For all those people who haven't worked in biometric security - let it be known now and forever: Reading children's fingerprints is usually fraught with failure. Children often have very, very soft skin that often doesn't read on scanners(flattens against the glass). Also - their lines are typically much closer together which often confuses reader software, or goes beyond the dpi of the scanner.
There's only two reasons to shoot this thing down: 1. It's going to land directly on a very populous area (New York, Shanghai, Berlin, etc...) 2. The tech is so embarrassing that we'd rather look like idiots than loose all credibility.
Number 2 is the most interesting to me. I assume that they can read a piece of paper from space now... and I don't even think that would be embarrassing anyway. I mean we've all got satelite maps - it's a no brainer to assume they have better tech and have for a LONG TIME.
No, this thing is perhaps either game-changing (reading paper through ceilings) or shameful (laser weapon system, "personal space assassin", or a WMD-type device).
The thing is - this size satellite comes down every few years and nobody cares. No military people go spilling beans anonymously to the press - which isn't very reassuring anyway. We'll probably never know - unless it really is that dangerous.
So if punishment is the only remedy, I would say the punishments currently do not fit the crime.
Tell that to the hundreds(thousands?) of bankrupt kids dropping out of college. I suppose they should be drawn and quartered?
It's no small irony that the music industry propagated such a huge moral decay on society, and now expect these kids to understand Plato's eternal question... "What is justice?" Perhaps it really is "giving to each what is owed." And if that is the answer, then I'm all for it.
I've had admins on my network simply copy both pub & private ssh keys from server to server (they're in the same directory). They leave the private keys on the machine and forget or don't know what they've done. An attacker with root on that machine can then su into the account and access other machines.
Attackers can trampoline onto other machines in the network if they share the same key. If you're going to do then be careful about which machines can freely contact each other, and use separate keys for each server.
IP protection *is* similar across the board. In fact, copyright law trumps many legal protections of personal privacy, academic research, and archiving. I fail to see how copyright could be any stronger!
There is no moral difference between kids and companies when they infringe copyrights - they are both wrong. Yet the magnitude of the theft is certainly not the same. Kids gain some music, probably freely available on the radio. Companies gain valuable property which could make millions of dollars over time.
Rational thought would say that if someone has taken goods or services - that they should reimburse the owners and pay a reasonable fine for disobeying the law. So far, copyright owners have failed to think sensibly when it comes to kids. How would they treat their own children? Does the punishment fit the crime?
No, what you're looking for is complete power over all uses of the work.
If any knowledge has come out of the DRM fiasco, it is that the cost to prevent each infringement rises exponentially as you approach complete power over the work.
You can not prevent people from planting seeds anymore than you can prevent people from giving drugs away, once the market penetration have grown greater than a non-trivial amount.
If the aim of copyright holders is to make money, then obviously there must be a tradeoff.
As far as the question of protection, surely you must be joking? Copyright holders have the power of government behind them - isn't that enough?
There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of copyrights, patents & trademarks. I make a living creating works - and so do many people on slashdot.
Copyrights not only protect artistic works - but indeed they are the basis of the GPL (which protects major open-source software such as the Linux kernel). When you see a company or person break the GPL license - justice is quickly meted out here.
That said, the "problem" isn't with copyrights et cetera - it is consumer expectations.
At least in the USA, we've been very used to paying for "premium" works, and getting older works for free or near free. The major air networks routinely broadcast movies, shows, and music for "free." The ones paying for these are advertisers, obviously - but beyond that it's essentially free. I can record onto tape, share it with a friend, keep it in on a shelf.
For premium works we buy tickets, subscriptions, DVD's, hard-back books, COTS software, and whatnot. The average consumer spends a lot of money here, and they feel that "buying" the work entitles them to fairly use these works.
Herein lies the problem: Consumers expect to be able to watch/read/listen on their computer - and they want to do it for around the same price they're already paying. They want choice, freedom to share with a few friends, and what have you.
Consumers have been "fooled" into thinking it was all really free because broadcasters have been making it essentially "free" for years. But instead of a VCR or a casette tape, we want to use computers - and the internet.
Copyright holders then did a stupid thing. They blamed their customers for stealing, while at the same time broadcasters are busy pumping content over the air. They called us "pirates" and evil-doers. They said consumers are rapist.
Here's your solution then. Start distributing your works over the internet. Sell the premium content for a fair price and stop calling the internet evil. Sure, you can build in a few protections like watermarking or digital signing to catch the real pirates! But stop turning against your customers!
In other words - do what you do best, and stop worrying about the kids that are *stealing* your works. They did it twenty years ago with mix tapes and VCR's - and yet the product still sells. The thing is - people really DO want a quality product. It is about the experience, it is about feeling like your getting a fair value for your money.
It's time to start moving those models that work in real space onto the internet. Broadcast it, sell tickets, sell movies, market it, and make money. Stop suing grandmothers and kids - it makes you look like monsters.
Why don't they throw us a bone and OSS Taligent... that would be cool. Hell, just the UI and compiler tools would be awesome.
Yeah, OS/2 is more useful, but HONESTLY, it's NEVER going to happen. OS2 is used on ATM machines around the world - does anybody think IBM wants to go fixing 10 year old buffer overflows on a system making zero dollars?
And the whole world always wonders why us Americans can't get our heads together.
All we need are a few name callings and/or political rhetoric and pretty soon we're embroiled in resentment, apathy, and counseling,... never mind the fact that nothing of value gets done.
You know... it's kind of funny you should mention that.
As a coder with 15 years experience - let me say as a matter of fact that no matter HOW good a job you've done, how WELL documented, or how CHEAP it is to run - someone like you will come along with a crock full of even "better, faster, cheaper" tech and drive the company/division into the ground.
Nothing personal, and hey - it works both ways! I still get paid, either way - and usually get a nice raise along the way too.
I've been on both sides of the development curve and I sometimes think - no wonder mainframes are still around! When sane people look at real project cost, risk, and reward they wisely increment tech on the edge instead of in the core business.
I'm not really singling you out - but this constant need to reincarnate code seems more and more ridiculous as I go along. Is it really cheaper, better, faster? Wouldn't we get the same or better bang with hardware upgrades? Are these questions ever asked?
Oh, gee, I don't know. How many countries out there can mass-produce millions of machines able to sieve RSA factors, brute force DSA keys, and generally out-compute our agencies at a fraction of the cost?
I've got to agree. I made a post which was (admittedly) antagonizing towards eBay security - but it was a far cry from the -2 Troll rating I received. I find the hyper-criticality of some people is really destructive.
Rob - I have a great proposal to fix this.
When you mod something down - both the post and the moderator's karma loose the point. I know this sounds bad - but I really think there needs to be something to dissuade the casual misuse of negative moderation. Something that enforces positive disagreement rather than retribution.
I don't want to be critical.. but my 3 year old IBM Thinkpad has a uniform display brightness & color, better battery life, larger keyboard, won't cook your lap, and a bonus right mouse button. Compared to the Macbook Pro it's "more professional" in many ways except CPU and disk i/o.
Yes, I own a Mac - and I'd be happy if the screen was just uniform in brightness and the keyboard was a smidgen larger.
Well, to be fair - they team didn't have the engine they wanted and the parts were sub-quality. They went ahead with the challenge knowing this. Their previous attempts have shown very impressive engineering - but had software glitches in the abort system. Testing that system is incredibly difficult - as you only get to test it when something goes really bad.
Well, if it's truly karma - I think a negative mod should effect the karma of BOTH the poster and the moderator. Those of us who sparingly mod would have nothing to worry about - and the mod trolls would slowly be eaten away with their own bile.
I've been on/. for 9 years and I think we're at another low point in moderation.
Awww - looks like I accidentally shattered somebody's poor, innocent ideals. *sniff*
I'm glad that's flamebait - it shows that I'm correct in assessing this communities ideals. You're a bunch of whiney "scientist wannabe's" with no backbone. You don't pursue truth - only next year's NSF/DARPA/ESA check in the coffer.
You get wrong results every week of the year and spend more time covering it up and explaining it away than understanding these anomalies. You spend more time on a computer than in a lab.
You're always on the lookout to ridicule the intelligence of others and have neither patience nor curiosity - it's a job, and you turn the wheel everyday.
Isn't Microsoft going to help Novell? They being patent buddies and all, I would assume they get to share patent protections. I wonder if Microsoft will even jump in and co-defend?
No disagreement with you. I simple worry that by allowing full i18n character sets to be used that we'll see an explosion of "mnemonics" that becomes more divisive than what we have now. Lets also not forget about the security issues here (remember micros0ft.com / microsOft.com?) Imagine now having to deal with Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and the other alphabets that resemble English in many ways when dealing with phishing scams.
The fellow above (humorously) mentioned that we should allow full i18n and let the search engines sort it out. Isn't this simply "moving the problem," and worse - placing the dependency upon a secondary system to translate these mnemonics? Sure, google can find the whitehouse.. but for many "lower" subjects the problem of language semantics grows exponentially.
I'm a big fan of languages - having done degree work in German, French, and ancient Greek. And I can't help but think that by opening up DNS to i18n that we're opening up a floodgate of nasty problems.
Slashdot Mirror
For all those people who haven't worked in biometric security - let it be known now and forever: Reading children's fingerprints is usually fraught with failure. Children often have very, very soft skin that often doesn't read on scanners(flattens against the glass). Also - their lines are typically much closer together which often confuses reader software, or goes beyond the dpi of the scanner.
Fingerprint + Children = bad combo.
(A public service announcement)
There's only two reasons to shoot this thing down:
1. It's going to land directly on a very populous area (New York, Shanghai, Berlin, etc...)
2. The tech is so embarrassing that we'd rather look like idiots than loose all credibility.
Number 2 is the most interesting to me. I assume that they can read a piece of paper from space now... and I don't even think that would be embarrassing anyway. I mean we've all got satelite maps - it's a no brainer to assume they have better tech and have for a LONG TIME.
No, this thing is perhaps either game-changing (reading paper through ceilings) or shameful (laser weapon system, "personal space assassin", or a WMD-type device).
The thing is - this size satellite comes down every few years and nobody cares. No military people go spilling beans anonymously to the press - which isn't very reassuring anyway. We'll probably never know - unless it really is that dangerous.
Best comment yet!
So if punishment is the only remedy, I would say the punishments currently do not fit the crime.
Tell that to the hundreds(thousands?) of bankrupt kids dropping out of college. I suppose they should be drawn and quartered?
It's no small irony that the music industry propagated such a huge moral decay on society, and now expect these kids to understand Plato's eternal question... "What is justice?" Perhaps it really is "giving to each what is owed." And if that is the answer, then I'm all for it.
Sorry, I wasn't clear:
I've had admins on my network simply copy both pub & private ssh keys from server to server (they're in the same directory). They leave the private keys on the machine and forget or don't know what they've done. An attacker with root on that machine can then su into the account and access other machines.
That's a good idea - but be careful!
Attackers can trampoline onto other machines in the network if they share the same key. If you're going to do then be careful about which machines can freely contact each other, and use separate keys for each server.
IP protection *is* similar across the board. In fact, copyright law trumps many legal protections of personal privacy, academic research, and archiving. I fail to see how copyright could be any stronger!
There is no moral difference between kids and companies when they infringe copyrights - they are both wrong. Yet the magnitude of the theft is certainly not the same. Kids gain some music, probably freely available on the radio. Companies gain valuable property which could make millions of dollars over time.
Rational thought would say that if someone has taken goods or services - that they should reimburse the owners and pay a reasonable fine for disobeying the law. So far, copyright owners have failed to think sensibly when it comes to kids. How would they treat their own children? Does the punishment fit the crime?
I see this type of attack all the time, the fact that someone automated it and gave it a zombie machine is not surprising.
* Don't allow root to ssh into your machine.
* Disable ssh1.
* Limit sudoers.
* Have good passwords.
* ???
* PROFIT!!
Seems like a formula everyone should know.
No, what you're looking for is complete power over all uses of the work.
If any knowledge has come out of the DRM fiasco, it is that the cost to prevent each infringement rises exponentially as you approach complete power over the work.
You can not prevent people from planting seeds anymore than you can prevent people from giving drugs away, once the market penetration have grown greater than a non-trivial amount.
If the aim of copyright holders is to make money, then obviously there must be a tradeoff.
As far as the question of protection, surely you must be joking? Copyright holders have the power of government behind them - isn't that enough?
There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of copyrights, patents & trademarks. I make a living creating works - and so do many people on slashdot.
Copyrights not only protect artistic works - but indeed they are the basis of the GPL (which protects major open-source software such as the Linux kernel). When you see a company or person break the GPL license - justice is quickly meted out here.
That said, the "problem" isn't with copyrights et cetera - it is consumer expectations.
At least in the USA, we've been very used to paying for "premium" works, and getting older works for free or near free. The major air networks routinely broadcast movies, shows, and music for "free." The ones paying for these are advertisers, obviously - but beyond that it's essentially free. I can record onto tape, share it with a friend, keep it in on a shelf.
For premium works we buy tickets, subscriptions, DVD's, hard-back books, COTS software, and whatnot. The average consumer spends a lot of money here, and they feel that "buying" the work entitles them to fairly use these works.
Herein lies the problem: Consumers expect to be able to watch/read/listen on their computer - and they want to do it for around the same price they're already paying. They want choice, freedom to share with a few friends, and what have you.
Consumers have been "fooled" into thinking it was all really free because broadcasters have been making it essentially "free" for years. But instead of a VCR or a casette tape, we want to use computers - and the internet.
Copyright holders then did a stupid thing. They blamed their customers for stealing, while at the same time broadcasters are busy pumping content over the air. They called us "pirates" and evil-doers. They said consumers are rapist.
Here's your solution then. Start distributing your works over the internet. Sell the premium content for a fair price and stop calling the internet evil. Sure, you can build in a few protections like watermarking or digital signing to catch the real pirates! But stop turning against your customers!
In other words - do what you do best, and stop worrying about the kids that are *stealing* your works. They did it twenty years ago with mix tapes and VCR's - and yet the product still sells. The thing is - people really DO want a quality product. It is about the experience, it is about feeling like your getting a fair value for your money.
It's time to start moving those models that work in real space onto the internet. Broadcast it, sell tickets, sell movies, market it, and make money. Stop suing grandmothers and kids - it makes you look like monsters.
Why don't they throw us a bone and OSS Taligent... that would be cool. Hell, just the UI and compiler tools would be awesome.
Yeah, OS/2 is more useful, but HONESTLY, it's NEVER going to happen. OS2 is used on ATM machines around the world - does anybody think IBM wants to go fixing 10 year old buffer overflows on a system making zero dollars?
And the whole world always wonders why us Americans can't get our heads together.
All we need are a few name callings and/or political rhetoric and pretty soon we're embroiled in resentment, apathy, and counseling,... never mind the fact that nothing of value gets done.
You know... it's kind of funny you should mention that.
As a coder with 15 years experience - let me say as a matter of fact that no matter HOW good a job you've done, how WELL documented, or how CHEAP it is to run - someone like you will come along with a crock full of even "better, faster, cheaper" tech and drive the company/division into the ground.
Nothing personal, and hey - it works both ways! I still get paid, either way - and usually get a nice raise along the way too.
I've been on both sides of the development curve and I sometimes think - no wonder mainframes are still around! When sane people look at real project cost, risk, and reward they wisely increment tech on the edge instead of in the core business.
I'm not really singling you out - but this constant need to reincarnate code seems more and more ridiculous as I go along. Is it really cheaper, better, faster? Wouldn't we get the same or better bang with hardware upgrades? Are these questions ever asked?
Dude.. that's so office space! LOL
But absolutely true... Except for one caveat: cool new stuff. If you're making cool new stuff and showing it off, I find good rapport pretty easy.
OMG!!! You've discovered the missing #2 in the "SUPER(tm) mystery of success" chain!!
1: invent bullcrap
2: ??
3: Profit!!
Sure...
(44.1 KHz @ 24 bits per sample * 24 channels) / 1024 / 1024 = 24 Mbps. Little room for protocol overhead there.
Most people probably feel the same way in the real world.
Oh, gee, I don't know. How many countries out there can mass-produce millions of machines able to sieve RSA factors, brute force DSA keys, and generally out-compute our agencies at a fraction of the cost?
Nah.... not happening.
I've got to agree. I made a post which was (admittedly) antagonizing towards eBay security - but it was a far cry from the -2 Troll rating I received. I find the hyper-criticality of some people is really destructive.
Rob - I have a great proposal to fix this.
When you mod something down - both the post and the moderator's karma loose the point. I know this sounds bad - but I really think there needs to be something to dissuade the casual misuse of negative moderation. Something that enforces positive disagreement rather than retribution.
I don't want to be critical.. but my 3 year old IBM Thinkpad has a uniform display brightness & color, better battery life, larger keyboard, won't cook your lap, and a bonus right mouse button. Compared to the Macbook Pro it's "more professional" in many ways except CPU and disk i/o.
Yes, I own a Mac - and I'd be happy if the screen was just uniform in brightness and the keyboard was a smidgen larger.
Perhaps that's why people want a hackintosh?
Well, to be fair - they team didn't have the engine they wanted and the parts were sub-quality. They went ahead with the challenge knowing this. Their previous attempts have shown very impressive engineering - but had software glitches in the abort system. Testing that system is incredibly difficult - as you only get to test it when something goes really bad.
Well, if it's truly karma - I think a negative mod should effect the karma of BOTH the poster and the moderator. Those of us who sparingly mod would have nothing to worry about - and the mod trolls would slowly be eaten away with their own bile.
/. for 9 years and I think we're at another low point in moderation.
I've been on
Awww - looks like I accidentally shattered somebody's poor, innocent ideals. *sniff*
I'm glad that's flamebait - it shows that I'm correct in assessing this communities ideals. You're a bunch of whiney "scientist wannabe's" with no backbone. You don't pursue truth - only next year's NSF/DARPA/ESA check in the coffer.
You get wrong results every week of the year and spend more time covering it up and explaining it away than understanding these anomalies. You spend more time on a computer than in a lab.
You're always on the lookout to ridicule the intelligence of others and have neither patience nor curiosity - it's a job, and you turn the wheel everyday.
You're the new old guard. Congratulations.
Isn't Microsoft going to help Novell? They being patent buddies and all, I would assume they get to share patent protections. I wonder if Microsoft will even jump in and co-defend?
No disagreement with you. I simple worry that by allowing full i18n character sets to be used that we'll see an explosion of "mnemonics" that becomes more divisive than what we have now. Lets also not forget about the security issues here (remember micros0ft.com / microsOft.com?) Imagine now having to deal with Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and the other alphabets that resemble English in many ways when dealing with phishing scams.
The fellow above (humorously) mentioned that we should allow full i18n and let the search engines sort it out. Isn't this simply "moving the problem," and worse - placing the dependency upon a secondary system to translate these mnemonics? Sure, google can find the whitehouse.. but for many "lower" subjects the problem of language semantics grows exponentially.
I'm a big fan of languages - having done degree work in German, French, and ancient Greek. And I can't help but think that by opening up DNS to i18n that we're opening up a floodgate of nasty problems.