The problem comes in with the studios, who demand that Netflix use DRM when a user streams a video on their site.
and the solution is for users to interpret that as "the studios have demanded that people bittorrent non-DRM versions." If you Just Say No to DRM, all problems go away. If that means no Netflix, aw geez, too bad. Call me back when you really open for business.
It makes me sad that people would even propose such a thing.
Evil space-governments and the far-flung future go hand in hand. It's not sad; it's science fiction! Part of what it means to be an astro-man is to overthrow your government and find out the awful truth about the illusory world that you took for granted all your life. But that ain't gonna happen if nobody hides the awful truth to begin with. And nobody is.. GOing.. to.. TALK.. a computer.. to DEATH, unless there's an evil computer with terrible master plans for the human race in the first place.
Government should be open and transparent, and the people should be informed.
Well, then, no extrasolar colonies for you! My point is was that free people would likely not follow through and do what we want them to do (waste their lives, as dehumanized DNA-cargo (or at best, maintenance techs), on a journey which won't personally benefit them at all).
Putting people on a generational ship is a really shitty thing to do (but maybe it could work). It's an evil premise: possible the most technically viable yet ethically horrible solution to interstellar travel. Oh sure, maybe the first generation were volunteers, but their kids weren't. So let's drop the pretense of having good intentions here, ok? If hiding the truth from the people, denying them any real power over their destinies, and setting them up for a life-long deception under the oppressive-yet-unseen yoke of a ruthlessly far-sighted computer that runs their shadowy government, is what it takes to accomplish our objectives, then I say the ends justify the means! If you don't have the stomach to play god and manipulate the fates of innocent people, then maybe this project is just too big for you, puny human.
Five years ago this really would have been a surprise. Maybe even more recently than that. Shit, I'll just admit it: to me, it's a surprise, today, right now. Last I heard, the DNA evidence was that nobody alive has Neanderthal lineage -- that they were an offshoot of homo sapiens ancestors rather than being homo sapiens ancestors. Just goes to show that if you're even just a few years out-of-date on anthropology, you can miss some big things. Real news is happening, right now.
given the choice to expand out into a entire planet I doubt there would be any society that would turn it down.
Oh, I agree with that. It seems like an easy decision for the final 3 or 4 generations ("We're almost there! Keep going!" and "Yippee, we're here!"). But a few dozen generations before that? I can imagine people saying, "Why spend our energy on the acceleration/deceleration rockets? Let's pump it into the holodeck instead."
With cryo-stasis ships, at least there's a reason to eventually settle somewhere. You want to wake up (or stop taking watches) and eventually start your new life. You can bear the hardships of the journey, because you have a personal goal that you intend to some day fulfill.
The thing about generational ships, is that if they're really self-sufficient and comfortable enough that the early generations don't go mad, then what's the point of landing anywhere? You can say that humans need to expand, but the people onboard won't be able to meet that need, and they're just going to have to cope with such a limited existence. But if they succeed, then that culture will be passed down, so you'll have a whole population that is happy staying in their little box. How can you plan so far into the future and keep the plan intact?
There's a Star Trek episode ("The World is Hollow And I Have Touched the Sky") where the people don't even know they're on such a ship, and the more I think of it, the more realistic and believable that seems. People wouldn't ever be able to stick to such a long-term mission in which they don't personally have any stake, so they might as well not be depended upon to achieve it, or even know it's happening. One single centralized authority with infinite patience (a computer) and a secret and tyrannical agenda, is about the only thing that could keep it going.
The cellphone towers are where you'd expect them to be, but in the year 2007. The person she is talking to, is actually a talking dog, in Middle Earth, several millennia earlier.
After all, if you can time travel, why can't your cellphone signals time travel too? Once you accept ridiculously improbable things, it would be pretty silly to reject other ridiculously improbable things as out-of-hand.
No longer does an HTPC need to be shoehorned into the confines of the entertainment center.
Is this really a problem? Some Mini-ITX cases are mountable right on the back of TVs, and some TVs themselves are fairly powerful computers in themselves, even if the embedded software is still kinda lame and primitive right now. If you can get the compressed video to the TV area, then at that point, I think you've pretty much won. I'm not knocking the bandwidth improvements; I think that's great, but actually using it for uncompressed HDMI seems like a waste.
It is not reasonable to allow one technically knowledgeable commercial organisation to sell a mass market product that comes with a massive security hole by default
It is very reasonable, because the "massive security hole" is conditional.
The only way to avoid the "massive security hole" that you speak of, is for the router to refuse to work in an unencrypted mode. i.e. Kill the "just works" aspect to it. If you haven't entered a passphrase, then no connection for you.
But that's actually not reasonable at all, because some people want open wifi! And open wifi actually isn't necessarily dumb, as long as your applications secure their connections at a higher level. Some people are so quick to blame the network equipment makers for Google being able to read passwords and emails -- why not blame the app developers whose apps send passwords without TLS, or sends email without OpenPGP? Insecure Wifi is really just a special case of Insecure Internet.
Heh, in a perverse way, I'd love to see the government pass a law that email clients must refuse to send an email that isn't encrypted. Right hand (consumer advocates), please meet left hand (NSA).
trusting that it would just work and not do crazy things like broadcasting all your private stuff to the world.
In non-techie dumbed-down laymen's terms: BROADCASTING IS WHAT IT DOES. IT'S A RADIO. NOTICE THE LACK OF WIRES CONNECTING THE COMPUTERS?
Transmitting the information is what the customer bought it for. If you speak into a walkie talkie and then pretend to not know that someone else with a walkie talkie can hear you, you're not showing mere lack of technical expertise; you're showing incredible (not just in the sense of "extreme" but also "unbelievable" or "improbable") lack of common sense. Why would you speak into a walkie talkie unless something else can receive it?
It's absurd to think that you can have a wifi router on one side of the house, a laptop on the other side, see 4 bars on your laptop's network icon thingie, and not think that the same damn signal can be seen 20 feet outside your front window. Your great grandmother in 1940 knew better than that, and maybe even on some nights she listened to radio broadcasts from hundreds of miles away that were intended for listeners in other cities; how can someone claim this as being arcane knowledge that requires expertise? For Fuck's Sale, I see 4 other house's essids right now, and I'm not approaching this as an expert; I'm just clicking on the little bars icon, and there they are, with mine among them.
You don't have to know what WPA2 is. All the layman has to know is that he does not know and that he has not taken action to do anything about it. A kid speaking into a walkie talkie to his buddy, knows that if he doesn't speak in a super seekrit code, then some other kid with a walkie talkie (perhaps not even maliciously) might overhear and understand the conversation. The kid doesn't need to be an expert on walkie talkie to understand that (though he might need some expertise in doing something about it, coming up with a good code). Likewise, the wifi user, not knowing what WPA2 vs WEP is, knows that if he didn't do anything to limit which devices his laptop's radio is talking to, then such devices may include things other than his router.
I don't believe you're that dumb. Really, I don't. (I might call you an asshole, but you're probably not stupid.) But just in case you really are, then I feel I can talk to you as a relative expert. So let me tell you something: If it Just Works without effort, then it's not secure. If you haven't set up a shared secret or directly exchanged public keys, then you have no reason to suspect there's any real protection from eavesdropping, malicious or otherwise. And if you don't know WTF I'm talking about when I say "shared secret" then guess what: your system is not secure. That's just how it is and how it will always be. It is not a defect in the system, or a flaw in the design (other than perhaps giving users like you too much credit). It's just how every single cryptosystem in the history (past and future) of the universe works: the user has to make an effort. This effort can be a relatively easy thing, like entering the same passphrase on two devices, or even pressing a button on two devices at the exact same time. But it's gotta be something, and without that "something" then insecure is the default. Do laymen really not know that? Even though their great grandmothers did?
Risk of what? Risk of "falling in" and coming out of your trance 3 hours later with 20 new browser tabs open? tvtropes and wikipedia are both.orgs, so I bet.org is the riskiest TLD.
It's pretty funny: even if you RTFA it doesn't really say what the risk is. The fact that they quote McAfee implies that they're talking about a risk of Windows users deciding to download and install malware from websites, but this isn't actually stated.
Really, all voters should be presumed to cast a "none of the above" ballot unless they specifically vote otherwise.
I think this is a bad idea, as long as you have write ins. If someone wants to vote for none of the above, they have the ability to do that. But how can they vote "I don't give a fuck" rather than voting for someone? There isn't any mechanism for signaling that, so having "I don't give a fuck" being the default option, is a pretty reasonable way to accommodate everyone.
I bet you're also unconvinced the Enterprise makes a whooshing noise as it flies by. But it does!
as well as just plain snotty
Snotty! Unconvincing and snotty?!! That you would make such a cruel and vicious comment about my science fiction novel, shows that in your universe, Spock has a beard.
I could explain this to you, but I would have to write a science fiction novel to do it. Well ok, I'll summarize the novel. Just remember this is a selective summary; pretend that all sorts of really cool things are happening and my characters are totally interesting and the plot is fucking fantastic. Can you do that for me, Wowbagger? Ok.
In an alternate universe, the IP4 designers did just as you suggest, and the loopback network was Class C. In this alternate universe, other things went in a different direction too. By 2010 we all have CPUs with thousands of cores, but they all run at 1 MHz and programmers discuss ways to improve the linearization of their code.
And we all have a weird crippled piece of shit operating system, which got popular despite all its limitations. (This may seem hard to believe to us, but remember I'm talking about an alternate reality.) One of its limitations, is that its networking code doesn't deal with port numbers, because the designers thought that was a waste of 16 bits. (Computers in this reality have about as much memory as what we're used to, but there are more addresses and the words are 4 bits wide, so working with 16 bit data is kind of a pain in the ass.) Another of its limitations is that is has no IPC as we currently know it. Fortunately in the 1990s some programmers "invented" IPC by having each process use the loopback network, but since there are no port numbers, each process has to have its own address on the loopback network so that the OS can sort out what process gets what message. This inevitably led to mocking jokes:
"255 loopback addresses ought to be enough for anyone." -- Vint Cert
There were terrible hacks for running hundreds of processes and having them all be able to talk to one another, where a proxy process would emulate a sub-loopback network for 254 other processes and present a single loopback address to the OS. It was such a broken, terrible system, that it delayed the popularization of personal computer networking, so there was no "mainstream" use of the internet and the supply of IP4 addresses lasted much longer. In 2010, there was no non-loopback address shortage; it wasn't expected for another decade.
Then one day a poster named whoasacker got on Hyphencolon and asked, "Why didn't they just use a Class A network for the loopback?" And a poster named Slippery answered, explaining, "In an alternate universe, they did..."
Obviously if you get all pedantic, this guy won't be able to use any cellphone (or even some wireless handsets) or any modern personal computer.. or a DVD player, or a Roku (because of the HDCP output) or perhaps even certain types of printer ink cartridges, or.. (it goes on and on).
The judge's intent was probably to ban secure encryption that works for its user. That is, any encryption applied to serve the user's interest (i.e. doesn't apply to HDCP) for which an adversary (actually, a very specific adversary: the government) can't trivially defeat. So that means the judge would probably be ok with him using SSL (provided he uses a "mainstream" CA) but not GPG. That's really all it comes down to: the judge wants to hold some power over this guy and make it hard for him to communicate securely. The judge probably doesn't actually give a damn if he watches movies from Netflix.
OTOH, an evil judge (assuming that's what we have here, as opposed to the far-more-likely sloppy or ignorant judge) could be setting him up. So, sure, this poses a theoretical risk but the thief probably ought to be worrying more about having a traffic accident or getting cancer.
Or just go back to the 1990s and use AWeb. All textareas had a wonderful little widget that you're just click and then you would be editing your text with $EDITOR.
I wonder why this rather obvious feature never really caught on. It's pretty silly to think that any web browser can possibly ever come up with The One Right way to edit text, considering the vim-vs-emacs war still isn't over. The best answer to the question is to un-ask the question. The user has already installed their favorite editor and told the environment that it's the one to use. Let 'em use it!
Bingo. There's no such thing as a comprehensive plan to log all "headers" without logging all the contents of all communications of any kind. You have to assume that Bad Guys use covert channels.
Encryption of your files is worthless when you can be arrested for failing to give up passwords as per the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
WTF are you talking about? Let's say you've got naughty pictures of your wife, a few commercial trade secrets, a spell for summoning Yog-Sothoth, and your bank account passphrases all stored on your laptop, encrypted. One day, the drive electronics (but not the platters) fails and you RMA it to Western Digital, install the replacement, and restore your backup. A few weeks later, someone steals your laptop. You're saying it's worthless to prevent both Western Digital and the laptop thief from having your information, because the government has the power to arrest you? You do realize, don't you, that RIPA actually only gives powers to the government (not everyone), right? RIPA doesn't say you have to give keys to just anyone who demands them or else face arrest.
And as meerling points out, encryption also gives you a lot of protection from the government too. Let's say it was the government who took your laptop. Maybe they even imaged the disk and then returned it to your house without you ever knowing. Without encryption, your privacy has been violated and since you don't know it happened, you have NO recourse. With encryption, even with RIPA (!), they forcefully coerce the key from you. Now you know you're under attack, you probably give them the key, then you call your solicitor (or do whatever it is that UK people do when they have conflict with their government).
RIPA or not, you've gotta be just plain negligent, to not encrypt. Use 5% of one of your 6 cores for something, geeze.
it still amazes me that MS is so bashed on/. and Apple so celebrated
Apple, unlike Microsoft, sometimes brings some pretty good pieces of ideas to market. Their products aren't anything I'd want, but they are fascinating and inspiring technological previews.
Take the iPhone. People have long known that really neat phones will be on the market any-day-now (whenever the hell that'll be) but the iPhone really showed that some day, someone really could make a phone that doesn't suck. It's not a mere idea anymore or cold-fusion-is-just-20-years-away kind of thing; it's pretty much as close to tangible reality as something can get without actually being tangible reality. Apple clearly would be able to do it -- right now, with the technology they have today -- if they wished. If they can do it, then others can do it, so someone probably will. Maybe even you can.
Compare that to Microsoft. Has any Microsoft product ever given you the feeling, "Some day things aren't going to be so bad?"
Considering the observation that Sculley makes that MS is all about hiring geeks and smart people
This is irrelevant if Microsoft wastes that talent. If none of them ever create something useful, then Redmond is just a black hole that people disappear into, removing talent from the industry. What's so great about that?
That a PVR connected to an HDMI output would be capturing uncompressed video. While it can be compressed again it won't be easy, won't be real time, and won't be cheap.
Ten years ago you could compress uncompressed standard def analog video in real time, and it was pretty cheap. HD is only about 7 times as many pixels (work) and a decade later (Moore's law) so from that, you should be able to guess that the modern equivalent functionality is possible. And reality bears out that guess: Hauppage already makes somewhat-affordable HD x264 realtime compressors; it's just that they're nearly useless because most people don't have plaintext HDMI to work on. The HDMI crack potentially changes that, making HDMI capture+compress tech more useful and improving the economy of scale for such devices.
Even that doesn't get around the fact that you can only record a single channel (what is being output over HDMI) and thus would still need a cable STB and some when to communicate to that box.
Yeah, but that can be a used/old cable box. Cheap when chump suckers upgrade to the new cable-endorsed PVRs and dump their old stuff on the market, and you won't care if they're lame because you'll only be using them as tuners for their HDMI-out.
Hey, this isn't a perfect solution but it's pretty analogous to what people were doing in the analog TV days, making it a hell of an improvement over how things have been recently. Some people are going to jump at the chance; I'm just waiting for the hardware to hit the market. QoS helps but isn't perfect; it would be nice to not be bittorrenting constantly, and violating DMCA in your own home where no one can tell you're doing it, is far less risky than violating copyright.
I think it is funny/sad that people think a crypto break in an unrelated technology suddenly unlocks everything.
It's not unrelated. It's different but this is a chain (that's what makes it related) where a break in any of the links gets you the plaintext.
(I didn't RTFA, but in this case, that probably helped.) I interpret "iTunes for exploits" as meaning that you go to the trouble to load up your computer with exploits, then you do a sync, and suddenly all of the exploits which you had loaded, but which didn't come from their "iTunes for exploits" are inexplicably missing. So as long as you install this "iTunes for exploits" software but don't ever use it for installing your malware, then occasional syncs can function as malware disinfectant. That doesn't sound illegal; it sounds like the natural progression of AV software.
Exactly! The HDMI key release will enable non-sucky PVRs for cable TV. Cable TV subscriptions are going to go up when the decrypter/re-encoders become generally available. Naturally, the cable companies are going to want to a piece of the action on all the PVRs themselves, so it's time to relax the rules and make the non-homebrew stuff more appealing.
Wow, you've discovered that context can alter or imply a particular meaning for a word with more than one possible interpretation!
No, I was bitching that this word has ambiguous meaning in many contexts, and conflicting meanings in closely-related (often overlapping) contexts. Sure, things can get messy, but usually not to this degree.
I like how you lumped in the companies that are not evil but are hated by liberals (Exxon-Mobil, Smith & Wesson) with the companies that are actually evil (Monsanto, Philip-Morris) in your little fantasy. And then left out Google.
He wasn't talking about evil potential victims of patents; he was talking about powerful potential victims of patents. What's wrong with lumping powerful companies together (whether they're evil or not), when you're talking about using power?
I think the person with the "little fantasy" was you, and when you decided to artificially divide the list of powerful prospective-patent-victim companies into evil vs not-evil-but-hated-by-liberals (a distinction that is totally irrelevant to what the thread was about; how victims might end up effectively striking back if they are sufficiently threatened by patent abuse), you revealed what your fantasy is: that teh librals are the only ones who are against patent abuse.
Now that i think of it, central bars aren't necessarily crazy, provided they aren't "spinning," but instead, the stars are just moving toward or away from the center. But that's not what really happens, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
and the solution is for users to interpret that as "the studios have demanded that people bittorrent non-DRM versions." If you Just Say No to DRM, all problems go away. If that means no Netflix, aw geez, too bad. Call me back when you really open for business.
Evil space-governments and the far-flung future go hand in hand. It's not sad; it's science fiction! Part of what it means to be an astro-man is to overthrow your government and find out the awful truth about the illusory world that you took for granted all your life. But that ain't gonna happen if nobody hides the awful truth to begin with. And nobody is .. GOing .. to .. TALK .. a computer .. to DEATH, unless there's an evil computer with terrible master plans for the human race in the first place.
Well, then, no extrasolar colonies for you! My point is was that free people would likely not follow through and do what we want them to do (waste their lives, as dehumanized DNA-cargo (or at best, maintenance techs), on a journey which won't personally benefit them at all).
Putting people on a generational ship is a really shitty thing to do (but maybe it could work). It's an evil premise: possible the most technically viable yet ethically horrible solution to interstellar travel. Oh sure, maybe the first generation were volunteers, but their kids weren't. So let's drop the pretense of having good intentions here, ok? If hiding the truth from the people, denying them any real power over their destinies, and setting them up for a life-long deception under the oppressive-yet-unseen yoke of a ruthlessly far-sighted computer that runs their shadowy government, is what it takes to accomplish our objectives, then I say the ends justify the means! If you don't have the stomach to play god and manipulate the fates of innocent people, then maybe this project is just too big for you, puny human.
Five years ago this really would have been a surprise. Maybe even more recently than that. Shit, I'll just admit it: to me, it's a surprise, today, right now. Last I heard, the DNA evidence was that nobody alive has Neanderthal lineage -- that they were an offshoot of homo sapiens ancestors rather than being homo sapiens ancestors. Just goes to show that if you're even just a few years out-of-date on anthropology, you can miss some big things. Real news is happening, right now.
Oh, I agree with that. It seems like an easy decision for the final 3 or 4 generations ("We're almost there! Keep going!" and "Yippee, we're here!"). But a few dozen generations before that? I can imagine people saying, "Why spend our energy on the acceleration/deceleration rockets? Let's pump it into the holodeck instead."
With cryo-stasis ships, at least there's a reason to eventually settle somewhere. You want to wake up (or stop taking watches) and eventually start your new life. You can bear the hardships of the journey, because you have a personal goal that you intend to some day fulfill.
The thing about generational ships, is that if they're really self-sufficient and comfortable enough that the early generations don't go mad, then what's the point of landing anywhere? You can say that humans need to expand, but the people onboard won't be able to meet that need, and they're just going to have to cope with such a limited existence. But if they succeed, then that culture will be passed down, so you'll have a whole population that is happy staying in their little box. How can you plan so far into the future and keep the plan intact?
There's a Star Trek episode ("The World is Hollow And I Have Touched the Sky") where the people don't even know they're on such a ship, and the more I think of it, the more realistic and believable that seems. People wouldn't ever be able to stick to such a long-term mission in which they don't personally have any stake, so they might as well not be depended upon to achieve it, or even know it's happening. One single centralized authority with infinite patience (a computer) and a secret and tyrannical agenda, is about the only thing that could keep it going.
The cellphone towers are where you'd expect them to be, but in the year 2007. The person she is talking to, is actually a talking dog, in Middle Earth, several millennia earlier.
After all, if you can time travel, why can't your cellphone signals time travel too? Once you accept ridiculously improbable things, it would be pretty silly to reject other ridiculously improbable things as out-of-hand.
Is this really a problem? Some Mini-ITX cases are mountable right on the back of TVs, and some TVs themselves are fairly powerful computers in themselves, even if the embedded software is still kinda lame and primitive right now. If you can get the compressed video to the TV area, then at that point, I think you've pretty much won. I'm not knocking the bandwidth improvements; I think that's great, but actually using it for uncompressed HDMI seems like a waste.
It is very reasonable, because the "massive security hole" is conditional.
The only way to avoid the "massive security hole" that you speak of, is for the router to refuse to work in an unencrypted mode. i.e. Kill the "just works" aspect to it. If you haven't entered a passphrase, then no connection for you.
But that's actually not reasonable at all, because some people want open wifi! And open wifi actually isn't necessarily dumb, as long as your applications secure their connections at a higher level. Some people are so quick to blame the network equipment makers for Google being able to read passwords and emails -- why not blame the app developers whose apps send passwords without TLS, or sends email without OpenPGP? Insecure Wifi is really just a special case of Insecure Internet.
Heh, in a perverse way, I'd love to see the government pass a law that email clients must refuse to send an email that isn't encrypted. Right hand (consumer advocates), please meet left hand (NSA).
In non-techie dumbed-down laymen's terms: BROADCASTING IS WHAT IT DOES. IT'S A RADIO. NOTICE THE LACK OF WIRES CONNECTING THE COMPUTERS?
Transmitting the information is what the customer bought it for. If you speak into a walkie talkie and then pretend to not know that someone else with a walkie talkie can hear you, you're not showing mere lack of technical expertise; you're showing incredible (not just in the sense of "extreme" but also "unbelievable" or "improbable") lack of common sense. Why would you speak into a walkie talkie unless something else can receive it?
It's absurd to think that you can have a wifi router on one side of the house, a laptop on the other side, see 4 bars on your laptop's network icon thingie, and not think that the same damn signal can be seen 20 feet outside your front window. Your great grandmother in 1940 knew better than that, and maybe even on some nights she listened to radio broadcasts from hundreds of miles away that were intended for listeners in other cities; how can someone claim this as being arcane knowledge that requires expertise? For Fuck's Sale, I see 4 other house's essids right now, and I'm not approaching this as an expert; I'm just clicking on the little bars icon, and there they are, with mine among them.
You don't have to know what WPA2 is. All the layman has to know is that he does not know and that he has not taken action to do anything about it. A kid speaking into a walkie talkie to his buddy, knows that if he doesn't speak in a super seekrit code, then some other kid with a walkie talkie (perhaps not even maliciously) might overhear and understand the conversation. The kid doesn't need to be an expert on walkie talkie to understand that (though he might need some expertise in doing something about it, coming up with a good code). Likewise, the wifi user, not knowing what WPA2 vs WEP is, knows that if he didn't do anything to limit which devices his laptop's radio is talking to, then such devices may include things other than his router.
I don't believe you're that dumb. Really, I don't. (I might call you an asshole, but you're probably not stupid.) But just in case you really are, then I feel I can talk to you as a relative expert. So let me tell you something: If it Just Works without effort, then it's not secure. If you haven't set up a shared secret or directly exchanged public keys, then you have no reason to suspect there's any real protection from eavesdropping, malicious or otherwise. And if you don't know WTF I'm talking about when I say "shared secret" then guess what: your system is not secure. That's just how it is and how it will always be. It is not a defect in the system, or a flaw in the design (other than perhaps giving users like you too much credit). It's just how every single cryptosystem in the history (past and future) of the universe works: the user has to make an effort. This effort can be a relatively easy thing, like entering the same passphrase on two devices, or even pressing a button on two devices at the exact same time. But it's gotta be something, and without that "something" then insecure is the default. Do laymen really not know that? Even though their great grandmothers did?
Risk of what? Risk of "falling in" and coming out of your trance 3 hours later with 20 new browser tabs open? tvtropes and wikipedia are both .orgs, so I bet .org is the riskiest TLD.
It's pretty funny: even if you RTFA it doesn't really say what the risk is. The fact that they quote McAfee implies that they're talking about a risk of Windows users deciding to download and install malware from websites, but this isn't actually stated.
I think this is a bad idea, as long as you have write ins. If someone wants to vote for none of the above, they have the ability to do that. But how can they vote "I don't give a fuck" rather than voting for someone? There isn't any mechanism for signaling that, so having "I don't give a fuck" being the default option, is a pretty reasonable way to accommodate everyone.
I bet you're also unconvinced the Enterprise makes a whooshing noise as it flies by. But it does!
Snotty! Unconvincing and snotty?!! That you would make such a cruel and vicious comment about my science fiction novel, shows that in your universe, Spock has a beard.
I could explain this to you, but I would have to write a science fiction novel to do it. Well ok, I'll summarize the novel. Just remember this is a selective summary; pretend that all sorts of really cool things are happening and my characters are totally interesting and the plot is fucking fantastic. Can you do that for me, Wowbagger? Ok.
In an alternate universe, the IP4 designers did just as you suggest, and the loopback network was Class C. In this alternate universe, other things went in a different direction too. By 2010 we all have CPUs with thousands of cores, but they all run at 1 MHz and programmers discuss ways to improve the linearization of their code.
And we all have a weird crippled piece of shit operating system, which got popular despite all its limitations. (This may seem hard to believe to us, but remember I'm talking about an alternate reality.) One of its limitations, is that its networking code doesn't deal with port numbers, because the designers thought that was a waste of 16 bits. (Computers in this reality have about as much memory as what we're used to, but there are more addresses and the words are 4 bits wide, so working with 16 bit data is kind of a pain in the ass.) Another of its limitations is that is has no IPC as we currently know it. Fortunately in the 1990s some programmers "invented" IPC by having each process use the loopback network, but since there are no port numbers, each process has to have its own address on the loopback network so that the OS can sort out what process gets what message. This inevitably led to mocking jokes:
There were terrible hacks for running hundreds of processes and having them all be able to talk to one another, where a proxy process would emulate a sub-loopback network for 254 other processes and present a single loopback address to the OS. It was such a broken, terrible system, that it delayed the popularization of personal computer networking, so there was no "mainstream" use of the internet and the supply of IP4 addresses lasted much longer. In 2010, there was no non-loopback address shortage; it wasn't expected for another decade.
Then one day a poster named whoasacker got on Hyphencolon and asked, "Why didn't they just use a Class A network for the loopback?" And a poster named Slippery answered, explaining, "In an alternate universe, they did..."
Obviously if you get all pedantic, this guy won't be able to use any cellphone (or even some wireless handsets) or any modern personal computer .. or a DVD player, or a Roku (because of the HDCP output) or perhaps even certain types of printer ink cartridges, or .. (it goes on and on).
The judge's intent was probably to ban secure encryption that works for its user. That is, any encryption applied to serve the user's interest (i.e. doesn't apply to HDCP) for which an adversary (actually, a very specific adversary: the government) can't trivially defeat. So that means the judge would probably be ok with him using SSL (provided he uses a "mainstream" CA) but not GPG. That's really all it comes down to: the judge wants to hold some power over this guy and make it hard for him to communicate securely. The judge probably doesn't actually give a damn if he watches movies from Netflix.
OTOH, an evil judge (assuming that's what we have here, as opposed to the far-more-likely sloppy or ignorant judge) could be setting him up. So, sure, this poses a theoretical risk but the thief probably ought to be worrying more about having a traffic accident or getting cancer.
Kick ass! Here I was, wondering why browsers don't have it, and didn't think to ask if extensions had it. Thanks, arielCo.
Or just go back to the 1990s and use AWeb. All textareas had a wonderful little widget that you're just click and then you would be editing your text with $EDITOR.
I wonder why this rather obvious feature never really caught on. It's pretty silly to think that any web browser can possibly ever come up with The One Right way to edit text, considering the vim-vs-emacs war still isn't over. The best answer to the question is to un-ask the question. The user has already installed their favorite editor and told the environment that it's the one to use. Let 'em use it!
Bingo. There's no such thing as a comprehensive plan to log all "headers" without logging all the contents of all communications of any kind. You have to assume that Bad Guys use covert channels.
WTF are you talking about? Let's say you've got naughty pictures of your wife, a few commercial trade secrets, a spell for summoning Yog-Sothoth, and your bank account passphrases all stored on your laptop, encrypted. One day, the drive electronics (but not the platters) fails and you RMA it to Western Digital, install the replacement, and restore your backup. A few weeks later, someone steals your laptop. You're saying it's worthless to prevent both Western Digital and the laptop thief from having your information, because the government has the power to arrest you? You do realize, don't you, that RIPA actually only gives powers to the government (not everyone), right? RIPA doesn't say you have to give keys to just anyone who demands them or else face arrest.
And as meerling points out, encryption also gives you a lot of protection from the government too. Let's say it was the government who took your laptop. Maybe they even imaged the disk and then returned it to your house without you ever knowing. Without encryption, your privacy has been violated and since you don't know it happened, you have NO recourse. With encryption, even with RIPA (!), they forcefully coerce the key from you. Now you know you're under attack, you probably give them the key, then you call your solicitor (or do whatever it is that UK people do when they have conflict with their government).
RIPA or not, you've gotta be just plain negligent, to not encrypt. Use 5% of one of your 6 cores for something, geeze.
Apple, unlike Microsoft, sometimes brings some pretty good pieces of ideas to market. Their products aren't anything I'd want, but they are fascinating and inspiring technological previews.
Take the iPhone. People have long known that really neat phones will be on the market any-day-now (whenever the hell that'll be) but the iPhone really showed that some day, someone really could make a phone that doesn't suck. It's not a mere idea anymore or cold-fusion-is-just-20-years-away kind of thing; it's pretty much as close to tangible reality as something can get without actually being tangible reality. Apple clearly would be able to do it -- right now, with the technology they have today -- if they wished. If they can do it, then others can do it, so someone probably will. Maybe even you can.
Compare that to Microsoft. Has any Microsoft product ever given you the feeling, "Some day things aren't going to be so bad?"
This is irrelevant if Microsoft wastes that talent. If none of them ever create something useful, then Redmond is just a black hole that people disappear into, removing talent from the industry. What's so great about that?
Ten years ago you could compress uncompressed standard def analog video in real time, and it was pretty cheap. HD is only about 7 times as many pixels (work) and a decade later (Moore's law) so from that, you should be able to guess that the modern equivalent functionality is possible. And reality bears out that guess: Hauppage already makes somewhat-affordable HD x264 realtime compressors; it's just that they're nearly useless because most people don't have plaintext HDMI to work on. The HDMI crack potentially changes that, making HDMI capture+compress tech more useful and improving the economy of scale for such devices.
Yeah, but that can be a used/old cable box. Cheap when chump suckers upgrade to the new cable-endorsed PVRs and dump their old stuff on the market, and you won't care if they're lame because you'll only be using them as tuners for their HDMI-out.
Hey, this isn't a perfect solution but it's pretty analogous to what people were doing in the analog TV days, making it a hell of an improvement over how things have been recently. Some people are going to jump at the chance; I'm just waiting for the hardware to hit the market. QoS helps but isn't perfect; it would be nice to not be bittorrenting constantly, and violating DMCA in your own home where no one can tell you're doing it, is far less risky than violating copyright.
It's not unrelated. It's different but this is a chain (that's what makes it related) where a break in any of the links gets you the plaintext.
(I didn't RTFA, but in this case, that probably helped.) I interpret "iTunes for exploits" as meaning that you go to the trouble to load up your computer with exploits, then you do a sync, and suddenly all of the exploits which you had loaded, but which didn't come from their "iTunes for exploits" are inexplicably missing. So as long as you install this "iTunes for exploits" software but don't ever use it for installing your malware, then occasional syncs can function as malware disinfectant. That doesn't sound illegal; it sounds like the natural progression of AV software.
Exactly! The HDMI key release will enable non-sucky PVRs for cable TV. Cable TV subscriptions are going to go up when the decrypter/re-encoders become generally available. Naturally, the cable companies are going to want to a piece of the action on all the PVRs themselves, so it's time to relax the rules and make the non-homebrew stuff more appealing.
No, I was bitching that this word has ambiguous meaning in many contexts, and conflicting meanings in closely-related (often overlapping) contexts. Sure, things can get messy, but usually not to this degree.
He wasn't talking about evil potential victims of patents; he was talking about powerful potential victims of patents. What's wrong with lumping powerful companies together (whether they're evil or not), when you're talking about using power?
I think the person with the "little fantasy" was you, and when you decided to artificially divide the list of powerful prospective-patent-victim companies into evil vs not-evil-but-hated-by-liberals (a distinction that is totally irrelevant to what the thread was about; how victims might end up effectively striking back if they are sufficiently threatened by patent abuse), you revealed what your fantasy is: that teh librals are the only ones who are against patent abuse.
Now that i think of it, central bars aren't necessarily crazy, provided they aren't "spinning," but instead, the stars are just moving toward or away from the center. But that's not what really happens, is it?