They know it by not making assumption. It is wrong, for example, to assume that a female is technically incompetent, just because you've experiences a lot of other females to be so. But it is offcourse equally wrong to assume that a male is in some way treating you differently just because other males have done so at some occasion or other.
Unlikely to be large costs though, the kind of user who knows enough to care which particular web-broweser he uses is also very likely to be clueful enough to, on the rare occasions when something doesn't work rigth because it's ie-code not standard html, fire up ie.
And when the costs are low, the "business reason" doesn't need to be a very vital one. Indeed, I'd expect in most cases "It is my prefered tool" should be sufficient. Worker satisfaction is also a factor. Workers are commonly unsatisfied at finding their everyday worklife filled with arbitrary restrictions and detail-control from on high.
The oposite problem is actually harder to solve. What if the twins for whatever reason, *want* to swap identities ?
I had twins in my class. They claim that only one of them hass actually passed a driving-test, though they both have a license. I dunno if it's true, there's no way to tell, but it's certainly plausible. Nobody would be the wiser if one of them borrowed the id of the other and passed the exam on his behalf. It's not hard to pass the same exam twice, under two different names afterall.
One thing is if the one twin wants to steal from the other, hopefully rare as you say. But what if twin A *claim* that that withdrawal wasn't made by him, and must be done by the other. You've got no way to tell, one way or the other, who is telling the truth. Current result under Norwegian law ? The bank would have to give him the money back, since they cannot show that he himself withdrew it, at the same time, they'd have no success claiming the money back from the other twin, 'cos they have no clue if he really took it.
Currently with pins that's easier: you're not supposed to tell anyone your pin. If you do, and they abuse this to take cash, you have to carry the loss yourself.
These things are useful for high-clue users in high-risk situations. In the real world though, being forced to withdraw cash from an ATM is a rare occurence, and the average holder of an ATM-card is low-clue and so likely wouldn't remember and/or act convincingly anyway, especially since the criminaly would offcourse be well-aware of the existence of duress-pins.
On top of this, users would be likely to forget their duress-pins, on account of them being used extremely seldom. (most users would never use them even once in their life)
Much simpler to set a weekly limit of aproximately double your normal weekly spendings and live with the remaining risk. It's not as if it's a huge deal to perhaps, if you're unlucky, once in your life, lose a few hundred bucks.
This is a good point. One major difference between European and US law is that you guys have a lot MORE of it.
The entire law of Norway is a single book, sized aproximately like a bible, 90% of which is irrelevant to average Joes. The actual interesting parts are 200 pages, tops.
My daugthers are identical twins. About 1% of all births are twin-births. About 1/3rd of all twins are identical.
It's trivial for my daugthers to choose different PINs.
Please explain how they would go about getting machines using the 3D face-contours to acknowledge that they are not, infact, the same person.
There's 300 million people in the US, of these about 2 million people are identical twins. I'd say a technology which is, from the get go, even absent any weaknesses, unusable for close to 1% of the population is pretty useless.
Yeah, there's differences to them, and these will increase as they grow older, as a result of environmental and lifestyle influences, nevertheless they are currently close enough that I sincerely doubt any software could tell them apart without being *too* picky and introducing many false negatives.
Re:All bank vaults and locks have also been cracke
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 1
Beats me. Beats anyone with half a brain and even a small dosis of crypto-knowledge. Beats people with more than a small dosis of crypto-knowledge too. Bruce Schneier says it like this: "Trying to make bits non-copyable is sort of like trying to make water non-wet."
Re:All bank vaults and locks have also been cracke
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sure there is. A correctly employed OTP is completely, mathemathically proven, uncrackable.
But there is no uncrackable DRM-technology. There can't be. By nessecity the users machine MUST contain all the information needed to decode the media. If it didn't, it couldn't display it. If it can display it, it fundamentally CAN also save it in an unrestricted format.
Yes, it may be more or less tricky to get at the keys. But it'll always be *possible*.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You assume that the "casual copyers" today start with original "protected" media. They don't.
The casual copiers of today visit a p2p-network and download the already-cracked, unprotected files. They don't notice that these files ever had DRM.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 1
Joe on the street can however download the unprotected already-cracked from his choice of p2p-network, just like he's been doing for a while already.
Joe on the street can also appreciate that it's unpleasant that his legally bougth music won't play in his choice of music-player.
"casual copying" these days consists of a visit to a p2p-network. It doesn't matter that Joe can't himself crack the DRM. He could download and run a turnkey-crack, but he doesn't even need to do that: he simply downloads the unprotected files.
It's ridicolous though, isn't it ? a *20*GB HD ? And the console is *new* can you even imagine how ridicolous that will look in 3-4 years ? Can you even -get- them that small in retail if you try these days ? Sorta like how a 16MB memory-card today retails for aproximately the same price as a 2GB usb-memory (a factor of 128 bigger !)
Yeah, I know they're laptop-drives, which gives miniscule bang-for-buck compared to 3.5" ones, but still.... 120GB is about standard for a new laptop these days, certainly not "ultra elite premium"
For a PVR, with HD, especially one costing $700 or something I'd want a 500GB-drive or similar. Or failing that, at a minimum, the opportunity of hooking up same by way of NAS or USB and have that utilised.
Yeah, I know. But the choice of hash is irrelevant for the main point of my suggestion. If you're paranoid you could even include like half a dozen believed-to-be-secure hashes. That way you'd only get to tamper with the logs by finding an alternative string that does not only give meaning as a log-entry *and* hash to the same sha1sum, no, it then also has to hash the same way in all the other hashes.
Longer record time is a very definite plus. Having to swap media during the recording of a single movie is hopeless, bad enough that you'll basically never want to do it. Often when you record something it's precisely because you're *not* there to watch it.
Having to swap when you're watching is _sligthly_ less horrible, but nevertheless a significant drawback. Getting from 1 to 3 hours is a major win.
The win continues with larger collections too, especially with media that are random access, as most are these days. Fitting one entire film on one physical disc is nice. Being able to fit *all* your media on a single media is even better. A major comfort-thig with mp3s over CDs is the fact that these days you get your entire collection at fingertip/remote-control access, not only a single CD.
Better yet. Don't print the logs. Print every (hour|day) a single line:
At (time) the sha1sum of [file] was [sha1sum] signed:.....
Then proceed to store [file] however you please, make sure to have good backups. There's a problem offcourse, there's nothing stopping you from replacing the paper in the future. Since you produced it once, you can certainly produce a valid-looking similar copy.
This problem can be solved by having an external, trustworthy, keep or publish a fact. For example, if you published the sha1sum of your logfile as a ad in the NYT, you'd never be able to change it after-the-fact.
But that's overkill. A (digitally) signed statement would suffice: "We, the [trustworthy-institution] attest to having been presented with the string [sha1sum] by [your-company] at [date] [our-signature]"
Such a scheme would make it impossible for you to tamper with the logs unless you had either subverted sha1, broken the digital-signature algorithm, or somehow gotten hold of the secret-key of trustworthy-institution. All of which should be significantly more difficult than exchanging one piece of paper for another.
As it happens, Thawte and others offers such "timestamp signing" where you send them a fingerprint of a file, and they send you back a digitally signed copy of the fingerprint, with a timetstamp for their reception added. (in effect, "we Thawte received [fingerprint] on [date:time] [signature]")
1) Part X can make whatever changes he feels like to this contract at any time, and Y shall be immediately bound by such changes. X, does not have to notify Y of the changes in any way, it is Y's responsibility to check the contract continously.
Is very obviously loopsided to the point where in many jurisdictions it is no longer a valid contract. It in effect changes a two-sided contract to become a one-sided dictate.
Playing devil's lawyer here. How exactly, do you go at modeling when a specific atom of an unstable element will, or will not, decay ?
We believe we have a reasonable understanding of why and how it does so, but we also believe that there *is* no explanation for exactly when a particular atom decides to decay, or not.
We may not hide results, but there sure is publication bias -- an experiment with a surprising and/or interesting and/or positive result is much more likely to get published than the oposite.
There's a lot of science of the type: We tried X, nothing happened, going on. Unfortunately it seldom gets published.
The only way that's absurd, is if you take it to be absurd that someone else has experienced something of consciousness that you have not yet experienced.
Two things have changed, gradually over the last 50 years. First, people take in more calories. Second, people move less, mainly as a consequence of the proportion of workers doing physical labourt declining steeply.
It's that simple. You eat more than your body needs, you gain weigth.
I agree. The study is kicking in open doors. It's no surprise at all that people, in general, tend to adapt to those around them. That is true of all behaviours.
If your friends drink a lot, you're (more) likely to drink a lot than if they drink seldom and little.
If your friends read a lot. You're (more) likely to read a lot than if they where the type who never opens a book.
I completely fail to see what's surprising, much less provoking, about this study.
Because it's a domain registered in april, for one year.
Because same guy has 5 earlier "Medison something" companies registered, 2 of which are bankrupt, rest of which are "dissolved"
Because the privacy-notice is cut-n-pasted from Apple (and poorly done at that)
Because the images of the laptops are photoshopped variants of a Taiwanese laptop. (and these claim to manufacture in Brazil)
Because they claim to charge ridicolous amounts for advertising on the site ($15K - $2 million) for a site with (if you believe their own claims!) 10K hits/month or thereabout.
Because the only way to contact them is a -hotmail- adress to what appears to be a private individual.
Because even their phone is "temporarily disconnected"
Because they have no adress, no contact-info whatsoever in any of the countries they claim to operate in ?
Because they (claim to) sell at about half the price of the nearest competitor.
Because they claim it's cheap becaus they "see it from a democratic point of view" which is crap.
Because there's around 20 other fishy-smelling things, but I'm tired of listing them.:-)
If, after all of this, you still want to order one. Go for it. Oh, and I have a bridge to sell ! Send small unmarked notes:-)
Makes it seem cheaper too. People compare online Dell-pricing to prices in their local shop. But the prices in the local shop are for walking out with the laptop *now* the Dell-prices are what you pay to have the laptop delivered in a month or something.
Which makes a bit of difference, particularily with new high-end gear that typically falls dramatically in price over time.
You are probably rigth on the social thing. I'd add political. Certainly it's not a technological limitation.
One factor may be that USA has a significant poor population. For a western country, USA has just about the highest inequality of all. On the GINI-index (which measures inequality, not wealth) you score "45" (where higher means more inequal, a country where everyone earns the same would score 0 a country where 1 person earns everything, and everyone else earns 0 would score 100)
Most other western countries are atleast down in the 30ies, and Norway, Sweden and Finland, the countries I used as examples of high broadband-penetration are at 25-27 which is near the bottom. (Denmark is the lowest, at 23, they *also* have high broadband-penetration, but in their case it's also a small, dense, country, so that's less surprising.)
So, it seems to me having a rich population *and* having a somewhat equal distribution of income such that there are few poor people, will tend to lead to a high percentage of households with disposable income for stuff like computers and internet.
Seems to me geography plays almost no role at all. Politics, wealth and distribution of wealth does.
It's more complicated than that. Your statement would be true if there was no re-use, and no externalities.
But that's the entire problem with environmental impact; it's an externality.
Spending energy contributes to global warming. But the *cost* of global warming is generally not carried by the company doing the pollution. Releasing Ozone-killers leads to increased UV-radiation, which again gives more skin-cancer, among other problems. But the *cost* of that isn't generally carried by the compan(ies) that does the polluting.
The best way to solve this would be to have taxes on polluting, and to use those taxes for financing cleanup and/or research into ways of doing the same thing with less of a damaging effect. It is impossible to put a "fair" price on different kinds of pollution though, priorities vary. How much is the "fair" price for one extinct insect ? For 1mm higher sea-level ? For 1% higher skin-cancer-rate ?
Capitalism is *very* efficient at allocating resources in the absence of externalities. With externalities though, the picture is somewhat less rosy.
Slashdot Mirror
They know it by not making assumption. It is wrong, for example, to assume that a female is technically incompetent, just because you've experiences a lot of other females to be so. But it is offcourse equally wrong to assume that a male is in some way treating you differently just because other males have done so at some occasion or other.
Unlikely to be large costs though, the kind of user who knows enough to care which particular web-broweser he uses is also very likely to be clueful enough to, on the rare occasions when something doesn't work rigth because it's ie-code not standard html, fire up ie.
And when the costs are low, the "business reason" doesn't need to be a very vital one. Indeed, I'd expect in most cases "It is my prefered tool" should be sufficient. Worker satisfaction is also a factor. Workers are commonly unsatisfied at finding their everyday worklife filled with arbitrary restrictions and detail-control from on high.
The oposite problem is actually harder to solve. What if the twins for whatever reason, *want* to swap identities ?
I had twins in my class. They claim that only one of them hass actually passed a driving-test, though they both have a license. I dunno if it's true, there's no way to tell, but it's certainly plausible. Nobody would be the wiser if one of them borrowed the id of the other and passed the exam on his behalf. It's not hard to pass the same exam twice, under two different names afterall.
One thing is if the one twin wants to steal from the other, hopefully rare as you say. But what if twin A *claim* that that withdrawal wasn't made by him, and must be done by the other. You've got no way to tell, one way or the other, who is telling the truth. Current result under Norwegian law ? The bank would have to give him the money back, since they cannot show that he himself withdrew it, at the same time, they'd have no success claiming the money back from the other twin, 'cos they have no clue if he really took it.
Currently with pins that's easier: you're not supposed to tell anyone your pin. If you do, and they abuse this to take cash, you have to carry the loss yourself.
These things are useful for high-clue users in high-risk situations. In the real world though, being forced to withdraw cash from an ATM is a rare occurence, and the average holder of an ATM-card is low-clue and so likely wouldn't remember and/or act convincingly anyway, especially since the criminaly would offcourse be well-aware of the existence of duress-pins.
On top of this, users would be likely to forget their duress-pins, on account of them being used extremely seldom. (most users would never use them even once in their life)
Much simpler to set a weekly limit of aproximately double your normal weekly spendings and live with the remaining risk. It's not as if it's a huge deal to perhaps, if you're unlucky, once in your life, lose a few hundred bucks.
This is a good point. One major difference between European and US law is that you guys have a lot MORE of it.
The entire law of Norway is a single book, sized aproximately like a bible, 90% of which is irrelevant to average Joes. The actual interesting parts are 200 pages, tops.
My daugthers are identical twins. About 1% of all births are twin-births. About 1/3rd of all twins are identical.
It's trivial for my daugthers to choose different PINs.
Please explain how they would go about getting machines using the 3D face-contours to acknowledge that they are not, infact, the same person.
There's 300 million people in the US, of these about 2 million people are identical twins. I'd say a technology which is, from the get go, even absent any weaknesses, unusable for close to 1% of the population is pretty useless.
Yeah, there's differences to them, and these will increase as they grow older, as a result of environmental and lifestyle influences, nevertheless they are currently close enough that I sincerely doubt any software could tell them apart without being *too* picky and introducing many false negatives.
Beats me. Beats anyone with half a brain and even a small dosis of crypto-knowledge. Beats people with more than a small dosis of crypto-knowledge too. Bruce Schneier says it like this: "Trying to make bits non-copyable is sort of like trying to make water non-wet."
Sure there is. A correctly employed OTP is completely, mathemathically proven, uncrackable.
But there is no uncrackable DRM-technology. There can't be. By nessecity the users machine MUST contain all the information needed to decode the media. If it didn't, it couldn't display it. If it can display it, it fundamentally CAN also save it in an unrestricted format.
Yes, it may be more or less tricky to get at the keys. But it'll always be *possible*.
You assume that the "casual copyers" today start with original "protected" media. They don't.
The casual copiers of today visit a p2p-network and download the already-cracked, unprotected files. They don't notice that these files ever had DRM.
Joe on the street can however download the unprotected already-cracked from his choice of p2p-network, just like he's been doing for a while already.
Joe on the street can also appreciate that it's unpleasant that his legally bougth music won't play in his choice of music-player.
"casual copying" these days consists of a visit to a p2p-network. It doesn't matter that Joe can't himself crack the DRM. He could download and run a turnkey-crack, but he doesn't even need to do that: he simply downloads the unprotected files.
It's ridicolous though, isn't it ? a *20*GB HD ? And the console is *new* can you even imagine how ridicolous that will look in 3-4 years ? Can you even -get- them that small in retail if you try these days ? Sorta like how a 16MB memory-card today retails for aproximately the same price as a 2GB usb-memory (a factor of 128 bigger !)
Yeah, I know they're laptop-drives, which gives miniscule bang-for-buck compared to 3.5" ones, but still.... 120GB is about standard for a new laptop these days, certainly not "ultra elite premium"
For a PVR, with HD, especially one costing $700 or something I'd want a 500GB-drive or similar. Or failing that, at a minimum, the opportunity of hooking up same by way of NAS or USB and have that utilised.
Yeah, I know. But the choice of hash is irrelevant for the main point of my suggestion. If you're paranoid you could even include like half a dozen believed-to-be-secure hashes. That way you'd only get to tamper with the logs by finding an alternative string that does not only give meaning as a log-entry *and* hash to the same sha1sum, no, it then also has to hash the same way in all the other hashes.
Longer record time is a very definite plus. Having to swap media during the recording of a single movie is hopeless, bad enough that you'll basically never want to do it. Often when you record something it's precisely because you're *not* there to watch it.
Having to swap when you're watching is _sligthly_ less horrible, but nevertheless a significant drawback. Getting from 1 to 3 hours is a major win.
The win continues with larger collections too, especially with media that are random access, as most are these days. Fitting one entire film on one physical disc is nice. Being able to fit *all* your media on a single media is even better. A major comfort-thig with mp3s over CDs is the fact that these days you get your entire collection at fingertip/remote-control access, not only a single CD.
Better yet. Don't print the logs. Print every (hour|day) a single line:
.....
At (time) the sha1sum of [file] was [sha1sum] signed:
Then proceed to store [file] however you please, make sure to have good backups. There's a problem offcourse, there's nothing stopping you from replacing the paper in the future. Since you produced it once, you can certainly produce a valid-looking similar copy.
This problem can be solved by having an external, trustworthy, keep or publish a fact. For example, if you published the sha1sum of your logfile as a ad in the NYT, you'd never be able to change it after-the-fact.
But that's overkill. A (digitally) signed statement would suffice: "We, the [trustworthy-institution] attest to having been presented with the string [sha1sum] by [your-company] at [date] [our-signature]"
Such a scheme would make it impossible for you to tamper with the logs unless you had either subverted sha1, broken the digital-signature algorithm, or somehow gotten hold of the secret-key of trustworthy-institution. All of which should be significantly more difficult than exchanging one piece of paper for another.
As it happens, Thawte and others offers such "timestamp signing" where you send them a fingerprint of a file, and they send you back a digitally signed copy of the fingerprint, with a timetstamp for their reception added. (in effect, "we Thawte received [fingerprint] on [date:time] [signature]")
True, but a contract that says:
1) Part X can make whatever changes he feels like to this contract at any time, and Y shall be immediately bound by such changes. X, does not have to notify Y of the changes in any way, it is Y's responsibility to check the contract continously.
Is very obviously loopsided to the point where in many jurisdictions it is no longer a valid contract. It in effect changes a two-sided contract to become a one-sided dictate.
Playing devil's lawyer here. How exactly, do you go at modeling when a specific atom of an unstable element will, or will not, decay ?
We believe we have a reasonable understanding of why and how it does so, but we also believe that there *is* no explanation for exactly when a particular atom decides to decay, or not.
We may not hide results, but there sure is publication bias -- an experiment with a surprising and/or interesting and/or positive result is much more likely to get published than the oposite. There's a lot of science of the type: We tried X, nothing happened, going on. Unfortunately it seldom gets published.
The only way that's absurd, is if you take it to be absurd that someone else has experienced something of consciousness that you have not yet experienced.
That's not knowledge. That's religion.Excuses excuses.
Two things have changed, gradually over the last 50 years. First, people take in more calories. Second, people move less, mainly as a consequence of the proportion of workers doing physical labourt declining steeply.
It's that simple. You eat more than your body needs, you gain weigth.
I agree. The study is kicking in open doors. It's no surprise at all that people, in general, tend to adapt to those around them. That is true of all behaviours.
If your friends drink a lot, you're (more) likely to drink a lot than if they drink seldom and little.
If your friends read a lot. You're (more) likely to read a lot than if they where the type who never opens a book.
I completely fail to see what's surprising, much less provoking, about this study.
- Because it's a domain registered in april, for one year.
- Because same guy has 5 earlier "Medison something" companies registered, 2 of which are bankrupt, rest of which are "dissolved"
- Because the privacy-notice is cut-n-pasted from Apple (and poorly done at that)
- Because the images of the laptops are photoshopped variants of a Taiwanese laptop. (and these claim to manufacture in Brazil)
- Because they claim to charge ridicolous amounts for advertising on the site ($15K - $2 million) for a site with (if you believe their own claims!) 10K hits/month or thereabout.
- Because the only way to contact them is a -hotmail- adress to what appears to be a private individual.
- Because even their phone is "temporarily disconnected"
- Because they have no adress, no contact-info whatsoever in any of the countries they claim to operate in ?
- Because they (claim to) sell at about half the price of the nearest competitor.
- Because they claim it's cheap becaus they "see it from a democratic point of view" which is crap.
- Because there's around 20 other fishy-smelling things, but I'm tired of listing them.
:-)
If, after all of this, you still want to order one. Go for it. Oh, and I have a bridge to sell ! Send small unmarked notesMakes it seem cheaper too. People compare online Dell-pricing to prices in their local shop. But the prices in the local shop are for walking out with the laptop *now* the Dell-prices are what you pay to have the laptop delivered in a month or something. Which makes a bit of difference, particularily with new high-end gear that typically falls dramatically in price over time.
Why would anyone pay $2 million for a year of ads on a website with 100K hits (bet that includes every object, so it's like 10K/pageviews) month ?
That is on the order of $17/pageview. Which is obviously completely bollocks insane.
Scam.
You are probably rigth on the social thing. I'd add political. Certainly it's not a technological limitation.
One factor may be that USA has a significant poor population. For a western country, USA has just about the highest inequality of all. On the GINI-index (which measures inequality, not wealth) you score "45" (where higher means more inequal, a country where everyone earns the same would score 0 a country where 1 person earns everything, and everyone else earns 0 would score 100)
Most other western countries are atleast down in the 30ies, and Norway, Sweden and Finland, the countries I used as examples of high broadband-penetration are at 25-27 which is near the bottom. (Denmark is the lowest, at 23, they *also* have high broadband-penetration, but in their case it's also a small, dense, country, so that's less surprising.)
So, it seems to me having a rich population *and* having a somewhat equal distribution of income such that there are few poor people, will tend to lead to a high percentage of households with disposable income for stuff like computers and internet.
Seems to me geography plays almost no role at all. Politics, wealth and distribution of wealth does.
It's more complicated than that. Your statement would be true if there was no re-use, and no externalities.
But that's the entire problem with environmental impact; it's an externality.
Spending energy contributes to global warming. But the *cost* of global warming is generally not carried by the company doing the pollution. Releasing Ozone-killers leads to increased UV-radiation, which again gives more skin-cancer, among other problems. But the *cost* of that isn't generally carried by the compan(ies) that does the polluting.
The best way to solve this would be to have taxes on polluting, and to use those taxes for financing cleanup and/or research into ways of doing the same thing with less of a damaging effect. It is impossible to put a "fair" price on different kinds of pollution though, priorities vary. How much is the "fair" price for one extinct insect ? For 1mm higher sea-level ? For 1% higher skin-cancer-rate ?
Capitalism is *very* efficient at allocating resources in the absence of externalities. With externalities though, the picture is somewhat less rosy.