So, you are unhappy with Slashdot's summary and the resulting comments, but instead of emailing the "editors", or writing a post like this one, correcting the inaccuracies as you perceive them, you redirected your site to the American Cancer Society, sending them hits from people who have no intention of going there, thereby costing them wasted bandwidth, and risking slashdotting their servers? Do you think that your pique, or your new-father status justifies that? Maybe your lack of sleep explains it, but it is all in very poor taste, and reflects very poor judgment.
Yes, I know that with RSA, if your adversary knows even one of your secret primes for certain, then she can compute your other secret prime, and therefore your secret key, in an instant, leaving you with no security at all. That's why I mentioned that they must both be kept secret.
The RSA situation that I was wondering about, and I'm still not sure about, is one where you have chosen just one famous prime for your secret pair, but your adversary doesn't know it for certain. In that case, I would expect the adversary to try famous primes first, when attempting to factor your key. But still they must test the primality of the other possible secret factor, that they derived by a single division. I wonder, would they find it truly feasible to do, or merely less difficult, because of your choice of one famous prime?
No, I wasn't kidding at all when I said "very secure". I really mean it. It's just that Kalirion (and you AC), and I are thinking of, and referring to, two very different systems of PK encryption, which have very different properties, and would be affected very differently by the choice of prime numbers.
In the case of Diffie-Hellman, only *one* prime number is used, and it is not a secret at all. It is transmitted in the clear, over an insecure channel, to the other party, in order to be used to establish the mutually shared secret key. This is by design, and in no way weakens the security of the encryption system. Please, don't take my word for it, just read the link in my first post.
In contrast, in the RSA system, which you and Kalirion are both referring to, *two* prime numbers are used, and these two primes must both be kept secret. Obviously, in this case, choosing one of the two secret primes from among the "famous" prime numbers, would certainly weaken the overall security of the encryption, by reducing the search space for a brute-force attack. However, given the huge set of primes from wich the other one could be chosen, I don't know whether choosing just one "famous" prime number for your secret pair would make the resulting secret key easy, or even computationally feasible to find, given our current state of technology.
I agree that a webcam would do a far better job than speakers and mic, but they couldn't use body heat to do it.
Although a ccd or cmos sensor in a webcam, or most any other digicam, is sensitive to IR as you mention, it is not sensitive to the thermal IR of body heat. Most digital cams are capable of IR sensitivity out to about 1um, if you remove their IR-cut filter. The human body with a skin surface temp of about 305 Kelvin emits most of its IR energy at a wavelength about 10x longer than this, or 9.5um.
"Sending a message" and punishing a defendant for egregious misconduct is the very purpose for which punitive damages exist in the U.S. legal system. The system recognizes that in some cases, merely compensating the victim for their actual damages is not sufficient. Punative damages exist both to punish, and to deter this defendant, as well as others, from repeating the same or similar tortious acts in the future.
The fact that the (very large) prime modulus is not secret, but rather public, is part of the design of many PK encryption systems, and therein lies their beauty, simplicity, and charm. If you are interested in learning more about it, here's a description of one very widely used system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie-Hellman_key_exchange
At least in the USA, unfair and deceptive commercial practices are forbidden by the FTC Act, and deception by omission is still deception.
Quoting from the FTC: "Section 5 of the FTC Act prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce. The Commission will find deception if there is a representation, omission, or practice that is likely to mislead the consumer acting reasonably in the circumstances, to the consumer's detriment."
The practice of publishing only the positive reviews, without disclosing that fact, appears to be an ommision likely to mislead a consumer, and would therefore be an illegal practice. You didn't say whether the merchant is based in the US, so this may not apply, if they are ouside of US jurisdiction.
Your entire premise is incorrect. In the USA, at least, the sole purpose of a corporation is to provide limited *financial* liability to its *shareholders*; limiting their financial liability to the amount that they invested in the corporation's stock. The officers and directors of a corporation certainly can be, and have been, held both criminally and civilly liable for their own wrongdoing, and for corporate wrongdoing that they either directed in advance, or ratified after the fact. Nowhere in the US concept of corporations does the idea of "...to AVOID personal responsibility" appear.
I strongly disagree that my analogy is silly. Your analogy, regarding a builder who *sells* the house he builds, does not address the case that I was discussing. Your analogy corresponds to an author who sells the copyright to his work. The present law fully recognizes the right of an author to sell his copyright, at his discretion, at which time his interest in the work will end, and pass to the new owner. But that is not the case that I was addressing. I was commenting on the case of an author who does not sell his copyright.
So, let's take your analogy of a house builder, and apply it to the situation that I was addressing.
Let's take the case of a house builder who works very hard, and builds a strong house of solid stone. The builder spends years designing the house, and lifting the stones and carefully putting them in position. And when he is done, he decides *NOT* to sell his creation. Instead, he decides to live in it, and raise his family in it, maybe he even decides to rent it out to summer tourists. Whatever he does, it is his house, and his to keep and enjoy, for as long as he lives. When he eventually dies, that house that he built will pass to his heirs, and rightfully so, because who has a stronger claim to the fruits of the builder's labor, his heirs, or the general public? So his heirs will rightfully inherit the house, and then they will be able to live in it and enjoy it, or rent it out, or whatever they see fit to do with it, but that house, that the builder created by the sweat of his brow, will most certainly not become public property.
I think that this is a much better analogy for the facts on the table.
But you will notice immediately, that as a society, we already treat the author more poorly than the builder, because we say that the author's creation enters the public domain after only 75 years following his death, in contrast with the creation of the builder, which can remain in his family in perpetuity. So we already discriminate, and terminate copyright after the passage of an arbitrary amount of time. I don't think that we need to treat authors any worse than we already do now. We already afford less protection for the product of intellectual effort, than for the product of physical effort. I don't think that the public should be eroding author's rights even more.
That would be going way too far the other way, for a couple of reasons.
First, it would deprive the author's heirs of their rightful claim to the income generated from the late author's work. As a society, we don't say that a person's physical property becomes "public property" as soon as they die, so why should their financial interest in intangible property end when they die? I think that the rights of the author need to be respected, and balanced against the rights of the public.
Second, it would give unscrupulous parties the incentive to kill a person who holds a copyright in a commercially valuable work, so that they could get their hands on his or her work, and profit from it for free.
One possible solution to balance the various interests could be to grant individual members of the public an automatic royalty free license to make copies of a deceased author's works for personal, non-commercial use, within a short period after the author's death, maybe 15 years, while maintaining the full death+75 year copyright for commercial use, copying, or making derivative works.
I decided to see what all the hype is about, so I tried a very simple trig identity "sin (x) cos (x)" to see what answer Wolfram would give, and I was surprised to see this output:
1/2 sin(2x)
Periodic in x with period 2pi <== This should be "Periodic in x with period pi" -- unless I'm terribly mistaken.
Curiously, when you enter: 1/2 sin(2x) directly, it yields the correct answer: Periodic in x with period pi.
I don't know how to account for this bug, but if it could be so wrong about something so basic, I wouldn't trust it for anything complex, and I hardly think that its results are worthy of citation.
I read the ruling, and I think that you're mistaken, and that the article actually has it right. The paragraph (14) that you are quoting is merely the defendant's claim of trial court error, or "Appelant's first assignment of error" which forms the basis for his appeal from the verdict. It is not the ruling of the appeals court. The court ruled against him on that point, as you can see in their decision at paragraphs 48-54:
Richland County, Case No. 08 CA 16 12
{48} In Appellant's first assignment of error, he argues that the trial court erred
in overruling his motion for acquittal on the charge of unauthorized access of a
computer. We disagree.
{49} Appellant was charged and convicted of unauthorized use of computer or
telecommunication property, in violation of R.C. 2913.04, which provides, in relevant
part:
{50} "(A) No person shall knowingly use or operate the property of another
without the consent of the owner or person authorized to give consent.
{51} "(B) No person, in any manner and by any means, including, but not
limited to, computer hacking, shall knowingly gain access to, attempt to gain access to,
or cause access to be gained to any computer, computer system, computer network,
cable service, cable system, telecommunications device, telecommunications service,
or information service without the consent of, or beyond the scope of the express or
implied consent of, the owner of the computer, computer system, computer network,
cable service, cable system, telecommunications device, telecommunications service,
or information service or other person authorized to give consent."
{52} Upon review, we find that the crux of the State's "unauthorized use" case
was based on the proposition that Appellant was acting outside the scope of his
authorization to use the computer by engaging in criminal conduct, i.e. soliciting
prostitution.
{53} Having found that the State presented evidence Appellant used his
computer to upload nude pictures of himself onto adult dating sites and to access
certain pornographic websites to support the charge of solicitation, in addition to using
his computer to engage in the criminal act of solicitation, we find such conduct was
"beyond the scope of the express or implied consent and the charge of "unauthorized
use of a computer" was based upon sufficient evidence.
{54} Accordingly, Appellant's first assignment of error is overruled
It is obvious from section 1 of the same TOS that this is google's standard boilerplate TOS, or as they call it, their "Universal Terms" that covers all of their services, including search, mail, adsense, adwords, blogger, etc... In addition, each product may also have separate, more specific terms that always supersede the universal terms. I quote:
1. Your relationship with Google
1.1 Your use of Google's products, software, services and web sites (referred to collectively as the "Services" in this document and excluding any services provided to you by Google under a separate written agreement) is subject to the terms of a legal agreement between you and Google. "Google" means Google Inc., whose principal place of business is at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States. This document explains how the agreement is made up, and sets out some of the terms of that agreement.
1.2 Unless otherwise agreed in writing with Google, your agreement with Google will always include, at a minimum, the terms and conditions set out in this document. These are referred to below as the "Universal Terms". Open source software licenses for Google Chrome source code constitute separate written agreements. To the limited extent that the open source software licenses expressly supersede these Universal Terms, the open source licenses govern your agreement with Google for the use of Google Chrome or specific included components of Google Chrome.
1.3 Your agreement with Google will also include the terms of any Legal Notices applicable to the Services, in addition to the Universal Terms. All of these are referred to below as the "Additional Terms". Where Additional Terms apply to a Service, these will be accessible for you to read either within, or through your use of, that Service.
1.4 The Universal Terms, together with the Additional Terms, form a legally binding agreement between you and Google in relation to your use of the Services. It is important that you take the time to read them carefully. Collectively, this legal agreement is referred to below as the "Terms".
1.5 If there is any contradiction between what the Additional Terms say and what the Universal Terms say, then the Additional Terms shall take precedence in relation to that Service.
I don't see anything hidden, or nefarious, or even anything very difficult to understand. It's simply that they use these TOS as their baseline agreement, and modify it as necessary to suit the specifics of the particular service offered. I really don't think it's anything to get excited about.
There are GPL GUIs for MySQL available now...
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 1
Such as HeidiSQL. It's a pretty good GPL graphical front end for MySQL written in Delphi. It's got a couple of bugs, but nothing show stopping that I've come across.
What they are proposing is just to extract the solar thermal energy from the beach sand. The solar energy doesn't have to be wasted. If they were to take the solar heat laden coolant, and pass it through a heat exchanger, and into a Stirling engine, they could use it to generate electricity to power desalination equipment, for example. Using the cooler ocean water as the heat sink wouldn't produce very high efficiency, but it would still be a net gain. It wouldn't cost very much more than just throwing the heat away. They could get coolor sand, and generate solar power at the same time. Just a thought...
Slashdot Mirror
So, you are unhappy with Slashdot's summary and the resulting comments, but instead of emailing the "editors", or writing a post like this one, correcting the inaccuracies as you perceive them, you redirected your site to the American Cancer Society, sending them hits from people who have no intention of going there, thereby costing them wasted bandwidth, and risking slashdotting their servers? Do you think that your pique, or your new-father status justifies that? Maybe your lack of sleep explains it, but it is all in very poor taste, and reflects very poor judgment.
Yes, I know that with RSA, if your adversary knows even one of your secret primes for certain, then she can compute your other secret prime, and therefore your secret key, in an instant, leaving you with no security at all. That's why I mentioned that they must both be kept secret.
The RSA situation that I was wondering about, and I'm still not sure about, is one where you have chosen just one famous prime for your secret pair, but your adversary doesn't know it for certain. In that case, I would expect the adversary to try famous primes first, when attempting to factor your key. But still they must test the primality of the other possible secret factor, that they derived by a single division. I wonder, would they find it truly feasible to do, or merely less difficult, because of your choice of one famous prime?
No, I wasn't kidding at all when I said "very secure". I really mean it. It's just that Kalirion (and you AC), and I are thinking of, and referring to, two very different systems of PK encryption, which have very different properties, and would be affected very differently by the choice of prime numbers.
In the case of Diffie-Hellman, only *one* prime number is used, and it is not a secret at all. It is transmitted in the clear, over an insecure channel, to the other party, in order to be used to establish the mutually shared secret key. This is by design, and in no way weakens the security of the encryption system. Please, don't take my word for it, just read the link in my first post.
In contrast, in the RSA system, which you and Kalirion are both referring to, *two* prime numbers are used, and these two primes must both be kept secret. Obviously, in this case, choosing one of the two secret primes from among the "famous" prime numbers, would certainly weaken the overall security of the encryption, by reducing the search space for a brute-force attack. However, given the huge set of primes from wich the other one could be chosen, I don't know whether choosing just one "famous" prime number for your secret pair would make the resulting secret key easy, or even computationally feasible to find, given our current state of technology.
I agree that a webcam would do a far better job than speakers and mic, but they couldn't use body heat to do it.
Although a ccd or cmos sensor in a webcam, or most any other digicam, is sensitive to IR as you mention, it is not sensitive to the thermal IR of body heat. Most digital cams are capable of IR sensitivity out to about 1um, if you remove their IR-cut filter. The human body with a skin surface temp of about 305 Kelvin emits most of its IR energy at a wavelength about 10x longer than this, or 9.5um.
"Sending a message" and punishing a defendant for egregious misconduct is the very purpose for which punitive damages exist in the U.S. legal system. The system recognizes that in some cases, merely compensating the victim for their actual damages is not sufficient. Punative damages exist both to punish, and to deter this defendant, as well as others, from repeating the same or similar tortious acts in the future.
Yes, in fact, it is very secure.
The fact that the (very large) prime modulus is not secret, but rather public, is part of the design of many PK encryption systems, and therein lies their beauty, simplicity, and charm. If you are interested in learning more about it, here's a description of one very widely used system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie-Hellman_key_exchange
At least in the USA, unfair and deceptive commercial practices are forbidden by the FTC Act, and deception by omission is still deception.
Quoting from the FTC: "Section 5 of the FTC Act prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce. The Commission will find deception if there is a representation, omission, or practice that is likely to mislead the consumer acting reasonably in the circumstances, to the consumer's detriment."
The practice of publishing only the positive reviews, without disclosing that fact, appears to be an ommision likely to mislead a consumer, and would therefore be an illegal practice. You didn't say whether the merchant is based in the US, so this may not apply, if they are ouside of US jurisdiction.
Your entire premise is incorrect. In the USA, at least, the sole purpose of a corporation is to provide limited *financial* liability to its *shareholders*; limiting their financial liability to the amount that they invested in the corporation's stock. The officers and directors of a corporation certainly can be, and have been, held both criminally and civilly liable for their own wrongdoing, and for corporate wrongdoing that they either directed in advance, or ratified after the fact. Nowhere in the US concept of corporations does the idea of "...to AVOID personal responsibility" appear.
I strongly disagree that my analogy is silly. Your analogy, regarding a builder who *sells* the house he builds, does not address the case that I was discussing. Your analogy corresponds to an author who sells the copyright to his work. The present law fully recognizes the right of an author to sell his copyright, at his discretion, at which time his interest in the work will end, and pass to the new owner. But that is not the case that I was addressing. I was commenting on the case of an author who does not sell his copyright.
So, let's take your analogy of a house builder, and apply it to the situation that I was addressing.
Let's take the case of a house builder who works very hard, and builds a strong house of solid stone. The builder spends years designing the house, and lifting the stones and carefully putting them in position. And when he is done, he decides *NOT* to sell his creation. Instead, he decides to live in it, and raise his family in it, maybe he even decides to rent it out to summer tourists. Whatever he does, it is his house, and his to keep and enjoy, for as long as he lives. When he eventually dies, that house that he built will pass to his heirs, and rightfully so, because who has a stronger claim to the fruits of the builder's labor, his heirs, or the general public? So his heirs will rightfully inherit the house, and then they will be able to live in it and enjoy it, or rent it out, or whatever they see fit to do with it, but that house, that the builder created by the sweat of his brow, will most certainly not become public property.
I think that this is a much better analogy for the facts on the table.
But you will notice immediately, that as a society, we already treat the author more poorly than the builder, because we say that the author's creation enters the public domain after only 75 years following his death, in contrast with the creation of the builder, which can remain in his family in perpetuity. So we already discriminate, and terminate copyright after the passage of an arbitrary amount of time. I don't think that we need to treat authors any worse than we already do now. We already afford less protection for the product of intellectual effort, than for the product of physical effort. I don't think that the public should be eroding author's rights even more.
That would be going way too far the other way, for a couple of reasons.
First, it would deprive the author's heirs of their rightful claim to the income generated from the late author's work. As a society, we don't say that a person's physical property becomes "public property" as soon as they die, so why should their financial interest in intangible property end when they die? I think that the rights of the author need to be respected, and balanced against the rights of the public.
Second, it would give unscrupulous parties the incentive to kill a person who holds a copyright in a commercially valuable work, so that they could get their hands on his or her work, and profit from it for free.
One possible solution to balance the various interests could be to grant individual members of the public an automatic royalty free license to make copies of a deceased author's works for personal, non-commercial use, within a short period after the author's death, maybe 15 years, while maintaining the full death+75 year copyright for commercial use, copying, or making derivative works.
I decided to see what all the hype is about, so I tried a very simple trig identity "sin (x) cos (x)" to see what answer Wolfram would give, and I was surprised to see this output:
1/2 sin(2x)
Periodic in x with period 2pi <== This should be "Periodic in x with period pi" -- unless I'm terribly mistaken.
Curiously, when you enter: 1/2 sin(2x) directly, it yields the correct answer: Periodic in x with period pi.
I don't know how to account for this bug, but if it could be so wrong about something so basic, I wouldn't trust it for anything complex, and I hardly think that its results are worthy of citation.
I read the ruling, and I think that you're mistaken, and that the article actually has it right. The paragraph (14) that you are quoting is merely the defendant's claim of trial court error, or "Appelant's first assignment of error" which forms the basis for his appeal from the verdict. It is not the ruling of the appeals court. The court ruled against him on that point, as you can see in their decision at paragraphs 48-54:
Richland County, Case No. 08 CA 16 12
{48} In Appellant's first assignment of error, he argues that the trial court erred in overruling his motion for acquittal on the charge of unauthorized access of a computer. We disagree.
{49} Appellant was charged and convicted of unauthorized use of computer or telecommunication property, in violation of R.C. 2913.04, which provides, in relevant part:
{50} "(A) No person shall knowingly use or operate the property of another without the consent of the owner or person authorized to give consent.
{51} "(B) No person, in any manner and by any means, including, but not limited to, computer hacking, shall knowingly gain access to, attempt to gain access to, or cause access to be gained to any computer, computer system, computer network, cable service, cable system, telecommunications device, telecommunications service, or information service without the consent of, or beyond the scope of the express or implied consent of, the owner of the computer, computer system, computer network, cable service, cable system, telecommunications device, telecommunications service, or information service or other person authorized to give consent."
{52} Upon review, we find that the crux of the State's "unauthorized use" case was based on the proposition that Appellant was acting outside the scope of his authorization to use the computer by engaging in criminal conduct, i.e. soliciting prostitution.
{53} Having found that the State presented evidence Appellant used his computer to upload nude pictures of himself onto adult dating sites and to access certain pornographic websites to support the charge of solicitation, in addition to using his computer to engage in the criminal act of solicitation, we find such conduct was "beyond the scope of the express or implied consent and the charge of "unauthorized use of a computer" was based upon sufficient evidence.
{54} Accordingly, Appellant's first assignment of error is overruled
I don't see anything hidden, or nefarious, or even anything very difficult to understand. It's simply that they use these TOS as their baseline agreement, and modify it as necessary to suit the specifics of the particular service offered. I really don't think it's anything to get excited about.
Citation needed? Here it is: Federal Patent Court declares FAT patent of Microsoft null and void
These same two patents were also invalidated in the U.S. for a while, but they were subsequently upheld after an appeal.
Such as HeidiSQL. It's a pretty good GPL graphical front end for MySQL written in Delphi. It's got a couple of bugs, but nothing show stopping that I've come across.
What they are proposing is just to extract the solar thermal energy from the beach sand. The solar energy doesn't have to be wasted. If they were to take the solar heat laden coolant, and pass it through a heat exchanger, and into a Stirling engine, they could use it to generate electricity to power desalination equipment, for example. Using the cooler ocean water as the heat sink wouldn't produce very high efficiency, but it would still be a net gain. It wouldn't cost very much more than just throwing the heat away. They could get coolor sand, and generate solar power at the same time. Just a thought...