PSUVM? Not even Everything2 knew what that meant. Definition please?
PSUVM was (apparently) a public access Vax at Penn State, (apparently) used by freshmen. Traditionally, users of PSUVM were permitted to read netnews, but not to post. One fine fall morning, that policy changed, and the world went to hell in a handbasket. I'm pretty sure that AOL was netted within the year, but at any rate, it was before the net had recovered from the shock of absorbing psuvm. I'm not positive, but ISTM that the original BIFF was a PSUVM user. But I could be mistaken.
said the recording industry will have to notify Napster of the title of the song, the name of the artist and the name of the file containing the infringing material.
After which, Napster will have 72 hours to block access to that file. Or, in other words:
Napster users will change their file names every 72 hours.
4. Major fines for running red lights. It's not like they don't warn you well ahead of time, after all. The only reason people run red lights is because they're either (a) not paying attention or (b) too damn important.
5. Where to stop at an intersection. That line there means something, it's so that trucks and buses can turn the corner without driving over you. Extra fines for stopping in crosswalks, or blocking the intersection.
6. Set speeding fines by percentage over the limit, not mere numbers. 15 over in a 15 mph zone is a big relative reduction in your reaction time, unlike 15 over in a 65.
7. Retests cover four-way stops, and right-on-red rules. Don't forget to yield to pedestrians!
8. Forget about testing parallel parking. Who ever got killed because somebody couldn't parallel park? 'Sides, most suburbanites have long since lost their ability to || park, even if they ever had it.
9. Oh yeah, turn signals again. Retests must cover how far in advance of an intersection you must signal, and proper lane positioning before the turn (ie, as far to the appropriate side of the lane as practicable, just like the law says).
10. Hm. I can't think of 10, but there must be one. Oh, I've got it. Major fines for honking at, screaming, and making obscene gestures at other people. It's illegal, after all, and at least as offensive as cellphone use.
You don't want just the 'ink', you want the pressure and acceleration data. That is much more resistant to forgery. So you need something a bit more sophisticated than a PDA.
As a computer security professional, I truly believe I cannot trust my digitised signature being held by commercial entities. They have nothing to lose if some miscreant absconds with it and misuses it. How could I prove it's a forgery? I CAN'T!
As a computer security professional, I understand that technology does not exist in complete isolation from the law.
A signature on a document is only one piece of evidence that you intended to be bound by a legal contract. The signature is not a magic spell, it's only part of a so-called "evidentiary chain," that is used to demonstrate that you did, in fact, agree to do something.
Now, if you repudiate that contract, the signature will be brought into court as evidence. You will deny having executed that signature. The other party will ask "how else could this signature exist?" You will say that it was forged. They will consult an expert who will inform the court that it's a damned good forgery, and that it's incredibly unlikely that any human could forge your signature so well. Your expert will inform the court that the signature has been electronically captured by a machine and could have been mechanically forged quite easily. The court will look for other evidence, to determine who is lying. The other party will demand to search your posessions for the property in question, to show that you do actually own the item which you said you didn't purchase. And in the end, the court will decide who is telling the truth, same as today.
Also, please note that your signature can be extracted from paper documents as easily as it can be extracted from an electronic pad. If anything, the electronic pad data is less prone to abuse.
The US census questions asked for each member of the household "what race does he consider himself?"
So I asked my wife what race she consider herself, and checked of "white".
Then I thought about what race I consider myself, and checked off some variant of mixed, I forget which.
Then I asked my three-year-old son what race he considers himself. Then I asked him to spell it, which he did, and I dutifully wrote in "BRLZMB", just like he said. It's pronounced bwerrlich, I think.
Chastity? You mean, Luke and Leia? Can't? Didn't? Whoa, that really sucks. I was living on the fantasy that Luke and Leia had done the nasty before discovering they were siblings. Bummer.
When our elected representatives are off-mike and off-camera, they show a genuine interest in the issues they deal with and a bipartisan spirit that I had not expected to see.
So when are they "real?" When they are off-camera, or when they are on? Farber implies that their off-camera persona is genuine and their on-camera persona is false.
I'll grant that at least one of the personae is false, but I wouldn't rule out that they both are.
Humm, the "marine sized target" range of my old 30.06 is well over 2000 feet. I'm guessing they are planning to only use this on unarmed crowds?
It certainly appears so. Another poster suggested that something like this would make an effective (difficult to detect) sniping device. This is subject to the same sort of power dropoff as a visible laser, so it's not likely to be any more effective as a sniping weapon than a high-power laser would be. Huge power requirements, not exactly portable, difficult to conceal, and only useful from a relatively close (1/3 mile) range. Thanks, I'll stick with a 50 year old M1.
Rather than try to establish an a priori definition of trivial, why don't we make business method, software, and such sorts of patents subject to a simple competition.
Every year, the PTO will be limited to 1000 such patents. Losing patents will be considered the following year, but their lifetime will be reduced by one year. So the criterion becomes "is this really one of the greatest advances of the year?" rather than "gee, off the top of my head, can I remember anybody else having done exactly this before?"
Bearpaw isn't trolling, either. For an interesting experience, go to a big library and read the marketing trade rags for a few months. If you weren't completely cynical beforehand, you will be afterwards.
However, my main complaint about banner ads is the fact that (A) the html code for the banner ad rarely, in my experience, has the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes filled in. This means, naturally, that the page can't really start to load properly until it has received that gif image from the ad server.
That will never change, because that's the way the advertisers WANT IT. They most certainly don't want you to escape that page and move on to someplace else before their ad displays.
When web sites first started putting up gif advertisements, the WSJ Interactive had tasteful black-and-white 1-inch ads very much like the print version.
Then they went to color. "Ok, just taking advantage of the medium," I thought. Some of them were informative, and I occasionally clicked through.
Then they started flashing at me, trying to get my attention. Hello! I'm Trying To Read, Here! It was worse than being in a room full of toddlers. I was quite disappointed that a
newspaper publisher
of all possible outfits, was destroying the reading experience in this way. And I told them so. Naturally, they ignored me.
And so I installed an ad filter and now I don't see a single one of their blessed ads, or any one elses.
you want the "convert" tool in image magick and ghostscript. Alternatively, you could use acrobat reader for the pdf->ps part. Finally, you could find all of this quickly with google.
Random numbers are not good enough if your need 100% all-the-time security. It's theoretically possible for a truly random number generator to spit out 10000 zeros in a row which could leave your message (or interesting parts of it) wide open.
False. Wrong. Incorrect. Pad must BE random to be provably unbreakable.
'Sides, it's equally likely that a true random sequence would contain precisely the bit sequence, which, when XOR'ed with your plaintext, yields the ciphertext "Th15 M322A63 C0n7A1N5 T0P-53CR3T N000Cl34R B0MB Pl4N5!!!"
If the pad is generated on the fly, it must use computer entropy, which is not truely random. Use a bad source and it is breakable, though not in a timeframe that matters
That's not what Rabin proposes. He proposes (assumes) a good OTP generated, perhaps, by observing quantum irregularity, and then broadcasting that OTP. For instance, this might be a satellite in space observing cosmic rays.
This scheme is provably unbreakable IFF: nobody stores the part of the OTP which is used to encipher your plaintext.
Rabin claims that it is "impractical to record the entire stream of endless bits", but anytime someone makes an unsupported claim of impracticality, consider that to be handwaving.
In fact, all I need to store is a subset of the entire stream: a buffer of sorts. I don't have to record a long enough subset that I have time to break the initial position negotiation, because I know two important details: 1. by the time you cease transmitting your message, you have stopped recording bits from the OTP. 2. you don't have an endless memory for past bits, so the start position can't be very old.
There's one more detail. Since I have access to the keystream and the ciphertext, all I have to do is a whole lot of trial decryptions until I find the plaintext. I don't even have to break the initial negotiation.
I disagree that this is no stronger than GPG, in fact, I think it's quite a bit weaker.
DNA evidence is already on its last legs. Even if you make it illegal to clone human beings, are you going to ban gene-sequencing hardware? Or DNA synthesis hardware? This stuff is available already.
So "all" you have to do in order to frame someone is get a sample of bodily fluid, or skin, or hair, whip up a batch of fake semen with the target's DNA, and then go on a serial rape spree.
I put "all" in scary quotes because it is a bit difficult to do at the moment, but probably not in 10 years. Unfortunately:-( we have a period of time ahead in which a lot of traditionally unquestioned evidence could easily be forged -- photos, videos, DNA... Given a big enough fish, anyway.
It's not "moral relativism" that causes cynicism, it's being repeatedly lied to again and again. Americans (and most of the rest of the world) have been lied to so often and so thoroughly that they have been trained to believe exactly the opposite of what they are told by mainstream sources.
Inside every cynic, there's a frustrated idealist.
Most spam I get on the mail servers I administer is from Asian open relays. Since it is just me and businesses I know and work with
closely, I may just cut of Asia, since none of us do business there anyway. If they can't configure their servers correctly, I don't want
to receive *anything* from them. Anyone else thought of doing this?
yep, I automatically turf any mail with a postmark from a Korean or Russian domain.
Slashdot Mirror
PSUVM? Not even Everything2 knew what that meant. Definition please?
PSUVM was (apparently) a public access Vax at Penn State, (apparently) used by freshmen. Traditionally, users of PSUVM were permitted to read netnews, but not to post. One fine fall morning, that policy changed, and the world went to hell in a handbasket. I'm pretty sure that AOL was netted within the year, but at any rate, it was before the net had recovered from the shock of absorbing psuvm. I'm not positive, but ISTM that the original BIFF was a PSUVM user. But I could be mistaken.
The September that Never Ended refers to when AOL openned Usenet access for it's members
Funny, I always thought it started with PSUVM.
said the recording industry will have to notify Napster of the title of the song, the name of the artist and the name of the file containing the infringing material.
After which, Napster will have 72 hours to block access to that file. Or, in other words:
Napster users will change their file names every 72 hours.
Look at /. Would it have been thinkable to see such a phenomenon 10 years ago?
Yes, it was called Usenet. Or various mailing lists.
4. Major fines for running red lights. It's not like they don't warn you well ahead of time, after all. The only reason people run red lights is because they're either (a) not paying attention or (b) too damn important.
5. Where to stop at an intersection. That line there means something, it's so that trucks and buses can turn the corner without driving over you. Extra fines for stopping in crosswalks, or blocking the intersection.
6. Set speeding fines by percentage over the limit, not mere numbers. 15 over in a 15 mph zone is a big relative reduction in your reaction time, unlike 15 over in a 65.
7. Retests cover four-way stops, and right-on-red rules. Don't forget to yield to pedestrians!
8. Forget about testing parallel parking. Who ever got killed because somebody couldn't parallel park? 'Sides, most suburbanites have long since lost their ability to || park, even if they ever had it.
9. Oh yeah, turn signals again. Retests must cover how far in advance of an intersection you must signal, and proper lane positioning before the turn (ie, as far to the appropriate side of the lane as practicable, just like the law says).
10. Hm. I can't think of 10, but there must be one. Oh, I've got it. Major fines for honking at, screaming, and making obscene gestures at other people. It's illegal, after all, and at least as offensive as cellphone use.
OK, who's with me?
How is this better than Lo-Jack? A smidgen easier to locate the vehicle, but more expensive and failure-prone.
You don't want just the 'ink', you want the pressure and acceleration data. That is much more resistant to forgery. So you need something a bit more sophisticated than a PDA.
As a computer security professional, I truly believe I cannot trust my digitised signature being held by commercial entities. They have nothing to lose if some miscreant absconds with it and misuses it. How could I prove it's a forgery? I CAN'T!
As a computer security professional, I understand that technology does not exist in complete isolation from the law.
A signature on a document is only one piece of evidence that you intended to be bound by a legal contract. The signature is not a magic spell, it's only part of a so-called "evidentiary chain," that is used to demonstrate that you did, in fact, agree to do something.
Now, if you repudiate that contract, the signature will be brought into court as evidence. You will deny having executed that signature. The other party will ask "how else could this signature exist?" You will say that it was forged. They will consult an expert who will inform the court that it's a damned good forgery, and that it's incredibly unlikely that any human could forge your signature so well. Your expert will inform the court that the signature has been electronically captured by a machine and could have been mechanically forged quite easily. The court will look for other evidence, to determine who is lying. The other party will demand to search your posessions for the property in question, to show that you do actually own the item which you said you didn't purchase. And in the end, the court will decide who is telling the truth, same as today.
Also, please note that your signature can be extracted from paper documents as easily as it can be extracted from an electronic pad. If anything, the electronic pad data is less prone to abuse.
http://www.geektools.com/geektels/
Has a list of hotels all over the world and what kind of geek amenities they offer.
No auto link, cuz you'll want to remember it, and I'm sick of goatse.cx links.
The US census questions asked for each member of the household "what race does he consider himself?"
So I asked my wife what race she consider herself, and checked of "white".
Then I thought about what race I consider myself, and checked off some variant of mixed, I forget which.
Then I asked my three-year-old son what race he considers himself. Then I asked him to spell it, which he did, and I dutifully wrote in "BRLZMB", just like he said. It's pronounced bwerrlich, I think.
Chastity? You mean, Luke and Leia?
Can't?
Didn't?
Whoa, that really sucks. I was living on the fantasy that Luke and Leia had done the nasty before discovering they were siblings. Bummer.
When our elected representatives are off-mike and off-camera, they show a genuine interest in the issues they deal with and a bipartisan spirit that I had not expected to see.
So when are they "real?" When they are off-camera, or when they are on? Farber implies that their off-camera persona is genuine and their on-camera persona is false.
I'll grant that at least one of the personae is false, but I wouldn't rule out that they both are.
Humm, the "marine sized target" range of my old 30.06 is well over 2000 feet. I'm guessing they are planning to only use this on unarmed crowds?
It certainly appears so.
Another poster suggested that something like this would make an effective (difficult to detect) sniping device. This is subject to the same sort of power dropoff as a visible laser, so it's not likely to be any more effective as a sniping weapon than a high-power laser would be. Huge power requirements, not exactly portable, difficult to conceal, and only useful from a relatively close (1/3 mile) range. Thanks, I'll stick with a 50 year old M1.
Rather than try to establish an a priori definition of trivial, why don't we make business method, software, and such sorts of patents subject to a simple competition.
Every year, the PTO will be limited to 1000 such patents. Losing patents will be considered the following year, but their lifetime will be reduced by one year. So the criterion becomes "is this really one of the greatest advances of the year?" rather than "gee, off the top of my head, can I remember anybody else having done exactly this before?"
Bearpaw isn't trolling, either. For an interesting experience, go to a big library and read the marketing trade rags for a few months. If you weren't completely cynical beforehand, you will be afterwards.
However, my main complaint about banner ads is the fact that (A) the html code for the banner ad rarely, in my experience, has the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes filled in. This means, naturally, that the page can't really start to load properly until it has received that gif image from the ad server.
That will never change, because that's the way the advertisers WANT IT. They most certainly don't want you to escape that page and move on to someplace else before their ad displays.
Then they went to color. "Ok, just taking advantage of the medium," I thought. Some of them were informative, and I occasionally clicked through.
Then they started flashing at me, trying to get my attention. Hello! I'm Trying To Read, Here! It was worse than being in a room full of toddlers. I was quite disappointed that a
- newspaper publisher
of all possible outfits, was destroying the reading experience in this way. And I told them so. Naturally, they ignored me.And so I installed an ad filter and now I don't see a single one of their blessed ads, or any one elses.
The web ad industry is its own worst enemy.
So my grandparents were right! Kids these days really are stupider.
you want the "convert" tool in image magick and ghostscript. Alternatively, you could use acrobat reader for the pdf->ps part.
Finally, you could find all of this quickly with google.
Random numbers are not good enough if your need 100% all-the-time security. It's theoretically possible for a truly random number generator to spit out 10000 zeros in a row which could leave your message (or interesting parts of it) wide open.
False. Wrong. Incorrect. Pad must BE random to be provably unbreakable.
'Sides, it's equally likely that a true random sequence would contain precisely the bit sequence, which, when XOR'ed with your plaintext, yields the ciphertext "Th15 M322A63 C0n7A1N5 T0P-53CR3T N000Cl34R B0MB Pl4N5!!!"
If the pad is generated on the fly, it must use computer entropy, which is not truely random. Use a bad source and it is breakable, though not in a timeframe that matters
That's not what Rabin proposes. He proposes (assumes) a good OTP generated, perhaps, by observing quantum irregularity, and then broadcasting that OTP. For instance, this might be a satellite in space observing cosmic rays.
This scheme is provably unbreakable IFF: nobody stores the part of the OTP which is used to encipher your plaintext.
Rabin claims that it is "impractical to record the entire stream of endless bits", but anytime someone makes an unsupported claim of impracticality, consider that to be handwaving.
In fact, all I need to store is a subset of the entire stream: a buffer of sorts. I don't have to record a long enough subset that I have time to break the initial position negotiation, because I know two important details:
1. by the time you cease transmitting your message, you have stopped recording bits from the OTP.
2. you don't have an endless memory for past bits, so the start position can't be very old.
There's one more detail. Since I have access to the keystream and the ciphertext, all I have to do is a whole lot of trial decryptions until I find the plaintext. I don't even have to break the initial negotiation.
I disagree that this is no stronger than GPG, in fact, I think it's quite a bit weaker.
DNA evidence is already on its last legs. Even if you make it illegal to clone human beings, are you going to ban gene-sequencing hardware? Or DNA synthesis hardware? This stuff is available already.
:-( we have a period of time ahead in which a lot of traditionally unquestioned evidence could easily be forged -- photos, videos, DNA... Given a big enough fish, anyway.
So "all" you have to do in order to frame someone is get a sample of bodily fluid, or skin, or hair, whip up a batch of fake semen with the target's DNA, and then go on a serial rape spree.
I put "all" in scary quotes because it is a bit difficult to do at the moment, but probably not in 10 years. Unfortunately
It's not "moral relativism" that causes cynicism, it's being repeatedly lied to again and again. Americans (and most of the rest of the world) have been lied to so often and so thoroughly that they have been trained to believe exactly the opposite of what they are told by mainstream sources.
Inside every cynic, there's a frustrated idealist.
Most spam I get on the mail servers I administer is from Asian open relays. Since it is just me and businesses I know and work with closely, I may just cut of Asia, since none of us do business there anyway. If they can't configure their servers correctly, I don't want to receive *anything* from them. Anyone else thought of doing this?
yep, I automatically turf any mail with a postmark from a Korean or Russian domain.