"I commend the nation's cable operators for utilizing the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) to negotiate and collectively enter into a unprecedented industry-wide agreement with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to limit the availability of child pornography on the internet."
No agreement is, or ever was, necessary for any ISP to proceed forth to fight child pornography. The fact that some kind of mutual agreement is in place suggests something else is going on behind the scenes. Would NCMEC have prohibited ISPs from fighting against child pornography without an agreement? I doubt that. Maybe these ISPs knew all along they were part of the problem with child pornography? Or is NCMEC trying some more extensive shake-down tactics?
The big question will be just to how far will these ISPs go in the name of protecting children? Just how many will use it as a false excuse to shut off internet resources that have nothing to do with child pornography and were not even the victim of spammers of such content?
How do you "regain control" of an encrypted data partition for which the only decryption key was in RAM before you rebooted the machine, having been entered a few months ago by ${BADADMIN} the last time the machine was rebooted?
If I wanted to do something like this, among the many parts of the scheme would be that the data is encrypted and the key for it is nowhere on the machine. If it gets rebooted, it would wait for someone to provide the key by some means. If it sits idle too long, people complain and the IT guy on call (our story's perp was an on-call person, as mentioned) logs in (maybe even from home), feeds in the data decryption key, and looks like a hero. If he's technically smart, he could also make the system very stable so this doesn't have to happen very often. And an OS re-install isn't enough to fix this (and might actually make things worse).
The greater reality is the system just didn't function well without the programmer's day to day "maintenance". And that's often just bad programming, rather than arrogance.
That's assuming that he actually did change the passwords.
For this to have even happened at all shows that the general level of intellect in that office area, and of the people above him, is rather poor, relatively speaking. If we assume this guy was smart (enough to set this up) and stupid (enough to actually do it)... and if there was another admin around equally smart, but not stupid, then the other admin should have seen some funky things being set up. Maybe this guy was the only admin for certain machines? Management wasn't doing their job right.
Now it really could be that this guy truly was the smartest (and stupidest) person around. Or it could be that he was the naive victim of someone else's efforts (another admin or maybe management itself). It happens (that the wrong guy can be fingered).
In many businesses, and even government offices, the upper management actually do view computer/IT people as "blue collar", especially when they are unionized (as apparently is the case at the SF city offices).
They basically told me that if I didn't give them my password I was fired. I absolutely REFUSED. Never do you ever need to have someone give you their password. A so-called security expert should know this.
So eventually I drove over there, typed in my password for them, and drove back to my office. They didn't find anything, obviously, and I got the machine back completely wiped two weeks later.
What you should have done was give them some random string of gibberish (write it down and keep it yourself so you can repeat the same exact string when asked again). They still won't be able to get in. Finally, when you have to go over there and help them, pull out that little piece of paper and type that random gibberish in again. When you also get access denied, repeat a few times more slowly. Then finally turn around and look at the idiots and say "You broke it!".
So here is your big business opportunity to start that small seller auction site you've always wanted to do. This way you can get rich off the smaller sellers for a few year before you, too, wander on over to the fixed price markets to move beyond the millionaire level.
I no longer use EBay because of the increased risk of dealing with people that don't keep their end of the deal (e.g. sellers that don't deliver the product or don't deliver a product that was described in the auction), and the fact that EBay was taking no steps to effectively deal with the issue.
Since then EBay has begun pushing PayPal harder, and that might also have been a reason for me to not use EBay.
The dilution of the auction space with fixed-price retailers is a big annoyance. Maybe it might also be a reason to quit.
If EBay wants to be in the business of aggregating retailers, then maybe it should register a new domain name and set it up, and provide links between it and the EBay site.
Here is a perspective on the size of these 25nm stripes and grooves. If a cross-hatch of these stripes and grooves done both vertically and horizontally each had a pixel of a picture placed on it, then the number of high definition 1920x1080 pictures you could fit in just one square millimeter would be 20.833 pictures wide by 37.037 pictures high, for an average of 771.605 pictures per square millimeter... a half minute of video at 25 fps. For the metric challenged, that's 529.166 pictures wide by 940.741 pictures high, for an average of 497808.642 pictures per square inch... over 4.6 hours of video at 30 fps.
In my most recent interview, instead of asking me to show code I had already written (which I had referenced via an open source project on my resume, anyway), they ask me to actually write some code on the whiteboard and explain why I would do things the way I was doing it. The interviewer asked for a specific algorithm example. But he was less interested in whether it would actually work (any good programmer can make code work), and more interested in my thought processes in figuring it out.
I ended up doing much the same thing there when I had the task of interviewing more programmers.
The problem with the web site forums is the severe fragmentation. You have to join so many different sites just to have access to several of the topics. With Usenet, you could go to a single place to get everything under one signon. With Usenet, if you wanted to jump to another topic you have never been on before to ask some question, it's easy. With the web, you have to go find a site that carries that topic, register, keep track of yet another password, sift through ads that are in many cases abusive, and post your question. Then repeat half of that after you login, and do this all several times to see if you got an answer. And that doesn't even account for the fragmentation of there often being a couple dozen web sites covering the issue. But no web site is as thorough as Usenet; not even close.
Yes, it is sad that New Yorkers seem to host so many of the idiots of the Democratic party.
I am sure you are aware of the New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's campaign that claims it is to rid the Internet of child porn. So far, several major ISPs have fallen for the lies perpetrated by AG Cuomo and agreed to a code of serious misconduct to broadly overreact and shut down a huge portion of the Internet that has nothing to do with child porn. I am a subscriber to your services and am concerned that you might also be mislead by these lies and end up committing to the destructive agenda set out by Attorney General Cuomo. I urge you to contact the Attorney General's Office as soon as possible and tell him you will not participate in this stupid foolishness that will do nothing to actually shut down child pornography. Tell him instead that you will shut down actual sources of child pornography and nothing more than that. Tell him that you do not need to sign any agreements with his office whatsoever in order to do the right thing.
Sincerely,
ADD YOUR NAME HERE
cc: Office of New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo
If Cuomo really wanted to stop the child porn, he'd focus on the child porn. But this absolute idiot who is a disgrace to the human race is running some kind of agenda to shut down the internet. Instead of asking these ISPs to close off the groups that have the porn, he's creating a situation where people who have absolutely nothing to do with the porn, and are involved in groups that do not have any porn, are forced to go somewhere else, which is likely to have those same porn groups. This is an action that won't shut down porn. It will just move it elsewhere... and move the other people that effectively and unknowingly help support it, along at the same time. Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! That is one dumb politician.
He's only making the problem worse.
The child porn will go somewhere else. He hasn't eliminated the market for it. Then he'll demand shutting down other parts of the net. Next you know he'll demand ISPs block port 443. Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! That is one dumb politician.
Part of the problem with hardware accelerated video decoding on Linux is that because Windows uses the accelerated video decoding to play back DRM protected media, the hardware companies cannot reveal how the video decoding part works (since it would presumably allow someone to grab the unencrypted-but-compressed video for various DRM protected video files by writing a windows driver or something)
However, the hardware could have been designed to merely decrypt, decode, check HDCP, and play, all in one. That is, one merely sends the A/V transport/container stream, in its encrypted form if not originally in the clear, to the video card (once it is set to operate in this mode). The video card will decrypt (if it has the appropriately licensed built-in key to enable this) the encrypted bits of the stream, do the (now clear) codec decoding (by whatever codec is involved), check to make sure the connection is to a proper HDCP device (which turns on re-encryption of the uncompressed HDMI stream, which the display device decrypts, so people can't tap into that), and then send the video over to the display. If it is encrypted and if a copy protection flag is set, it would disable any video or audio read-back capability (so the driver can't get a copy of what was decrypted either before or after decoding). While those of us that hate DRM (myself included) would despise the fact that this lets DRM work better, at least it CAN work in BSD and Linux because all the CPU software has to do is just replicate the stream up to the video card as-is (no decrypting, no decoding, etc). It keeps all the naughty DRM in the hardware (and also the patent licensing on the DRM and codecs). The BSD and Linux system can be entirely home-compiled from source with hacks and still let this work.
Actually, it might have been even better if the transport decrypt/decode was done in the monitor, or at least the decode part of this, which would have kept the bit rate over the HDMI manageable, even when we migrate to the Super Ultra Cinema format running at 5120x2160p120 (64:27 aspect ratio, which is the same 4x/3x ratio over 16:9 as 16:9 is over 4:3, and is almost exactly what cinema wide movies do now) in a couple decades. Even dual-link DVI couldn't handle this in uncompressed form. So they would need a whole new display interconnect or just need to retrofit compression into the existing one.
(I say fines and not compensation. Fines should go to the public and never to the accused, who only should get actual expenses covered. In Ius Commune, a firm principle is that neither the accuser nor the accused must ever benefit economically from the justice system. Rewarding the victim makes becoming a victim desirable, just like rewarding the accuser makes accusations more profitable than avoiding the initial issue.)
I disagree... in part. The victim (the defendant in a wrongful lawsuit) should, absent any proof that the defendant tricked the plaintiff into this action (that itself should also be a crime with fines and even jail time, in a separate criminal procedure), receive not only actual expenses, but certain additional compensations. One of those should cover the harassment and stress aspect. We're not talking about millions of dollars here. Maybe at most $50,000 prorated per year the case dragged out.
Plaintiffs often are at an advantage in obtaining an attorney to represent them on the basis that with potential high rewards, the attorney could reap many times the actual expenses on a big case. We see this all the time, especially in medical cases. Defendants, however, don't get the advantage of attracting an attorney to represent them in most cases because of the general lack of reciprocity in the reward mechanism.
I do agree with the principle that neither party should benefit from the judicial system. The end result should be to make the harmed party whole again (or the equivalent thereof). To the extent that a plaintiff's case should be able to attract representation by virtual of making the lawyer rich from it, the defendant should be equally able to attract representation by making that lawyer rich from it (whichever wins gets rich, presumably). But I think maybe the best way about this is to cut back on just how rich the lawyers can become in these cases, while still providing a means for parties that cannot afford lawyers to attract them on a contingency basis (for both sides).
Slashdot Mirror
"I commend the nation's cable operators for utilizing the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) to negotiate and collectively enter into a unprecedented industry-wide agreement with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to limit the availability of child pornography on the internet."
No agreement is, or ever was, necessary for any ISP to proceed forth to fight child pornography. The fact that some kind of mutual agreement is in place suggests something else is going on behind the scenes. Would NCMEC have prohibited ISPs from fighting against child pornography without an agreement? I doubt that. Maybe these ISPs knew all along they were part of the problem with child pornography? Or is NCMEC trying some more extensive shake-down tactics?
The big question will be just to how far will these ISPs go in the name of protecting children? Just how many will use it as a false excuse to shut off internet resources that have nothing to do with child pornography and were not even the victim of spammers of such content?
A smarter admin would have:
Oh wait!
How do you "regain control" of an encrypted data partition for which the only decryption key was in RAM before you rebooted the machine, having been entered a few months ago by ${BADADMIN} the last time the machine was rebooted?
Or ... he's the wrong guy and doesn't have the password.
If I wanted to do something like this, among the many parts of the scheme would be that the data is encrypted and the key for it is nowhere on the machine. If it gets rebooted, it would wait for someone to provide the key by some means. If it sits idle too long, people complain and the IT guy on call (our story's perp was an on-call person, as mentioned) logs in (maybe even from home), feeds in the data decryption key, and looks like a hero. If he's technically smart, he could also make the system very stable so this doesn't have to happen very often. And an OS re-install isn't enough to fix this (and might actually make things worse).
The greater reality is the system just didn't function well without the programmer's day to day "maintenance". And that's often just bad programming, rather than arrogance.
And I suppose they are going to try to hire a slashdotter with a 7 figure user ID to fix this.
That's assuming that he actually did change the passwords.
For this to have even happened at all shows that the general level of intellect in that office area, and of the people above him, is rather poor, relatively speaking. If we assume this guy was smart (enough to set this up) and stupid (enough to actually do it) ... and if there was another admin around equally smart, but not stupid, then the other admin should have seen some funky things being set up. Maybe this guy was the only admin for certain machines? Management wasn't doing their job right.
Now it really could be that this guy truly was the smartest (and stupidest) person around. Or it could be that he was the naive victim of someone else's efforts (another admin or maybe management itself). It happens (that the wrong guy can be fingered).
In many businesses, and even government offices, the upper management actually do view computer/IT people as "blue collar", especially when they are unionized (as apparently is the case at the SF city offices).
Now that you have installed a fresh new OS and have full control of the machine ... decrypt the encrypted data partitions!
They basically told me that if I didn't give them my password I was fired. I absolutely REFUSED. Never do you ever need to have someone give you their password. A so-called security expert should know this.
So eventually I drove over there, typed in my password for them, and drove back to my office. They didn't find anything, obviously, and I got the machine back completely wiped two weeks later.
What you should have done was give them some random string of gibberish (write it down and keep it yourself so you can repeat the same exact string when asked again). They still won't be able to get in. Finally, when you have to go over there and help them, pull out that little piece of paper and type that random gibberish in again. When you also get access denied, repeat a few times more slowly. Then finally turn around and look at the idiots and say "You broke it!".
So here is your big business opportunity to start that small seller auction site you've always wanted to do. This way you can get rich off the smaller sellers for a few year before you, too, wander on over to the fixed price markets to move beyond the millionaire level.
I no longer use EBay because of the increased risk of dealing with people that don't keep their end of the deal (e.g. sellers that don't deliver the product or don't deliver a product that was described in the auction), and the fact that EBay was taking no steps to effectively deal with the issue.
Since then EBay has begun pushing PayPal harder, and that might also have been a reason for me to not use EBay.
The dilution of the auction space with fixed-price retailers is a big annoyance. Maybe it might also be a reason to quit.
If EBay wants to be in the business of aggregating retailers, then maybe it should register a new domain name and set it up, and provide links between it and the EBay site.
I guess someone just wanted to have the world's smallest Etch-A-Sketch.
Eventually they will figure out to just put RAM there in place of the extra cores.
Here is a perspective on the size of these 25nm stripes and grooves. If a cross-hatch of these stripes and grooves done both vertically and horizontally each had a pixel of a picture placed on it, then the number of high definition 1920x1080 pictures you could fit in just one square millimeter would be 20.833 pictures wide by 37.037 pictures high, for an average of 771.605 pictures per square millimeter ... a half minute of video at 25 fps. For the metric challenged, that's 529.166 pictures wide by 940.741 pictures high, for an average of 497808.642 pictures per square inch ... over 4.6 hours of video at 30 fps.
In my most recent interview, instead of asking me to show code I had already written (which I had referenced via an open source project on my resume, anyway), they ask me to actually write some code on the whiteboard and explain why I would do things the way I was doing it. The interviewer asked for a specific algorithm example. But he was less interested in whether it would actually work (any good programmer can make code work), and more interested in my thought processes in figuring it out.
I ended up doing much the same thing there when I had the task of interviewing more programmers.
The problem with the web site forums is the severe fragmentation. You have to join so many different sites just to have access to several of the topics. With Usenet, you could go to a single place to get everything under one signon. With Usenet, if you wanted to jump to another topic you have never been on before to ask some question, it's easy. With the web, you have to go find a site that carries that topic, register, keep track of yet another password, sift through ads that are in many cases abusive, and post your question. Then repeat half of that after you login, and do this all several times to see if you got an answer. And that doesn't even account for the fragmentation of there often being a couple dozen web sites covering the issue. But no web site is as thorough as Usenet; not even close.
Yes, it is sad that New Yorkers seem to host so many of the idiots of the Democratic party.
Both parties have their stupid people. Dems have their Cuomo, Pelosi, and Clinton. Reps have their Bush, Cheney, and McCain. Nothing new here.
ADD ISP ADDRESS HERE
RE: Stopping child porn on the Internet
Dear ISP:
I am sure you are aware of the New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's campaign that claims it is to rid the Internet of child porn. So far, several major ISPs have fallen for the lies perpetrated by AG Cuomo and agreed to a code of serious misconduct to broadly overreact and shut down a huge portion of the Internet that has nothing to do with child porn. I am a subscriber to your services and am concerned that you might also be mislead by these lies and end up committing to the destructive agenda set out by Attorney General Cuomo. I urge you to contact the Attorney General's Office as soon as possible and tell him you will not participate in this stupid foolishness that will do nothing to actually shut down child pornography. Tell him instead that you will shut down actual sources of child pornography and nothing more than that. Tell him that you do not need to sign any agreements with his office whatsoever in order to do the right thing.
Sincerely,
ADD YOUR NAME HERE
cc: Office of New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo
If Cuomo really wanted to stop the child porn, he'd focus on the child porn. But this absolute idiot who is a disgrace to the human race is running some kind of agenda to shut down the internet. Instead of asking these ISPs to close off the groups that have the porn, he's creating a situation where people who have absolutely nothing to do with the porn, and are involved in groups that do not have any porn, are forced to go somewhere else, which is likely to have those same porn groups. This is an action that won't shut down porn. It will just move it elsewhere ... and move the other people that effectively and unknowingly help support it, along at the same time. Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! That is one dumb politician.
He's only making the problem worse.
The child porn will go somewhere else. He hasn't eliminated the market for it. Then he'll demand shutting down other parts of the net. Next you know he'll demand ISPs block port 443. Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! That is one dumb politician.
Part of the problem with hardware accelerated video decoding on Linux is that because Windows uses the accelerated video decoding to play back DRM protected media, the hardware companies cannot reveal how the video decoding part works (since it would presumably allow someone to grab the unencrypted-but-compressed video for various DRM protected video files by writing a windows driver or something)
However, the hardware could have been designed to merely decrypt, decode, check HDCP, and play, all in one. That is, one merely sends the A/V transport/container stream, in its encrypted form if not originally in the clear, to the video card (once it is set to operate in this mode). The video card will decrypt (if it has the appropriately licensed built-in key to enable this) the encrypted bits of the stream, do the (now clear) codec decoding (by whatever codec is involved), check to make sure the connection is to a proper HDCP device (which turns on re-encryption of the uncompressed HDMI stream, which the display device decrypts, so people can't tap into that), and then send the video over to the display. If it is encrypted and if a copy protection flag is set, it would disable any video or audio read-back capability (so the driver can't get a copy of what was decrypted either before or after decoding). While those of us that hate DRM (myself included) would despise the fact that this lets DRM work better, at least it CAN work in BSD and Linux because all the CPU software has to do is just replicate the stream up to the video card as-is (no decrypting, no decoding, etc). It keeps all the naughty DRM in the hardware (and also the patent licensing on the DRM and codecs). The BSD and Linux system can be entirely home-compiled from source with hacks and still let this work.
Actually, it might have been even better if the transport decrypt/decode was done in the monitor, or at least the decode part of this, which would have kept the bit rate over the HDMI manageable, even when we migrate to the Super Ultra Cinema format running at 5120x2160p120 (64:27 aspect ratio, which is the same 4x/3x ratio over 16:9 as 16:9 is over 4:3, and is almost exactly what cinema wide movies do now) in a couple decades. Even dual-link DVI couldn't handle this in uncompressed form. So they would need a whole new display interconnect or just need to retrofit compression into the existing one.
Need a lot of names (1400), many of which end in "-os"? Try Greek Islands.
So does that mean I'd be in violation of a trademark if I were selling pants intended for "mouse characters to cover up with"?
(I say fines and not compensation. Fines should go to the public and never to the accused, who only should get actual expenses covered. In Ius Commune, a firm principle is that neither the accuser nor the accused must ever benefit economically from the justice system. Rewarding the victim makes becoming a victim desirable, just like rewarding the accuser makes accusations more profitable than avoiding the initial issue.)
I disagree ... in part. The victim (the defendant in a wrongful lawsuit) should, absent any proof that the defendant tricked the plaintiff into this action (that itself should also be a crime with fines and even jail time, in a separate criminal procedure), receive not only actual expenses, but certain additional compensations. One of those should cover the harassment and stress aspect. We're not talking about millions of dollars here. Maybe at most $50,000 prorated per year the case dragged out.
Plaintiffs often are at an advantage in obtaining an attorney to represent them on the basis that with potential high rewards, the attorney could reap many times the actual expenses on a big case. We see this all the time, especially in medical cases. Defendants, however, don't get the advantage of attracting an attorney to represent them in most cases because of the general lack of reciprocity in the reward mechanism.
I do agree with the principle that neither party should benefit from the judicial system. The end result should be to make the harmed party whole again (or the equivalent thereof). To the extent that a plaintiff's case should be able to attract representation by virtual of making the lawyer rich from it, the defendant should be equally able to attract representation by making that lawyer rich from it (whichever wins gets rich, presumably). But I think maybe the best way about this is to cut back on just how rich the lawyers can become in these cases, while still providing a means for parties that cannot afford lawyers to attract them on a contingency basis (for both sides).