The last time I watched the movie, I didn't care about "rebellion" or "youth". I interpreted it as a question of "how far would I be willing to let society go to deal with violent criminals?" Alex was so heinous, so over-the-top despicable, and manipulative of the system, would I be willing to let someone like that be "chemically imprisoned" or "chemically castrated?" Should his victim's husband be given the right to torture him to death? Should society simply kill him, quick and easy? Should we spend millions on life imprisonment?
There are no easy answers, although for me at no point did "return him to the streets" become a viable option.
He was appalled only by what was done to him. The aversion therapy twisted his love of the music into revulsion, even though he still wanted to love it.
Otherwise, Alex enjoyed the pain and suffering of any other human for any reason whatsoever.
The difference between the way you learned hard disks worked long ago and the way we use them now is due to IDE technology. Internally, the drive is still commanding cylinder, head and sector. Externally (to the PC), the interface is very different.
Way back when we used to have the computer telling the drive controller board to operate the physical drive mechanisms, with the controller telling the drive which cylinder, head and sector to retrieve. This was called Cylinder-Head-Sector (CHS) addressing. If you ever worked on an original IBM PC-AT, you might remember having to set the "heads and cylinders" in the BIOS settings. You, the human, had to select from a list in the BIOS how many heads and cylinders the disk drive had. (And the older the PC, the fewer the choices. That meant every drive you could buy already had to be supported in the BIOS, but since there were so few originally, it didn't matter too much. As I recall, the max size drive supported by the original AT BIOS was 33MB, even though the largest drive IBM offered at the time was something like 20MB, if you had all the money.) The protocol was called ST-506, named after the first commercially available 5-1/4" hard drive.
Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) changed that. The controller board was moved from the PC to the drive itself. So now the controller board was set up by the drive manufacturer to know exactly how many heads and cylinders the drive had. To talk to an IDE drive, ATA was developed as a protocol. The computer would no longer send commands for a specific physical drive geometry, but would instead ask for a "logical block number", and the IDE would do a translation (looking it up in a map) to command the hardware to move to the correct physical cylinder, head and sector to retrieve the data. This is called Logical Block Addressing (LBA).
So unless the original story author knows exactly what drive he's dealing with, and can download the lookup table from the drive, what he's asking for is no longer realistic. Each individual drive has its own unique mapping from LBA to CHS, because each drive maintains its own map of bad sectors. A computer asking for logical block #52 might physically get it from head#0, cylinder#3, sector#21 on one drive, but due to bad block mapping on a different drive it might get it from head#0, cylinder#4, sector#35.
SCSI works on a similar principle, and Serial ATA has made further improvements on the scheme for performance and size changes. But all modern drive interfaces use some form of logical block addressing to access the data, and none use direct cylinder-head-sector addressing.
I'll say it again: if you are one of the people carrying cell phones, quit complaining about RFID tags "tracking you". That little candy-bar-sized transmitter clipped to your belt is actively broadcasting your location every single minute to a computer up to 40,000,000 cm away, and the phone network is making your location instantly globally available to anyone with the proper authority. Not only that, but the phone network is RECORDING your location even when not asked, so they can correlate your previous locations for as far back as they keep a history.
These complainers are screaming "I AM RIGHT HERE!!!" at the top of their lungs every single minute, with a blinking strobe light mounted on top of their tinfoil hats; the phone company is writing their location down every time they hear them; and yet they're afraid that someone is going to spend thousands of dollars outfitting a building with secret door readers just to see who comes in, never mind that cameras are already pointed at those doors. Right.
Of course it's true. Please re-read what I said (that you even quoted!) The read range for many RFID technologies is measured in centimeters, not meters. Not all RFID technologies can be picked up at 21 meters.
Yes, I am fully aware that certain types of RFID tags are capable of being detected at 21 meters or more. Near-field RFID, however, has a max range of 1 meter or so (commercial near field RF readers claim less than a 50 cm range.) An implantable tag could use a technology that travels far less than 20 meters.
How did you get from "chip implant" to "track every move"? The read range for many RFID technologies is measured in centimeters, not meters. (It varies by frequency and other factors.) If tracking every move meant "place a reader in every doorknob" then maybe I'd buy your argument.
On the flip side, are you one of the 99% of people who carries a cell phone? Not only is your every movement known already, regardless of your proximity to anything but a cell tower that could be miles away, but is instantly accessible by law enforcement (and who knows who else.) By carrying the phone, you are a willful participant in your own tracking.
Perhaps your tin-foil hat is just a bit maladjusted.
I just can't get past the idea that you either tell people what they want (advertising) or let people discover things on their own (interconnection).
The best advertising is advertising misinterpreted as interconnection.
Remember the kerfluffle a year or two ago with the web site twittering your friends with your purchases, or some kind of plug in that monitored your purchases? I don't remember exactly which site, nor do I care because the details aren't important, but that was one step away from the goal here. Imagine if all your friends posted all their purchases all the time, and you got tweeted with all those purchases, and all those tweets flowed through a giant recommendation algorithm. Now imagine if I run that algorithm, and Nike pays me for advertising. I'll make sure that when your friend Joe buys Nike shoes the tweet will get through to you and all his friends; but when Mary buys Adidas and Carol buys Sketchers, nobody will see them.
To you, it's interconnection: your friends bought Nike shoes and apparently nothing else, so maybe you'll buy Nike shoes. To Nike, it's advertising. To me, it's profit.
Of course the drawback to these systems happens when they're discovered and revealed for what they truly are. History says they won't last beyond that point. But they're highly profitable right up until they are outed.
The great composers might not have done it through conscious math. They may simply have been "wired" that way, to hear music, to break it down into its components, and then reassemble them with their own style. We don't know, because they're gone.
Cope, on the other hand, waded through their work, identifying phrase after phrase, cataloging and quantifying what they had done, and spotted the very patterns by which they broke the rules. More importantly he figured out how to describe and codify those patterns. The analysis process took him years. Writing the software was possibly the easiest part of the whole task.
And once he was done, he was able to quantify other musicians work, and discovered that styles were plagiarized all over the place. Perhaps not consciously, but he found that composers everywhere and everywhen were building upon the music of their predecessors.
That's a metric ton of hard, grinding work, and is definitely evidence of higher brain power than J. Random Slashdotter. (And likely a severe case of OCD.)
Now getting a program that will write music that is as good as the greats is a huge accomplishment, don't get me wrong, but their is little reason to believe it is impossible.
That's kind of what drove Cope. Early on he found his synthetic process could create musical sentences and phrases that were grammatically and syntactically correct, like your first year computer student. But stringing them together didn't produce a musical work any more than a collection of sentences makes a story. Even putting similar concepts together gave tiresome blobs that didn't have "soul".
What he did was drill deeper and deeper into the works of the composers, and figured out what made their music stand out. He discovered it was not just following the rules, but was related to breaking the rules, and how they broke them. Randomly breaking them didn't accomplish the task. He instead identified their pattern of "rule breaking" and codified it, and copied it, and that's when Emmy's music became moving.
No, it's not impossible, but it was a huge feat of analyzing huge piles of music by the masters, categorizing and labeling measures, phrases, and concepts in ways that had never been explored before.
Y'know, when described that way it sounds like the TV Tropes Story Generator on steroids, with MIDI output. Hmm...
First of all, I don't think their device is time synchronized. Smart cards don't typically have power sources or clocks on board. And you wouldn't trust the clock in the reader.
Where it gets interesting is, as the device can encode any string, you can also use it to secure wire transfers : instead of directly typing the account number of the merchang you're paying, you type the account into the device, and give the encoded version to the web-form (for each new recipient. Once a recipient account is known as "safe", you can also do it without encryption). Case 2-type injection can't work : the torjan can't change the recipient on the fly because there's no merchant's account number to replace. In theory, the trojan should replace the encrypted merchant's account with an encrypted criminal account. But that's impossible because the encryption is done on a separate device which isn't accessible to the trojan*.
Which is all well and good, except even that is still vulnerable to a spoofed web page. Let's say I was shopping on Amazon, and got XSS hijacked to evilHackers.com. evilHackers web page delivers Amazon's exact page, but replaces the Merchant ID of Amazon (12345) with their own Merchant ID (54321). When Amazon tells me to type in their merchant number into my PED to secure the payment to them, I don't know if it's supposed to be 12345 or 54321 -- as an ordinary consumer I just type whatever crazy number their web page tells me to type!
The only real way I can think to prevent MITM attacks is if the device could actually read the web site's address from my screen. If it had a little camera and I pointed it at the web site's
scan here --> AMAZON.COM <-- box, it could show me on the screen that it is going to pay AMAZON.COM. Barcodes would be a mostly OK substitute for OCR if it showed me the decoded human readable name on my PED screen.
Numbers don't work because I don't know Amazon's real number. And you can't permit anyone to upload a table of number-to-merchant-name pairs either, because those could be tampered with. Text and OCR would be best because I could verify them with my human eyes.
Finally, the issuer of text IDs would have to be 100% trustworthy. They must never permit registration of typsos or lookalike names, such as AMAZ0N.C0M or AMA7ON.COM.
Really? Forced to type a whole PIN? Did you also go to the bank manager and complain "Gosh, Mr. Banker, please don't make me be so responsible for my money!"
Since you seem to like convenient access to your cash, do you just tape your money to the outside of your clothes so you don't have to go through all the work of digging in your pocket, pulling out your wallet, opening it up, and removing the bills? Or rather than counting, do you just hand your wallet to the bus driver and ask the driver to "take whatever?" My guess is you take better care of your personal pocket money than that. So why would you expect less security from a bank who you *pay* to hold and protect your money?
Which would you select if you were given this choice: A) Full insurance against theft from your account if you use the e.dentifier; or B) No insurance on your account but you don't need the e.dentifier. I'm pretty sure a bank wouldn't even want to offer choice B because they wouldn't want to have to tell those customers "sorry but your money is all gone and there's nothing we can do for you."
Why can't we use a cell phone as a proxy for this?
Because the cell phone is reprogrammable, and so ultimately can't be trusted. You might get a virus or install some kind of Trojan horse J2ME app that pretends to be your PIN pad, but makes large withdrawals silently in the background after you enter the PIN for a legitimate transaction. A cell phone is actually the worst possible place, because it can go on-line immediately and start abusing your account right up until you yank the battery (or go broke.)
The best possible security will come from the bank supplying the end user with both the card and the PIN Entry Device. Sure, they might want to offer it in a cell-phone-carrying-case-form-factor (think iPhone cradle with a PIN pad on the back.) Slightly ugly but more convenient to carry. But it needs its own dedicated PIN pad and display.
The first version of the e.dentifier was even more secure than this one IMHO because it did NOT have the convenient USB port. The user had to type in the values into the pad manually. The security advantage is the air gap is something no hacker can ever bridge (without resorting to social engineering, extortion, or threats of violence.) Mind you, this device is probably plenty secure as long as it can never be re-flashed or re-programmed through the consumer facing USB port.
RSA actually offers credit card form factor devices with a little 10-key pad and a one line LCD display. They are used for SecurID tokens where the user has to enter a PIN to get the generated #. The same form factor would make an excellent bank card where you don't have to carry around the extra little device to use it.
Done. There's already a cryptographic device that offers near-perfect cryptographic security for web banking. ABN AMRO uses it for their e.dentifier2 device. The brilliant part is that the trust lies only within the card's chip and the handheld device, never only the PC or the browser. It's exactly what a bank should provide: end to end encryption of the user's authorization to perform a transaction, where both ends are created and maintained by the bank.
Now we just need a bank that's willing to deploy those here in the U.S.
Of course it's a worst-case scenario, and no, there isn't a realistic way of suppressing the US short of an all-out nuclear attack, which would indeed have the undesirable side effect of terminating life on the planet.
You're right -- invasion wouldn't be a viable option.
Before 9/11, we didn't feel we had the God-Bless-American-Right to kill foreign terrorists without a trial. After 9/11, we suspended all those nice legalities and started butchering the bastards.
I don't know which is worse. All I know is I like America 2.0 a whole lot less than I liked the previous version of America.
And that's why the US can not "win" this war. The reason Japan surrendered is not that the allies were defeating their armies down to the very last man, but because we were firebombing and nuking entire cities. When the suffering became too great, the persons in charge knew the war had to end.
The significant difference between then and now are that the enemy is already not in power, and the enemy has no concern for the well being of the civilian populations in which they hide.
If the US were to switch to a carpet-bombing strategy in Afghanistan, things would be almost no different from a battle point of view. A few civilians might even cooperate with turning over the combatants out of sheer terror of the bombers. But the world opinion would turn against America, certainly to punitive isolation and perhaps even to the point of invasion. Which would be exactly what both the hawks and xenophobes of the extremist right wing want.
So the US plods along, killing a Taliban here and a Taliban there, never making much progress. It's a quagmire, plain and simple.
The problem in TFA actually isn't about Flash(TM) itself, the real problem is the direct coupling of the mouse to the user interface experience via the web. "Hover" is a mouse-specific capability. Flash supports this capability, as well as javascript and other languages, (although Flash sites seem to rely on it more often than others.)
Too many web designers assume a mouse is present, leading to all kinds of human factors problems, not the least of which is handicapped accessibility.
Of course the idea that Apple wants Adobe to FOAD is still perfectly valid. But if people want to believe that "hover" plus "iPhone" equals "no Flash", well, that's what they'll believe.
Hey, I'm just reading Apple's conditions straight off their web page, I'm not telling you how you can follow them or that you should violate them.
As far as I can tell, the sensor is working perfectly. These guys handled the phone as if they were deliberately trying to create condensation, succeeded at creating condensation, and are whining that they got caught by a moisture detector, as if condensation isn't moisture.
The part where I sympathize with them hasn't come yet.
But being both an Apple loather and a slightly embarrassed owner of an iPhone, I can still blame Apple for this. If they'd make the damn battery user replaceable, they could put the moisture sensor inside the battery compartment like every other phone manufacturer. Condensation wouldn't be a problem. But because of their f*cking insistence on gluing shut every useful physical and digital feature, they uncaringly expose their customers to poorly conceived side effects.
As cool as half the iPhone is, the other half sucks out loud. I'll never buy another Apple product.
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The last time I watched the movie, I didn't care about "rebellion" or "youth". I interpreted it as a question of "how far would I be willing to let society go to deal with violent criminals?" Alex was so heinous, so over-the-top despicable, and manipulative of the system, would I be willing to let someone like that be "chemically imprisoned" or "chemically castrated?" Should his victim's husband be given the right to torture him to death? Should society simply kill him, quick and easy? Should we spend millions on life imprisonment?
There are no easy answers, although for me at no point did "return him to the streets" become a viable option.
He was appalled only by what was done to him. The aversion therapy twisted his love of the music into revulsion, even though he still wanted to love it.
Otherwise, Alex enjoyed the pain and suffering of any other human for any reason whatsoever.
You are aware that A Clockwork Orange was fiction, aren't you? It was a movie and not a documentary.
The difference between the way you learned hard disks worked long ago and the way we use them now is due to IDE technology. Internally, the drive is still commanding cylinder, head and sector. Externally (to the PC), the interface is very different.
Way back when we used to have the computer telling the drive controller board to operate the physical drive mechanisms, with the controller telling the drive which cylinder, head and sector to retrieve. This was called Cylinder-Head-Sector (CHS) addressing. If you ever worked on an original IBM PC-AT, you might remember having to set the "heads and cylinders" in the BIOS settings. You, the human, had to select from a list in the BIOS how many heads and cylinders the disk drive had. (And the older the PC, the fewer the choices. That meant every drive you could buy already had to be supported in the BIOS, but since there were so few originally, it didn't matter too much. As I recall, the max size drive supported by the original AT BIOS was 33MB, even though the largest drive IBM offered at the time was something like 20MB, if you had all the money.) The protocol was called ST-506, named after the first commercially available 5-1/4" hard drive.
Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) changed that. The controller board was moved from the PC to the drive itself. So now the controller board was set up by the drive manufacturer to know exactly how many heads and cylinders the drive had. To talk to an IDE drive, ATA was developed as a protocol. The computer would no longer send commands for a specific physical drive geometry, but would instead ask for a "logical block number", and the IDE would do a translation (looking it up in a map) to command the hardware to move to the correct physical cylinder, head and sector to retrieve the data. This is called Logical Block Addressing (LBA).
So unless the original story author knows exactly what drive he's dealing with, and can download the lookup table from the drive, what he's asking for is no longer realistic. Each individual drive has its own unique mapping from LBA to CHS, because each drive maintains its own map of bad sectors. A computer asking for logical block #52 might physically get it from head#0, cylinder#3, sector#21 on one drive, but due to bad block mapping on a different drive it might get it from head#0, cylinder#4, sector#35.
SCSI works on a similar principle, and Serial ATA has made further improvements on the scheme for performance and size changes. But all modern drive interfaces use some form of logical block addressing to access the data, and none use direct cylinder-head-sector addressing.
I'll say it again: if you are one of the people carrying cell phones, quit complaining about RFID tags "tracking you". That little candy-bar-sized transmitter clipped to your belt is actively broadcasting your location every single minute to a computer up to 40,000,000 cm away, and the phone network is making your location instantly globally available to anyone with the proper authority. Not only that, but the phone network is RECORDING your location even when not asked, so they can correlate your previous locations for as far back as they keep a history.
These complainers are screaming "I AM RIGHT HERE!!!" at the top of their lungs every single minute, with a blinking strobe light mounted on top of their tinfoil hats; the phone company is writing their location down every time they hear them; and yet they're afraid that someone is going to spend thousands of dollars outfitting a building with secret door readers just to see who comes in, never mind that cameras are already pointed at those doors. Right.
"I need a perspective check on Aisle 1, please."
Of course it's true. Please re-read what I said (that you even quoted!) The read range for many RFID technologies is measured in centimeters, not meters. Not all RFID technologies can be picked up at 21 meters.
Yes, I am fully aware that certain types of RFID tags are capable of being detected at 21 meters or more. Near-field RFID, however, has a max range of 1 meter or so (commercial near field RF readers claim less than a 50 cm range.) An implantable tag could use a technology that travels far less than 20 meters.
How did you get from "chip implant" to "track every move"? The read range for many RFID technologies is measured in centimeters, not meters. (It varies by frequency and other factors.) If tracking every move meant "place a reader in every doorknob" then maybe I'd buy your argument.
On the flip side, are you one of the 99% of people who carries a cell phone? Not only is your every movement known already, regardless of your proximity to anything but a cell tower that could be miles away, but is instantly accessible by law enforcement (and who knows who else.) By carrying the phone, you are a willful participant in your own tracking.
Perhaps your tin-foil hat is just a bit maladjusted.
I just can't get past the idea that you either tell people what they want (advertising) or let people discover things on their own (interconnection).
The best advertising is advertising misinterpreted as interconnection.
Remember the kerfluffle a year or two ago with the web site twittering your friends with your purchases, or some kind of plug in that monitored your purchases? I don't remember exactly which site, nor do I care because the details aren't important, but that was one step away from the goal here. Imagine if all your friends posted all their purchases all the time, and you got tweeted with all those purchases, and all those tweets flowed through a giant recommendation algorithm. Now imagine if I run that algorithm, and Nike pays me for advertising. I'll make sure that when your friend Joe buys Nike shoes the tweet will get through to you and all his friends; but when Mary buys Adidas and Carol buys Sketchers, nobody will see them.
To you, it's interconnection: your friends bought Nike shoes and apparently nothing else, so maybe you'll buy Nike shoes. To Nike, it's advertising. To me, it's profit.
Of course the drawback to these systems happens when they're discovered and revealed for what they truly are. History says they won't last beyond that point. But they're highly profitable right up until they are outed.
The great composers might not have done it through conscious math. They may simply have been "wired" that way, to hear music, to break it down into its components, and then reassemble them with their own style. We don't know, because they're gone.
Cope, on the other hand, waded through their work, identifying phrase after phrase, cataloging and quantifying what they had done, and spotted the very patterns by which they broke the rules. More importantly he figured out how to describe and codify those patterns. The analysis process took him years. Writing the software was possibly the easiest part of the whole task.
And once he was done, he was able to quantify other musicians work, and discovered that styles were plagiarized all over the place. Perhaps not consciously, but he found that composers everywhere and everywhen were building upon the music of their predecessors.
That's a metric ton of hard, grinding work, and is definitely evidence of higher brain power than J. Random Slashdotter. (And likely a severe case of OCD.)
Now getting a program that will write music that is as good as the greats is a huge accomplishment, don't get me wrong, but their is little reason to believe it is impossible.
That's kind of what drove Cope. Early on he found his synthetic process could create musical sentences and phrases that were grammatically and syntactically correct, like your first year computer student. But stringing them together didn't produce a musical work any more than a collection of sentences makes a story. Even putting similar concepts together gave tiresome blobs that didn't have "soul".
What he did was drill deeper and deeper into the works of the composers, and figured out what made their music stand out. He discovered it was not just following the rules, but was related to breaking the rules, and how they broke them. Randomly breaking them didn't accomplish the task. He instead identified their pattern of "rule breaking" and codified it, and copied it, and that's when Emmy's music became moving.
No, it's not impossible, but it was a huge feat of analyzing huge piles of music by the masters, categorizing and labeling measures, phrases, and concepts in ways that had never been explored before.
Y'know, when described that way it sounds like the TV Tropes Story Generator on steroids, with MIDI output. Hmm...
I am Nomad... I am performing... my function ... sterilize ... sterilize ...
Google for the Clams and OT III. Same thing happened to samizdat.
MagicJack are indeed stubborn pricks.
But take it no further: "Litigious bastards" is still a phrase best reserved for SCO.
First of all, I don't think their device is time synchronized. Smart cards don't typically have power sources or clocks on board. And you wouldn't trust the clock in the reader.
Where it gets interesting is, as the device can encode any string, you can also use it to secure wire transfers :
instead of directly typing the account number of the merchang you're paying, you type the account into the device, and give the encoded version to the web-form (for each new recipient. Once a recipient account is known as "safe", you can also do it without encryption).
Case 2-type injection can't work : the torjan can't change the recipient on the fly because there's no merchant's account number to replace. In theory, the trojan should replace the encrypted merchant's account with an encrypted criminal account. But that's impossible because the encryption is done on a separate device which isn't accessible to the trojan*.
Which is all well and good, except even that is still vulnerable to a spoofed web page. Let's say I was shopping on Amazon, and got XSS hijacked to evilHackers.com. evilHackers web page delivers Amazon's exact page, but replaces the Merchant ID of Amazon (12345) with their own Merchant ID (54321). When Amazon tells me to type in their merchant number into my PED to secure the payment to them, I don't know if it's supposed to be 12345 or 54321 -- as an ordinary consumer I just type whatever crazy number their web page tells me to type!
The only real way I can think to prevent MITM attacks is if the device could actually read the web site's address from my screen. If it had a little camera and I pointed it at the web site's
scan here --> AMAZON.COM <--
box, it could show me on the screen that it is going to pay AMAZON.COM. Barcodes would be a mostly OK substitute for OCR if it showed me the decoded human readable name on my PED screen.
Numbers don't work because I don't know Amazon's real number. And you can't permit anyone to upload a table of number-to-merchant-name pairs either, because those could be tampered with. Text and OCR would be best because I could verify them with my human eyes.
Finally, the issuer of text IDs would have to be 100% trustworthy. They must never permit registration of typsos or lookalike names, such as AMAZ0N.C0M or AMA7ON.COM.
Really? Forced to type a whole PIN? Did you also go to the bank manager and complain "Gosh, Mr. Banker, please don't make me be so responsible for my money!"
Since you seem to like convenient access to your cash, do you just tape your money to the outside of your clothes so you don't have to go through all the work of digging in your pocket, pulling out your wallet, opening it up, and removing the bills? Or rather than counting, do you just hand your wallet to the bus driver and ask the driver to "take whatever?" My guess is you take better care of your personal pocket money than that. So why would you expect less security from a bank who you *pay* to hold and protect your money?
Which would you select if you were given this choice: A) Full insurance against theft from your account if you use the e.dentifier; or B) No insurance on your account but you don't need the e.dentifier. I'm pretty sure a bank wouldn't even want to offer choice B because they wouldn't want to have to tell those customers "sorry but your money is all gone and there's nothing we can do for you."
Why can't we use a cell phone as a proxy for this?
Because the cell phone is reprogrammable, and so ultimately can't be trusted. You might get a virus or install some kind of Trojan horse J2ME app that pretends to be your PIN pad, but makes large withdrawals silently in the background after you enter the PIN for a legitimate transaction. A cell phone is actually the worst possible place, because it can go on-line immediately and start abusing your account right up until you yank the battery (or go broke.)
The best possible security will come from the bank supplying the end user with both the card and the PIN Entry Device. Sure, they might want to offer it in a cell-phone-carrying-case-form-factor (think iPhone cradle with a PIN pad on the back.) Slightly ugly but more convenient to carry. But it needs its own dedicated PIN pad and display.
The first version of the e.dentifier was even more secure than this one IMHO because it did NOT have the convenient USB port. The user had to type in the values into the pad manually. The security advantage is the air gap is something no hacker can ever bridge (without resorting to social engineering, extortion, or threats of violence.) Mind you, this device is probably plenty secure as long as it can never be re-flashed or re-programmed through the consumer facing USB port.
RSA actually offers credit card form factor devices with a little 10-key pad and a one line LCD display. They are used for SecurID tokens where the user has to enter a PIN to get the generated #. The same form factor would make an excellent bank card where you don't have to carry around the extra little device to use it.
This article was not worth the five minutes I spent reading it.
Tell me about it. I clicked on the link hoping it would have pictures of "the little man in the browser." Was I disappointed.
Done. There's already a cryptographic device that offers near-perfect cryptographic security for web banking. ABN AMRO uses it for their e.dentifier2 device. The brilliant part is that the trust lies only within the card's chip and the handheld device, never only the PC or the browser. It's exactly what a bank should provide: end to end encryption of the user's authorization to perform a transaction, where both ends are created and maintained by the bank.
Now we just need a bank that's willing to deploy those here in the U.S.
And one of my favorites: http://web.archive.org/web/20011027002011/http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2001182781025.gif
Sorry, no, invasion is not what anybody wants, but isolationism is.
Of course it's a worst-case scenario, and no, there isn't a realistic way of suppressing the US short of an all-out nuclear attack, which would indeed have the undesirable side effect of terminating life on the planet.
You're right -- invasion wouldn't be a viable option.
Before 9/11, we didn't feel we had the God-Bless-American-Right to kill foreign terrorists without a trial. After 9/11, we suspended all those nice legalities and started butchering the bastards.
I don't know which is worse. All I know is I like America 2.0 a whole lot less than I liked the previous version of America.
And that's why the US can not "win" this war. The reason Japan surrendered is not that the allies were defeating their armies down to the very last man, but because we were firebombing and nuking entire cities. When the suffering became too great, the persons in charge knew the war had to end.
The significant difference between then and now are that the enemy is already not in power, and the enemy has no concern for the well being of the civilian populations in which they hide.
If the US were to switch to a carpet-bombing strategy in Afghanistan, things would be almost no different from a battle point of view. A few civilians might even cooperate with turning over the combatants out of sheer terror of the bombers. But the world opinion would turn against America, certainly to punitive isolation and perhaps even to the point of invasion. Which would be exactly what both the hawks and xenophobes of the extremist right wing want.
So the US plods along, killing a Taliban here and a Taliban there, never making much progress. It's a quagmire, plain and simple.
The problem in TFA actually isn't about Flash(TM) itself, the real problem is the direct coupling of the mouse to the user interface experience via the web. "Hover" is a mouse-specific capability. Flash supports this capability, as well as javascript and other languages, (although Flash sites seem to rely on it more often than others.)
Too many web designers assume a mouse is present, leading to all kinds of human factors problems, not the least of which is handicapped accessibility.
Of course the idea that Apple wants Adobe to FOAD is still perfectly valid. But if people want to believe that "hover" plus "iPhone" equals "no Flash", well, that's what they'll believe.
Hey, I'm just reading Apple's conditions straight off their web page, I'm not telling you how you can follow them or that you should violate them.
As far as I can tell, the sensor is working perfectly. These guys handled the phone as if they were deliberately trying to create condensation, succeeded at creating condensation, and are whining that they got caught by a moisture detector, as if condensation isn't moisture.
The part where I sympathize with them hasn't come yet.
But being both an Apple loather and a slightly embarrassed owner of an iPhone, I can still blame Apple for this. If they'd make the damn battery user replaceable, they could put the moisture sensor inside the battery compartment like every other phone manufacturer. Condensation wouldn't be a problem. But because of their f*cking insistence on gluing shut every useful physical and digital feature, they uncaringly expose their customers to poorly conceived side effects.
As cool as half the iPhone is, the other half sucks out loud. I'll never buy another Apple product.