This guy's method is not only insecure, but just plain stupid and addresses no concerns in the crypto community.
I would at least request and review the actual implementation before making this judgement. It is quite possible the analogy -- not to mention my interpretation -- does not do his system justice.
As much as I hate to play devil's advocate, the rampant adoption of PVRs has left television in a sad state. Advertisers are no longer willing to pay top dollar for airtime out of fear that their commercials will not be watched, prompting an exec to compare fast-forwarding to theft of service in a fit of hyperbole.
Theatrics aside, the cost of quality cable or satellite programming has gone up, but the quality has been on a steady decline because of the loss of ad revenue. The FCC decision like most of their actions was made to preserve the standard of service that we've grown accustomed to, and one wonders if it will be worth recording if there is nothing at all to record.
I have not seen the implementation, so I am only speculating.
I believe that, in this case, Alice could generate the contents of said envelope with her public key, then send both the envelope and the key to the remote host. That host would respond with its positions, encrypt those with Alice's public key as well, and return the whole bunch to Alice who then decrypts everything with her private key.
There's something missing in my speculation -- why does Alice need to send anything but her public key?
I've got a friend that was working on biodiesel development at the uni. At the moment it doesn't appear profitable, although only because we don't factor in the cost of diminishing resources and environmental pollution as costs, but as petroleum becomes scarcer alternative methods of energy reclaimation will look better and better (especially when we get to the point of getting more out than we're putting in.)
I think it's important that we research these alternatives now. There are certain uses for petroleum that we can't reproduce via other means -- powering our cars and homes isn't one of them.
People having access to information that should not.
Strictly partitioning information access on a organizational basis costs money and increases friction within an organization, which is traditionally (in addition to a certain lesser-faire attitude towards other people's information) why such measures have been opposed. The pressure to outsource and a greater degree of connectivity has only increased this risk.
The problems would clear up overnight if the companies involved had a greater degree of legal liability for their actions. Look at HIPA.
It may very well break the U.S. economy, given the exemptions on developing countries that are already absorbing business from the country, not to mention putting a serious crimp on individuals if they've got to buy more expensive equipment or gasoline for their vehicles (or pay for it through most other forms of transit).
Certainly given the current mood of those at the helm of U.S. corporations, only the short term matters. If the environment is reasonably good during our lifetimes and technology keeps getting better, why risk everything on a huge fix now if we can continue to make incremental impact improvements?
A backup is fair use, true, but we've got law saying you can't circumvent these protections to make one. Besides, if you take care of your media you don't really need them -- "backups" are traditionally heavily abused -- and DVDs are more resistant than CDs.
It'd be nice if they'd put in a low-cost replacement program for damaged DVDs, though.
Are definitely into it for the gadgetry rather than the purpose. Unfortunately, that serendipity in addition to the average longevity of cellular hardware and batteries in general contributes to a major environmental problem.
Granted, the manufacturing processes have gotten better, or at least have been outsourced to other countries, but we desparately need to find a way to extend the life of old electronics and recycling components in order to develop a environmentally-safe and sustainable electronic culture.
It's probably the next stage in computing. Mono (and.NET) are lambasted by folks who are rooted in the past; much like Java, it will have an uphill battle to win mindshare amongst people who believe we should continue to concern ourselves with type safety, buffer overflows and memory leaks when we can design or use a system that takes care of such problems for us.
Fortunately, this is not a popularity contest. If it works best I'll use it, and if it becomes the patent minefield that others suggest I'll use something else. But I think people just don't want to admit that Microsoft came up with something better than the rest of us, even if it's implemented by a open-source friendly developer.
While on the topic of France, you can't take a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night without permission because of the new light display installed and copyrighted in 2003..
The slide to creepy began with the introduction of gender in MMORPG. 98% pasty white males in real-life to a roughly 50-50 mix in the game world... well, you do the math.
Software shouldn't be patented. It shouldn't even be copyrighted or trademarked. There is such a short shelf life on software and software companies that the impact of denying access to techniques and logarithms effectively shuts out competition and fair use not only for the life of a product but well beyond, negatively influencing people well beyond the useful scope of any novelty that could possibly be discovered.
One only has to look at the rampant achievements and success of Free Software and Open Source to see how much the rest of the industry is being held back by software patents and other "intellectual property" restrictions.
Having deployed Firefox in a large installation, I noticed a great deal of complaints. While it seemed somewhat snappier, albeit slower to load, than it's IE counterpart, it was incapable of properly processing the internal helpdesk software that was designed with FrontPage to the latest standards.
Unfortunately, this meant rolling back to Internet Explorer. While I personally prefer Opera, most of the users agreed that Internet Explorer did the best at talking with the internet after this experiment.
Some do it to enforce ratios. As they run the tracker, which is aware of any uploading and downloading you do (I believe each client reports to it and reads from it such that each client is aware of how much the others are uploading and adjusting who it shares with accordingly), they've figured out how to tie what and how much you share to a user profile. As people generally like to cut out of a session as soon as they're finished downloading, this no doubt seemed like a clever approach to ensure that people within a filesharing community played things by the rules -- a measure probably more important with pirates than others.
As you say, an idiotic thing to do if the activity isn't above board. Except maybe not so idiotic in hindsight if one collects ad revenue from all those users, maybe manages to settle for less at the end of the day, and uses the logs as a bargaining chip to escape harsher treatment. I am unfamiliar with lokitorrent and whether they actually kept logs as part of a ratio-enforcement method, for legal reasons or just for kicks, but I'm afraid this will be taken as a reason to keep logs around rather than get rid of them -- even though I think they could be forceably obtained with not much more difficulty than they are negotiated for.
MySQL is a different animal from PostgreSQL, which is itself a horse of a different color than DBI. To truly profile these operating systems you must take into account the differences in:
Tuple calculus
Transaction journaling
Operator space/system call overhead
Disk cache timings
And much more... in essence, you can't be certain these benchmarks hold true for the performance of all databases and it may even be a mute argument -- the same operating system may be tweaked differently if you're fileserving or mailserving or networkserving or if you're only dataserving. A useful tool, but one that must be run on each server.
One successful 419 scam (where they soak some victim for hundreds of thousands of dollars) will pay quite handily for one of these fake websites, DoS or no DoS.
On the other hand, the rest of us pay thrice: once for the victimization of regular people not yet wise to this game, once for the waste of bandwidth because of the huge amount of spam being sent out for this scam, and now once for do-gooders pumping loads of worthless data back through our shared Internet at these websites, which are replaced faster than they go down.
On the surface it looks like a good idea, but it's just adding to the damage like all these other vigilante anti-spam tactics. A better technical solution already exists; switch from e-mail to instant messaging within a company and save all your instant messages.
The northern lights are particularly fascinating, and are visible to about 25% of the Earth with the naked eye during the fall and spring equinoxum -- and take note, a similar phenomenon, referred to as the southern lights, occurs in the lower hemisphere to treat the other 25%.
There are also shooting stars occurring quite often, more now with the space junk we've got floating up there. And there should be at least two comets, which are effectively luminescent asteroids, visible this year as well.
Just make sure you get away from light pollution if you want the best opportunity to observe these spectacles. About fifteen minutes in any direction out of town will do, and will make you think seriously about more serious astrology (you'd be surprised how much can be done with under $1000 of equipment!)
You know, heaven forbid that anybody take responsibility for themselves when it comes to keeping their systems clean. Ten years ago you couldn't get a new user to sit at a computer without them expressing concerns about "messing something up"; i.e., a healthy level of paranoia, like the first time you use a chainsaw or wire an outlet.
Today? Plug that shit in to a world full of malcontents and send your worries packing; it wouldn't be easy if it wasn't safe. You are an idiot if you put unpatched Windows XP on the Internet, as even mainstream news has covered the problem six ways from Sunday. My OEM hands out trial Antivirus and Internet Security suites and preloads the latest SP of Windows on new systems -- demand no less.
The ring will probably be illegal in anti-wardriving jurisdictions.
Although one wonders if 802.11g should be illegal as well -- if it can light up an LED with the juice it's pouring into the air, what else might it be doing that we're not aware of yet?
No password length can match a biometric, especially mine. The level of detail a good scanner can pick up well exceeds a memorizable password, with of course the understanding that too perfect a read will make it impossible to scan twice the same way, and the technology is only getting better.
In the future, we'll have smart cards that will act like our Social Security numbers/national IDs work today. Cash, credit, verification and signing will all be possible using one card or perhaps even an embedded chip, and we can once and for all eliminate this nonsense about having to remember a different password for each service or the concern about identity theft.
Is greater than what you say on a weblog. It's about the ability for an organization you work for (or attend as a student) being increasingly able to dictate your behavior and lifestyle outside of the workplace.
We've been on a fairly steady decline since they found out they can make employees go through demeaning tests for insurance purposes and are currently at the point where companies are trying to kick smokers out. Meanwhile there are people arguing free speech rights only apply when the government is attempting to restrict them, conveniently ignoring the fact that if there were any multinational corporations around when the founders set this place up maybe the Bill of Rights would have been a little tighter.
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I would at least request and review the actual implementation before making this judgement. It is quite possible the analogy -- not to mention my interpretation -- does not do his system justice.
Theatrics aside, the cost of quality cable or satellite programming has gone up, but the quality has been on a steady decline because of the loss of ad revenue. The FCC decision like most of their actions was made to preserve the standard of service that we've grown accustomed to, and one wonders if it will be worth recording if there is nothing at all to record.
I believe that, in this case, Alice could generate the contents of said envelope with her public key, then send both the envelope and the key to the remote host. That host would respond with its positions, encrypt those with Alice's public key as well, and return the whole bunch to Alice who then decrypts everything with her private key.
There's something missing in my speculation -- why does Alice need to send anything but her public key?
The only part I can't figure out is how they're going to send the carbon paper and envelopes across the Internet. I can't find the protocol for that.
I think it's important that we research these alternatives now. There are certain uses for petroleum that we can't reproduce via other means -- powering our cars and homes isn't one of them.
Strictly partitioning information access on a organizational basis costs money and increases friction within an organization, which is traditionally (in addition to a certain lesser-faire attitude towards other people's information) why such measures have been opposed. The pressure to outsource and a greater degree of connectivity has only increased this risk.
The problems would clear up overnight if the companies involved had a greater degree of legal liability for their actions. Look at HIPA.
Certainly given the current mood of those at the helm of U.S. corporations, only the short term matters. If the environment is reasonably good during our lifetimes and technology keeps getting better, why risk everything on a huge fix now if we can continue to make incremental impact improvements?
A backup is fair use, true, but we've got law saying you can't circumvent these protections to make one. Besides, if you take care of your media you don't really need them -- "backups" are traditionally heavily abused -- and DVDs are more resistant than CDs.
It'd be nice if they'd put in a low-cost replacement program for damaged DVDs, though.
You could also do Wheel of Fortune, handheld or maybe on the computer (I don't know if there are any recent versions).
Granted, the manufacturing processes have gotten better, or at least have been outsourced to other countries, but we desparately need to find a way to extend the life of old electronics and recycling components in order to develop a environmentally-safe and sustainable electronic culture.
Fortunately, this is not a popularity contest. If it works best I'll use it, and if it becomes the patent minefield that others suggest I'll use something else. But I think people just don't want to admit that Microsoft came up with something better than the rest of us, even if it's implemented by a open-source friendly developer.
While on the topic of France, you can't take a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night without permission because of the new light display installed and copyrighted in 2003..
The slide to creepy began with the introduction of gender in MMORPG. 98% pasty white males in real-life to a roughly 50-50 mix in the game world... well, you do the math.
One only has to look at the rampant achievements and success of Free Software and Open Source to see how much the rest of the industry is being held back by software patents and other "intellectual property" restrictions.
Unfortunately, this meant rolling back to Internet Explorer. While I personally prefer Opera, most of the users agreed that Internet Explorer did the best at talking with the internet after this experiment.
As you say, an idiotic thing to do if the activity isn't above board. Except maybe not so idiotic in hindsight if one collects ad revenue from all those users, maybe manages to settle for less at the end of the day, and uses the logs as a bargaining chip to escape harsher treatment. I am unfamiliar with lokitorrent and whether they actually kept logs as part of a ratio-enforcement method, for legal reasons or just for kicks, but I'm afraid this will be taken as a reason to keep logs around rather than get rid of them -- even though I think they could be forceably obtained with not much more difficulty than they are negotiated for.
- Tuple calculus
- Transaction journaling
- Operator space/system call overhead
- Disk cache timings
And much more... in essence, you can't be certain these benchmarks hold true for the performance of all databases and it may even be a mute argument -- the same operating system may be tweaked differently if you're fileserving or mailserving or networkserving or if you're only dataserving. A useful tool, but one that must be run on each server.On the other hand, the rest of us pay thrice: once for the victimization of regular people not yet wise to this game, once for the waste of bandwidth because of the huge amount of spam being sent out for this scam, and now once for do-gooders pumping loads of worthless data back through our shared Internet at these websites, which are replaced faster than they go down.
On the surface it looks like a good idea, but it's just adding to the damage like all these other vigilante anti-spam tactics. A better technical solution already exists; switch from e-mail to instant messaging within a company and save all your instant messages.
There are also shooting stars occurring quite often, more now with the space junk we've got floating up there. And there should be at least two comets, which are effectively luminescent asteroids, visible this year as well.
Just make sure you get away from light pollution if you want the best opportunity to observe these spectacles. About fifteen minutes in any direction out of town will do, and will make you think seriously about more serious astrology (you'd be surprised how much can be done with under $1000 of equipment!)
(Although I should explain I'm not calling you an idiot, as you have enabled ICF -- a positive scenario I haven't included in my rant but would have.)
Today? Plug that shit in to a world full of malcontents and send your worries packing; it wouldn't be easy if it wasn't safe. You are an idiot if you put unpatched Windows XP on the Internet, as even mainstream news has covered the problem six ways from Sunday. My OEM hands out trial Antivirus and Internet Security suites and preloads the latest SP of Windows on new systems -- demand no less.
Because Windows is the worst operating system, except for all the others.
Although one wonders if 802.11g should be illegal as well -- if it can light up an LED with the juice it's pouring into the air, what else might it be doing that we're not aware of yet?
In the future, we'll have smart cards that will act like our Social Security numbers/national IDs work today. Cash, credit, verification and signing will all be possible using one card or perhaps even an embedded chip, and we can once and for all eliminate this nonsense about having to remember a different password for each service or the concern about identity theft.
We've been on a fairly steady decline since they found out they can make employees go through demeaning tests for insurance purposes and are currently at the point where companies are trying to kick smokers out. Meanwhile there are people arguing free speech rights only apply when the government is attempting to restrict them, conveniently ignoring the fact that if there were any multinational corporations around when the founders set this place up maybe the Bill of Rights would have been a little tighter.