My thoughts exactly. Murdoch seems to be hell-bent on capturing some revenue per reader on a subscription model, regardless of how poorly this is doomed to work on the Internet. No matter how good the content is or even how low the price is, no paywall-based news site will be more attractive than the convenient "point browser at URL, get page" model of Murdoch's many competitors.
Really, it's the same mindset as the RIAA/MPAA companies who are ignominiously featured on Slashdot so often. They have a pre-Internet business model that allows them to get paid per copy of their product, and rather than accept that it won't survive a new technological environment where anything can be copied and transmitted around the world for free, they keep trying to hammer their outdated but profitable square peg into its new round hole with awkward technical and legislative "solutions." The good news about Murdoch's new project is that, unlike DRM and the DMCA, paywalled newspapers are easy to just ignore.
When this story was first posted, the headline didn't say anything about a hoax; it had just the one line in the summary admitting it was "probably" fake. I can still see the original headline in my RSS feed. Now they've altered it as though they knew all along, which makes posts like yours look like pointless complaining. A little transparency would be nice, maybe an editor's note added to the bottom of the summary with a clear timestamp.
Some university really should hire them, because if they can prove P!=NP just to cover up a sex scandal, imagine what they could do if they didn't waste time writing press releases.
Oh man, if you think the politics and backbiting are bad in typical academia, wait until you see an entire computer science department arguing over who gets to have illicit sex in order to set off the proof-generating team.
Imagine facebook levels of popularity but with encryption, privacy, and control as primary factors of computing for the masses.
As I understand it, this is essentially what the Diaspora project is trying to do. Hopefully they'll succeed. (And maybe smooth out some of those concerns that the name is inappropriate.)
Ah man, no matter how inadequate the Elo system may be for chess, it's much worse seeing it applied to other games where it doesn't belong, which happens regrettably often. The trouble is that the Elo system depends on the premise that nothing affects the outcome of a game other than the skill of each player (and who gets the white pieces).
In chess, that assumption is a pretty good approximation to reality, since every tournament game in run the same way. But many games do have variations in rules or format across different events, such as different maps or races in a real-time strategy game, or different card pools in Magic: The Gathering. Then Elo ratings are biased by how often a player has the chance to play to his strong areas. Players in turn are compelled to game the system: "I should avoid this event because they're using Format X and my rating will stay stronger if I stick to Format Y." The Elo system is meant precisely to obviate that kind of gamesmanship: chess players should need to think only about the strengths of their opponents, which (in principle) will be weighted fairly when calculating rating adjustments. But if there are other competitive factors, which is true for most any popular game invented in the last 30 years, Elo ratings become that much less meaningful.
Several other readers have pointed out that WikiLeaks posted a mysterious, encrypted "insurance" file on Thursday, which sent the media into a speculative frenzy over what it could possibly contain.
Oh man, this is the coolest part of all. Who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory–friendly mystery? From the relevant link:
The 1.4GB file is encrypted with AES-256, so its contents are unknown, but it was quietly posted on the site's Afghan War Diary page on Thursday, days after it controversially disclosed tens of thousands of frontline reports.
The new file has prompted speculation, including from Cryptome's John Young, that Wikileaks would publish the passphrase to decrypt the file if the US took action against spokesman Julian Assange or others involved in the site.
Or perhaps the passphrase is even in someone else's safekeeping, to be published if Assange is arrested or otherwise incapacitated. Of course, the truly badass way to do it would be to have a cron job somewhere that will automatically upload the passphrase to a website unless Assange manually intervenes on a regular basis, like an informational dead-man's-switch. (I'm just idly speculating. That last plan would be overkill, better suited to a movie or something. Come to think of it, has that specific thing been done in fiction? I can think of similar examples but none with a cryptographic key to sensitive information.)
Or even better, use a cryptographically secure secret sharing scheme, and use the shared secret as a symmetric key to encrypt whatever other data if necessary. Then (if I'm interpreting your post correctly) you wouldn't have to worry about which parties got which segment of the key. In fact, I believe that's just what they're doing. Bruce Schneier had a post on it the other day.
My understanding of copyright law, at least pre-DMCA, was that you had to make and distribute a copy to another party in order for it to be an infringement. But the rulings we're talking about said that making an ephemeral copy between two devices in the same computer, all within a single person's possession, counts as copyright infringement. (Or possibly modifying the copy, I'm trying to piece an answer together from the replies here, but my essential question is why it matters if the copy never leaves your possession.)
Can anyone explain the courts' rationale here? Is it then also a crime to photocopy an entire book and then immediately burn the copies alone in a room? Does this come from the DMCA or some other nonsense legislation, or is it actually meant to mesh with common sense somehow?
And I was wondering why they would necessarily want to make their own smartphones at all. Google, the company, happens to be in the search business and the smartphone business (among others). Baidu happens to compete with them on search. Is there a reason, other than some irrational copycat strategy, that they would want to go and compete with Google in other markets?
I guess this could coincidentally be the profitable choice for them, but it leaves the impression that Baidu is trying to horn into Google's market as an end unto itself.
The real principle is that if a system depends on its design not being known, it's secure only through obscurity. [...] A good encryption system doesn't rely on security through obscurity just because the keys need to be kept secret.
You are correct, and to summarize/generalize the point you were making: the meaning of the "no security through obscurity" principle is precisely that only the key should be secret.
In other words, you have a single, small, and well-defined piece of information—a password or key—that is kept secret, and if the system requires that anything else—techniques, algorithms, protocols—be kept secret, then it sucks.
Every child born will also be assigned a permanent unique sequential code, in the form of a UUID, including a series of digits that represent the time of birth/registration, and a series of digits that represent the locality of birth, as well as a sequential serial number.
And then all the kids with 6-digit UUIDs will scoff at the newcomers with 7-digit UUIDs...
Blizzard issued official no-CD patches for Starcraft, Diablo II, and Warcraft III a while after they were out. They're quite capable of being reasonable about removing anti-piracy features that annoy their players after some time has passed. Something tells me that the removal of LAN support is mostly just to keep Blizzard's corporate overlords from wringing their hands about teh p1rates too much. Hopefully, they will add LAN support in a patch after the initial rushes of retail sales are over.
Not that it isn't still totally rude. But it's important to separate the Activision business jackasses from the intelligent people who actually make the games. It seems that the latter were in charge of this decision about the forums and they (eventually) made the right one.
And yet everyone gives out their real name on Facebook when they have the choice to give a fake one.
But Facebook is intended for communicating with people whom you already know in real life.
Pretty much every forum on the Internet that is (unlike Facebook) meant for communicating with strangers allows anonymity; the WoW forums are about to become the only exception I can think of. And users generally want it this way, gaining anonymity at the cost of occasional trolling and such. So either Blizzard knows something that every other forum and their users don't know, or they're making a massive mistake. I give Blizzard a lot of credit as game designers but something tells me it's the latter.
With all the non latin address character sets being approved I imagine there is a world of new opportunities which completely void all the "inspect the address bar" education which was pushed on the general public for so many years.
Seems like a good browser feature would be to highlight any non-ASCII characters in the address bar in a contrasting color, such as red or bright green. Then it would take only a minimal amount of additional education to understand that it means something is amiss, unless you're clearly expecting an address composed of foreign characters.
Hm. There's gotta be a way to discourage politicians from making new laws.
I've heard it suggested that every law should automatically expire after a fixed period, such as one year or five years. Not only would the legislature be kept busy with votes for the laws that obviously should be kept ("Uh oh, armed robbery is going to become legalized on Wednesday..."), but it would limit the damage from laws that spend frivolously, are poorly thought out, or are motivated by special interests. At worst, lobbyists would have influence legislators over and over again to reap the benefits of a law that favors them.
Not saying it's the best idea, but it's definitely an interesting one, and I feel strongly that we need a way to get laws that were, say, meant to help bring electricity to rural areas 80 years ago off the books.
I'd mention Linux but, frankly, the backward compatibility is the big one.
At least, if backward compatibility ever worked on your PS3, it still works today. But Linux was forcibly removed from bought-and-paid-for consoles—at least, it was if you wanted to continue using any online services, and many people applied the patch anyway without knowing that their Linux installations would be trashed—because of some paranoid anti-piracy strategy. That isn't just corporate greed undermining a product's features, it's downright malicious to your private property, much like the Sony BMG rootkit scandal.
According to its developers, a possible reason for using it is that that "Illuminati are watching your computer, and you need to use morse code to blink out your PGP messages on the numlock key."
Nice. For the uninitiated, this is (spoiler alert) an allusion to one of the coolest (realistic) hacks in all of fiction, which occurs in the novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Required reading for computer and cryptography geeks.
Slashdot Mirror
My thoughts exactly. Murdoch seems to be hell-bent on capturing some revenue per reader on a subscription model, regardless of how poorly this is doomed to work on the Internet. No matter how good the content is or even how low the price is, no paywall-based news site will be more attractive than the convenient "point browser at URL, get page" model of Murdoch's many competitors.
Really, it's the same mindset as the RIAA/MPAA companies who are ignominiously featured on Slashdot so often. They have a pre-Internet business model that allows them to get paid per copy of their product, and rather than accept that it won't survive a new technological environment where anything can be copied and transmitted around the world for free, they keep trying to hammer their outdated but profitable square peg into its new round hole with awkward technical and legislative "solutions." The good news about Murdoch's new project is that, unlike DRM and the DMCA, paywalled newspapers are easy to just ignore.
When this story was first posted, the headline didn't say anything about a hoax; it had just the one line in the summary admitting it was "probably" fake. I can still see the original headline in my RSS feed. Now they've altered it as though they knew all along, which makes posts like yours look like pointless complaining. A little transparency would be nice, maybe an editor's note added to the bottom of the summary with a clear timestamp.
Off the top of my head, to support higher-overhead system calls to the modern platforms it's being ported to, probably.
Searching google with the terms: "site:wikileaks.org abdullah" returns about a page of results. [...] ...not a single result was from the Afghan files.
Unless I'm mistaken, the Afghan files are all distributed in compressed 7-Zip archives, which might account for Google not indexing them.
That's one hell of a spin department.
Some university really should hire them, because if they can prove P!=NP just to cover up a sex scandal, imagine what they could do if they didn't waste time writing press releases.
Oh man, if you think the politics and backbiting are bad in typical academia, wait until you see an entire computer science department arguing over who gets to have illicit sex in order to set off the proof-generating team.
Imagine facebook levels of popularity but with encryption, privacy, and control as primary factors of computing for the masses.
As I understand it, this is essentially what the Diaspora project is trying to do. Hopefully they'll succeed. (And maybe smooth out some of those concerns that the name is inappropriate.)
Ah man, no matter how inadequate the Elo system may be for chess, it's much worse seeing it applied to other games where it doesn't belong, which happens regrettably often. The trouble is that the Elo system depends on the premise that nothing affects the outcome of a game other than the skill of each player (and who gets the white pieces).
In chess, that assumption is a pretty good approximation to reality, since every tournament game in run the same way. But many games do have variations in rules or format across different events, such as different maps or races in a real-time strategy game, or different card pools in Magic: The Gathering. Then Elo ratings are biased by how often a player has the chance to play to his strong areas. Players in turn are compelled to game the system: "I should avoid this event because they're using Format X and my rating will stay stronger if I stick to Format Y." The Elo system is meant precisely to obviate that kind of gamesmanship: chess players should need to think only about the strengths of their opponents, which (in principle) will be weighted fairly when calculating rating adjustments. But if there are other competitive factors, which is true for most any popular game invented in the last 30 years, Elo ratings become that much less meaningful.
Others hoping to bring elements of the Open Source model to the school textbook world include Vinod Khosla (who co-founded Sun with McNealy)
"Push" is a noun in the headline. That is, it is about a push, by the Sun founders, for open source education.
Also, the editor usually writes the headline, not the submitter.
If you're going to post flamebait, at least try to be correct.
Several other readers have pointed out that WikiLeaks posted a mysterious, encrypted "insurance" file on Thursday, which sent the media into a speculative frenzy over what it could possibly contain.
Oh man, this is the coolest part of all. Who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory–friendly mystery? From the relevant link:
The 1.4GB file is encrypted with AES-256, so its contents are unknown, but it was quietly posted on the site's Afghan War Diary page on Thursday, days after it controversially disclosed tens of thousands of frontline reports.
The new file has prompted speculation, including from Cryptome's John Young, that Wikileaks would publish the passphrase to decrypt the file if the US took action against spokesman Julian Assange or others involved in the site.
Or perhaps the passphrase is even in someone else's safekeeping, to be published if Assange is arrested or otherwise incapacitated. Of course, the truly badass way to do it would be to have a cron job somewhere that will automatically upload the passphrase to a website unless Assange manually intervenes on a regular basis, like an informational dead-man's-switch. (I'm just idly speculating. That last plan would be overkill, better suited to a movie or something. Come to think of it, has that specific thing been done in fiction? I can think of similar examples but none with a cryptographic key to sensitive information.)
Or even better, use a cryptographically secure secret sharing scheme, and use the shared secret as a symmetric key to encrypt whatever other data if necessary. Then (if I'm interpreting your post correctly) you wouldn't have to worry about which parties got which segment of the key. In fact, I believe that's just what they're doing. Bruce Schneier had a post on it the other day.
My understanding of copyright law, at least pre-DMCA, was that you had to make and distribute a copy to another party in order for it to be an infringement. But the rulings we're talking about said that making an ephemeral copy between two devices in the same computer, all within a single person's possession, counts as copyright infringement. (Or possibly modifying the copy, I'm trying to piece an answer together from the replies here, but my essential question is why it matters if the copy never leaves your possession.)
Can anyone explain the courts' rationale here? Is it then also a crime to photocopy an entire book and then immediately burn the copies alone in a room? Does this come from the DMCA or some other nonsense legislation, or is it actually meant to mesh with common sense somehow?
And I was wondering why they would necessarily want to make their own smartphones at all. Google, the company, happens to be in the search business and the smartphone business (among others). Baidu happens to compete with them on search. Is there a reason, other than some irrational copycat strategy, that they would want to go and compete with Google in other markets?
I guess this could coincidentally be the profitable choice for them, but it leaves the impression that Baidu is trying to horn into Google's market as an end unto itself.
The real principle is that if a system depends on its design not being known, it's secure only through obscurity. [...] A good encryption system doesn't rely on security through obscurity just because the keys need to be kept secret.
You are correct, and to summarize/generalize the point you were making: the meaning of the "no security through obscurity" principle is precisely that only the key should be secret.
In other words, you have a single, small, and well-defined piece of information—a password or key—that is kept secret, and if the system requires that anything else—techniques, algorithms, protocols—be kept secret, then it sucks.
Every child born will also be assigned a permanent unique sequential code, in the form of a UUID, including a series of digits that represent the time of birth/registration, and a series of digits that represent the locality of birth, as well as a sequential serial number.
And then all the kids with 6-digit UUIDs will scoff at the newcomers with 7-digit UUIDs...
Playing a multiplayer game with someone in the same room as you without using/needing Internet bandwidth is functionality.
Blizzard issued official no-CD patches for Starcraft, Diablo II, and Warcraft III a while after they were out. They're quite capable of being reasonable about removing anti-piracy features that annoy their players after some time has passed. Something tells me that the removal of LAN support is mostly just to keep Blizzard's corporate overlords from wringing their hands about teh p1rates too much. Hopefully, they will add LAN support in a patch after the initial rushes of retail sales are over.
Not that it isn't still totally rude. But it's important to separate the Activision business jackasses from the intelligent people who actually make the games. It seems that the latter were in charge of this decision about the forums and they (eventually) made the right one.
And yet everyone gives out their real name on Facebook when they have the choice to give a fake one.
But Facebook is intended for communicating with people whom you already know in real life.
Pretty much every forum on the Internet that is (unlike Facebook) meant for communicating with strangers allows anonymity; the WoW forums are about to become the only exception I can think of. And users generally want it this way, gaining anonymity at the cost of occasional trolling and such. So either Blizzard knows something that every other forum and their users don't know, or they're making a massive mistake. I give Blizzard a lot of credit as game designers but something tells me it's the latter.
With all the non latin address character sets being approved I imagine there is a world of new opportunities which completely void all the "inspect the address bar" education which was pushed on the general public for so many years.
Seems like a good browser feature would be to highlight any non-ASCII characters in the address bar in a contrasting color, such as red or bright green. Then it would take only a minimal amount of additional education to understand that it means something is amiss, unless you're clearly expecting an address composed of foreign characters.
Hm. There's gotta be a way to discourage politicians from making new laws.
I've heard it suggested that every law should automatically expire after a fixed period, such as one year or five years. Not only would the legislature be kept busy with votes for the laws that obviously should be kept ("Uh oh, armed robbery is going to become legalized on Wednesday..."), but it would limit the damage from laws that spend frivolously, are poorly thought out, or are motivated by special interests. At worst, lobbyists would have influence legislators over and over again to reap the benefits of a law that favors them.
Not saying it's the best idea, but it's definitely an interesting one, and I feel strongly that we need a way to get laws that were, say, meant to help bring electricity to rural areas 80 years ago off the books.
Good plan. Just make sure that vote-buying is part of your platform too or you'll get prosecuted for that instead of the plundering.
I'd mention Linux but, frankly, the backward compatibility is the big one.
At least, if backward compatibility ever worked on your PS3, it still works today. But Linux was forcibly removed from bought-and-paid-for consoles—at least, it was if you wanted to continue using any online services, and many people applied the patch anyway without knowing that their Linux installations would be trashed—because of some paranoid anti-piracy strategy. That isn't just corporate greed undermining a product's features, it's downright malicious to your private property, much like the Sony BMG rootkit scandal.
According to its developers, a possible reason for using it is that that "Illuminati are watching your computer, and you need to use morse code to blink out your PGP messages on the numlock key."
Nice. For the uninitiated, this is (spoiler alert) an allusion to one of the coolest (realistic) hacks in all of fiction, which occurs in the novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Required reading for computer and cryptography geeks.
Yup. Hey, it could be worse, they could have advertised the game as a platform feature and then forcibly disabled it after it was paid for.
But what language do you use to program a blank sheet of paper?
I can guess...