCIe connector, without so much as the decency of different keying or anything, to handle what are, electrically, SATA signal lines plus power. There would be nothing wrong with this if these things were actually storage-oriented mini-PCIe cards(like the HDD PCI cards of yore, with a controller chip+flash, capable of acting like a normal PCIe device; or if they were just using some 'sub-mini SATA' connector; but using a straight mini-PCIe connector for something electrically and logically completely different is plain hostile.
I get this sense that users aren't really supposed to touch these things, or the innards of the devices in which they will end up, or such a confusing and potentially damaging connector misuse would likely have not taken place...
Depending on exactly how PS3 games tend to operate, and whether they are free to do their own thing or have to operate through some sort of inbuilt API, you might be able to spread the pain out into a continuous layer of hurt: In the same way that AV programs are busy dragging down most wintels by hooking all file access operations and scanning each file on access; you might be able to do the hashing file by file or chunk by chunk... Easier if games have to go through some API to pull stuff off the disk, much, much harder if "trusted" disks are, once initially verified, basically given free reign to do whatever they want with the system and in terms of implementing schemes to pull and cache material from the disk in whatever way suits them best.
The only saving grace of doing a 50GB hashing operation at startup would be that the access would be pretty close to linear, which is about the best case for an optical disk... It'd still be ugly, though.
You may be more than 18 years of age, and in possession of a y chromosome; but there is No. Fucking. Way. that you have yet graduated to the status of "man" if you are actually playing in traffic because of the influence of Frogger.
Honestly, I can't think of a stupidity-related term that is strong enough and doesn't end up insulting the garden-variety mentally handicapped by putting them in the same basket as this pathetic man-child-thing...
We can only hope that he is sold for parts before he comes up with any other brilliant plans.
It will be interesting to see what, if any, strange neurological effects early and heavy exposure to the various more-or-less-unknown-in-nature quasi-3d tricks used for "3d" media have on the visual cortexes and/or eye muscles of the humanspawn...
Quite frankly, The Atlantic should be bitterly ashamed of itself for that ghastly piece of drivel.
Wikileaks revealed a cable, the contents of which included the fact that Tsvangirai, while pretending to be against sanctions against Zimbabwe while at home, sucking up to the electorate, was in fact in favor of them. The Atlantic says that this is a blow to democracy. Srsly? Do they actually think that "Democracy" is just some kind of game show, where you get to line up and put your little scrap of paper in the box every few years, to decide which of the competing politicians you find more mediagenic? Some kind of variant on "Survivor"; but with more national pride?
Unless your "democracy" is to be a cargo-cult sham, where you go through the motions and get none of the effects, people must be able to(and must be willing to, which might ultimately be the harder part...) vote for positions and platformsrepresented by politicians, not for politicians-as-characters. The fact that one of the major contenders actually represents the exact opposite of his stated position is, y'know, just a teeny bit relevant...
Now, if The Atlantic holds the view that, since Mugabe is just such a scumbag, his removal is more important than democracy; they ought to say so. It isn't hard: "Hey, Raison d'etat, bitches! Getting rid of an obviously bad dude is clearly more important than a bunch of little people getting to know what they are casting their cute little ballots for. Maybe when they are all grown up and sophisticated, like us, they will be ready for real democracy; but, for now, the important thing is making sure that they get what they need, not what they claim to want." See, that was easy, use it with my compliments.
However, if The Atlantic actually values "democracy" in Zimbabwe, they should be celebrating the fact that the people thereof now know more than they did before about who and what they are voting for. Instead, we get this pusillanimous drivel. Pathetic.
On a vaguely related note, adorable kittens are excellent model organisms for visual cortex plasticity research. It will be interesting to see if the various quasi-"3d" tricks used in "3d" media have any cool neurological effects on humanspawn(since who seriously thinks that kiddies are going to be taking regular breaks and limiting their gaming to minimal amounts a day?)
Hence: "Now, since the private keys presumably also control verification of patches, it is likely that some number of PS3s will permanently leave their control, with hacked patches applied that spoof acceptance of future patches, thus leaving them in control of their owners; but regaining control of all unsophisticated updaters and all PS3s leaving the factory from now on doesn't seem fundamentally impractical..."
By the sound of it, this crack does, indeed, offer sufficiently sophisticated current owners, and obtainers of back stock, who refrain from applying any Sony updates until a suitably permanent hack with a properly faked signature is available and applied, a chance to permanently remove some number of PS3s from Sony control(the possibility of Sony hiding subtle inference mechanisms in future games/updates that attempt to detect hacked consoles and ban them should, though, be considered. As with A/V, in theory you can't trust anything on a rooted system. In practice, you can sometimes ask clever questions and trick a rooted system into behaving slightly differently than a clean one...)
Future PS3s, of course, will be loaded with Sony's latest at the factory, and are presumably out of luck until another crack is discovered.
Are you going to tell me why I'm wrong, or is computing the fact that I am wrong, with certainty; without revealing the wrongness, part of some very subtle public/private key pun on your part?
Not that I want them to succeed; but they could always do something like:
"Consider private key X revoked, and trust nothing signed with it, unless that something has SHA1 hash equal to one of the hashes on the following list..."
The number of existing PS3 games, DLCs, etc., while not small, is finite and pretty well characterized. It would be a pain in the ass; but not fundamentally difficult, to compute the hash of each one that is tainted by the compromised key and hardcode trust of it into the same patch that otherwise nukes that key and anything signed by it.
Now, since the private keys presumably also control verification of patches, it is likely that some number of PS3s will permanently leave their control, with hacked patches applied that spoof acceptance of future patches, thus leaving them in control of their owners; but regaining control of all unsophisticated updaters and all PS3s leaving the factory from now on doesn't seem fundamentally impractical...
I think that the "epic fail" part isn't the overall security of the PS3(which has generally been a pretty good sinister representative of the dystopian "trusted computing" future); but the fact that they somehow managed to build a code-signing verification mechanism that allowed their private key to be computed by an outside party.
Assymetric key crypto is supposed to be(barring serious implementation failures or incredible algorithmic/technological breakthroughs) such that you should be able to verify that a private key was used to sign something with nothing more than the public key, from which the private key should be computable only in a time longer than the lifespan of the universe's remaining protons. That is the part that they apparently managed to fuck up. In terms of generally being a tough nut to crack, Sony did a pretty decent job. However, if TFA is true and not misleading, they failed to implement an absolutely foundational part of practical cryptography properly...
It was my(admittedly layman's) understanding that a public/private key crypto implementation, assuming it isn't deeply flawed, using key lengths suited to the computational capacities of PDP-8s, or otherwise totally fucked, was mathematically secure against anything other than a profound breakthrough in prime factorization algorithms, an unbelievable advance in computational power, or an insider leaking your private key.
With stuffy like HDCP, it was understood that serious tradeoffs were made in order to make the crypto cheap and fast enough that any POS $200 monitor should be able to decode an encrypted bitstream fast enough to handle the demands of uncompressed digital monitor connections. The weaknesses just came with the territory.
With something like the PS3, though, they have serious computing power available, and were dealing with a straightforward case of "verify that the code signed with private key X has indeed been thus signed, and not modified since, using public key Y, from which private key X is essentially not computable". Virtually every real-world use of cryptography depends on the ability to do that without disclosing your private key(save by malicious insider/hacker attack).
What did Sony do wrong? Obviously, they could do nothing about a suitably well-equipped hacker physically modifying a PS3 to stop it from verifying at all, or to always return "yup, all good" regardless of the verification outcome; similarly, a firmware bug could allow the same outcome without the expense of physical modification; but how could it be that they would have to put anything in their client(no matter how well hidden by hardware obfuscation/TPMs/smarcards/whatever) that could be used to compute their private key? Isn't a public key, which is a totally safe piece of data to disclose, all you need to verify whether or not something has been signed with the matching private key?
I admit that I don't have a deep understanding of this stuff; but it seems like this is the equivalent of "Hey, possession of the list of trusted CAs and their public keys has allowed a hacker with a copy of firefox to compute Verisign's root signing keys!".
How did Sony fuck up such that this story is not the biggest breakthrough in cryptoanalysis since frequency analysis?
The first amendment has nothing to do with ripoff reports' terms of use: there is absolutely no logical connection whatsoever between freedom of speech/first amendment and whether or not a website allows you to perform certain operations on their servers that will alter the appearance of one of their webpages. Completely disjoint issues.
However, the first amendment/free speech considerations do, quite arguably, have a strong bearing on whether or not a website operator should be allowed to either speak freely on their own behalf, or operate a venue wherein anybody with an account may speak as they wish.(this doesn't mean that the speaker necessarily enjoys absolute impunity, libel/slander can be a punishable thing).
One may, (as I would), urge the operators of ripoffreport to, where further information is available, append or prepend that further information to a report, in the style of an editorial comment. If the commenter was later found guilty of libel in a court of law, that would be sort of salient information to note, if resources permit, in the comment record. That doesn't mean, and freedom of speech would arguably protect against, imposing a legal duty upon the mere venue of speech to censor the libel, any more than a research library could justly be compelled to burn its collection of transparently libelous propaganda materials from some historical social or armed conflict...
If their policy is to be, essentially, a public write-once-read-many record to consumer interactions with businesses(which it seems to be) protecting their right to continue that policy seems both perfectly logical and, frankly, to be in the public interest.
It is not at all uncommon for businesses to apply various sorts of suasion, either positive(take down your comment and we'll throw in a free XYZ.." or coercive(take down your comment or we'll sue/report you as a bad buyer/scotch your warranty/whatever). Anybody who has spent time on ebay should be familiar with the phenomenon. Thus, making reports irrevertable likely keeps that to a minimum.
More broadly, there is a much more basic, and vital consideration at stake: Historically, there have existed various common venues that, in general, were never considered responsible for the behavior that occurred on them(If a piece of land, say, is owned by the state or somebody who has never seen it in his life and it has existed as a public right-of-way for 200 years, who are you going to punish, other than the guilty parties themselves, for the fact that something bad happened on it? The idea is barely plausible, and certainly not practical.) On the internet, clearly a vital communication medium of the present and future, there are no such "natural commons". If somebody doesn't maintain the server and pay the bandwidth bills, any internet venue will vanish into the ether within months, at most. All "spaces" on the internet have an owner(at most, an owner who exploits jurisdictional blind spots to try to stay out of sight; but there are no "commons").
If web operators are not given a degree of impunity for material that they happen to host; but have no other relation to, the results will be unpleasant: On a purely practical level, censorship of anything more than some tiny little hobby forum is extremely expensive. Say goodbye to any largely-automated online services. This is why even the DMCA, almost wholly an odious giveaway to the most reactionary of IP lobbyists, recognizes "safe harbor".
In an analogous vein, so long as ripoffreports does not purport to speak for the truth of the statements, merely to provide a venue for making them, suppressing them, would be analogous to forcing landowners to control the speech of anybody they let use their land, even if they do so on a "free public access" basis...
I think that all the G-Wiz stuff was(poorly contextualized) speculation on the possible effects of the Parisian experiment; based on London's existing "congestion charge" program, which apparently sent their popularity soaring on that side of the channel. Not a gigantic shock, I suppose. They look pretty suitable for strictly in-city work, particularly if the vehicles large enough to crush them like insects have been brought to heel first...
Slashdot Mirror
A fairly large part of Amazon's business practice, aside from efficient JIT inventory/shipping, is customer profiling and recommendation(an extension of the classic retail upsell, only every recommendation isn't for a magazine or service plan, and beaten over your head!). Given their fair expertise in this area, and generally commanding lead in online bookselling, it seems unlikely that this is a case of "poor, poor, Amazon, haunted by the lawsuits of angry parents whose offspring's attempt to search for sparkle-ponies dumped them into the M/M Rape BDSM section". Surely they can trivially keep team pathologically sensitive from finding anything they don't search for, and wave the free speech flag to cover the rest.
Thus, one is inclined to suspect that(since books about incest, rape, or whatever are presumably sold for a profit just like any other book) somebody inside or outside the company is being pushy for reasons ideological rather than financial, and that they are being surprisingly quiet about it(unlike say, the tremulous morons at the Parent's Television Council, who are explicitly ideological; but ontologically incapable of being quiet). Who exactly that might be is rather puzzling...
Colleges and universities(unless they have reached some degenerate end state) are supposed to be collections of substantially independent faculty, chosen for their excellence in teaching and/or research in their field, and then not micro-managed thereafter. College students, similarly, are supposed to be reasonably competent young adults, capable of doing such crazy things as "choosing a major" and "signing up for classes to suit their major and schedule".
For an entire college to have some fiat position on laptops (unless it is simply a statistical product of the fact that the entire faculty feel the same way about them...) would be uneccessary and pernicious interference into the classroom.
Now, if Professor X thinks that laptops are of Satan, and ruin all learning, the college should back him/her/hypocritical positronic brain up on the matter(unless somebody has a suitably compelling ADA style case to make). Students who don't like it can choose Professor Y, who thinks that 'engaging 21st century media integration is the future of collaborative learning'(and, similarly, deserves the college's support, within their financial means, in making sure that IT in their room doesn't suck).
"Colleges" are (unless we are talking about somewhere from which you should urgently switch) collections of professors given considerable autonomy in their teaching and/or(emphasis on the or in a few cases) research, and students given considerable autonomy in choosing which classes to take, and from which professors(even core curriculum/distribution requirements, while fundamentally premised on the "we do actually know better than you do, at present, what you should have a taste of" notion, generally give you pretty broad latitude in which section of Phil101 to enroll in...).
A "College" should have an opinion on the issue measurable only statistically. Individual professors, on the other hand, should do as they see pedagogically best, and students should seek out professors whose styles suit them and whose pedagogical records are worth the $/minute they are paying...
(of course, in the small but nonzero number of cases where some neurological or musculoskeletal quirk makes typing rather than writing an ADA requirement, people should deal with the exception with good grace, and the exception should avoid abusing their good grace with distracting Farmville sessions...)
Even better, with the availability of sliding rails and matching cable management arms on the back, you could get multiple rows of what you describe, in a single 1U, if you were willing to make the user slide the device out and pop the top to replace parts that aren't in the front row(certainly not as convenient, there is a reason that HDD bays are generally mounted on the front; but not unprecedented in high-density storage applications...)
Even if you were shooting for '2 post' friendly depth you could likely get two or three rows in, while a full 4 post requiring depth might be good for 8ish. It wouldn't be cheap; but it would be dense, fast, quiet, relatively cool-running, and cheaper than some alternatives...
As good old Tom Lehrer, songwriter, NSA mathematician, and alleged inventor of the jello shot, remarked in Send the Marines:
"They've got to be protected; all their rights respected; 'til somebody we like can be elected!"
If mounted upright, these guys would be just a little too tall for a 1U; but a 2U could fit several hundred... With the economies of scale enjoyed by something designed to be shoved into consumer laptops, a shelf or two of these little puppies could, with the right controller, make fibre channel stuff that costs a factor of ten or two as much wet itself...
Worse, it's both. Mechanically identical to a mini PCIe connector; but electrically/logically identical to SATA. Won't work if plugged into a PCIe bus, because it isn't a PCIe device; but won't plug in to virtually any SATA connector; because it has the form factor of a mini PCIe card.
It goes back at least as far as XP, probably 2000 if you don't need the Fisher-Price skin...
Now, just to get back to the bigotry and one-upsmanship, any setup that forces the user to think about how best to allocate filesystem stuff between block devices, or forces them to commit to one inflexible configuration, is arguably underutilizing the capabilities of this sort of technology.
Machines are, unless the human really wants to, supposed to handle the grunt work(not to mention, keeping accurate track of file accesses, speed and latency of multiple devices, etc. properly is really beyond the capabilities of a human, at least in realtime).
What you really want is an FS arrangement that can seamlessly present you with a single logical volume, silently handling the details of what to commit to flash and what to platter, for optimal performance and responsiveness without the cost of going all Flash.
Until you hit the really high end(where SATA is a bottleneck), there isn't much wrong with SATA. It's more the fact that mini-PCIe slots, sometimes several, are downright standard in notebooks and similar small devices, while these strange, hybrid 'electrically SATA; but mini-PCIe connector' things are not. an SATA device isn't going to do anything useful plugged in to a conventional mini-PCIe slot, and it will require a mechanical adapter to connect to any reasonably normal SATA connector.
For the moment, unless these things really take off, this particular combination of form factor and bus type screams "OEMs only", where either PCIe or SATA are common, standard, and amenable to individual use and upgrade...
It isn't wildly impressive, since many of the larger SSDs are either smaller boards padded out with aluminum or plastic to meet 2.5inch size standards, or 2.5 inch boards taking advantage of relatively lax density requirements to save on board layers and fabrication expenses; but it is the case that most high-performing SSDs are doing somewhat RAID-esque stuff across their multiple flash chips. Thus, unless the design is severely gimped by either incompetence or cost constraints, larger device=space for more chips=more opportunity for spreading operations across multiple flash chips=higher overall apparent speed. For a very small device to hit high speeds, the maker is either doing some clever packaging, to get a competitive number of dice in that space, or implementing a nice controller that can compensate for not having substantial parallelism to play with, or using comparatively pricey flash that is high on the speed and density curves, rather than just doubling up on whatever is available at mainstream price points and taking advantage of the available board space.
Given Intel's formidable fab expertise and capital resources, it would not surprise me if two and three are at play here...
It isn't a vice exclusive to Intel; but that is indeed what you are seeing.
For reasons that I can only imagine had something to do with "somebody pinching pennies until their pecuniary ichor flows", the trend somehow started of using the mini-PCIe connector, without so much as the decency of different keying or anything, to handle what are, electrically, SATA signal lines plus power. There would be nothing wrong with this if these things were actually storage-oriented mini-PCIe cards(like the HDD PCI cards of yore, with a controller chip+flash, capable of acting like a normal PCIe device; or if they were just using some 'sub-mini SATA' connector; but using a straight mini-PCIe connector for something electrically and logically completely different is plain hostile.
I get this sense that users aren't really supposed to touch these things, or the innards of the devices in which they will end up, or such a confusing and potentially damaging connector misuse would likely have not taken place...
Depending on exactly how PS3 games tend to operate, and whether they are free to do their own thing or have to operate through some sort of inbuilt API, you might be able to spread the pain out into a continuous layer of hurt: In the same way that AV programs are busy dragging down most wintels by hooking all file access operations and scanning each file on access; you might be able to do the hashing file by file or chunk by chunk... Easier if games have to go through some API to pull stuff off the disk, much, much harder if "trusted" disks are, once initially verified, basically given free reign to do whatever they want with the system and in terms of implementing schemes to pull and cache material from the disk in whatever way suits them best.
The only saving grace of doing a 50GB hashing operation at startup would be that the access would be pretty close to linear, which is about the best case for an optical disk... It'd still be ugly, though.
You may be more than 18 years of age, and in possession of a y chromosome; but there is No. Fucking. Way. that you have yet graduated to the status of "man" if you are actually playing in traffic because of the influence of Frogger.
Honestly, I can't think of a stupidity-related term that is strong enough and doesn't end up insulting the garden-variety mentally handicapped by putting them in the same basket as this pathetic man-child-thing...
We can only hope that he is sold for parts before he comes up with any other brilliant plans.
As it turns out, adorable kittens are a very useful model organism for visual cortex plasticity...
It will be interesting to see what, if any, strange neurological effects early and heavy exposure to the various more-or-less-unknown-in-nature quasi-3d tricks used for "3d" media have on the visual cortexes and/or eye muscles of the humanspawn...
Quite frankly, The Atlantic should be bitterly ashamed of itself for that ghastly piece of drivel.
Wikileaks revealed a cable, the contents of which included the fact that Tsvangirai, while pretending to be against sanctions against Zimbabwe while at home, sucking up to the electorate, was in fact in favor of them. The Atlantic says that this is a blow to democracy. Srsly? Do they actually think that "Democracy" is just some kind of game show, where you get to line up and put your little scrap of paper in the box every few years, to decide which of the competing politicians you find more mediagenic? Some kind of variant on "Survivor"; but with more national pride?
Unless your "democracy" is to be a cargo-cult sham, where you go through the motions and get none of the effects, people must be able to(and must be willing to, which might ultimately be the harder part...) vote for positions and platforms represented by politicians, not for politicians-as-characters. The fact that one of the major contenders actually represents the exact opposite of his stated position is, y'know, just a teeny bit relevant...
Now, if The Atlantic holds the view that, since Mugabe is just such a scumbag, his removal is more important than democracy; they ought to say so. It isn't hard: "Hey, Raison d'etat, bitches! Getting rid of an obviously bad dude is clearly more important than a bunch of little people getting to know what they are casting their cute little ballots for. Maybe when they are all grown up and sophisticated, like us, they will be ready for real democracy; but, for now, the important thing is making sure that they get what they need, not what they claim to want." See, that was easy, use it with my compliments.
However, if The Atlantic actually values "democracy" in Zimbabwe, they should be celebrating the fact that the people thereof now know more than they did before about who and what they are voting for. Instead, we get this pusillanimous drivel. Pathetic.
On a vaguely related note, adorable kittens are excellent model organisms for visual cortex plasticity research. It will be interesting to see if the various quasi-"3d" tricks used in "3d" media have any cool neurological effects on humanspawn(since who seriously thinks that kiddies are going to be taking regular breaks and limiting their gaming to minimal amounts a day?)
I'm sure Sony's deep and abiding concern for the pleasantness of the peasants' consumption experience will restrain them...
Hence: "Now, since the private keys presumably also control verification of patches, it is likely that some number of PS3s will permanently leave their control, with hacked patches applied that spoof acceptance of future patches, thus leaving them in control of their owners; but regaining control of all unsophisticated updaters and all PS3s leaving the factory from now on doesn't seem fundamentally impractical..."
By the sound of it, this crack does, indeed, offer sufficiently sophisticated current owners, and obtainers of back stock, who refrain from applying any Sony updates until a suitably permanent hack with a properly faked signature is available and applied, a chance to permanently remove some number of PS3s from Sony control(the possibility of Sony hiding subtle inference mechanisms in future games/updates that attempt to detect hacked consoles and ban them should, though, be considered. As with A/V, in theory you can't trust anything on a rooted system. In practice, you can sometimes ask clever questions and trick a rooted system into behaving slightly differently than a clean one...)
Future PS3s, of course, will be loaded with Sony's latest at the factory, and are presumably out of luck until another crack is discovered.
Are you going to tell me why I'm wrong, or is computing the fact that I am wrong, with certainty; without revealing the wrongness, part of some very subtle public/private key pun on your part?
Not that I want them to succeed; but they could always do something like: "Consider private key X revoked, and trust nothing signed with it, unless that something has SHA1 hash equal to one of the hashes on the following list..."
The number of existing PS3 games, DLCs, etc., while not small, is finite and pretty well characterized. It would be a pain in the ass; but not fundamentally difficult, to compute the hash of each one that is tainted by the compromised key and hardcode trust of it into the same patch that otherwise nukes that key and anything signed by it.
Now, since the private keys presumably also control verification of patches, it is likely that some number of PS3s will permanently leave their control, with hacked patches applied that spoof acceptance of future patches, thus leaving them in control of their owners; but regaining control of all unsophisticated updaters and all PS3s leaving the factory from now on doesn't seem fundamentally impractical...
I think that the "epic fail" part isn't the overall security of the PS3(which has generally been a pretty good sinister representative of the dystopian "trusted computing" future); but the fact that they somehow managed to build a code-signing verification mechanism that allowed their private key to be computed by an outside party.
Assymetric key crypto is supposed to be(barring serious implementation failures or incredible algorithmic/technological breakthroughs) such that you should be able to verify that a private key was used to sign something with nothing more than the public key, from which the private key should be computable only in a time longer than the lifespan of the universe's remaining protons. That is the part that they apparently managed to fuck up. In terms of generally being a tough nut to crack, Sony did a pretty decent job. However, if TFA is true and not misleading, they failed to implement an absolutely foundational part of practical cryptography properly...
How did Sony fuck that one up?
It was my(admittedly layman's) understanding that a public/private key crypto implementation, assuming it isn't deeply flawed, using key lengths suited to the computational capacities of PDP-8s, or otherwise totally fucked, was mathematically secure against anything other than a profound breakthrough in prime factorization algorithms, an unbelievable advance in computational power, or an insider leaking your private key.
With stuffy like HDCP, it was understood that serious tradeoffs were made in order to make the crypto cheap and fast enough that any POS $200 monitor should be able to decode an encrypted bitstream fast enough to handle the demands of uncompressed digital monitor connections. The weaknesses just came with the territory.
With something like the PS3, though, they have serious computing power available, and were dealing with a straightforward case of "verify that the code signed with private key X has indeed been thus signed, and not modified since, using public key Y, from which private key X is essentially not computable". Virtually every real-world use of cryptography depends on the ability to do that without disclosing your private key(save by malicious insider/hacker attack).
What did Sony do wrong? Obviously, they could do nothing about a suitably well-equipped hacker physically modifying a PS3 to stop it from verifying at all, or to always return "yup, all good" regardless of the verification outcome; similarly, a firmware bug could allow the same outcome without the expense of physical modification; but how could it be that they would have to put anything in their client(no matter how well hidden by hardware obfuscation/TPMs/smarcards/whatever) that could be used to compute their private key? Isn't a public key, which is a totally safe piece of data to disclose, all you need to verify whether or not something has been signed with the matching private key?
I admit that I don't have a deep understanding of this stuff; but it seems like this is the equivalent of "Hey, possession of the list of trusted CAs and their public keys has allowed a hacker with a copy of firefox to compute Verisign's root signing keys!".
How did Sony fuck up such that this story is not the biggest breakthrough in cryptoanalysis since frequency analysis?
The first amendment has nothing to do with ripoff reports' terms of use: there is absolutely no logical connection whatsoever between freedom of speech/first amendment and whether or not a website allows you to perform certain operations on their servers that will alter the appearance of one of their webpages. Completely disjoint issues.
However, the first amendment/free speech considerations do, quite arguably, have a strong bearing on whether or not a website operator should be allowed to either speak freely on their own behalf, or operate a venue wherein anybody with an account may speak as they wish.(this doesn't mean that the speaker necessarily enjoys absolute impunity, libel/slander can be a punishable thing).
One may, (as I would), urge the operators of ripoffreport to, where further information is available, append or prepend that further information to a report, in the style of an editorial comment. If the commenter was later found guilty of libel in a court of law, that would be sort of salient information to note, if resources permit, in the comment record. That doesn't mean, and freedom of speech would arguably protect against, imposing a legal duty upon the mere venue of speech to censor the libel, any more than a research library could justly be compelled to burn its collection of transparently libelous propaganda materials from some historical social or armed conflict...
If their policy is to be, essentially, a public write-once-read-many record to consumer interactions with businesses(which it seems to be) protecting their right to continue that policy seems both perfectly logical and, frankly, to be in the public interest.
It is not at all uncommon for businesses to apply various sorts of suasion, either positive(take down your comment and we'll throw in a free XYZ.." or coercive(take down your comment or we'll sue/report you as a bad buyer/scotch your warranty/whatever). Anybody who has spent time on ebay should be familiar with the phenomenon. Thus, making reports irrevertable likely keeps that to a minimum.
More broadly, there is a much more basic, and vital consideration at stake: Historically, there have existed various common venues that, in general, were never considered responsible for the behavior that occurred on them(If a piece of land, say, is owned by the state or somebody who has never seen it in his life and it has existed as a public right-of-way for 200 years, who are you going to punish, other than the guilty parties themselves, for the fact that something bad happened on it? The idea is barely plausible, and certainly not practical.) On the internet, clearly a vital communication medium of the present and future, there are no such "natural commons". If somebody doesn't maintain the server and pay the bandwidth bills, any internet venue will vanish into the ether within months, at most. All "spaces" on the internet have an owner(at most, an owner who exploits jurisdictional blind spots to try to stay out of sight; but there are no "commons").
If web operators are not given a degree of impunity for material that they happen to host; but have no other relation to, the results will be unpleasant: On a purely practical level, censorship of anything more than some tiny little hobby forum is extremely expensive. Say goodbye to any largely-automated online services. This is why even the DMCA, almost wholly an odious giveaway to the most reactionary of IP lobbyists, recognizes "safe harbor".
In an analogous vein, so long as ripoffreports does not purport to speak for the truth of the statements, merely to provide a venue for making them, suppressing them, would be analogous to forcing landowners to control the speech of anybody they let use their land, even if they do so on a "free public access" basis...
I think that all the G-Wiz stuff was(poorly contextualized) speculation on the possible effects of the Parisian experiment; based on London's existing "congestion charge" program, which apparently sent their popularity soaring on that side of the channel. Not a gigantic shock, I suppose. They look pretty suitable for strictly in-city work, particularly if the vehicles large enough to crush them like insects have been brought to heel first...