Why do we call it soccer?
on
RoboCup 2003
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· Score: 1
This has always befuddled me.
BTW: watching robots play soccer is really, really boring, but coding them to play sounds kind of interesting. Is there any software out there similar to ASM-Robots that lets you do something like that?
I kind of like the idea (mentioned in the first link) of blanket compulsory licensing for Internet media. It sounds like something that could open up new markets in content delivery while ensuring that the artists get paid, which is a win-win, while allowing both the industry and music listeners to benefit from a wider selection of music to pick from and instantaneously purchase.
But I figure this will end up like the MPAA vs. VCR. Fight the technology tooth and nail until you realize it's another way of getting fistfuls of cash shoved in your general direction.
I don't understand.
on
802.11 Security
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· Score: 1, Insightful
What is so fundamentally different about 802.11 from other forms of networking that is making it so hard to secure? Is there an inherent vulnerability in wireless communication that I'm not spotting (besides not having to splice a wire or find an unused network drop to get in) or is this about people who don't follow good security practices and decide they want to compound their difficulties by broadcasting network access?
Maybe the problem isn't 802.11 security, but computer security in general.
It's not like we've even figured out what the hell.NET is yet, right? I've played around a bit with C# (both Microsoft and Ximian versions) and thought, well, this is great but where is this going to take us that Java hasn't?
It's important not to get caught up in the buzzwords, the hype, or the marketing ploy to redefine the paradigm.
For example, just the other day while I was enjoying a meal of Hunan Chicken I was reflecting on the history of chopsticks, and the humor in the whole situation of people getting pretentious in their ability to use them. Aren't people aware that the things were invented in America in the 1800s by Chinese immigrants seeking to differentiate their restaurants in the mining communities? But this is just another situation where marketing has gained such a foothold that myth becomes historical fact, amusingly so when you realize that chopstick use in Asia now far outstrips American chopstick use and that something like 1% of all our lumber exports go towards manufacturing wooden chopsticks.
It's easy to carve new markets out of ignorance, but it doesn't imply relevancy -- far from it. You can slap.NET on a game, but it still comes down to the fundamentals: does it run, is it fun, does your player have a gun? I don't see anything in the toolset that will make development any simpler, and in fact think it'll make it harder to create something that works properly and properly exploits all this expensive hardware people are packing into their systems nowadays.
I'm not even going to try to back up that first post, but would like to point out a bit of truth from the following bit:
A deception that copyrights somehow financially benefit artists and creators. The simple fact is, that for every artist that makes it "big" there are litterally thousands who copyrights haven't helped a bit, even hindered, or destroyed.
I disagree with that fellow's assertion to a degree -- I think that eliminating copyrights altogether wouldn't be such a hot idea. However, he may be right that copyright in its current form is restricting the flow of new content. I hear all the time that the music industry (and publishing houses) are afraid to risk investment in new material because they're able to rely on publishing rights going back into the 20s on content that's been proven.
Actually, I'm kind of interested in hearing your take on this, what with your line of work and all...
So segregating people intolerant of Creationistic views is a bad thing, which I understand, but segregating people with Creationistic views would be a good thing?
I don't think it's right to exclude someone from medical practice just because they don't ascribe to the theory of evolution. They're still capable of observation and understanding the scientific process, perhaps even more so than those who blindly adhere to a theory because they keep their minds open to the possibility that it is wrong. Science isn't about religious prejudice.
Isn't it part of Microsoft licensing that you must run the software under Microsoft's environment? I haven't used FoxPro since Microsoft bought it out, but I've heard that's a pretty common term with at least some of their EULAs.
I know that Linux and GNU software carries some terms of their own, and I can't imagine any Open Source developer that would be that thrilled if Microsoft pulled a quid-pro-pro and copied our stuff into their stuff. Isn't there any alternative that was actually designed to run on Linux?
I tried the NetBSD on Dreamcast thing a while back (much simpler process -- burn a disc and boot) but kind of wondered what the point was after getting it to boot. Walmart sells $200 Lindows machines with more functionality, particularly factoring in the hard drive, so why do folks sink lots of time and effort into this?
It's pretty inexpensive to set up a legitimate SMTP server on a static IP (or use part of someone else's). It's fun and all to try out these services on the residental ISP, but none of them seem to permit operating such a service to begin with... so it's probably worth the cost to avoid the hassle even without AOL's machinations.
OTOH, one could always steer the people they know away from AOL too.
Isn't this a bit like trying to figure out which year we're going to time travel to first, or the best type of outfit to wear when you're teleporting to a party millions of light years away?
Cleaning up the image of open source
on
Open Source DRM
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· Score: 1
While I am not likely to use DRM anytime soon, I think that this project goes a long way towards legitimizing open source in the commercial industry, where until now many might have seen open source as completely opposite to conventional business wisdom.
Hopefully, this will be the impetus necessary to make Linux relevant on the home desktop front, as content providers will be able to deploy their music and video without having qualms about the ease with which their material could be distributed ad infinitum. It's good to see the technology maturing to the point where it's admitted that not everything can be or should be free.
Perhaps, although I can't help but wonder how many unbiased coin flips it would take to retrieve a DVD rip of the widescreen version of Clue.
Kind of wierd that I never noticed the connection between the author of the Dining Cryptographers Problem and the creator of the (appropriately named) Chaum mix. I always thought both were a neat idea.
I want to make it clear that we are not trying to validate content. Gnutella implementations are by nature content-agnostic - we have no prior knowledge of what a node may share or download and we have no way to control these things. Gnutella simply sets up a communications medium - what is said is up to the individual user.
I'm not a Gnutella user, but I did fire up gtk-gnutella today to check things out and I do have a pretty good idea of what you're talking about. One of the things I noted was a number of machines from the same IP class giving me results for a query -- after looking them up and doing a bit of searching on Google I found out those belonged to an odious company named Overpeer, who according to Wired is actively attempting to corrupt P2P networks (does that count as immoral?) And of course I got all sorts of results that were obviously worms or spam.
But I understand your question now, and agree with your assessment of the situation. For what it's worth coming from someone with unknown credentials, I'd say trust of the sort you're mentioning isn't something you're going to achieve on a free open decentralized network. As with USENET, there is a certain element of chaos that is going to come with the territory.
What can cryptography buy you? Perhaps some form of distributed user ranking system could be designed into the protocol. I have an identity (public/private keypair) generated by my client the first time I run it (hopefully with the abilities to backup that identity and later if I choose to generate a new one). This identity is used with Gnutella transactions. If I'm sharing corrupted files from my incomplete/ directory, anybody who notices this marks my identity as a loser in their client. If somebody has just downloaded successfully one of Richard Stallman's speeches from my system and actually approves of it, they have the option to mark my identity as a good sharer in their client. A web of trust is then formed by Gnutella users choosing identities whom opinions of traders they can respect. These identities can then be slowly queried over the network when a client is started and if a node is up corresponding to an identity, a fresh list of opinions can be retrieved from said node (signed with its identity's secret key for identification, of course). It is important that users can see what the rankings are in the list and to be able to remove identities from their 'trust' list if they disagree with them in the future.
There are of course issues with this concept if it isn't flawed outright, but I hope it's helpful.
Didn't Windows 95 networking have a flaw along these lines? It sounds pretty familiar, and I remember thinking at the time that it was astonishing that such a bug wasn't noticed until years after it was introduced...
What's the alternative? We need a central authority on domain name issues to ensure that standards are kept and every country is on an equal footing when disputes occur. ICANN, like any other organization that is in ultimate control of a resource, can't please everybody, but as mentioned in the article breaking it up would make the domain name system more worthless than IP addresses.
I think there are a lot of people with business interests in getting a piece of ICANN for themselves, but giving it to them would hamper the interests of everybody who enjoys a stable Internet. Most people who dig beneath the anti-ICANN arguments to look at the facts and logic behind the situation come to realize that it is a necessary evil to cede control to one entity rather than trying to run DNS by committee.
The VIA C3 is actually a processor of its own, and if I recall correctly is designed as a low-power low-heat alternative to Intel/AMD CPUs better suited to low profile small form factor systems such as thin clients or laptops. If you're dodging AMD because of compatibility concerns (which are probably unfounded), this isn't going to be an option either. My guess is that it'll match a comparable Celeron in performance.
Lindows, like the CPU, is designed to be a low-cost alternative to the conventional (Wintel). You get what you pay for; me, I'd sink a little extra cash in given that I'd expect to use it for three or four years, and I'd probably want Windows with it because I wouldn't want to try to solve all those wierd laptop issues that open source products demonstrate... I don't want to waste the first year waiting for proper hardware support.
Nothing we're doing in the near term will be unbreakable in the long term. Moore's Law, nanotechnology, and quantum cryptographic methods will make today's best ciphers (barring one time pads, which are unusable for DRM on any meaningful scale) as secure as yesterday's substitution cipher.
We have more to fear from the attitude that it is a right to keep information from the public domain indefinitely or for periods of time beyond that which is necessary on average for a creator to recognize benefits from a piece of work that made it worth the effort to create it. The artificial scarcity on information will have a very real impact on the innovation and creativity of tomorrow's minds.
Not that anybody seems concerned about the cerebral anymore.
By DRM, I think they're referring to the protection on a user profile of files (not that you'd store many on here), messaging ID, and e-mail account. It probably implements enough of their DRM API to sync with things like Palladium when it comes out later to sufficiently protect a computer sync of the phone's databases over infrared (assuming that's an addon to this model) as well.
Yours isn't the first comment I've seen mentioning the tidal wave of spam from the U.S., yet here in the middle of this great land I get spam coming from just about everywhere but America (and junk faxes 'from' the U.K. to boot.) Yet they all seem to use dollars too, or are pushing a pump-and-dump scheme with stocks on the NYSE/Nasdaq. Who would have thought spammers lie?:)
I've pushed the idea before and I will again that one (meaningful) country needs to set the standard of no spam on a national level and use a scheme of border router filters (in the literal sense!) on SMTP traffic to block everything except from/to pairs whitelisted by citizens and SMTP traffic from countries that meet the no-spam standards. I doubt the U.S. would be the first adopter and frankly don't care -- it'd be a good kick to the ass to get our representatives serious about fixing things if the E.U. implemented something like this.
There are an array of technical alternatives that could be strung together into a workable solution, but it involves an infrastructure update. I'm informed that this is about as likely to happen as the deployment of IPv6 and, therefore, am not holding my breath.
'Filtering' the Internet is an almost textbook example of the idiom "Shovelling shit against the tide."
For months people got around the filters by changing the way they entered the web addresses (use IP addresses instead of domain names until that ceased to work; use the integer encoding of the IP address until THAT ceased to work, etc.) They fixed that. Then they went through well-known proxies like anonymizer.com and made proxies out of well-known services like babelfish.altavista.com. They fixed that. Eventually proxy access on well-known ports will probably be blocked at the border to stave off the unknown proxy usage, but that doesn't do anything about the ports that are unknown. Then they can start filtering things that look like web traffic on non-standard ports, but SSL gateways and VPN software can always get past that until they decide to block encryption.
My point: there will always be ways around filters on the Internet, because at any point there aren't, we've no longer got an Internet. There are sufficient business interests in maintaining the Internet as a useful tool to keep the book-burning impulses of even the most ardent censorship advocates in check.
That sentence in my comment was confused. The paper was more a puff piece for near-future storage technologies than a dissertation on optical physics, but it strongly implied that greater multilayer storage potential was to be had by shifting the wavelength higher up the spectrum.
However, perhaps to combat the quantum phenomenon you mention (which I wasn't aware of probably due to my halfassed attention to physics in school), the media planned to be used in these drives will be sandwiching an undisclosed fluorescent alloy to greatly increase the resolution of readout, which will likely be a redshifted version of the write wavelength (deep blue rather than UV?). I couldn't find the piece online, but a search on Multilayer Fluorescent Disks (MFD) should find a description of a closely related technology that is also around the corner and will supposedly handle as many as a hundred layers/disc, as if we ever max out the potential of a current technology before moving on to the next...
Hope this helps, and thank you for framing your query in polite terms.
One advantage of the technology itself that counters this effect to some degree is the increased penetration ability of higher energy wavelengths. I've read that near future plans with blue laser media include tripling the thickness and adding as many as fourteen recording layers, making every third layer a parity layer.
Not only will this technology be safer than CD for information storage, but it will also push the recording/playback speeds something like 2x or 3x beyond what is possible with current CD drives -- the media itself can't spin anywhere near as fast, but the multiple layers make it function like a RAID. Neat stuff.
Wow... no wonder Nintendo went to a disc format. If two more employees decide to bitch they're not going to have any place to put the game.
It's cool to see a scener in game development, though that's where I figured most of them settled. I'm not surprised with his discontent towards the development process; with the amount of ingenuity and dedication that goes into (went into?) intros/demos it's got to be a shock to hit a corporate environment and have somebody tell you "It's good enough as it is" when you're working on your project and ship it out the door.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW: watching robots play soccer is really, really boring, but coding them to play sounds kind of interesting. Is there any software out there similar to ASM-Robots that lets you do something like that?
But I figure this will end up like the MPAA vs. VCR. Fight the technology tooth and nail until you realize it's another way of getting fistfuls of cash shoved in your general direction.
Maybe the problem isn't 802.11 security, but computer security in general.
It's not like we've even figured out what the hell .NET is yet, right? I've played around a bit with C# (both Microsoft and Ximian versions) and thought, well, this is great but where is this going to take us that Java hasn't?
It's important not to get caught up in the buzzwords, the hype, or the marketing ploy to redefine the paradigm.
For example, just the other day while I was enjoying a meal of Hunan Chicken I was reflecting on the history of chopsticks, and the humor in the whole situation of people getting pretentious in their ability to use them. Aren't people aware that the things were invented in America in the 1800s by Chinese immigrants seeking to differentiate their restaurants in the mining communities? But this is just another situation where marketing has gained such a foothold that myth becomes historical fact, amusingly so when you realize that chopstick use in Asia now far outstrips American chopstick use and that something like 1% of all our lumber exports go towards manufacturing wooden chopsticks.
It's easy to carve new markets out of ignorance, but it doesn't imply relevancy -- far from it. You can slap .NET on a game, but it still comes down to the fundamentals: does it run, is it fun, does your player have a gun? I don't see anything in the toolset that will make development any simpler, and in fact think it'll make it harder to create something that works properly and properly exploits all this expensive hardware people are packing into their systems nowadays.
A deception that copyrights somehow financially benefit artists and creators. The simple fact is, that for every artist that makes it "big" there are litterally thousands who copyrights haven't helped a bit, even hindered, or destroyed.
I disagree with that fellow's assertion to a degree -- I think that eliminating copyrights altogether wouldn't be such a hot idea. However, he may be right that copyright in its current form is restricting the flow of new content. I hear all the time that the music industry (and publishing houses) are afraid to risk investment in new material because they're able to rely on publishing rights going back into the 20s on content that's been proven.
Actually, I'm kind of interested in hearing your take on this, what with your line of work and all...
I don't think it's right to exclude someone from medical practice just because they don't ascribe to the theory of evolution. They're still capable of observation and understanding the scientific process, perhaps even more so than those who blindly adhere to a theory because they keep their minds open to the possibility that it is wrong. Science isn't about religious prejudice.
I know that Linux and GNU software carries some terms of their own, and I can't imagine any Open Source developer that would be that thrilled if Microsoft pulled a quid-pro-pro and copied our stuff into their stuff. Isn't there any alternative that was actually designed to run on Linux?
My guess is that the DMCA would have the same contented papery thoughts that other printed documents have, not to mention an intense dislike for fire.
I tried the NetBSD on Dreamcast thing a while back (much simpler process -- burn a disc and boot) but kind of wondered what the point was after getting it to boot. Walmart sells $200 Lindows machines with more functionality, particularly factoring in the hard drive, so why do folks sink lots of time and effort into this?
OTOH, one could always steer the people they know away from AOL too.
Isn't this a bit like trying to figure out which year we're going to time travel to first, or the best type of outfit to wear when you're teleporting to a party millions of light years away?
Hopefully, this will be the impetus necessary to make Linux relevant on the home desktop front, as content providers will be able to deploy their music and video without having qualms about the ease with which their material could be distributed ad infinitum. It's good to see the technology maturing to the point where it's admitted that not everything can be or should be free.
Kind of wierd that I never noticed the connection between the author of the Dining Cryptographers Problem and the creator of the (appropriately named) Chaum mix. I always thought both were a neat idea.
I'm not a Gnutella user, but I did fire up gtk-gnutella today to check things out and I do have a pretty good idea of what you're talking about. One of the things I noted was a number of machines from the same IP class giving me results for a query -- after looking them up and doing a bit of searching on Google I found out those belonged to an odious company named Overpeer, who according to Wired is actively attempting to corrupt P2P networks (does that count as immoral?) And of course I got all sorts of results that were obviously worms or spam.
But I understand your question now, and agree with your assessment of the situation. For what it's worth coming from someone with unknown credentials, I'd say trust of the sort you're mentioning isn't something you're going to achieve on a free open decentralized network. As with USENET, there is a certain element of chaos that is going to come with the territory.
What can cryptography buy you? Perhaps some form of distributed user ranking system could be designed into the protocol. I have an identity (public/private keypair) generated by my client the first time I run it (hopefully with the abilities to backup that identity and later if I choose to generate a new one). This identity is used with Gnutella transactions. If I'm sharing corrupted files from my incomplete/ directory, anybody who notices this marks my identity as a loser in their client. If somebody has just downloaded successfully one of Richard Stallman's speeches from my system and actually approves of it, they have the option to mark my identity as a good sharer in their client. A web of trust is then formed by Gnutella users choosing identities whom opinions of traders they can respect. These identities can then be slowly queried over the network when a client is started and if a node is up corresponding to an identity, a fresh list of opinions can be retrieved from said node (signed with its identity's secret key for identification, of course). It is important that users can see what the rankings are in the list and to be able to remove identities from their 'trust' list if they disagree with them in the future.
There are of course issues with this concept if it isn't flawed outright, but I hope it's helpful.
Didn't Windows 95 networking have a flaw along these lines? It sounds pretty familiar, and I remember thinking at the time that it was astonishing that such a bug wasn't noticed until years after it was introduced...
Can the fellow who asked it please clarify what is meant by 'trust' in a Gnutella environment -- what features are being thought about?
I think there are a lot of people with business interests in getting a piece of ICANN for themselves, but giving it to them would hamper the interests of everybody who enjoys a stable Internet. Most people who dig beneath the anti-ICANN arguments to look at the facts and logic behind the situation come to realize that it is a necessary evil to cede control to one entity rather than trying to run DNS by committee.
Lindows, like the CPU, is designed to be a low-cost alternative to the conventional (Wintel). You get what you pay for; me, I'd sink a little extra cash in given that I'd expect to use it for three or four years, and I'd probably want Windows with it because I wouldn't want to try to solve all those wierd laptop issues that open source products demonstrate... I don't want to waste the first year waiting for proper hardware support.
We have more to fear from the attitude that it is a right to keep information from the public domain indefinitely or for periods of time beyond that which is necessary on average for a creator to recognize benefits from a piece of work that made it worth the effort to create it. The artificial scarcity on information will have a very real impact on the innovation and creativity of tomorrow's minds.
Not that anybody seems concerned about the cerebral anymore.
It's a good thing in this context.
I've pushed the idea before and I will again that one (meaningful) country needs to set the standard of no spam on a national level and use a scheme of border router filters (in the literal sense!) on SMTP traffic to block everything except from/to pairs whitelisted by citizens and SMTP traffic from countries that meet the no-spam standards. I doubt the U.S. would be the first adopter and frankly don't care -- it'd be a good kick to the ass to get our representatives serious about fixing things if the E.U. implemented something like this.
There are an array of technical alternatives that could be strung together into a workable solution, but it involves an infrastructure update. I'm informed that this is about as likely to happen as the deployment of IPv6 and, therefore, am not holding my breath.
For months people got around the filters by changing the way they entered the web addresses (use IP addresses instead of domain names until that ceased to work; use the integer encoding of the IP address until THAT ceased to work, etc.) They fixed that. Then they went through well-known proxies like anonymizer.com and made proxies out of well-known services like babelfish.altavista.com. They fixed that. Eventually proxy access on well-known ports will probably be blocked at the border to stave off the unknown proxy usage, but that doesn't do anything about the ports that are unknown. Then they can start filtering things that look like web traffic on non-standard ports, but SSL gateways and VPN software can always get past that until they decide to block encryption.
My point: there will always be ways around filters on the Internet, because at any point there aren't, we've no longer got an Internet. There are sufficient business interests in maintaining the Internet as a useful tool to keep the book-burning impulses of even the most ardent censorship advocates in check.
However, perhaps to combat the quantum phenomenon you mention (which I wasn't aware of probably due to my halfassed attention to physics in school), the media planned to be used in these drives will be sandwiching an undisclosed fluorescent alloy to greatly increase the resolution of readout, which will likely be a redshifted version of the write wavelength (deep blue rather than UV?). I couldn't find the piece online, but a search on Multilayer Fluorescent Disks (MFD) should find a description of a closely related technology that is also around the corner and will supposedly handle as many as a hundred layers/disc, as if we ever max out the potential of a current technology before moving on to the next...
Hope this helps, and thank you for framing your query in polite terms.
Not only will this technology be safer than CD for information storage, but it will also push the recording/playback speeds something like 2x or 3x beyond what is possible with current CD drives -- the media itself can't spin anywhere near as fast, but the multiple layers make it function like a RAID. Neat stuff.
It's cool to see a scener in game development, though that's where I figured most of them settled. I'm not surprised with his discontent towards the development process; with the amount of ingenuity and dedication that goes into (went into?) intros/demos it's got to be a shock to hit a corporate environment and have somebody tell you "It's good enough as it is" when you're working on your project and ship it out the door.