Although as a developer who has some experience with Microsoft's DDK I'd expect that if they started working on an intermediate NDIS driver in late 2002 they might have a prototype ready as early as 2006.
This just brings things in parity with requesting library records. Except that ISP accounts can be used for more nefarious purposes than library books.
The most important thing is to make sure that with any additional powers granted there is enough oversight from a disinterested third party to insure said powers are used only within their intended scope for their intended purpose.
On Friday March 19, 2004 at approximately 8:45pm PST, an Internet worm began to spread, targeting a buffer overflow vulnerability
[...]
The vulnerability was discovered by eEye on March 8, 2004 and announced by both eEye and ISS on March 18, 2004. ISS released an alert warning users of a possibly exploitable security hole and provided updated software versions that were not vulnerable to the buffer overflow attack.
I think there's a lesson in this: the only way to keep ahead of exploits is to demand software companies automatically patch your software against security flaws via the Internet when exploits are discovered -- before details are released.
I think the relationship they're trying to draw is similar to finding locksmithing tools in the jacket of a suspected burglar.
The unfortunate thing about encryption is that it's not as pervasive as it should be. Virtually everybody has a lock on their house, and only rarely are they trying to conceal a criminal act. Virtually everybody puts mail -- particularly sensitive mail -- in envelopes before sending it, and again this is to retain privacy rather than deter law enforcement. But encrypted files are uncommon and therefore draw attention, right or wrong.
This is another example of where our justice system has gone round the bend when it comes to understanding new (and not even -that- new) technology and its relation to currently accepted practices in other parts of life. Locksmithing tools are specific to that practice, but encryption tools are general purpose and not only legal but encouraged for use by average citizens to retain their privacy.
Horrible precedents are usually set over reprehensible crimes, when said crimes represent only the tinest portion of the larger picture. Hopefully that won't be the case here when everything shakes out, but I have a feeling encryption will be severely curtailed in years to come as average people become more familiar with it and it becomes harder for law enforcement to deal with.
To use some bit of knowledge you have rather than writing down something obscure on a piece of paper that you can lose.
For example, your password could be your birthdate, or favorite football team, or even the year you graduated from high school. Or all three if a longer password is necessary. It's fairly easy to learn to enter this information backwards as well, for further obfuscation, without making it harder to remember.
Gone are the days when you can leave the password blank or simply use your login name again and expect any level of security. Hackers eat that stuff up. But if you protect your account better than the rest it's more likely they'll move on to some other schmoe who isn't as hip to security as you are.
The trick is in persuading people to use them. Microsoft is in the best position to do this, and I applaud the techniques they released in SP2 to recommend basic firewalling and regular software updates, but it is still up to users to run a virus scanner, file integrity checker, and turn off services they don't require.
A vegetarian diet is tastier and better for you than what most people eat, but it requires consciousness that there is a problem with the status quo and a dedication to change it. Similarly it is easier to run a computer packed full of spyware and viruses than it is to research the problem and patch the holes. That's up to the end user, but they first need to be aware of the problems -- and it's up to people like us to wake them up.
sure no one has heard of people recording video programs for later watching, thank you for your time and insight!
No, I meant the part about having a social schedule.
Re:On-demand is the future, today.
on
Television Reloaded
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm betting this will surprise you, but the work and social schedules of most people are growing to preclude their ability to plunk their ass in front of the tube for hours at a stretch. As television has cut into reading time, so too the Internet has cut into television time. iTunes is demonstrating the feasibility of delivering paid-for digital media over the Internet, technology companies are gearing up digital rights management, the broadcast flag for consumer video equipment is on the horizon (delayed, maybe defeated, maybe not), and Microsoft is pushing Windows Media Center. Satellite companies are offering DVR as part of their services and a ton of content is being released on DVD -- at the same time, broadcasters are doubling- and tripling-up the same shows on their schedules each day and delivering some considerably lousy content (Reality TV, one- or two- star movies, home improvement and crime shows are all I can tune) while explaining that the problem is that they aren't getting the money they need from commercials.
Anybody in the pay-per-view industry will tell you on-demand television works. Details such as whether you pay per watch, per episode, or per 'channel' of content are certainly up to the implementors, but if you don't believe this is coming soon you're not properly interpreting the signals. I don't have to sing its praises to the broadcast industry; they're simply waiting for the various pieces that make up the technology and legislation necessary for such a scheme to fall into place.
On-demand is the future, today.
on
Television Reloaded
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The broadcast industry is fighting it every step of the way, but the
future is in on-demand television. I argue the success of TiVo and other
DVR devices demonstrates this; people want to be able to watch what they want
when they want, without wasting time on things like commercials.
The best thing the industry could do would be to figure out a system where
you select what you want to watch from a menu, give you a VCR commandset
(play, pause, rewind, forward, stop), and offer a meaningful guarantee of
retention or recordability. And figure out how to make money off of it
without breaking the people who want to use it.
They're working so hard on figuring out how to make you watch commercials that
they're missing the larger picture. If you charge for access to a service like
this nobody can 'steal' content by fast-forwarding through commercials because
there won't be any.
Actually, the scam is that free trade is supposed to work to the benefit of both countries but in many ways works to the benefit of neither, particularly in the long run.
Can someone please tell me why we are letting the MPAA (or any **aa for that matter) draft legislation?
Because voters do no research beyond attack advertisements and puff pieces on news channels, reelect lousy incumbents because they're afraid of the other party getting in, and care only about one or two issues rather than integrity.
As it is, a congressman is more likely to get raked over the coals for voting with integrity because this stuff always gets attached to patriotic or must-pass legislation (and voters never seem to go after the guys that sneak this stuff in.)
Actually, I don't think there's anything wrong with industry giving input to legislation that will affect them, but there's clearly no balance here. You'd be surprised too by how many articles are written and segments are produced by PR firms and basically passed on as news by the media. We let them get away with it for the same reason they do it -- it's easier than the alternative.
Many here voice concerns about whether Google will be forced to abide by the law and whether it is ethical to do so. Valid concerns, but I remind you we would be quite upset if a foreign company came in and did things against our own laws because of what they believed.
Capitalism is a democratizing force. Whether or not Google complies with local laws and regulations matters far less than the increasing degree of involvement in modern capitalism -- which promotes the individual above the community (a little too much in some cases, in my opinion). Chopsticks were invented by Chinese restauranteers seeking to differentiate their fare from typical diners in 1800s American mining communities and have swept the world by storm -- to the point of accounting for 4.7% of our lumber exports! Similarly Chinese manufacturing holds up our steel industry today and provides a wide array of goods that ten years ago would have been completely unaffordable.
Now it is time for us to give something back. I think it is all but certain that Google will be required to block search terms, but I also think it likely that this will be a mute point as people communicate with each other and take advantage of technology to be more involved in changing their society. It will be to their benefit, much as the Internet has been to our own here.
Sadly, this is incorrect. The most recent version of the bill available on Thomas is H.R.1268.RFS (Referred to Senate Committee after being Received from House). You'll see the final thing on there in a day or so. I explained why in a buried comment yesterday.
BTW, their search engine has this thing where it caches results for your session only. If you check the URL and see a 'temp' in it after 'query' linking to that particular page of results won't work.
There was a period of years between 32-bit hitting the market and 32-bit being taken seriously as a development target by the majority of developers.
True, a large part of that was due to MS-DOS being the platform of choice, but the speed with which you need to adapt to the 64-bit environment will be made up for by the relative ease of conversion. We're relatively insulated from the word size of the system, except for the size of 'int' in C, and we won't have to deal with memory managers or extenders -- that's all up to the OS.
Just keep in mind while you program to be flexible and avoid tying yourself to any OS particulars in an unnecessary way. It's a bump in the road, but nowhere near as bad as it used to be.
I expect to see 32-bit support in development tools for years yet. Microsoft's window of support seems to be five or more years for operating systems so you've got at least that much time.
I believe that in the near term specialized chips using the concept could be grafted to existing systems in order to greatly reduce the heat generated by common operations. I suspect a completely reversible computer would indeed have limits to its functionality, and would perform some operations very quickly and others slowly if at all. It would also be very expensive, for the reasons you mention involving memory, but if you look at the memory potential of nanotechnology that problem may solve itself. Today's uses of reversible computing would focus on self-contained low-memory algorithms I expect.
Maximally-entropic randomness is by nature wasteful. On the other hand, there should be a way to create a reversible PRNG algorithm (one probably exists). I suspect there are other common algorithms that could be farmed out to a coprocessor that would greatly reduce heat.
I've heard that one group has already shown an advantage in using reversible computing with large capacitive loads, like LCD or CMOS access, and hopefully it'll scale down... quantum computing is based on reversible computing principles, so it looks like it's expected to.
I know that in theory it's possible to build a Turing-complete reversible computer.
I'm a firm believer in cryptography for everybody. As Phil Zimmerman said
(paraphrased) wrapping electronic communication with cryptography is not
unlike wrapping your mail in an envelope. Nobody wonders why we don't send
everything on postcards. There are two problems with practical ubiquitous
cryptography as I see it: ease-of-use and computer power. The ease-of-use
argument has been done to death (yet it's still not easy to use, proving that
it's not an easy or fun problem to solve) but I'd like to take a look into the
future of computing and with it the future of cryptography.
The greatest hurdle faced by those of us seeking to extend Moore's Law to
the pultem calidus (atomic limit) is the exothermic waste present
in today's electronics. It's no secret that computers nowadays give off
terrible amounts of heat -- excessive thermal generation is a sign that
not only is there resistance to cooling, but there is resistance to
electricity as well!
What baffles me is that while reversible computing is a concept that has been
around for decades, it has all but disappeared from the modern CS
cirriculum. Reversible computing holds the key to unlock both unparalleled
levels of computing performance and complex nanotechnological machinery
(i.e., any that does not solely rely on chemical or physical properties of
tiny matter to get the job done). The concept is nearly above my head, let
alone you folks, but I'll try to simplify it as much as possible.
In the 80s (and maybe before) computer scientists determined that virtually
all exothermic waste is given
off by erasing bits. Some even created a language, Janus, which
demonstrates reversible computing principles. The concept is that if you
create a chip and a lanuage that permit you both to advance in your program
(normal behavior) but also reverse to any previous execution point, you only
move bits around instead of erasing them.
One of the problems with reversible computing is that occasionally you get more
bits than you have space for. At the time, they felt that each chip could be
loaded with as many bits as you needed like an electronic abacus at the factory,
and perhaps this is practical for nanotechnology, but development hit the wall
until the concept of "garbage collection" emerged as a programming idiom.
There is a step before quantum computing, or perhaps it's the other foot
stepping besides it, and it is reversible computing. Tomorrow's PC will look
much like today's, but reversible computing in conjunction with garbage
collection will shift extra overflow bits from your CPU to your peripherals
and underflow bits from your peripherals to your CPU. It will be hybrid
technology with unreversible computing, as any interface to hotswap
peripherals would put a reversible computer at risk of a deficit of bits if
disconnected at the wrong time, but it will function much as your computer of
today. But cooler -- in more ways than one.
What does reversible logic mean for cryptography? Take a look at the quantum
solutions, which rely on the fact that the act of observing changes the
observed: a weak photon with a particular spin can only be picked up by one
detector -- an eavesdropper will be instantly spotted because the message
won't get through, the communication will be broken, and the eavesdropper
won't have enough of the message to do anything. I argue that the parity of
reversible computing offers the same solution: apply it to a network
connection, and if an extra bit appears or disappears the message is
undelivered but also undisclosed to a snoop.
If there's anybody out there working on reversible computing, I'd be interested in perusing your research. It seems like a lonely field but one with lots of potential if venture capital ever comes available for IT R&D in the industry again.
If you expect copyright protection on binaries in a reformed copyright system you submit your source code to the Library of Congress or local equivalent.
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I fail to see why this would be a problem. Five years is a long time in the computer industry, and both open and closed source models would benefit from having prior knowledge or code unlocked and usable to build upon.
As things are now, we reinvent the wheel way too much because of the way Intellectual Property is implemented. It hinders progress and innovation.
In a way consumers have always been able to vote on features in a natural selection sort of way (lousy software dies off, the best stuff gets a year or letters next to the title). But this allows much more direct feedback while still allowing the project leaders to control what direction the software is developed in.
Additionally, it will perhaps put egos in check to see what users want and to be able to say you're giving them what they pay for, instead of getting upset when they feel they have a legitimate gripe about bugs in a free product and you feel they should be thankful for what they've got already (video game emulation community?)
And on top of that maybe it would allow even stronger claims to be made if a company violates your licence -- those users aren't paying for features to be appropriated by someone who's going to steal work and close the source.
The thing about Perl...
on
Perl Medic
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
While its ubiquitiousness and relative ease of use as far as banging together a CGI script in an hour goes, it does not seem designed for maintainability.
Preventative and maintainance coding is difficult enough when a language has a particular idiom you can follow. Perl gives you an unparallelled freedom of expression and with it several confusingly different ways to achieve the same task.
I used to be a believer, but now it seems Python is ready to take the yoke, at least with those of us who wonder how can you build a complex yet maintainable script without static typing.
While BitTorrent has gotten a bit of a bad rap because of its use for copyright infringement, what kind of future do you envision for commercial uses of the protocol?
The most recent action on this bill occurred in the House on May 5th. The most current version is H.R.1268.RFS off the link the grandparent provides (H.R. 1268 Referred to Senate Committee after being Received from House).
The link does not list bill versions by order of date so you have to work it out from the bill history (click on any bill version, click on link to Bill Summary & Status, then click on All Congressional Actions) -- in this case, the bill started in the House (.RH), was modified, passed, and sent to the Senate (.RS), was modified, passed, and sent back to the House (there's an entry about the Senate ordering the measure printed as passed --.PP?), who have again modified and passed it (.EH) and now it awaits Senate action (.RFS).
I'd give proper links, but any query on there that contains a 'temp' in the URL is, well, temporarily cached.
Why do you guys keep electing the people that pass this stuff? You've got mandatory voting, so you've got to get the word out to everyone you know what's happening and who's doing it.
Don't keep putting people back in control who don't represent your interests.
Slashdot Mirror
Although as a developer who has some experience with Microsoft's DDK I'd expect that if they started working on an intermediate NDIS driver in late 2002 they might have a prototype ready as early as 2006.
The most important thing is to make sure that with any additional powers granted there is enough oversight from a disinterested third party to insure said powers are used only within their intended scope for their intended purpose.
This 'free trade' thing is working out real keen guys.
[...]
The vulnerability was discovered by eEye on March 8, 2004 and announced by both eEye and ISS on March 18, 2004. ISS released an alert warning users of a possibly exploitable security hole and provided updated software versions that were not vulnerable to the buffer overflow attack.
I think there's a lesson in this: the only way to keep ahead of exploits is to demand software companies automatically patch your software against security flaws via the Internet when exploits are discovered -- before details are released.
The unfortunate thing about encryption is that it's not as pervasive as it should be. Virtually everybody has a lock on their house, and only rarely are they trying to conceal a criminal act. Virtually everybody puts mail -- particularly sensitive mail -- in envelopes before sending it, and again this is to retain privacy rather than deter law enforcement. But encrypted files are uncommon and therefore draw attention, right or wrong.
This is another example of where our justice system has gone round the bend when it comes to understanding new (and not even -that- new) technology and its relation to currently accepted practices in other parts of life. Locksmithing tools are specific to that practice, but encryption tools are general purpose and not only legal but encouraged for use by average citizens to retain their privacy.
Horrible precedents are usually set over reprehensible crimes, when said crimes represent only the tinest portion of the larger picture. Hopefully that won't be the case here when everything shakes out, but I have a feeling encryption will be severely curtailed in years to come as average people become more familiar with it and it becomes harder for law enforcement to deal with.
For example, your password could be your birthdate, or favorite football team, or even the year you graduated from high school. Or all three if a longer password is necessary. It's fairly easy to learn to enter this information backwards as well, for further obfuscation, without making it harder to remember.
Gone are the days when you can leave the password blank or simply use your login name again and expect any level of security. Hackers eat that stuff up. But if you protect your account better than the rest it's more likely they'll move on to some other schmoe who isn't as hip to security as you are.
A vegetarian diet is tastier and better for you than what most people eat, but it requires consciousness that there is a problem with the status quo and a dedication to change it. Similarly it is easier to run a computer packed full of spyware and viruses than it is to research the problem and patch the holes. That's up to the end user, but they first need to be aware of the problems -- and it's up to people like us to wake them up.
sure no one has heard of people recording video programs for later watching, thank you for your time and insight!
No, I meant the part about having a social schedule.
Anybody in the pay-per-view industry will tell you on-demand television works. Details such as whether you pay per watch, per episode, or per 'channel' of content are certainly up to the implementors, but if you don't believe this is coming soon you're not properly interpreting the signals. I don't have to sing its praises to the broadcast industry; they're simply waiting for the various pieces that make up the technology and legislation necessary for such a scheme to fall into place.
The best thing the industry could do would be to figure out a system where you select what you want to watch from a menu, give you a VCR commandset (play, pause, rewind, forward, stop), and offer a meaningful guarantee of retention or recordability. And figure out how to make money off of it without breaking the people who want to use it.
They're working so hard on figuring out how to make you watch commercials that they're missing the larger picture. If you charge for access to a service like this nobody can 'steal' content by fast-forwarding through commercials because there won't be any.
Actually, the scam is that free trade is supposed to work to the benefit of both countries but in many ways works to the benefit of neither, particularly in the long run.
I'm sorry if the article offended you nuts.
Because voters do no research beyond attack advertisements and puff pieces on news channels, reelect lousy incumbents because they're afraid of the other party getting in, and care only about one or two issues rather than integrity.
As it is, a congressman is more likely to get raked over the coals for voting with integrity because this stuff always gets attached to patriotic or must-pass legislation (and voters never seem to go after the guys that sneak this stuff in.)
Actually, I don't think there's anything wrong with industry giving input to legislation that will affect them, but there's clearly no balance here. You'd be surprised too by how many articles are written and segments are produced by PR firms and basically passed on as news by the media. We let them get away with it for the same reason they do it -- it's easier than the alternative.
Capitalism is a democratizing force. Whether or not Google complies with local laws and regulations matters far less than the increasing degree of involvement in modern capitalism -- which promotes the individual above the community (a little too much in some cases, in my opinion). Chopsticks were invented by Chinese restauranteers seeking to differentiate their fare from typical diners in 1800s American mining communities and have swept the world by storm -- to the point of accounting for 4.7% of our lumber exports! Similarly Chinese manufacturing holds up our steel industry today and provides a wide array of goods that ten years ago would have been completely unaffordable.
Now it is time for us to give something back. I think it is all but certain that Google will be required to block search terms, but I also think it likely that this will be a mute point as people communicate with each other and take advantage of technology to be more involved in changing their society. It will be to their benefit, much as the Internet has been to our own here.
BTW, their search engine has this thing where it caches results for your session only. If you check the URL and see a 'temp' in it after 'query' linking to that particular page of results won't work.
True, a large part of that was due to MS-DOS being the platform of choice, but the speed with which you need to adapt to the 64-bit environment will be made up for by the relative ease of conversion. We're relatively insulated from the word size of the system, except for the size of 'int' in C, and we won't have to deal with memory managers or extenders -- that's all up to the OS.
Just keep in mind while you program to be flexible and avoid tying yourself to any OS particulars in an unnecessary way. It's a bump in the road, but nowhere near as bad as it used to be.
I expect to see 32-bit support in development tools for years yet. Microsoft's window of support seems to be five or more years for operating systems so you've got at least that much time.
Maximally-entropic randomness is by nature wasteful. On the other hand, there should be a way to create a reversible PRNG algorithm (one probably exists). I suspect there are other common algorithms that could be farmed out to a coprocessor that would greatly reduce heat. I've heard that one group has already shown an advantage in using reversible computing with large capacitive loads, like LCD or CMOS access, and hopefully it'll scale down... quantum computing is based on reversible computing principles, so it looks like it's expected to.
I know that in theory it's possible to build a Turing-complete reversible computer.
The greatest hurdle faced by those of us seeking to extend Moore's Law to the pultem calidus (atomic limit) is the exothermic waste present in today's electronics. It's no secret that computers nowadays give off terrible amounts of heat -- excessive thermal generation is a sign that not only is there resistance to cooling, but there is resistance to electricity as well!
What baffles me is that while reversible computing is a concept that has been around for decades, it has all but disappeared from the modern CS cirriculum. Reversible computing holds the key to unlock both unparalleled levels of computing performance and complex nanotechnological machinery (i.e., any that does not solely rely on chemical or physical properties of tiny matter to get the job done). The concept is nearly above my head, let alone you folks, but I'll try to simplify it as much as possible.
In the 80s (and maybe before) computer scientists determined that virtually all exothermic waste is given off by erasing bits. Some even created a language, Janus, which demonstrates reversible computing principles. The concept is that if you create a chip and a lanuage that permit you both to advance in your program (normal behavior) but also reverse to any previous execution point, you only move bits around instead of erasing them.
One of the problems with reversible computing is that occasionally you get more bits than you have space for. At the time, they felt that each chip could be loaded with as many bits as you needed like an electronic abacus at the factory, and perhaps this is practical for nanotechnology, but development hit the wall until the concept of "garbage collection" emerged as a programming idiom.
There is a step before quantum computing, or perhaps it's the other foot stepping besides it, and it is reversible computing. Tomorrow's PC will look much like today's, but reversible computing in conjunction with garbage collection will shift extra overflow bits from your CPU to your peripherals and underflow bits from your peripherals to your CPU. It will be hybrid technology with unreversible computing, as any interface to hotswap peripherals would put a reversible computer at risk of a deficit of bits if disconnected at the wrong time, but it will function much as your computer of today. But cooler -- in more ways than one.
What does reversible logic mean for cryptography? Take a look at the quantum solutions, which rely on the fact that the act of observing changes the observed: a weak photon with a particular spin can only be picked up by one detector -- an eavesdropper will be instantly spotted because the message won't get through, the communication will be broken, and the eavesdropper won't have enough of the message to do anything. I argue that the parity of reversible computing offers the same solution: apply it to a network connection, and if an extra bit appears or disappears the message is undelivered but also undisclosed to a snoop.
If there's anybody out there working on reversible computing, I'd be interested in perusing your research. It seems like a lonely field but one with lots of potential if venture capital ever comes available for IT R&D in the industry again.
Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment. It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.
As things are now, we reinvent the wheel way too much because of the way Intellectual Property is implemented. It hinders progress and innovation.
In a way consumers have always been able to vote on features in a natural selection sort of way (lousy software dies off, the best stuff gets a year or letters next to the title). But this allows much more direct feedback while still allowing the project leaders to control what direction the software is developed in.
Additionally, it will perhaps put egos in check to see what users want and to be able to say you're giving them what they pay for, instead of getting upset when they feel they have a legitimate gripe about bugs in a free product and you feel they should be thankful for what they've got already (video game emulation community?)
And on top of that maybe it would allow even stronger claims to be made if a company violates your licence -- those users aren't paying for features to be appropriated by someone who's going to steal work and close the source.
Preventative and maintainance coding is difficult enough when a language has a particular idiom you can follow. Perl gives you an unparallelled freedom of expression and with it several confusingly different ways to achieve the same task.
I used to be a believer, but now it seems Python is ready to take the yoke, at least with those of us who wonder how can you build a complex yet maintainable script without static typing.
While BitTorrent has gotten a bit of a bad rap because of its use for copyright infringement, what kind of future do you envision for commercial uses of the protocol?
The most recent action on this bill occurred in the House on May 5th. The most current version is H.R.1268.RFS off the link the grandparent provides (H.R. 1268 Referred to Senate Committee after being Received from House).
The link does not list bill versions by order of date so you have to work it out from the bill history (click on any bill version, click on link to Bill Summary & Status, then click on All Congressional Actions) -- in this case, the bill started in the House (.RH), was modified, passed, and sent to the Senate (.RS), was modified, passed, and sent back to the House (there's an entry about the Senate ordering the measure printed as passed -- .PP?), who have again modified and passed it (.EH) and now it awaits Senate action (.RFS).
I'd give proper links, but any query on there that contains a 'temp' in the URL is, well, temporarily cached.
Don't keep putting people back in control who don't represent your interests.