When it comes to the internet, the architecture arguably matters even more than the law. Any internet censorship apparatus is either an utter joke or a fairly comprehensive re-working of the structure of the internet in that jurisdiction. Once such a thing is in place, it can block just about anything as easily as it can block porn(which is to say, it won't be perfectly effective; but an imperfectly effective filter for some flavor of dissent will differ only in a few lists and regexes from the one for porn).
Once you've created a general-purpose internet censorship apparatus, other purposes will invariably come out of the woodwork. Either by law, or just by lobbying whatever opaque entity is created to sysadmin the censorship system.
Because you typically don't get voted out of office for being "tough on crime". Who wouldn't want "took bold action to protect your homes and families from the cyber-criminal menace" on their CV?
How do supporters of this preposterous, so called, "scientific impotence theory" account for the fact that Science produces the world's entire supply of Viagra?
Scientia potestas est, and sometimes it is willing to share...
Trouble is, while the "nothing packaged" heuristic will largely keep you away from any of the thousands of varieties of carefully flavored and textured corn syrup that purport to be a wide variety of food items, it is worth approximately fuck-all if you want to avoid a potential ingredient that you are worried about...
Watching the meat dude cut and wrap your meat gives you the warm and fuzzies; but not control over whether that meat has been eating ground-up sheep spines, antibiotics, and feed grains that were cheap because they had fungicide levels exceeding those legal for human consumption.
Your ability to discern whether or not the dew-kissed produce at the produce stand were being bathed in organophosphates two weeks ago.
My point in "The regulatory two-step" is that, you often find yourself in the situation of having neither the information needed to make a "choice" in any meaningful sense, nor the protection of any (enforced) regulation.
I'm going to guess, just for giggles, the following:
1.Any regulation of these novel techniques will be resisted on the grounds of "consumer choice"
2. Any requirement that foodstuffs incorporating these novel techniques be identified as such in any way will be resisted as "confusing" or "alarmist".
3. People will have no idea what they are buying; but their "decisions" will be held up as a vindication for consumer satisfaction with the new techniques.
That isn't strictly true. Sure, if you draw an org chart, and everyone falls under "the state", then it looks like you couldn't possibly have a "complex" with only a single actor.
However, "The state" is never a monolithic actor. Indeed, more totalitarian states can have incredibly colorful internal power struggles, with individuals competing for influence over various state organs, with new organs being created as more loyal replacements for older, ideologically challenged ones, sometimes even direct conflict between different state entities.
If, in practice, you have a situation where factional leaders in whatever military organ is dominant are strongly aligned, strategically, financially, culturally, with the factional leaders in the dominant industrial entities, the fact that the theoretical org chart says that they are all under one state doesn't really interefere with this being a situation usefully describable as a "military industrial complex", any more than the fact that, in the US case, the public sector military and the private sector industry are supposedly separate.
A cynic would suggest that what our "analyst" friends are actually so butthurt about is the fact that all those sweet, sweet shares are locked up in some oddball quasi-coop/quasi-privately-held arrangement, rather than floating around on stock exchanges, where they can be traded and hedged and sliced and diced (for a variety of nice commissions) by the more and less blatantly parasitic middlemen who live there.
Rather analogous to the swarms of "social security reformers" who talk a lot about cash-flow and solvency; but are basically pissed off that all those billions aren't being overseen by Wall Street, for an appropriate fee...
Now, as a separate issue, it seems quite plausible that Huawei's stuff is bugged. A certain "coziness" seems to be virtually inevitable between strategic corporations and the state's military and intelligence arms. That was certainly the case in the (formally) much less government dominated economy of the US during the cold war, I have no reason to suspect that it isn't the case in china now. However, stuff doesn't get bugged because sinister agents of the state buy 51% of the shares, and then introduce a "motion to bug hardware shipped to capitalist running dogs" at the next shareholder meeting. There are much subtler and more tactful ways of getting that done.
Consider, for instance, the tracking codes produced by numerous models of color laser printer, built around print engines produced by a number of different companies, ostensibly as an "anti-counterfeiting measure". This occurred despite the fact that the US Secret Service has no ownership stake in any of the companies involved. Exactly what inducements where used is unknown; but anybody who thinks that stock ownership is particularly relevant is a moron.
In any overclocking scenario results aren't assured(though, at certain historical moments, they very nearly have been for certain chips). It isn't a huge surprise that there is some variability being seen; but the small sample size(maybe a dozen review sites, with a chip or two each) doesn't let us say too much).
The only thing that would be really sleazy would be if the review processors "just happened" to perform atypically well compared to the ones that poor saps can actually buy. Since, though, the mixed reviews are coming from reviewers, that seems less likely, and that these chips are simply spotty overclockers more likely(unless, of course, some of the reviewers are reviewing "representative samples" kindly provided by Intel, and others are reviewing representative samples scored from somewhere in the distribution chain.
The fact that a chip only sometimes outperforms its sticker speed is irksome for the overclocker; but not a big deal. If Intel is feeding handpicks to the reviewers, that sucks.
Oh, there's no way in hell that anything contemporary is going to beat a used Xbox on price. Those things are at a practically perfect historical moment in terms of cheapness. Mass market item, so there are millions of them floating around. Generally considered obsolete(particularly now that MS scotched their multiplayer). Durable enough that many of those millions are still alive.
And, given that today's move doesn't retroactively break XBMC builds for XBox, all those used Xboxes should be fine until they die or become victims of disinterest.
However, it isn't a huge shock that the project would abandon further development on a decade-old hardware platform which imposes nontrivial constraints, particularly now that much more modern hardware is available at prices approaching what an Xbox went for in its heyday, but with a faster CPU, GPU, and mass storage, no dodgy legal build issues, and a supply that isn't gradually dwindling.
When making a direct comparison between chip X running at frequency Y and chip X running at frequency Z, speed does correlate pretty closely to frequency(unless you are being bottlenecked hard by some other aspect of the system). Assuming you don't care about puny things like "deafening fan noise" and "having to throw a baby seal into the boiler every 15 minutes just to keep the lights from flickering"(and, if you are a true overclocker, you care nothing for such trifles) faster is better.
In its day, and for a fair while after, the XBOX was an excellent deal for video applications. ~PIII-733 level performance and(rather more importantly) a decent set of video outs, something that was sort of dodgy with the PC graphics cards of the day. They got quite cheap, especially used, as well.
However, at this point, a PIII-733 with, IIRC, 64MB of RAM, just isn't that exciting. Nor, with the proliferation of nettops, is the price delta between a real computer and a used xbox nearly what it used to be. Then there is the fact that, while XMBC as a project has always been legit, actually building it for the xbox has been legally kind of dodgy.
There is certainly some chicken-and-egg concern(though this might be obviated by the fact that Google has a massive arsenal of web videos, and a browser, and mozilla could probably also be counted on).
As for costs, it wouldn't surprise me if the format was designed(in part) to keep those low. Remember the analysis linked to here a few days ago? The punchline was, in essence "very much like h.264, except in a few specific ways that are largely worse". Now, assuming that the On2 people aren't complete morons(which would also imply that their new Google overlords are complete suckers), why would they create a codec like that?
Well, h.264 is the best supported(in terms of software, and embedded hardware decoders) of modern video formats. It is also considered to be quite good, the product of research by a large number of people and entities. However, it is patent encumbered. Therefore, you would expect a rational competitor to do the following: Copy h.264 as closely as possible in all unpatented respects, or respects where patents can be worked around. Nobody is giving you any extra credit for re-inventing the wheel, and (unless you have particular reasons to believe the contrary) trying to do so would likely result in a worse wheel. Where the spec is simply too patent encumbered, implement the least-worst replacement for that bit that isn't encumbered.
Based on that technical analysis, it strikes me as extremely likely that this is more or less what On2 did. Do a patent search, presumably focusing on the MPEG-LA pool, and any other likely suspects. For any parts of h.264 too heavily covered to engineer around the patents, make the smallest legally tenable compromise.
Since the vast majority is extremely similar to h.264, this will likely make adding hardware support cheaper, since most of the dedicated decoder logic and/or embedded DSP firmware can be shared between h.264 and WebM, with small additions to cover the differences.
Dare I inquire as to the thought process behind the notion that the inferiority of an OSS program called "Fuzz" and the superiority of an debian-based VM, running a GPLed perl script automating a WTFPLv2-licenced fuzzer proves the unimpressiveness of OSS?
Because the print guys are grasping at anything they can to distinguish themselves from the reams of text-and-images-in-HTML available for free in any browser.
They are hoping(with some mixture of sheer desperation and modestly interesting UI quirks) that there is somehow a "digital magazine" that will allow them to get with this "digital" that they are losing all their readership and ad money to; but without sacrificing the "magazine" part.
I have to wonder what sort of testing Apple(didn't) do here. If it is possible for a linux machine to mount the filesystem, then setting a PIN clearly has no effect at all on the device's access control of that filesystem. Even if plugged into a mac or PC running iTunes, the data should be equally accessible.
Either they simply didn't feel the need to make the PIN actually do much more than lock the screen(arguably fairly misleading), or next to no testing was done, or (even worse), setting the PIN also sets some sort of "politely ignore the data you could easily access" flag, that iTunes obeys and the third-party implementations don't.
No way for a casual attacker to do so. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to remove the chips, which are a well-understood commodity item, and talk to them directly.
Depending on exactly how bad-block information and the like are stored, they may run into some trouble there; but only proper data encryption would actually stop them.
I'm assuming that the particular math used to encode the fingerprint in such a way that it doesn't die a horrible death the second it hits a lossy codec(which is pretty much assured before it hits the intertubes) or somebody get ahold of two distinct leaks and diffs them is probably substantially more novel than the basic idea of "add artificial differences to discover leaks".
Whether it is, or ought to be, patentable is not something I can really comment on; but I would strongly suspect that the actual method being employed is considerably different than historical examples in the same broad conceptual vein.
Why would you consider messing with something that works?
Your description suggests that, for anybody who doesn't really want to get their hands dirty, there is an adequate if rather retro menu driven interface. Great. A little reading never hurt anybody important.
Even better, if your application is written within the limitations of CMD batch files, it'll be trivial for any admin who cares and has a copy of notepad to pick it apart, if needed.
I, for one, fucking hate shiny-but-opaque vendor tools("Oh, great, you made it so easy that a trained monkey could do it, once. I need to do it 10,000 times, I see that your only officially supported method is '10,000 trained monkeys'. Would it have killed you to include some useful command-line options?". If your application is "send PCL test commands to networked printers" you ain't selling to grandma and cousin jim-bob. You may well be dealing with somebody who might need to programmatically test dozens or hundreds of printers. He will appreciate being able to rework your tool.
CMD sucks; but it ships with every version of Windows since ever, and(since you've already written your application) apparently its limitations didn't cripple you. Why mess with it?
Only if the company that makes the router is releasing their source; but Wal-Mart is installing their own cryptographically tamper-resistant bootloader that prevents you from loading modified firmware on the router.
That's the thing. Apple is the retailer; but they aren't just the retailer. They are also the ones imposing the restrictions that make the App GPL-violating.
I think the "detrimental to human survival" bit is his suggestion that (unlike previous arms races) arms races in those areas will not have (human) conquerors, or slaves, at all(except possibly in the rather short term).
Slashdot Mirror
You honestly think BP will face more than token consequences and maybe a name change?
When it comes to the internet, the architecture arguably matters even more than the law. Any internet censorship apparatus is either an utter joke or a fairly comprehensive re-working of the structure of the internet in that jurisdiction. Once such a thing is in place, it can block just about anything as easily as it can block porn(which is to say, it won't be perfectly effective; but an imperfectly effective filter for some flavor of dissent will differ only in a few lists and regexes from the one for porn).
Once you've created a general-purpose internet censorship apparatus, other purposes will invariably come out of the woodwork. Either by law, or just by lobbying whatever opaque entity is created to sysadmin the censorship system.
They were also achingly poor and forever desperate to numb the agonizing grind of their squalid lives.
Luckily, when it comes to developing a culinary tradition of booze, those two statements are essentially synonymous....
Because you typically don't get voted out of office for being "tough on crime". Who wouldn't want "took bold action to protect your homes and families from the cyber-criminal menace" on their CV?
How do supporters of this preposterous, so called, "scientific impotence theory" account for the fact that Science produces the world's entire supply of Viagra?
Scientia potestas est, and sometimes it is willing to share...
Trouble is, while the "nothing packaged" heuristic will largely keep you away from any of the thousands of varieties of carefully flavored and textured corn syrup that purport to be a wide variety of food items, it is worth approximately fuck-all if you want to avoid a potential ingredient that you are worried about...
Watching the meat dude cut and wrap your meat gives you the warm and fuzzies; but not control over whether that meat has been eating ground-up sheep spines, antibiotics, and feed grains that were cheap because they had fungicide levels exceeding those legal for human consumption.
Your ability to discern whether or not the dew-kissed produce at the produce stand were being bathed in organophosphates two weeks ago.
My point in "The regulatory two-step" is that, you often find yourself in the situation of having neither the information needed to make a "choice" in any meaningful sense, nor the protection of any (enforced) regulation.
I'm going to guess, just for giggles, the following:
1.Any regulation of these novel techniques will be resisted on the grounds of "consumer choice"
2. Any requirement that foodstuffs incorporating these novel techniques be identified as such in any way will be resisted as "confusing" or "alarmist".
3. People will have no idea what they are buying; but their "decisions" will be held up as a vindication for consumer satisfaction with the new techniques.
That isn't strictly true. Sure, if you draw an org chart, and everyone falls under "the state", then it looks like you couldn't possibly have a "complex" with only a single actor.
However, "The state" is never a monolithic actor. Indeed, more totalitarian states can have incredibly colorful internal power struggles, with individuals competing for influence over various state organs, with new organs being created as more loyal replacements for older, ideologically challenged ones, sometimes even direct conflict between different state entities.
If, in practice, you have a situation where factional leaders in whatever military organ is dominant are strongly aligned, strategically, financially, culturally, with the factional leaders in the dominant industrial entities, the fact that the theoretical org chart says that they are all under one state doesn't really interefere with this being a situation usefully describable as a "military industrial complex", any more than the fact that, in the US case, the public sector military and the private sector industry are supposedly separate.
A cynic would suggest that what our "analyst" friends are actually so butthurt about is the fact that all those sweet, sweet shares are locked up in some oddball quasi-coop/quasi-privately-held arrangement, rather than floating around on stock exchanges, where they can be traded and hedged and sliced and diced (for a variety of nice commissions) by the more and less blatantly parasitic middlemen who live there.
Rather analogous to the swarms of "social security reformers" who talk a lot about cash-flow and solvency; but are basically pissed off that all those billions aren't being overseen by Wall Street, for an appropriate fee...
Now, as a separate issue, it seems quite plausible that Huawei's stuff is bugged. A certain "coziness" seems to be virtually inevitable between strategic corporations and the state's military and intelligence arms. That was certainly the case in the (formally) much less government dominated economy of the US during the cold war, I have no reason to suspect that it isn't the case in china now. However, stuff doesn't get bugged because sinister agents of the state buy 51% of the shares, and then introduce a "motion to bug hardware shipped to capitalist running dogs" at the next shareholder meeting. There are much subtler and more tactful ways of getting that done.
Consider, for instance, the tracking codes produced by numerous models of color laser printer, built around print engines produced by a number of different companies, ostensibly as an "anti-counterfeiting measure". This occurred despite the fact that the US Secret Service has no ownership stake in any of the companies involved. Exactly what inducements where used is unknown; but anybody who thinks that stock ownership is particularly relevant is a moron.
In any overclocking scenario results aren't assured(though, at certain historical moments, they very nearly have been for certain chips). It isn't a huge surprise that there is some variability being seen; but the small sample size(maybe a dozen review sites, with a chip or two each) doesn't let us say too much).
The only thing that would be really sleazy would be if the review processors "just happened" to perform atypically well compared to the ones that poor saps can actually buy. Since, though, the mixed reviews are coming from reviewers, that seems less likely, and that these chips are simply spotty overclockers more likely(unless, of course, some of the reviewers are reviewing "representative samples" kindly provided by Intel, and others are reviewing representative samples scored from somewhere in the distribution chain.
The fact that a chip only sometimes outperforms its sticker speed is irksome for the overclocker; but not a big deal. If Intel is feeding handpicks to the reviewers, that sucks.
Oh, there's no way in hell that anything contemporary is going to beat a used Xbox on price. Those things are at a practically perfect historical moment in terms of cheapness. Mass market item, so there are millions of them floating around. Generally considered obsolete(particularly now that MS scotched their multiplayer). Durable enough that many of those millions are still alive.
And, given that today's move doesn't retroactively break XBMC builds for XBox, all those used Xboxes should be fine until they die or become victims of disinterest.
However, it isn't a huge shock that the project would abandon further development on a decade-old hardware platform which imposes nontrivial constraints, particularly now that much more modern hardware is available at prices approaching what an Xbox went for in its heyday, but with a faster CPU, GPU, and mass storage, no dodgy legal build issues, and a supply that isn't gradually dwindling.
When making a direct comparison between chip X running at frequency Y and chip X running at frequency Z, speed does correlate pretty closely to frequency(unless you are being bottlenecked hard by some other aspect of the system). Assuming you don't care about puny things like "deafening fan noise" and "having to throw a baby seal into the boiler every 15 minutes just to keep the lights from flickering"(and, if you are a true overclocker, you care nothing for such trifles) faster is better.
In its day, and for a fair while after, the XBOX was an excellent deal for video applications. ~PIII-733 level performance and(rather more importantly) a decent set of video outs, something that was sort of dodgy with the PC graphics cards of the day. They got quite cheap, especially used, as well.
However, at this point, a PIII-733 with, IIRC, 64MB of RAM, just isn't that exciting. Nor, with the proliferation of nettops, is the price delta between a real computer and a used xbox nearly what it used to be. Then there is the fact that, while XMBC as a project has always been legit, actually building it for the xbox has been legally kind of dodgy.
There is certainly some chicken-and-egg concern(though this might be obviated by the fact that Google has a massive arsenal of web videos, and a browser, and mozilla could probably also be counted on).
As for costs, it wouldn't surprise me if the format was designed(in part) to keep those low. Remember the analysis linked to here a few days ago? The punchline was, in essence "very much like h.264, except in a few specific ways that are largely worse". Now, assuming that the On2 people aren't complete morons(which would also imply that their new Google overlords are complete suckers), why would they create a codec like that?
Well, h.264 is the best supported(in terms of software, and embedded hardware decoders) of modern video formats. It is also considered to be quite good, the product of research by a large number of people and entities. However, it is patent encumbered. Therefore, you would expect a rational competitor to do the following: Copy h.264 as closely as possible in all unpatented respects, or respects where patents can be worked around. Nobody is giving you any extra credit for re-inventing the wheel, and (unless you have particular reasons to believe the contrary) trying to do so would likely result in a worse wheel. Where the spec is simply too patent encumbered, implement the least-worst replacement for that bit that isn't encumbered.
Based on that technical analysis, it strikes me as extremely likely that this is more or less what On2 did. Do a patent search, presumably focusing on the MPEG-LA pool, and any other likely suspects. For any parts of h.264 too heavily covered to engineer around the patents, make the smallest legally tenable compromise.
Since the vast majority is extremely similar to h.264, this will likely make adding hardware support cheaper, since most of the dedicated decoder logic and/or embedded DSP firmware can be shared between h.264 and WebM, with small additions to cover the differences.
Dare I inquire as to the thought process behind the notion that the inferiority of an OSS program called "Fuzz" and the superiority of an debian-based VM, running a GPLed perl script automating a WTFPLv2-licenced fuzzer proves the unimpressiveness of OSS?
Because the print guys are grasping at anything they can to distinguish themselves from the reams of text-and-images-in-HTML available for free in any browser.
They are hoping(with some mixture of sheer desperation and modestly interesting UI quirks) that there is somehow a "digital magazine" that will allow them to get with this "digital" that they are losing all their readership and ad money to; but without sacrificing the "magazine" part.
Hey! Wired is the magazine that I can trust to print long, insightful articles about how the print media is dead!
I have to wonder what sort of testing Apple(didn't) do here. If it is possible for a linux machine to mount the filesystem, then setting a PIN clearly has no effect at all on the device's access control of that filesystem. Even if plugged into a mac or PC running iTunes, the data should be equally accessible.
Either they simply didn't feel the need to make the PIN actually do much more than lock the screen(arguably fairly misleading), or next to no testing was done, or (even worse), setting the PIN also sets some sort of "politely ignore the data you could easily access" flag, that iTunes obeys and the third-party implementations don't.
No way for a casual attacker to do so. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to remove the chips, which are a well-understood commodity item, and talk to them directly.
Depending on exactly how bad-block information and the like are stored, they may run into some trouble there; but only proper data encryption would actually stop them.
I'm assuming that the particular math used to encode the fingerprint in such a way that it doesn't die a horrible death the second it hits a lossy codec(which is pretty much assured before it hits the intertubes) or somebody get ahold of two distinct leaks and diffs them is probably substantially more novel than the basic idea of "add artificial differences to discover leaks".
Whether it is, or ought to be, patentable is not something I can really comment on; but I would strongly suspect that the actual method being employed is considerably different than historical examples in the same broad conceptual vein.
Why would you consider messing with something that works?
Your description suggests that, for anybody who doesn't really want to get their hands dirty, there is an adequate if rather retro menu driven interface. Great. A little reading never hurt anybody important.
Even better, if your application is written within the limitations of CMD batch files, it'll be trivial for any admin who cares and has a copy of notepad to pick it apart, if needed.
I, for one, fucking hate shiny-but-opaque vendor tools("Oh, great, you made it so easy that a trained monkey could do it, once. I need to do it 10,000 times, I see that your only officially supported method is '10,000 trained monkeys'. Would it have killed you to include some useful command-line options?". If your application is "send PCL test commands to networked printers" you ain't selling to grandma and cousin jim-bob. You may well be dealing with somebody who might need to programmatically test dozens or hundreds of printers. He will appreciate being able to rework your tool.
CMD sucks; but it ships with every version of Windows since ever, and(since you've already written your application) apparently its limitations didn't cripple you. Why mess with it?
Only if the company that makes the router is releasing their source; but Wal-Mart is installing their own cryptographically tamper-resistant bootloader that prevents you from loading modified firmware on the router.
That's the thing. Apple is the retailer; but they aren't just the retailer. They are also the ones imposing the restrictions that make the App GPL-violating.
Sounds good to me. I'm too smug and linux-using to catch a virus...
I think the "detrimental to human survival" bit is his suggestion that (unlike previous arms races) arms races in those areas will not have (human) conquerors, or slaves, at all(except possibly in the rather short term).
"PC LOAD PHOSPHORUS"?
What the fuck does that mean?