Let's start with quantum foam. No, it most assuredly isn't nonsense - if you cannot understand what I write, it merely means that you do not understand what I write, it does not make what I write wrong. I will go through this more slowly, then. The laws of thermodynamics strictly prohibit having any point with zero entropy. If there is neither mass nor energy, then you have no entropy. This is therefore a prohibited state. Which is why quantum foam is needed at all, there's bugger all observational evidence for it.
However, when a particle forms in quantum foam, it forms with its opposite pair. Always. The sum MUST equal zero. That is a requirement of the conservation of information, plus the conservation of matter/energy. Neither information NOR matter/energy can be created nor destroyed. EVER. These particles form, diverge, converge, collide and produce nothing. No matter-antimatter reactions here, this is strictly a zero-sum game. So, you ask, what is this sum of? Matter? Energy? Information? Everything. That should be obvious. If you cannot create or destroy information, then when these particles form, no NET information can be being added to the universe. However, if the particles in and of themselves had no information, no mass, no energy, then you would still have no entropy and would have utterly failed in the point of the exercise.
(God, sometimes I feel like I'm trying to teach schoolkids. Actually, no, I -have- taught schoolkids. They actually did a decent job of following the logic.)
Now for T=0. See Hawking's statements after visiting Pope John Paul. THEN come back and read this. Hey, off you go. You won't understand (and obviously won't accept) a word of this until you listen to the source I am working from. Yes, the source I am working from. A Professor Stephen Hawking. You may have heard of him. I've done rather more than heard of him, I've attended his lectures.
Spacetime is curved, and it curves more where there is more mass. That curvature can be expressed as a differential equation, Professor Hawking (yes, him again) expressed it as a parabola with no discontinuities and no singularities. He also talked of "imaginary time", but since his explanation suggested that this was not a reference to T=sqrt(-1), I wasn't particularly interested in that aspect of his explanation. I was much more concerned with a growing theory that time also has dimensions and was busy exploring that.
Anyways, if you factor in that spacetime curves with mass into the early universe, not merely space, then you get the result that there is - in Professor Hawking's words - "no point of creation and therefore no need of a Creator".
The energy density required is nowhere near as great as you claim. I forget the specific New Scientist article that gave the workings and results, you'll need to get off your backside and look it up like everyone else. It's about 20 years ago now that there was a large feature on inflationary theory, maybe a little older. I'm not hunting through all the back issues of a journal for the 1980s for one solitary Slashdot reader who can't be arsed to do the basic research.
Despite your low UID, I see you're unfamiliar with:
HFSC
DiffServ and IntServ
CBQ
ECN
BLACK
PURPLE
(QoS isn't a violation of network neutrality, provided all users experience identical QoS.)
Let's take ECN. User X has an app that demands bandwidth at the expense of others. ECN offers the application the choice of cutting back or being squelched. But it doesn't matter who happens to be X on any given day. If every single person in the area made that same excessive demand, every single person would experience the same consequence. No "pay-as-you-play".
Ok, what about BLACK and PURPLE? They are packet-dropping schemes analogous to RED and BLUE (what is it with packet-dropping and colours?) but designed to work in the case of unresponsive streaming traffic. Seems to describe your case fairly well. The streams are gracefully degraded so that the level of service any user gets is the level of service that can be comfortably supported at that time. That means those bandwidth hogs will be fine off-peak but will have to play fair during peak. Again, without respect to who those hogs are at any given time. Everyone gets the same experience and the same constraints.
Is it catastrophic if these sorts of features (that are available - don't go crying to the developers if the ISPs don't use what they have) are not being utilized? Nah. Not really. Early cable ISPs all used heavily shared lines with no level of service guarantee. Some still do. If the users were that bothered by the experience, the market forces would encourage more DSL providers to open up. Many early DSL providers died out precisely because the heavily shared lines were just fine for most users.
Ok, but the people pay for such-and-such bandwidth, right? Wrong. They pay for a pipe of that amount, that is all. The ISP could, if they so wished, provide some sort of ubiquitous level of service guarantee. Easy enough to do - they set their CBQ up to provide service such that if the maximum number of users supportable all connected at once, no user could push more than this universally guaranteed minimum service. Or you could have the routers provide one narrow pipe at the guaranteed level of service and a second pipe at the remaining total pipe space. The router can then load-balance between the two. The router at the ISP's end then runs a virtual circuit that pools the non-guaranteed pipes of all customers together, then uses CBQ to guarantee each of the guaranteed circuits, with all remaining space thrown open to the non-guaranteed pipe.
And I'm not even getting warmed up on the sheer number of ways any of this can be done, never mind all the other possibilities.
And this is how ISP-to-ISP or ISP-to-Business lines work at the moment.
LynxOS is the only Linux derivative (that I know of) that is FAA-approved for use on aviation-related hardware. It is actually DO-178B certified, which is damn impressive for a general-purpose OS. Since there are Common Criteria level 5 (EAL5) tests available for Linux, it is presumably possible to produce a system that is FAA-certified and EAL5-compliant. Finally, the question of whether something could suppress or interfere with an alarm. That rather depends on exactly what has been included in LynxOS, as patching the kernel would negate the certification. However, ON CONDITION THAT something approximating hard realtime exists, it should be impossible for anything to interfere with activity by, say, polluting the scheduler. Equally, you would need Mandatory Access Controls. I don't think any of the implementations for Linux support true memory separation, but they do support enough controls that each process could be running in minimum privilege. Capabilities then allows you to eliminate services that nothing needs. Finally, you would ALSO need the system to have all of the fixes/patches necessary to be Carrier Grade-certified. (Yes, Carrier Grade Linux does exist.) That doesn't mean it'll never crash, but a 5Ns guarantee is not bad going.
Now, for your second point that if they couldn't secure Windows, they couldn't secure anything else -- in this case, you are completely correct. They didn't take even the most basic of precautions. As such, even the best security in the world (an Orange Book A1-class OS, for example) wouldn't be worth a whole lot. It would be like putting a nuclear bunker door in a doorway when the walls are missing. However, Linux does have the capacity to be used in such systems reliably and safely.
In the UK, it is not legal to store personally identifying information without consent and that person has a legal right to challenge the information if they feel it is inaccurate. A store camera recording your image, so long as it is registered with the Data Protection Registrar -and- there is a notice stating that the store is under surveillance, is probably ok but walking the edge as it is implicit consent not explicit consent. It is also not strictly personally identifying, as the picture alone cannot conclusively identify you.
Now, a phone taking a picture of you, coupling that with the phone's ID, phone's number and phone's owner's records, is most certainly personally identifying. And if you're trying to replace some of the software on the phone, it is arguable that you are most certainly not consenting to the terms and conditions for that software. Indeed, as software is licensed but a phone is bought, if you do not agree to the terms of the software you are actually legally obliged to delete all copies of it. As the phone is yours, however, you are not obliged to delete the phone as well. Since it is unreasonable to assume that the customer wanted an expensive paperweight (too light to be a brick), Common Law's "Reasonable Man" kicks in. A Reasonable Man who buys a phone expects to be able to use a phone. If they cannot use it with Apple's software, then they will have to use it with some other software. Further, if that personally identifying information is exported to the US, it may be in violation of safeguards prohibiting such transfers when data is exported to a country with no data protection laws (such as the US). Indeed, the US Government had to negotiate for many years just to gain access to the SWIFT criminal database due to data protection laws. (It would likely have been easier, but they were caught hacking into the database previously rather than obtaining legal access and that rather bothered some folks. Particularly as the US was publicly caught. Makes it harder to turn a blind eye.)
Now, I'm no lawyer, but British Law and European Law seem conducive to thinking this argument is good enough that a lawyer could craft an entirely acceptable and legally sound case out of it. I may well be wrong on that, since I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I can tell as a non-expert Apple does NOT have legal permission in the EU to take such photographs and does NOT have legal permission to restrict what you do with the phone hardware if you decouple it from the phone software.
The ISP doesn't pay more, the ISP has a fixed pipe for a fixed cost from their ISP, and so on up the chain. At the top of the chain, the backbones have a peering agreement at either fixed cost or no cost.
The pyramid works because the cost of the pipe is 99.9% the cost of installation, with 99% of the installation that will ever need to be done already done (via the existing telephone networks, cable networks, used fiber and dark fiber). The only actual cost to the providers is that 0.1% for maintenance. The cost of heating the buildings that the staff are in and cooling the server rooms the ISP's equipment is in, vastly exceeds the cost of actually providing the service. And that cost is fixed, regardless of how many customers there are or how much bandwidth they want.
Secondly, you are using an inherently unreliable network, NOT a commercial-grade MPLS tunnel. Even there, the same rule applies. A fixed pipe for a fixed cost. The cost is higher than regular rates, but the format is identical. If they want to scrap the regular scheme and move to a guaranteed service system, then price accordingly. I don't think anyone would dispute that. But metering merely works to obscure the real costs and the real service. You paying for a packet you send to the ISP, when you have no guarantee they will ever forward that packet to their provider OR that it'll ever make it to the destination OR that the reply will make it back to you -- it's about the same as paying the full price for a return train ticket in the knowledge that you can be kicked off that train at any time to make way for someone else with no possibility of a refund, a change of heart or a new ticket. If you wouldn't accept that for the train, then why are you so willing to accept the same crappy treatment of anyone else?
It is because people accept crappy treatment that most services today - be it the Internet, the phone networks, television, or whatever - are all crap. Don't add to the crap that you'll take from others, for goodness sakes!
What we have is good? Try telling that to the old-timers like me who remember when USENET was a place where people enjoyed conversing, rather than a place of spam, hatred and hostility.
The silliness has lasted over 300 years in America and many thousands throughout Europe. Even Plato despaired for democracy because of it.
In modern times, only part of the problem is the media. Short attention spans, short memories and a winner-takes-all culture lead to efforts by all sides to manipulate perceptions in the safe knowledge that virtually nobody is going to bother actually checking any supposed facts. To seriously alter elections or the marketplace, you'd need 10%-20% of those who would be adversely affected if the claim was wrong to be willing enough to be hurt to go out and look.
I can't imagine 10% of fans for a given sports team calling for their team to be deprived of a win if a replay cast it in doubt. And that's when it doesn't matter and doesn't affect them personally.
Where are you going to find that kind of number being willing to challenge their side when it does matter and would affect them personally?
If an honest willingness to be wrong does not exist, never has existed, and is unlikely to ever exist, then we need to find a way to create a wholly neutral apolitical body that can prevent distortion.
(Remember, 1st Amendment only applies to the Government, so if such a body existed and was not a part of the government but still had regulatory powers, it would be able to keep the silliness under some sort of control. Of course, that assumes that apolitical organizations can ever exist, that it could be prevented from ever having any agenda or bias, etc. But until artificial intelligence reaches an advanced state, I don't see how you're going to do that.)
Ummm, we can't be sure if nobody has attacked RFID. I seem to remember an international incident, not too long ago, where 50+ passports were successfully cloned - including those from countries implementing RFID on passports. At this time, there is zero information on whether the cloning was someone compromising the primary databases of the respective countries or whether it was done more directly by lifting information from passports in the open. It is extremely doubtful that we will ever be given that information, as no government is going to want to admit that people can access secure databases OR admit that the security on their passports is useless. (It has to be one of the two.)
Since we cannot know where the vulnerability was, it is prudent to assume that ANY part of the chain could be broken. Only a complete fool would do otherwise. This means that whilst we cannot be certain RFID has been compromised, we MUST believe that it might have been. To assume, blithely, that of course it couldn't be RFID is stupid. Why? Because that results you in only looking at facts that meet your theory. A very bad practice, and one that no reputable journal would be caught dead doing. Of course, a trade magazine isn't really a reputable journal. No trade magazine is ever going to question the assumptions of those who both pay for the advertising and then pay for the journal afterwards.
(Those familiar with certain works of Jeremy Brett may be familiar with the cry of "Data! I cannot work without data!")
Not quite. The Inflationary phase was anything but controlled. The current model predicts that between the initial Big Bang and the start of the inflationary phase (roughly one planck time), the universe expanded at some unknown rate. We can't observe the pre-inflationary phase, so there is no useful model for it. When the conditions for inflation were met, the Universe suddenly expanded at a truly fantastic rate (effectively faster than light). This inflationary phase not only generated an enormous amount of space very quickly, but also generated an enormous amount of matter very quickly. This is a consequence of quantum foam having a zero sum over a non-zero amount of space and non-zero amount of time but a non-zero sum at any given instant in space and time. (Hawking Radiation, likewise, results in something from an average of nothing for the same reason.)
The inflationary phase is extremely hard to model because, as Professor Hawking has noted, not only does space vary non-linearly in the universe, so does time. At whatever point the density of the universe was greatest, the rate of time was slowest. In some models of the very early universe, time follows a parabolic path. As you approach T=0, the rate of change of time also approaches zero. If this is correct, then there was no moment of Big Bang (and therefore no singularity) because there wasn't any point in time for it to occur. (Since Black Hole theory stems from Big Bang theory, and since the argument over time revolves around the density of matter bending time as well as space, this raises questions about whether models of Black Holes can be correct. A singularity cannot accumulate mass if delta-T is zero, for there is no point in time for the accumulation to occur in. However, that is another debate.)
Because mass bends time as well as space, we cannot accurately model the effects of inflation on the universe without knowing how mass changed due to the properties of quantum foam, because we cannot know the effect on time otherwise. All we know is that mass/energy was not a constant during this phase and that at no point in this phase did it equal the mass/energy of the universe today. We think the latter part of inflation will have tended to this value, but frankly there is no evidence for that. The universe dropped out of the inflationary phase, and it is assumed that the transition was relatively non-turbulent - or can at least be modeled as such - but most transitions we do know of are extremely turbulent and disruptive.
Some of this can be solved experimentally. You need an extremely high energy density - about the same as the output of a hydrogen bomb packed into a cubic centimeter is how I've heard it described - but it's not an unachievable amount of energy (obviously) even if we're not sure quite how to get the density that high. It's perfectly safe, too. Well, so long as theory is correct, at least. It would form a universe attached to this one through a mini black hole. Essentially you'd form a blister on this universe, where the blister contained another universe. The black hole is a good thing - prevents this universe getting fried from the inflationary phase of the new one - but since the black hole exists in some form in both universes, its state must reveal something about that other universe.
To me, a.sig/quotation is not a bumper sticker. It's a quote and a quote is a quote is a quote. Nothing more. Sorry to hear you feel otherwise. I'd have used more text, but the.sig field is limited. And, yes, it does matter. If you do not know the context, then you do not understand the quotation.
Ummm, the first truly working IPv6 patch for Linux was rolled out for the 2.0.20 kernel. My IPv6 box at the University of Manchester was registered on the 6Bone a year, possibly two, before Tony Blair was elected. Solaris patches came out even earlier. The author clearly doesn't know their history. The rest of their arguments may be right or wrong, but I have trouble trusting arguments made by someone willing to make inaccurate claims that could have been checked with but a few seconds effort.
If it was the Internet Auditing Project, they wrote a lightweight Nessus-like program called BASS to do the scan. They also got hacked by the NSA. This was the first time a serious report of MD5 being broken surfaced.
It's basically security through obscurity. A dangerous, but popular, past-time that never actually delivers at the end of the day. Not through lack of sincerity (necessarily) but through the fact that such a method is inherently flawed. Being easy doesn't mean it's any good. It's ultimately why steganography alone is not secure - there will be fingerprints (always) that allow you to separate the two signals and thus yield the original message, if the message is kept as-is. In the case of steganography, the solution is simple - increase the entropy. If the message is compressed and/or encrypted, and the pixels NOT used for storing the text have the same bits scrambled such that the level of randomness is roughly uniform across the whole message, the most you can definitely do is determine that the low pixels do not contain picture information. You would not necessarily be able to tell if that was due to storing more bits than the capture device was capable of accurately recording or if there was some other cause. The image would look, from any obvious analytical standpoint, the same in both cases.
So the question here is could you do the same in a proxy? Instead of trying to merely hide the data in traffic, can you reduce the fingerprint on the traffic you actually consider important and increase the background noise such that the signal and the noise are indistinguishable by any method whatsoever?
Not obviously. Not without rolling out IPSec, and I don't see any dictatorship agreeing to that. Hell, I can't see ANY country being willing to tolerate the bulk of Internet traffic being encrypted. (That, I suspect, is some part of why IPv6 is so late in being rolled out. Originally, it mandated IPSec. Which meant EVERYTHING on the Internet being encrypted well beyond the capacity of anyone to break. From the three-letter agency perspective, that would be bad for business. From the uber-expensive SSL certificate standpoint, that would kill any business other than authentication entirely. From the ISP perspective, it would cut into their profit margins for virtual leased lines.)
Yes, if multi-path is enabled, ISPs and backbone networks haven't turned themselves into spanning trees, and routers are configured to balance things properly, then you could randomize the paths of packet fragments. If (and if you thought that last lot was a big if, then wait till you see this!) the web server ALWAYS supports compressed and/or encrypted requests AND sends the replies likewise (ie: gzip and/or SSL/TLS can ALWAYS be used for ANY request, without exception, AND replies are no less compressed or encrypted), then (in principle) it would be difficult even with deep packet inspection to tell if a fragment was from legal content or illegal content. Not impossible, but difficult.
To make it impossible, you have to make the fragments non-differentiable to an external observer. ATM uses very small packets, so if you tunneled the fragments over ATM to make even smaller fragments, then tunnel over IP so that you could use IP-over-DNS (since the ATM fragments are roughly the same size as DNS packets), and THEN use something like DNSSec to make it extremely hard to distinguish tunneled packets versus conventional packets, and THEN somehow get this DNS tree linked into the official DNS tree in said country...
This could work. It's a variant of the Byzantine General's Problem. You can only tell what are real packets if (N/2)+1 nodes are legitimate. If the rogue network of interconnected DNS nodes is great enough that the authorized network of DNS nodes cannot reach that threshold, the authorized tree could, in principle, be subverted to serve the purposes of the rogue network.
In practice, no country is so stupid that it would blithely provide enough tunnels into anything that country regarded as mission-critical in such a manner as to allow such subversion. They MIGHT provide a few such tunnels and use the bottleneck in an effort to track the source (since it would be guaranteed that only hostile traffic would be coming through that tunnel). In other words, create a bloody great honeypot.
The last time a country DID allow critical infrastructure to be subverted, Julius Caesar ended up with a knife in his back. It kinda discourages the practice.
Oooooh! That's an idea I'd not thought of. You're right! A complete virtual network of honeypots, especially on one of the less secure cable networks, would be awesome. You'd probably want fewer than a million nodes, but with a complete simulated network, you could not only see how an intruder/malware attacked a single node but how they moved around the network as a whole. That could actually be quite a fascinating project in itself. A whole network would also surely be a very tempting target.
Why do you think I aimed low?:) Besides, it's not like anyone counting would run Nessus over 5 billion addresses. (And if they ran Superman over them, his X-Ray vision would corrupt the state of the memory chips.)
Actually, I'd disagree with the "roughly what a newborn can do". By the time a baby is born, it has a non-zero number of neural connections. These are not coded for anywhere in the DNA and the exact dynamics of how they do form isn't clear to me (if it's known at all). A newborn has roughly twice the number of connections than an adult brain, according to some estimates I've seen. Some will die off as new ones form, but the net result is a die-back. There is then a massive construction phase in the brain between the ages of around 7-18, with a second die-back at about 22-24. The adult brain then forms connections at a slower pace. The net result is a massively structured brain, not a loose collection of cells.
What you'd get if you followed this approach of Kurzweil's is the equivalent of stuffing a few billion zygotes together. Not a terribly useful approach. Well, actually it's worse even than that. Kurzweil's approach involves only the genome. It ignores everything we know about mechanisms external to the genome that control how any specific codon is expressed - of if it even is. We already know that this metadata is capable of selecting which protein any given sequence codes to or whether the sequence is used at all, but Kurzweil has assumed that coding is absolutely 1:1 and that all sequences are always used. Arguably, this metadata is a form of data compression, since in order to get the data in a form for which a 1:1 is always true will involve a substantially longer strand of DNA. I think we can assume that the sum total of all information sources for DNA is a Turing Machine, but it is a Turing Machine with parametrized functions, self-modifying code and highly obscure flow-control. And given how many strands of DNA there are in any given cell, it is also a Turing Machine that is part of a colossal Beowulf Cluster where the node count is comparable to anything in the Top 500 list. Further, nucleic DNA is not the only DNA in cells. Human cells only have nucleic DNA and mitochondrial DNA, but there are other organelles and other cell mechanisms which play a role.
So, this is not quite the same as using zygotes. Zygotes are more complex than his description as they DO use the metadata and are running massively in parallel at the protein level. Maybe it's closer to throwing a few billion prokaryotes together. Even there, there's still far more complexity than allowed for in Kurzweil's model, but damnit, I can't find any simpler self-replicating form of life! How the hell am I supposed to come up with a perfect analogy when there is nothing organic as remotely as primitive and ultra-simplistic as Kurzweil? (I was going to say Kurzweil's description but then realized that this would be more accurate phrasing.)
The cheapest method is to not have physical hardware. Get a single box, plug in the CLICK software routing element for the kernel and the routing element to pipe onto a network simulator like NS-2 or NS-3. Have your simulated network contain a million virtual nodes, all with their own IP address. You now have a million nodes on your network and there's nothing even a simple portscan could do to tell you that they were not physical devices.
If you're really clever, have some of the terminal nodes on the virtual tree connect to a virtual machine running on the Linux box. For any one of those nodes, you can even demonstrate the existence of applications, login prompts, etc.
It is a paradox that the extreme opposite of many things (be it freedom, intolerance, etc) is itself - albeit in another form. Before anyone asks, no that does not mean that war is peace or lies are truth. An effective lie is always a distortion of the truth, not its opposite. Equally, war is a distortion of peace (which is why America isn't under Martial Law and everything appears normal).
In this case, total freedom for the accused has become total freedom for the accuser. No middle ground has been sought. Yes, "common sense" is hard (and not always that common), but until someone can find a better way to balance it so that freedom is equitable, all you have is this "winner" mentality where the "loser" is there for your entertainment. You want to see something dehumanizing? How much more dehumanizing can you get?! Freedom is just a word if it doesn't carry responsibility and equality.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's start with quantum foam. No, it most assuredly isn't nonsense - if you cannot understand what I write, it merely means that you do not understand what I write, it does not make what I write wrong. I will go through this more slowly, then. The laws of thermodynamics strictly prohibit having any point with zero entropy. If there is neither mass nor energy, then you have no entropy. This is therefore a prohibited state. Which is why quantum foam is needed at all, there's bugger all observational evidence for it.
However, when a particle forms in quantum foam, it forms with its opposite pair. Always. The sum MUST equal zero. That is a requirement of the conservation of information, plus the conservation of matter/energy. Neither information NOR matter/energy can be created nor destroyed. EVER. These particles form, diverge, converge, collide and produce nothing. No matter-antimatter reactions here, this is strictly a zero-sum game. So, you ask, what is this sum of? Matter? Energy? Information? Everything. That should be obvious. If you cannot create or destroy information, then when these particles form, no NET information can be being added to the universe. However, if the particles in and of themselves had no information, no mass, no energy, then you would still have no entropy and would have utterly failed in the point of the exercise.
(God, sometimes I feel like I'm trying to teach schoolkids. Actually, no, I -have- taught schoolkids. They actually did a decent job of following the logic.)
Now for T=0. See Hawking's statements after visiting Pope John Paul. THEN come back and read this. Hey, off you go. You won't understand (and obviously won't accept) a word of this until you listen to the source I am working from. Yes, the source I am working from. A Professor Stephen Hawking. You may have heard of him. I've done rather more than heard of him, I've attended his lectures.
Spacetime is curved, and it curves more where there is more mass. That curvature can be expressed as a differential equation, Professor Hawking (yes, him again) expressed it as a parabola with no discontinuities and no singularities. He also talked of "imaginary time", but since his explanation suggested that this was not a reference to T=sqrt(-1), I wasn't particularly interested in that aspect of his explanation. I was much more concerned with a growing theory that time also has dimensions and was busy exploring that.
Anyways, if you factor in that spacetime curves with mass into the early universe, not merely space, then you get the result that there is - in Professor Hawking's words - "no point of creation and therefore no need of a Creator".
The energy density required is nowhere near as great as you claim. I forget the specific New Scientist article that gave the workings and results, you'll need to get off your backside and look it up like everyone else. It's about 20 years ago now that there was a large feature on inflationary theory, maybe a little older. I'm not hunting through all the back issues of a journal for the 1980s for one solitary Slashdot reader who can't be arsed to do the basic research.
Despite your low UID, I see you're unfamiliar with:
(QoS isn't a violation of network neutrality, provided all users experience identical QoS.)
Let's take ECN. User X has an app that demands bandwidth at the expense of others. ECN offers the application the choice of cutting back or being squelched. But it doesn't matter who happens to be X on any given day. If every single person in the area made that same excessive demand, every single person would experience the same consequence. No "pay-as-you-play".
Ok, what about BLACK and PURPLE? They are packet-dropping schemes analogous to RED and BLUE (what is it with packet-dropping and colours?) but designed to work in the case of unresponsive streaming traffic. Seems to describe your case fairly well. The streams are gracefully degraded so that the level of service any user gets is the level of service that can be comfortably supported at that time. That means those bandwidth hogs will be fine off-peak but will have to play fair during peak. Again, without respect to who those hogs are at any given time. Everyone gets the same experience and the same constraints.
Is it catastrophic if these sorts of features (that are available - don't go crying to the developers if the ISPs don't use what they have) are not being utilized? Nah. Not really. Early cable ISPs all used heavily shared lines with no level of service guarantee. Some still do. If the users were that bothered by the experience, the market forces would encourage more DSL providers to open up. Many early DSL providers died out precisely because the heavily shared lines were just fine for most users.
Ok, but the people pay for such-and-such bandwidth, right? Wrong. They pay for a pipe of that amount, that is all. The ISP could, if they so wished, provide some sort of ubiquitous level of service guarantee. Easy enough to do - they set their CBQ up to provide service such that if the maximum number of users supportable all connected at once, no user could push more than this universally guaranteed minimum service. Or you could have the routers provide one narrow pipe at the guaranteed level of service and a second pipe at the remaining total pipe space. The router can then load-balance between the two. The router at the ISP's end then runs a virtual circuit that pools the non-guaranteed pipes of all customers together, then uses CBQ to guarantee each of the guaranteed circuits, with all remaining space thrown open to the non-guaranteed pipe.
And I'm not even getting warmed up on the sheer number of ways any of this can be done, never mind all the other possibilities.
And this is how ISP-to-ISP or ISP-to-Business lines work at the moment.
LynxOS is the only Linux derivative (that I know of) that is FAA-approved for use on aviation-related hardware. It is actually DO-178B certified, which is damn impressive for a general-purpose OS. Since there are Common Criteria level 5 (EAL5) tests available for Linux, it is presumably possible to produce a system that is FAA-certified and EAL5-compliant. Finally, the question of whether something could suppress or interfere with an alarm. That rather depends on exactly what has been included in LynxOS, as patching the kernel would negate the certification. However, ON CONDITION THAT something approximating hard realtime exists, it should be impossible for anything to interfere with activity by, say, polluting the scheduler. Equally, you would need Mandatory Access Controls. I don't think any of the implementations for Linux support true memory separation, but they do support enough controls that each process could be running in minimum privilege. Capabilities then allows you to eliminate services that nothing needs. Finally, you would ALSO need the system to have all of the fixes/patches necessary to be Carrier Grade-certified. (Yes, Carrier Grade Linux does exist.) That doesn't mean it'll never crash, but a 5Ns guarantee is not bad going.
Now, for your second point that if they couldn't secure Windows, they couldn't secure anything else -- in this case, you are completely correct. They didn't take even the most basic of precautions. As such, even the best security in the world (an Orange Book A1-class OS, for example) wouldn't be worth a whole lot. It would be like putting a nuclear bunker door in a doorway when the walls are missing. However, Linux does have the capacity to be used in such systems reliably and safely.
In the UK, it is not legal to store personally identifying information without consent and that person has a legal right to challenge the information if they feel it is inaccurate. A store camera recording your image, so long as it is registered with the Data Protection Registrar -and- there is a notice stating that the store is under surveillance, is probably ok but walking the edge as it is implicit consent not explicit consent. It is also not strictly personally identifying, as the picture alone cannot conclusively identify you.
Now, a phone taking a picture of you, coupling that with the phone's ID, phone's number and phone's owner's records, is most certainly personally identifying. And if you're trying to replace some of the software on the phone, it is arguable that you are most certainly not consenting to the terms and conditions for that software. Indeed, as software is licensed but a phone is bought, if you do not agree to the terms of the software you are actually legally obliged to delete all copies of it. As the phone is yours, however, you are not obliged to delete the phone as well. Since it is unreasonable to assume that the customer wanted an expensive paperweight (too light to be a brick), Common Law's "Reasonable Man" kicks in. A Reasonable Man who buys a phone expects to be able to use a phone. If they cannot use it with Apple's software, then they will have to use it with some other software. Further, if that personally identifying information is exported to the US, it may be in violation of safeguards prohibiting such transfers when data is exported to a country with no data protection laws (such as the US). Indeed, the US Government had to negotiate for many years just to gain access to the SWIFT criminal database due to data protection laws. (It would likely have been easier, but they were caught hacking into the database previously rather than obtaining legal access and that rather bothered some folks. Particularly as the US was publicly caught. Makes it harder to turn a blind eye.)
Now, I'm no lawyer, but British Law and European Law seem conducive to thinking this argument is good enough that a lawyer could craft an entirely acceptable and legally sound case out of it. I may well be wrong on that, since I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I can tell as a non-expert Apple does NOT have legal permission in the EU to take such photographs and does NOT have legal permission to restrict what you do with the phone hardware if you decouple it from the phone software.
The ISP doesn't pay more, the ISP has a fixed pipe for a fixed cost from their ISP, and so on up the chain. At the top of the chain, the backbones have a peering agreement at either fixed cost or no cost.
The pyramid works because the cost of the pipe is 99.9% the cost of installation, with 99% of the installation that will ever need to be done already done (via the existing telephone networks, cable networks, used fiber and dark fiber). The only actual cost to the providers is that 0.1% for maintenance. The cost of heating the buildings that the staff are in and cooling the server rooms the ISP's equipment is in, vastly exceeds the cost of actually providing the service. And that cost is fixed, regardless of how many customers there are or how much bandwidth they want.
Secondly, you are using an inherently unreliable network, NOT a commercial-grade MPLS tunnel. Even there, the same rule applies. A fixed pipe for a fixed cost. The cost is higher than regular rates, but the format is identical. If they want to scrap the regular scheme and move to a guaranteed service system, then price accordingly. I don't think anyone would dispute that. But metering merely works to obscure the real costs and the real service. You paying for a packet you send to the ISP, when you have no guarantee they will ever forward that packet to their provider OR that it'll ever make it to the destination OR that the reply will make it back to you -- it's about the same as paying the full price for a return train ticket in the knowledge that you can be kicked off that train at any time to make way for someone else with no possibility of a refund, a change of heart or a new ticket. If you wouldn't accept that for the train, then why are you so willing to accept the same crappy treatment of anyone else?
It is because people accept crappy treatment that most services today - be it the Internet, the phone networks, television, or whatever - are all crap. Don't add to the crap that you'll take from others, for goodness sakes!
What we have is good? Try telling that to the old-timers like me who remember when USENET was a place where people enjoyed conversing, rather than a place of spam, hatred and hostility.
The silliness has lasted over 300 years in America and many thousands throughout Europe. Even Plato despaired for democracy because of it.
In modern times, only part of the problem is the media. Short attention spans, short memories and a winner-takes-all culture lead to efforts by all sides to manipulate perceptions in the safe knowledge that virtually nobody is going to bother actually checking any supposed facts. To seriously alter elections or the marketplace, you'd need 10%-20% of those who would be adversely affected if the claim was wrong to be willing enough to be hurt to go out and look.
I can't imagine 10% of fans for a given sports team calling for their team to be deprived of a win if a replay cast it in doubt. And that's when it doesn't matter and doesn't affect them personally.
Where are you going to find that kind of number being willing to challenge their side when it does matter and would affect them personally?
If an honest willingness to be wrong does not exist, never has existed, and is unlikely to ever exist, then we need to find a way to create a wholly neutral apolitical body that can prevent distortion.
(Remember, 1st Amendment only applies to the Government, so if such a body existed and was not a part of the government but still had regulatory powers, it would be able to keep the silliness under some sort of control. Of course, that assumes that apolitical organizations can ever exist, that it could be prevented from ever having any agenda or bias, etc. But until artificial intelligence reaches an advanced state, I don't see how you're going to do that.)
Ummm, we can't be sure if nobody has attacked RFID. I seem to remember an international incident, not too long ago, where 50+ passports were successfully cloned - including those from countries implementing RFID on passports. At this time, there is zero information on whether the cloning was someone compromising the primary databases of the respective countries or whether it was done more directly by lifting information from passports in the open. It is extremely doubtful that we will ever be given that information, as no government is going to want to admit that people can access secure databases OR admit that the security on their passports is useless. (It has to be one of the two.)
Since we cannot know where the vulnerability was, it is prudent to assume that ANY part of the chain could be broken. Only a complete fool would do otherwise. This means that whilst we cannot be certain RFID has been compromised, we MUST believe that it might have been. To assume, blithely, that of course it couldn't be RFID is stupid. Why? Because that results you in only looking at facts that meet your theory. A very bad practice, and one that no reputable journal would be caught dead doing. Of course, a trade magazine isn't really a reputable journal. No trade magazine is ever going to question the assumptions of those who both pay for the advertising and then pay for the journal afterwards.
(Those familiar with certain works of Jeremy Brett may be familiar with the cry of "Data! I cannot work without data!")
Not quite. The Inflationary phase was anything but controlled. The current model predicts that between the initial Big Bang and the start of the inflationary phase (roughly one planck time), the universe expanded at some unknown rate. We can't observe the pre-inflationary phase, so there is no useful model for it. When the conditions for inflation were met, the Universe suddenly expanded at a truly fantastic rate (effectively faster than light). This inflationary phase not only generated an enormous amount of space very quickly, but also generated an enormous amount of matter very quickly. This is a consequence of quantum foam having a zero sum over a non-zero amount of space and non-zero amount of time but a non-zero sum at any given instant in space and time. (Hawking Radiation, likewise, results in something from an average of nothing for the same reason.)
The inflationary phase is extremely hard to model because, as Professor Hawking has noted, not only does space vary non-linearly in the universe, so does time. At whatever point the density of the universe was greatest, the rate of time was slowest. In some models of the very early universe, time follows a parabolic path. As you approach T=0, the rate of change of time also approaches zero. If this is correct, then there was no moment of Big Bang (and therefore no singularity) because there wasn't any point in time for it to occur. (Since Black Hole theory stems from Big Bang theory, and since the argument over time revolves around the density of matter bending time as well as space, this raises questions about whether models of Black Holes can be correct. A singularity cannot accumulate mass if delta-T is zero, for there is no point in time for the accumulation to occur in. However, that is another debate.)
Because mass bends time as well as space, we cannot accurately model the effects of inflation on the universe without knowing how mass changed due to the properties of quantum foam, because we cannot know the effect on time otherwise. All we know is that mass/energy was not a constant during this phase and that at no point in this phase did it equal the mass/energy of the universe today. We think the latter part of inflation will have tended to this value, but frankly there is no evidence for that. The universe dropped out of the inflationary phase, and it is assumed that the transition was relatively non-turbulent - or can at least be modeled as such - but most transitions we do know of are extremely turbulent and disruptive.
Some of this can be solved experimentally. You need an extremely high energy density - about the same as the output of a hydrogen bomb packed into a cubic centimeter is how I've heard it described - but it's not an unachievable amount of energy (obviously) even if we're not sure quite how to get the density that high. It's perfectly safe, too. Well, so long as theory is correct, at least. It would form a universe attached to this one through a mini black hole. Essentially you'd form a blister on this universe, where the blister contained another universe. The black hole is a good thing - prevents this universe getting fried from the inflationary phase of the new one - but since the black hole exists in some form in both universes, its state must reveal something about that other universe.
And so am I!
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(Sparticles would have worked so much better in "Fires of Pompeii" -- so very much more Doctorish.)
Quantum Thermodynamics (another real theory) is much easier to understand and can be summed up as: "Eventually, everything is worthless."
In subprime space, nobody can hear you default.
To me, a .sig/quotation is not a bumper sticker. It's a quote and a quote is a quote is a quote. Nothing more. Sorry to hear you feel otherwise. I'd have used more text, but the .sig field is limited. And, yes, it does matter. If you do not know the context, then you do not understand the quotation.
As you are the first to have noticed my .sig, I'll give you the opportunity to tell me where it is from and what it relates to.
Ummm, the first truly working IPv6 patch for Linux was rolled out for the 2.0.20 kernel. My IPv6 box at the University of Manchester was registered on the 6Bone a year, possibly two, before Tony Blair was elected. Solaris patches came out even earlier. The author clearly doesn't know their history. The rest of their arguments may be right or wrong, but I have trouble trusting arguments made by someone willing to make inaccurate claims that could have been checked with but a few seconds effort.
Ah. Ingres being GPLed isn't open enough for you?
I thought it was 79.5%.
Unkaptshunned Kittehs aer a kryme agaynst kitteh-hood. Unless dey're orinj. Teh orinj wuns aer poyson.
If it was the Internet Auditing Project, they wrote a lightweight Nessus-like program called BASS to do the scan. They also got hacked by the NSA. This was the first time a serious report of MD5 being broken surfaced.
It's basically security through obscurity. A dangerous, but popular, past-time that never actually delivers at the end of the day. Not through lack of sincerity (necessarily) but through the fact that such a method is inherently flawed. Being easy doesn't mean it's any good. It's ultimately why steganography alone is not secure - there will be fingerprints (always) that allow you to separate the two signals and thus yield the original message, if the message is kept as-is. In the case of steganography, the solution is simple - increase the entropy. If the message is compressed and/or encrypted, and the pixels NOT used for storing the text have the same bits scrambled such that the level of randomness is roughly uniform across the whole message, the most you can definitely do is determine that the low pixels do not contain picture information. You would not necessarily be able to tell if that was due to storing more bits than the capture device was capable of accurately recording or if there was some other cause. The image would look, from any obvious analytical standpoint, the same in both cases.
So the question here is could you do the same in a proxy? Instead of trying to merely hide the data in traffic, can you reduce the fingerprint on the traffic you actually consider important and increase the background noise such that the signal and the noise are indistinguishable by any method whatsoever?
Not obviously. Not without rolling out IPSec, and I don't see any dictatorship agreeing to that. Hell, I can't see ANY country being willing to tolerate the bulk of Internet traffic being encrypted. (That, I suspect, is some part of why IPv6 is so late in being rolled out. Originally, it mandated IPSec. Which meant EVERYTHING on the Internet being encrypted well beyond the capacity of anyone to break. From the three-letter agency perspective, that would be bad for business. From the uber-expensive SSL certificate standpoint, that would kill any business other than authentication entirely. From the ISP perspective, it would cut into their profit margins for virtual leased lines.)
Yes, if multi-path is enabled, ISPs and backbone networks haven't turned themselves into spanning trees, and routers are configured to balance things properly, then you could randomize the paths of packet fragments. If (and if you thought that last lot was a big if, then wait till you see this!) the web server ALWAYS supports compressed and/or encrypted requests AND sends the replies likewise (ie: gzip and/or SSL/TLS can ALWAYS be used for ANY request, without exception, AND replies are no less compressed or encrypted), then (in principle) it would be difficult even with deep packet inspection to tell if a fragment was from legal content or illegal content. Not impossible, but difficult.
To make it impossible, you have to make the fragments non-differentiable to an external observer. ATM uses very small packets, so if you tunneled the fragments over ATM to make even smaller fragments, then tunnel over IP so that you could use IP-over-DNS (since the ATM fragments are roughly the same size as DNS packets), and THEN use something like DNSSec to make it extremely hard to distinguish tunneled packets versus conventional packets, and THEN somehow get this DNS tree linked into the official DNS tree in said country...
This could work. It's a variant of the Byzantine General's Problem. You can only tell what are real packets if (N/2)+1 nodes are legitimate. If the rogue network of interconnected DNS nodes is great enough that the authorized network of DNS nodes cannot reach that threshold, the authorized tree could, in principle, be subverted to serve the purposes of the rogue network.
In practice, no country is so stupid that it would blithely provide enough tunnels into anything that country regarded as mission-critical in such a manner as to allow such subversion. They MIGHT provide a few such tunnels and use the bottleneck in an effort to track the source (since it would be guaranteed that only hostile traffic would be coming through that tunnel). In other words, create a bloody great honeypot.
The last time a country DID allow critical infrastructure to be subverted, Julius Caesar ended up with a knife in his back. It kinda discourages the practice.
Oooooh! That's an idea I'd not thought of. You're right! A complete virtual network of honeypots, especially on one of the less secure cable networks, would be awesome. You'd probably want fewer than a million nodes, but with a complete simulated network, you could not only see how an intruder/malware attacked a single node but how they moved around the network as a whole. That could actually be quite a fascinating project in itself. A whole network would also surely be a very tempting target.
Why do you think I aimed low? :) Besides, it's not like anyone counting would run Nessus over 5 billion addresses. (And if they ran Superman over them, his X-Ray vision would corrupt the state of the memory chips.)
Actually, I'd disagree with the "roughly what a newborn can do". By the time a baby is born, it has a non-zero number of neural connections. These are not coded for anywhere in the DNA and the exact dynamics of how they do form isn't clear to me (if it's known at all). A newborn has roughly twice the number of connections than an adult brain, according to some estimates I've seen. Some will die off as new ones form, but the net result is a die-back. There is then a massive construction phase in the brain between the ages of around 7-18, with a second die-back at about 22-24. The adult brain then forms connections at a slower pace. The net result is a massively structured brain, not a loose collection of cells.
What you'd get if you followed this approach of Kurzweil's is the equivalent of stuffing a few billion zygotes together. Not a terribly useful approach. Well, actually it's worse even than that. Kurzweil's approach involves only the genome. It ignores everything we know about mechanisms external to the genome that control how any specific codon is expressed - of if it even is. We already know that this metadata is capable of selecting which protein any given sequence codes to or whether the sequence is used at all, but Kurzweil has assumed that coding is absolutely 1:1 and that all sequences are always used. Arguably, this metadata is a form of data compression, since in order to get the data in a form for which a 1:1 is always true will involve a substantially longer strand of DNA. I think we can assume that the sum total of all information sources for DNA is a Turing Machine, but it is a Turing Machine with parametrized functions, self-modifying code and highly obscure flow-control. And given how many strands of DNA there are in any given cell, it is also a Turing Machine that is part of a colossal Beowulf Cluster where the node count is comparable to anything in the Top 500 list. Further, nucleic DNA is not the only DNA in cells. Human cells only have nucleic DNA and mitochondrial DNA, but there are other organelles and other cell mechanisms which play a role.
So, this is not quite the same as using zygotes. Zygotes are more complex than his description as they DO use the metadata and are running massively in parallel at the protein level. Maybe it's closer to throwing a few billion prokaryotes together. Even there, there's still far more complexity than allowed for in Kurzweil's model, but damnit, I can't find any simpler self-replicating form of life! How the hell am I supposed to come up with a perfect analogy when there is nothing organic as remotely as primitive and ultra-simplistic as Kurzweil? (I was going to say Kurzweil's description but then realized that this would be more accurate phrasing.)
The cheapest method is to not have physical hardware. Get a single box, plug in the CLICK software routing element for the kernel and the routing element to pipe onto a network simulator like NS-2 or NS-3. Have your simulated network contain a million virtual nodes, all with their own IP address. You now have a million nodes on your network and there's nothing even a simple portscan could do to tell you that they were not physical devices.
If you're really clever, have some of the terminal nodes on the virtual tree connect to a virtual machine running on the Linux box. For any one of those nodes, you can even demonstrate the existence of applications, login prompts, etc.
It is a paradox that the extreme opposite of many things (be it freedom, intolerance, etc) is itself - albeit in another form. Before anyone asks, no that does not mean that war is peace or lies are truth. An effective lie is always a distortion of the truth, not its opposite. Equally, war is a distortion of peace (which is why America isn't under Martial Law and everything appears normal).
In this case, total freedom for the accused has become total freedom for the accuser. No middle ground has been sought. Yes, "common sense" is hard (and not always that common), but until someone can find a better way to balance it so that freedom is equitable, all you have is this "winner" mentality where the "loser" is there for your entertainment. You want to see something dehumanizing? How much more dehumanizing can you get?! Freedom is just a word if it doesn't carry responsibility and equality.