unsurprising.
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, you can make hardware that will only run signed binaries, and thus close that hardware to tinkering. Infact, making such hardware has already been attempted, it's called a console.
In essence, the bootloader of such hardware does the equivalent of:
if (valid_signature(kernel)) boot(kernel) else com plain_and_stop();
This is nasty, if you are running on such hardware, than the ability to change the kernel in any way you like brings you nothing: if you change anything, even something completely trivial, the signature will no longer be valid, and your new changed kernel will not boot.
Linus is rigth though, this is clearly allowed under the GPL. And furthermore, it very likely CANNOT be forbidden even if we would want to.
A Signature is (or atleast it can be) a separate document saying the equivalent of: "I, Bill Gates, testify to the fact that the kernel with sha1sum=b7a7bf03dcafd4d48001d6a2a6fd2ceaefa4cc1e is trustworthy and can be booted. signed(bill_g)"
There is no way for the GPL, or any other legal document to forbid the above document from existing. The signature above is clearly not a derived work of the kernel, but rather a commentary upon it. (namely a commentary on the trustworthiness) The only info derived from the kernel is the sha1sum, but the only function of this is to make it clear which kernel you are talking about. (much like mentioning the ISBN-number of a book you are reviewing)
Furthermore, there is also no way you would be able to forbid hardware from acting on the existence (or absence) of such a signature. Afterall there is no law saying that "hardware *must* boot all code."
Now, what *would* be nasty would be new laws *requiring* hardware to implement signature-checking. Such laws would essentially make it forbidden to make user-modifiable computers. The way the US is moving at the moment, I would not be too surprised if such a law is introduced and passed in the next few years.
Should not take anywhere close to that long. The ones I have generally come on in less than a second from I hit the switch, and I am not able to perceive any increase in ligth-output after the first 3 seconds or so.
You can also buy low-energy lamps that are coated in better multi-spectrum phosphors, good enough that they give better ligth than incadescent. Only drawback is that those tend to cost a fair bit more. Around $5 or so.
We hear that leds will replace ligthbulbs every 2 years or so, and yet, they are still not even in the ballpark.
A white led today has about twice the efficiency of a normal ligthbulb. That sounds great -- until you consider:
The brigthest white led existing (in a lab environment, not on the shelves) is a 5 watt led, equivalent to a 10W ligthbulb, yay !
Twice the efficiency ain't that good, this still means only about 10% of the energy-input gets turned to ligth, even halogen can do better than that and fluorescent has it beat into the ground with like 20-30%.
The prices are out of this world, no, each LED ain't that expensive, but it also has a tiny ligth-output, try calculating the price for reasonably ligthing a single room.
The color-spectra suck. Seriously, led is inherently monochromatic. Yes they can remedy this with various phosphors and the like, but those reduce efficiency (which was supposed to be the advantage of leds, remember?) and even with those it's hard getting a natural full ligth-spectrum.
In the meantime pluorescents are developing at a breakneck pace. Today you can buy pluorescents compact-bulbs that fit in a normal bulb-socket, are 5 times as efficient as a standard bulb, cost around 2$ a piece, are available in wattages up to 25 W (equivalent to 125W standardbulb), and last for around 10000 hours.
This is a no-brainer people. Replace a single 100W ligthbulb with a 20W energy-saver and the math looks like this over the 10000hour lifetime:
Cost of bulb: 2$ instead of 5*0.20$, extra cost 1$
Energy comsumed: 10000*0.02=200Kwh instead of 1000Kwh for the normal bulbs.
You pay 1$ extra for the bulb, and you save 800Kwh over the lifetime of the bulb. With an energy-price of 13 cent (most pay more!) you will save over 100 dollars over the lifetime of that single bulb.
The convention is to use http-scheme URIs to identify namespaces, but in reality they can be any unique URI.
You are rigth, they *could* be anything unique, but they *actually* look like this:
http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/2/wo rdml
When you deliberately choose to use a valid URL for naming your schema, it's not too much of an assumption that the schema would actually be described at that URL.
It does not pre-de-re-encode (funky word !), but on the other hand you also do not have to wait for the recoding to take place, because the slimp3-server uses pipes and essentially streams the ogg trough ogg123 and lame, there is in theory something like 1/10s delay before the pipeline fills up and the song begins, but honestly I've never really noticed.
I find the quality quite acceptable, but obvioslu transcoding from one lossy format to another will always cause some quality-loss. For me this is not noticeable, but then again I'm not a hi-fi religious either. (i.e. I rarely notice the difference between 196 and 256kbs encoded files anyway)
Yeah, it's a pity that the hardware mpeg-decoder does not handle ogg. It's no big issue if you have got a reasonable new system for the server though.
I've got an Athlon xp 2000+, and with this system the cpu-use stays at like maybe 5% when playing oggs trough the slimp3. When playing mp3s the cpu-usage is not noticeable at all (i.e. in the noise)
You want to head over to www.slimdevices.com and check out their product.
I love mine to death. It takes all of 5 minutes to set up, and plays like a charm. It can be commanded from a skinnable web-interface (separate ligth-skin for pdas for example) by remote-control, or optionally trough an interactive CLI.
The biggest two pluses with this device are that the product has good quality, and the company has a clue. Let me elaborate.
The thing is small and elegant. It is well engineered. It has a VFD-display with adjustable brigthness that actually looks at home in the stereo, not a cheap-ass poorly readable LCD.
For me even more important is that the company has a clue:
The server is written in perl, and runs on any platform where perl runs.
The software is open source.
They have a CVS-repository and public mailing-lists where development is discussed.
They actually care about their customers. (or if not they're certainly good at faking it:-)
They're a small company, but I have not for a second regretted my decision to give them a try. I recommend you try them out too.
It will let you install/remove anything you want. You're supposed to have a clue. Some people want/need to remove a critical component and replace it with their own flavor. Sorry it didn't work out for you, but it's really better for you that it didn't, apparently.
So will any linux-distribution. The only difference is that the system is trying to help you. I fail to see how this can be constructed to be negative.
rpm -e glibc
Removing glibc would break dependencies for the following packages: ... ...
rpm -e --nodeps glibc
What exactly is wrong with forcing the admin to say: "Yes, I want to, even though it will fubar my system" when that is, indeed what it will do ?
I agree that it would be silly to disallow removing critical components, but that's not the case. All a decent packaging-system does is make you aware of the consequences.
If you read the linked pdf describing the suggested weapon you would see that no "power cables" are planned.
The device is powered by a nuclear active isotope that emits alpha-radiation. The suggested weapon has enough of this to provide continous 100Kws of power for around 2 months, thereafter you're going to need a new powerpack.
Indeed this would improve current logistics quite a bit, providing each infantrty-soldier with a new powerpack once every 2 months is a lot easier than giving him enough ammo to last that long.
As a plus, the device generates these 100Kw all the time (there's no way to "stop" a radioactive isotope from degrading), so I imagine it could be used for powering camp-gear radios and other equipment when outside of battle.
Creating the needed isotope in big enough quantities cheaply enough is going to be a killer though. Afterall, if we had cheap, reliable, 100Kw 2-months-lasting power-cells available, I imagine electric cars would be a lot more popular than they are. At current energy-prices the energy output by such a power-cell alone is worth around 15000$
It is not correct, as stated, that only 9% find something wrong with their actions. Like always, statistics are subtle. 9% say that they agree with the statement: "Downloading free music online is wrong."
That statement says nothing about piracy. Nothing about illegal copying. If I go to some artists personal homepage and download fully legal but free samples of that artists work, is that wrong ?
I suppose most people would answer "sometimes" to that statement. And that's not very useful. If the statement had instead said: "Downloading music from the Internet without permission from the copyrigth-owner is wrong." I suspect many more people would have agreed with it.
If the market thougth that SCO has a legitimite claim to a billion dollars, and the ability to actually get that money, then obviously SCO would be valued at atleast 1 bilion.
The fact that they're not, says that the market does not believe that they have a legitimate claim to that money, or atleast not that they will be able to extract it.
Try to get more text coded with the same cryptosystem (and preferably the same key). Cracking anything based on 25 bytes of ciphertext is going to be hard.
Look for statistics. Run character-statistics. Do they look like normal text, only with different symbols ? If so you have a monoalphabetic substitution-cipher, crackable in 5 seconds by a computer or 5 minutes by hand. Repeat for digraphs or trigraphs. Any result different from "all combinations equally likely" (or close) gives you a hint.
Try to xor the text with a copy of itself shifted various places left and rigth. Observe how many nulls you get with various displacements. If you get a jump in nulls for a certain shift, you're likely dealing with a periodic substitution-cipher. Again easily crackable if the period is not too long and you have enough ciphertext. (enough here is something like 20 times the period. So if the period is 50 you'd need a kilobyte of ciphertext to easily attack it, more or less.)
If the text looks completely random under all statistical analysis you can think of, and stays that way even when xored with itself shifted various ways odds are you're dealing with something a bit more serious, and you'll need more expertise than you can gain from a "ask slashdot" article to crack it.
The cable simply lacks the required strength to do this. It's made of carbon nanotubes, which are incredibly strong and ligthweigth. Those tubes would however burn up on reentry in the atmosphere.
If some low pieces should somehow *not* burn up, then they would fall very slowly, this is due to the low density of such a cable. Think along the lines of a 5cm wide strip of paper falling. It would not make a huge mess on impact exactly...
What are you smoking man ? What's wrong with 2.4 ? The current stable kernel, which has been so for over a year... 3.0 would be rather hard to benchmark since it doesn't even exist yet, what *Does* exist is 2.5.* which migth become 2.6 or 3.0 (whatever Linus decides) once it's done.
I know why it is good for you and me. It make it easier for the technology haves to download the music, games, videos they love so much. but why is this good for the world?
Because the world consists of 99.9% people like you and me, so what's good for us is almost by definition good for the world ? Yes, you could argue that the damage to the last 0.1% of people is so severe that it more than offsets our benefit, but I don't see that happening, all I see is an industry running in circles and screaming 'cos they lost 10% of their sales. (which many other industries also did in the poor economic climate of today...) That doesn't cut it.
If your transmitter board is damaged, you can
throw in a new one. If a jolt takes out the hard drive on your software radio, you're screwed. Perhaps the US hasn't been in a real war for so long they forgot how to design for damage?
What stops you from throwing in one of the spare harddrives ?
Seriously, your "problem" is a problem of too little redundancy, not a problem of modern technology.
Things like this make the news because they ARE important to the groups they represent.
Yes, sure. I'm not surprised that say Israeli news-sources would report on it. Like you said, it migth have importance for the groups it represents.
What I question is why it's newsworthy for Slashdot. For an international collection of mostly hackers or whatever. Do you really think this would be reported if it was the first astronaut from any other tiny country ?
Was Norways first astronaut reported ? Swedens ? Mexicos ? Italys ?
To me it still smells like a "Go Israel!" propaganda-article. You're free to disagree offcourse.
What exactly is news in this ? The *nationality* of a astronaut ? Will we now have slashdot storeis about the first astronaut from all countries ?
Apparently what he's doing or what the mission is for or anything of the sort is not interesting enough to be worth metioning, only the nationality is so sensational it deserves a story of its own.
Oh, and offcourse anything who says/anything/ that is a) negative and b) involves israel, however indirectly, is a rabid anti-semite.
If you are having DB or other problems "multiple nigths in a row" you are doing something wrong. Learn to do your job.
If you let your employer call you at home when he feels like it, without compensation high enough that it's worth it to you and your girlfriend, you are doing something wrong.
What makes you think that so few sysadmins have girlfriends ? This is a bullshit clichee. Infact I can think of only one co-worker who has no girlfriend, and for him it's more 'cos he tends to be a little unstable and have different ones...
If you don't want to be disturbed at nigth, pull out the phone. How hard is that ? Employer doesn't accept it ? In that case he should be *paying* you for being "always accessible".
Actually in many parts of the world and the USA the peak energy-usage is on warm days when everyone runst their air-conditionining on full, exactly the kinds od days where the solar-cells would be most effective.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you can make hardware that will only run signed binaries, and thus close that hardware to tinkering. Infact, making such hardware has already been attempted, it's called a console.
m plain_and_stop();
In essence, the bootloader of such hardware does the equivalent of:
if (valid_signature(kernel))
boot(kernel)
else
co
This is nasty, if you are running on such hardware, than the ability to change the kernel in any way you like brings you nothing: if you change anything, even something completely trivial, the signature will no longer be valid, and your new changed kernel will not boot.
Linus is rigth though, this is clearly allowed under the GPL. And furthermore, it very likely CANNOT be forbidden even if we would want to.
A Signature is (or atleast it can be) a separate document saying the equivalent of: "I, Bill Gates, testify to the fact that the kernel with sha1sum=b7a7bf03dcafd4d48001d6a2a6fd2ceaefa4cc1e is trustworthy and can be booted. signed(bill_g)"
There is no way for the GPL, or any other legal document to forbid the above document from existing. The signature above is clearly not a derived work of the kernel, but rather a commentary upon it. (namely a commentary on the trustworthiness) The only info derived from the kernel is the sha1sum, but the only function of this is to make it clear which kernel you are talking about. (much like mentioning the ISBN-number of a book you are reviewing)
Furthermore, there is also no way you would be able to forbid hardware from acting on the existence (or absence) of such a signature. Afterall there is no law saying that "hardware *must* boot all code."
Now, what *would* be nasty would be new laws *requiring* hardware to implement signature-checking. Such laws would essentially make it forbidden to make user-modifiable computers. The way the US is moving at the moment, I would not be too surprised if such a law is introduced and passed in the next few years.
You can also buy low-energy lamps that are coated in better multi-spectrum phosphors, good enough that they give better ligth than incadescent. Only drawback is that those tend to cost a fair bit more. Around $5 or so.
A white led today has about twice the efficiency of a normal ligthbulb. That sounds great -- until you consider:
- The brigthest white led existing (in a lab environment, not on the shelves) is a 5 watt led, equivalent to a 10W ligthbulb, yay !
- Twice the efficiency ain't that good, this still means only about 10% of the energy-input gets turned to ligth, even halogen can do better than that and fluorescent has it beat into the ground with like 20-30%.
- The prices are out of this world, no, each LED ain't that expensive, but it also has a tiny ligth-output, try calculating the price for reasonably ligthing a single room.
- The color-spectra suck. Seriously, led is inherently monochromatic. Yes they can remedy this with various phosphors and the like, but those reduce efficiency (which was supposed to be the advantage of leds, remember?) and even with those it's hard getting a natural full ligth-spectrum.
In the meantime pluorescents are developing at a breakneck pace. Today you can buy pluorescents compact-bulbs that fit in a normal bulb-socket, are 5 times as efficient as a standard bulb, cost around 2$ a piece, are available in wattages up to 25 W (equivalent to 125W standardbulb), and last for around 10000 hours.This is a no-brainer people. Replace a single 100W ligthbulb with a 20W energy-saver and the math looks like this over the 10000hour lifetime:
You pay 1$ extra for the bulb, and you save 800Kwh over the lifetime of the bulb. With an energy-price of 13 cent (most pay more!) you will save over 100 dollars over the lifetime of that single bulb.
You are rigth, they *could* be anything unique, but they *actually* look like this: http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/word/2003/2/wo rdml
When you deliberately choose to use a valid URL for naming your schema, it's not too much of an assumption that the schema would actually be described at that URL.
I find the quality quite acceptable, but obvioslu transcoding from one lossy format to another will always cause some quality-loss. For me this is not noticeable, but then again I'm not a hi-fi religious either. (i.e. I rarely notice the difference between 196 and 256kbs encoded files anyway)
I've got an Athlon xp 2000+, and with this system the cpu-use stays at like maybe 5% when playing oggs trough the slimp3. When playing mp3s the cpu-usage is not noticeable at all (i.e. in the noise)
I love mine to death. It takes all of 5 minutes to set up, and plays like a charm. It can be commanded from a skinnable web-interface (separate ligth-skin for pdas for example) by remote-control, or optionally trough an interactive CLI.
The biggest two pluses with this device are that the product has good quality, and the company has a clue. Let me elaborate.
The thing is small and elegant. It is well engineered. It has a VFD-display with adjustable brigthness that actually looks at home in the stereo, not a cheap-ass poorly readable LCD.
For me even more important is that the company has a clue:
- The server is written in perl, and runs on any platform where perl runs.
- The software is open source.
- They have a CVS-repository and public mailing-lists where development is discussed.
- They actually care about their customers. (or if not they're certainly good at faking it
:-)
They're a small company, but I have not for a second regretted my decision to give them a try. I recommend you try them out too.Trying to use Access for 50 databases with a multitude of concurrent users the world over is simply the wrong tool for the job.
Get a proper database and your problems will solve themselves.
So will any linux-distribution. The only difference is that the system is trying to help you. I fail to see how this can be constructed to be negative.
rpm -e glibc
...
...
Removing glibc would break dependencies for the following packages:
rpm -e --nodeps glibc
What exactly is wrong with forcing the admin to say: "Yes, I want to, even though it will fubar my system" when that is, indeed what it will do ?
I agree that it would be silly to disallow removing critical components, but that's not the case. All a decent packaging-system does is make you aware of the consequences.
The device is powered by a nuclear active isotope that emits alpha-radiation. The suggested weapon has enough of this to provide continous 100Kws of power for around 2 months, thereafter you're going to need a new powerpack.
Indeed this would improve current logistics quite a bit, providing each infantrty-soldier with a new powerpack once every 2 months is a lot easier than giving him enough ammo to last that long.
As a plus, the device generates these 100Kw all the time (there's no way to "stop" a radioactive isotope from degrading), so I imagine it could be used for powering camp-gear radios and other equipment when outside of battle.
Creating the needed isotope in big enough quantities cheaply enough is going to be a killer though. Afterall, if we had cheap, reliable, 100Kw 2-months-lasting power-cells available, I imagine electric cars would be a lot more popular than they are. At current energy-prices the energy output by such a power-cell alone is worth around 15000$
That statement says nothing about piracy. Nothing about illegal copying. If I go to some artists personal homepage and download fully legal but free samples of that artists work, is that wrong ?
I suppose most people would answer "sometimes" to that statement. And that's not very useful. If the statement had instead said: "Downloading music from the Internet without permission from the copyrigth-owner is wrong." I suspect many more people would have agreed with it.
The fact that they're not, says that the market does not believe that they have a legitimate claim to that money, or atleast not that they will be able to extract it.
To find a spot in a 3D-environment the direction from 3 distinct baseballs is enough. In a 2D field, *2* baseballs would be enough.
Yeah. You're rigth. But the editor who wrote that knew it. Please go look up the words "irony" and "sarcasm" in a convenient dictionary.
- Try to get more text coded with the same cryptosystem (and preferably the same key). Cracking anything based on 25 bytes of ciphertext is going to be hard.
- Look for statistics. Run character-statistics. Do they look like normal text, only with different symbols ? If so you have a monoalphabetic substitution-cipher, crackable in 5 seconds by a computer or 5 minutes by hand. Repeat for digraphs or trigraphs. Any result different from "all combinations equally likely" (or close) gives you a hint.
- Try to xor the text with a copy of itself shifted various places left and rigth. Observe how many nulls you get with various displacements. If you get a jump in nulls for a certain shift, you're likely dealing with a periodic substitution-cipher. Again easily crackable if the period is not too long and you have enough ciphertext. (enough here is something like 20 times the period. So if the period is 50 you'd need a kilobyte of ciphertext to easily attack it, more or less.)
If the text looks completely random under all statistical analysis you can think of, and stays that way even when xored with itself shifted various ways odds are you're dealing with something a bit more serious, and you'll need more expertise than you can gain from a "ask slashdot" article to crack it.Good luck !
The cable simply lacks the required strength to do this. It's made of carbon nanotubes, which are incredibly strong and ligthweigth. Those tubes would however burn up on reentry in the atmosphere.
If some low pieces should somehow *not* burn up, then they would fall very slowly, this is due to the low density of such a cable. Think along the lines of a 5cm wide strip of paper falling. It would not make a huge mess on impact exactly...
What are you smoking man ? What's wrong with 2.4 ? The current stable kernel, which has been so for over a year... 3.0 would be rather hard to benchmark since it doesn't even exist yet, what *Does* exist is 2.5.* which migth become 2.6 or 3.0 (whatever Linus decides) once it's done.
Because the world consists of 99.9% people like you and me, so what's good for us is almost by definition good for the world ? Yes, you could argue that the damage to the last 0.1% of people is so severe that it more than offsets our benefit, but I don't see that happening, all I see is an industry running in circles and screaming 'cos they lost 10% of their sales. (which many other industries also did in the poor economic climate of today...) That doesn't cut it.
What stops you from throwing in one of the spare harddrives ?
Seriously, your "problem" is a problem of too little redundancy, not a problem of modern technology.
He created a Visual Basic frontend that made an *existing* tool for decrypting DVD-movies easier for novice Windows-users to use.
Yes, sure. I'm not surprised that say Israeli news-sources would report on it. Like you said, it migth have importance for the groups it represents.
What I question is why it's newsworthy for Slashdot. For an international collection of mostly hackers or whatever. Do you really think this would be reported if it was the first astronaut from any other tiny country ?
Was Norways first astronaut reported ? Swedens ? Mexicos ? Italys ?
To me it still smells like a "Go Israel!" propaganda-article. You're free to disagree offcourse.
there's a difference between a patent and a copyrigth. There is no such thing as a "copyrigthed algorithm".
/implementations/ of algorithms, but this you can get around by writing your own implementation.
There are copyrigthed
What exactly is news in this ? The *nationality* of a astronaut ? Will we now have slashdot storeis about the first astronaut from all countries ?
/anything/ that is a) negative and b) involves israel, however indirectly, is a rabid anti-semite.
Apparently what he's doing or what the mission is for or anything of the sort is not interesting enough to be worth metioning, only the nationality is so sensational it deserves a story of its own.
Oh, and offcourse anything who says
Actually in many parts of the world and the USA the peak energy-usage is on warm days when everyone runst their air-conditionining on full, exactly the kinds od days where the solar-cells would be most effective.