Abstract: Logcrypt provides strong cryptographic assurances that data stored by a logging facility before a system compromise cannot be modified after the compromise without detection. We build on prior work by showing how log creation can be separated from log verification, and describing several additional performance and convenience features not previously considered.
It's shameful how much they brag about their patent portfolio. The RSA and Diffie-Hellman patents presented a very real impediment to the uptake of public key cryptography until very recently, when the patents finally started expiring.
And why don't we have digital cash? Well, social problems primarily, but it doesn't help that David Chaum and Stefan Brands, after developing *phenomenally* cool techniques for preserving privacy in electronic cash, carpeted the whole area with patents.
So, thanks for setting up yet another tollbooth to an empty amusement park, Certicom. You've lowered the bar for all of us.
This'll last about as long as it takes for the 82nd Airborne to get their butts kicked by a bunch of 12 year olds. Maybe that's why they're calling it Asymmetric Warfare...
You don't have to be a fundamentalist to learn something from the Bible.
Your right arm symbolizes the effort you put into things. Your forehead, just as it does now, symbolizes the things you're always thinking about. Thus the law of Moses required, for certain religious observances, that the believer actually strap passages of scripture to their right arm and forehead (and put them in the front door of their homes). It's a pretty overt reminder to them of the principles that should be influencing their thoughts and actions. (And not too unlike the modern practice of wearing clothing that says "No fear!", "Eddie Bauer" or "Budweiser" in huge letters for all to see).
The mark of the beast is the same concept - followers of the antichrist (think of him as a collection of all the ideologies that are harmful and destructive) will always have his principles on their minds and influencing their actions. And they'll require everyone else to do so as well, as much as they can. Revelations makes a lot of references to trade and commerce, so it's worth considering that those might be major tools of an Evil Overlord(tm).
Especially considering that the law of Moses has so many provisions against ruthless business - believers were required to take care of the poor, loan to those in need without interest (usury), and weren't even allowed to accumulate lots of land (it all reverted to the original owner periodically).
And if you don't get too distracted by the literalists (which most Christians aren't), you can see that the Bible's pretty acurate on this count, whether or not you believe in Jesus. When I was in grade school, kids told me explicitly that the reason I wasn't popular was because I didn't wear the right brand of clothes. Many people give up families and personal relationships because possessions and money get in the way. People starve because of greedy and corrupt governments.
So the Bible's a pretty remarkable predictor of human tendencies that have stayed the same over thousands of years. Want to spend your time thinking about philosophy and developing relationships with your friends and family? Well, in *this* society you're going to have to put a lot of effort into making a lot of money before you can expect that kind of leisure.
Have them explore a multi-user text-based reality simulator, like Elendor. My little brother learned his excellent writing skills on Elendor, as a byproduct of interacting textually with extremely literate and picturesque writers.
He has been playing for about 7 years now. I asked him about the character he plays... and he could have gone on for hours. Read some of the "Role Play Logs". Amazing. And amazing that they're ephemeral - imagine if every action were logged! We could spend years just as spectators, watching wars and communities from hundreds of different perspectives.
In our community there's a lot of value placed on treating people properly even when we disapprove of their activities. I protested with a smile on my face and didn't throw rocks at their building.
But I was dead serious about making the point that greedy bastards trying to take control of community software to inflate their pocketbooks will not only get you smacked down by IBM, but that people in your own home town will take the afternoon off work to make sure that everybody in the neighborhood knows what you're up to. I want their kids to ask them why we were out there, and I want their stockholders to wonder why protesters are showing up on LWN,/. and the Deseret News.
I was polite to everyone I met, but I held the sign I was carrying none the lower.
Neither, actually. It's about getting it up in the air and then back down in one piece. You know, it's really hard to have a serious conversation about rockets.
If my argument fails, then yours gains nothing from patent law and also fails. The pharm companies must do precisely this analysis to decide how much to spend on R&D - what are our chances c of success, how big is the payoff p? If the cost to acheive that probaility is less than cp you'll win in the long term.
You argue that $100k is too small to be worthwhile - but that's just saying that the probability of success is too low to be worth $100k, which is exactly what the formula is designed to tell you. You'll have to do a little calculus to find out if there's *any* price point at which the probability gives you a winning proposition; I'm sure the pharms are quite good at that, and that's why you won't see massive investments on hard-to-cure rare diseases.
I like your point that the risk can be borne by either side - either the HMOs offer a bounty and the researchers take a risk on doing the research, or the HMOs do the numbers and offer the grant, taking the risk (and reward) themselves.
I won't insult you by pointing out the obvious ways of eliminating the ambiguity you mention. You said yourself that everyone would want unbiased arbitrators to make decisions on the awards, which sounds fine to me.
Patents largely work out to be a poor implementation of my proposal anyway - we as a society bear (much!) higher costs for medications because the pharms have monopolies on them, and that serves as a reward to their risk. They just plug the monopoly rights into the equation. Unfortunately, *monopoly* means that if they decide they can make more money by letting Africans die than by selling at a low enough price for them, or letting them license the patent, then sucks to be them.
Okay, let's take a look at that question. You have the potential of developing a drug that can cure disease X. There are n people who are going to die of disease X who would pay an average of P dollars to help find a cure, and who are going to cost their insurance providers D dollars in the process of dying.
We have a demand, both from individuals and from powerful companies. We have a potential supply that will produce results with a certain probability p. You should be able to fill in the gaps at this point, but I'll spell it out anyway.
The patients and the insurers get together and offer a bounty to the first company to produce a drug which meets a certain criteria for curing disease X. Or they take bids first and then award the contract to a single company. Or, they create a grant and award it to a university.
The size of the grant?
Up to (nP + D)p - 1 dollars. Assuming that the cost of the research eats up every one of those dollars with no ancillary benefits to anyone, $1 wealth is created (and a lot of people are really happy) on average. That *includes* the cases in which a cure is not found.
Now that's true greed. I'm so apathetic about something that I wrote 20 years ago that I can't even be bothered to be *contacted* about it, but you sure as heck can't use it or share it with the others who are trying to preserve the history of an ancient hardware platform.
Enjoy the company of your dusty floppy disks, and sleep well knowing that you deprived a hobbyist of a trifle of enjoyment just because you could.
I recall being chided by a very popular girl once about my unpopularity. If I wanted to be popular, why didn't I take the initiative and make friends? Invite people over, throw parties. Seemed obvious when she said it - it's my own fault.
Later it hit me. I did talk to everybody. I tried to get people together to play volleyball at the church. It worked for a week or two and then fizzled. The popular guys would talk about the cool stuff they were doing, and I'd try to show an interest in it. "Hey, we ought to invite you next time," they said, but oddly enough, the phone never rang.
These were the nice kids, and I don't think any of them consciously excluded me. But ultimately I wasn't included, and that lack of interaction made it harder to integrate as time went on.
I caught up after about 23, and it's fascinating to see the other side. And to see how easy it is to forget the less confident, less popular folks. And how much of my popularity is a result of... popularity.
So don't think for a second that your popularity is a result of your own effort. It's a process that involves externally imposed status, similarity to the others in a group, and confidence which comes from acceptance. If it was easy for you, be grateful and start genuinely accepting the ones it doesn't come easily to.
I used to read the ERPS-list in the mid-90's - they had resorted to distilling their own h2o2 (taking commercial h2o2 93% up to >97% purity, as I recall), after dealing with several problems in which additives made it hard to distill.
They ran the still in a trailer on the rocket ranch, and a pressure release valve failed. The resulting explosion left a sizeable hole in the trailer, and drew some attention from inquisitive government officials.
So, John, the moral of the story is to make sure your still is in proper operating condition before using it in your home.:)
I was musing the other day that an MP3 player would be really convenient to own *if* it had pitch control. If player firmware was available, somebody would have likely already written a patch, or I could do it myself.
Similarly, the linuxbios folks have gone to a great deal of effort to write a free PC BIOS from scratch - because nobody had the features they needed (like serial console support).
What will it take to get companies to start releasing firmware as Free Software?
You want us to help you get a patent? One that says that nobody, including us, can use this idea you had or anything closely related to it - for the next 20 years? What are you smoking?
Hearing your idea isn't worth the shackles it'll place on society. I'd rather solve the problem myself than come to you for permission to *use*an*idea* (what a travesty of a statement!), but if you succeed I won't even have that option.
The whole point of the patent system is to require that a company disclose its methods in exchange for the patent. If you clicked a EULA that said you couldn't reverse-engineer code, and they could somehow prove that that's what you did, then they might be able to claim copyright infringement. But patents are designed to keep things *from* being secret, not to keep them secret.
Nah, once I see it's the GPL I don't bother to re-read it. I do occasionally use software that isn't GPL, but a quick check of FSF's free software license list is usually enough to assure me that a package isn't going to abuse my freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
Crypto can take you surprisingly far in this case:
http://lunkwill.org/cv/logcrypt_update.pdf
Abstract: Logcrypt provides strong cryptographic assurances that data stored by a logging facility before a system compromise cannot be modified after the compromise without detection. We build on prior work by showing how log creation can be separated from log verification, and describing several additional performance and convenience features not previously considered.
Warthog, huh? Looks to me more like a puma.
It's shameful how much they brag about their patent portfolio. The RSA and Diffie-Hellman patents presented a very real impediment to the uptake of public key cryptography until very recently, when the patents finally started expiring.
And why don't we have digital cash? Well, social problems primarily, but it doesn't help that David Chaum and Stefan Brands, after developing *phenomenally* cool techniques for preserving privacy in electronic cash, carpeted the whole area with patents.
So, thanks for setting up yet another tollbooth to an empty amusement park, Certicom. You've lowered the bar for all of us.
This'll last about as long as it takes for the 82nd Airborne to get their butts kicked by a bunch of 12 year olds. Maybe that's why they're calling it Asymmetric Warfare...
You don't have to be a fundamentalist to learn something from the Bible.
Your right arm symbolizes the effort you put into things. Your forehead, just as it does now, symbolizes the things you're always thinking about. Thus the law of Moses required, for certain religious observances, that the believer actually strap passages of scripture to their right arm and forehead (and put them in the front door of their homes). It's a pretty overt reminder to them of the principles that should be influencing their thoughts and actions. (And not too unlike the modern practice of wearing clothing that says "No fear!", "Eddie Bauer" or "Budweiser" in huge letters for all to see).
The mark of the beast is the same concept - followers of the antichrist (think of him as a collection of all the ideologies that are harmful and destructive) will always have his principles on their minds and influencing their actions. And they'll require everyone else to do so as well, as much as they can. Revelations makes a lot of references to trade and commerce, so it's worth considering that those might be major tools of an Evil Overlord(tm).
Especially considering that the law of Moses has so many provisions against ruthless business - believers were required to take care of the poor, loan to those in need without interest (usury), and weren't even allowed to accumulate lots of land (it all reverted to the original owner periodically).
And if you don't get too distracted by the literalists (which most Christians aren't), you can see that the Bible's pretty acurate on this count, whether or not you believe in Jesus. When I was in grade school, kids told me explicitly that the reason I wasn't popular was because I didn't wear the right brand of clothes. Many people give up families and personal relationships because possessions and money get in the way. People starve because of greedy and corrupt governments.
So the Bible's a pretty remarkable predictor of human tendencies that have stayed the same over thousands of years. Want to spend your time thinking about philosophy and developing relationships with your friends and family? Well, in *this* society you're going to have to put a lot of effort into making a lot of money before you can expect that kind of leisure.
Hm, rebooting. Rebooting. Oh yeah, I remember now. I had to do that to my GNU/Linux system once when I upgraded my motherboard.
I found some photos of the devices.
He has been playing for about 7 years now. I asked him about the character he plays... and he could have gone on for hours. Read some of the "Role Play Logs". Amazing. And amazing that they're ephemeral - imagine if every action were logged! We could spend years just as spectators, watching wars and communities from hundreds of different perspectives.
In our community there's a lot of value placed on treating people properly even when we disapprove of their activities. I protested with a smile on my face and didn't throw rocks at their building.
/. and the Deseret News.
But I was dead serious about making the point that greedy bastards trying to take control of community software to inflate their pocketbooks will not only get you smacked down by IBM, but that people in your own home town will take the afternoon off work to make sure that everybody in the neighborhood knows what you're up to. I want their kids to ask them why we were out there, and I want their stockholders to wonder why protesters are showing up on LWN,
I was polite to everyone I met, but I held the sign I was carrying none the lower.
Neither, actually. It's about getting it up in the air and then back down in one piece. You know, it's really hard to have a serious conversation about rockets.
Ours is bigger.
If my argument fails, then yours gains nothing from patent law and also fails. The pharm companies must do precisely this analysis to decide how much to spend on R&D - what are our chances c of success, how big is the payoff p? If the cost to acheive that probaility is less than cp you'll win in the long term.
You argue that $100k is too small to be worthwhile - but that's just saying that the probability of success is too low to be worth $100k, which is exactly what the formula is designed to tell you. You'll have to do a little calculus to find out if there's *any* price point at which the probability gives you a winning proposition; I'm sure the pharms are quite good at that, and that's why you won't see massive investments on hard-to-cure rare diseases.
I like your point that the risk can be borne by either side - either the HMOs offer a bounty and the researchers take a risk on doing the research, or the HMOs do the numbers and offer the grant, taking the risk (and reward) themselves.
I won't insult you by pointing out the obvious ways of eliminating the ambiguity you mention. You said yourself that everyone would want unbiased arbitrators to make decisions on the awards, which sounds fine to me.
Patents largely work out to be a poor implementation of my proposal anyway - we as a society bear (much!) higher costs for medications because the pharms have monopolies on them, and that serves as a reward to their risk. They just plug the monopoly rights into the equation. Unfortunately, *monopoly* means that if they decide they can make more money by letting Africans die than by selling at a low enough price for them, or letting them license the patent, then sucks to be them.
Okay, let's take a look at that question. You have the potential of developing a drug that can cure disease X. There are n people who are going to die of disease X who would pay an average of P dollars to help find a cure, and who are going to cost their insurance providers D dollars in the process of dying.
We have a demand, both from individuals and from powerful companies. We have a potential supply that will produce results with a certain probability p. You should be able to fill in the gaps at this point, but I'll spell it out anyway.
The patients and the insurers get together and offer a bounty to the first company to produce a drug which meets a certain criteria for curing disease X. Or they take bids first and then award the contract to a single company. Or, they create a grant and award it to a university.
The size of the grant?
Up to (nP + D)p - 1 dollars. Assuming that the cost of the research eats up every one of those dollars with no ancillary benefits to anyone, $1 wealth is created (and a lot of people are really happy) on average. That *includes* the cases in which a cure is not found.
Homer: We played Dungeons & Dragons for three hours! Then I was slain by an elf.
Seriously, though, I want to see some screenshots of the carnage!
Right. What's a qubit?
Now that's true greed. I'm so apathetic about something that I wrote 20 years ago that I can't even be bothered to be *contacted* about it, but you sure as heck can't use it or share it with the others who are trying to preserve the history of an ancient hardware platform.
Enjoy the company of your dusty floppy disks, and sleep well knowing that you deprived a hobbyist of a trifle of enjoyment just because you could.
Clearly, you have not heard about the gummy fingers.
I recall being chided by a very popular girl once about my unpopularity. If I wanted to be popular, why didn't I take the initiative and make friends? Invite people over, throw parties. Seemed obvious when she said it - it's my own fault.
Later it hit me. I did talk to everybody. I tried to get people together to play volleyball at the church. It worked for a week or two and then fizzled. The popular guys would talk about the cool stuff they were doing, and I'd try to show an interest in it. "Hey, we ought to invite you next time," they said, but oddly enough, the phone never rang.
These were the nice kids, and I don't think any of them consciously excluded me. But ultimately I wasn't included, and that lack of interaction made it harder to integrate as time went on.
I caught up after about 23, and it's fascinating to see the other side. And to see how easy it is to forget the less confident, less popular folks. And how much of my popularity is a result of... popularity.
So don't think for a second that your popularity is a result of your own effort. It's a process that involves externally imposed status, similarity to the others in a group, and confidence which comes from acceptance. If it was easy for you, be grateful and start genuinely accepting the ones it doesn't come easily to.
I used to read the ERPS-list in the mid-90's - they had resorted to distilling their own h2o2 (taking commercial h2o2 93% up to >97% purity, as I recall), after dealing with several problems in which additives made it hard to distill.
:)
They ran the still in a trailer on the rocket ranch, and a pressure release valve failed. The resulting explosion left a sizeable hole in the trailer, and drew some attention from inquisitive government officials.
So, John, the moral of the story is to make sure your still is in proper operating condition before using it in your home.
I was musing the other day that an MP3 player would be really convenient to own *if* it had pitch control. If player firmware was available, somebody would have likely already written a patch, or I could do it myself.
Similarly, the linuxbios folks have gone to a great deal of effort to write a free PC BIOS from scratch - because nobody had the features they needed (like serial console support).
What will it take to get companies to start releasing firmware as Free Software?
You want us to help you get a patent? One that says that nobody, including us, can use this idea you had or anything closely related to it - for the next 20 years? What are you smoking?
Hearing your idea isn't worth the shackles it'll place on society. I'd rather solve the problem myself than come to you for permission to *use*an*idea* (what a travesty of a statement!), but if you succeed I won't even have that option.
managers...*how* God invented purgatory.
The whole point of the patent system is to require that a company disclose its methods in exchange for the patent. If you clicked a EULA that said you couldn't reverse-engineer code, and they could somehow prove that that's what you did, then they might be able to claim copyright infringement. But patents are designed to keep things *from* being secret, not to keep them secret.
Nah, once I see it's the GPL I don't bother to re-read it. I do occasionally use software that isn't GPL, but a quick check of FSF's free software license list is usually enough to assure me that a package isn't going to abuse my freedom.
Contests are good at proving *insecurity*. Thus the RSA contests. But lack of proof of insecurity isn't proof of security.