I have to say I really like the idea and think it's great. However, making an object a paint brush seems to be just an unimaginative copy of the tool for the physical world. It would seem to me that the brush interface would just be silly at best and interfere with usage at worst.
Sure if the idea of this brush is to sell it to artists or other adults mimicking an interface they are comfortable with might be best. However, this is a limitation of adults they project onto children thinking of them like limited innocent versions of adults. Children are exceptionally good at learning new interfaces and ways of controlling things and it is probably a good experience for them as well.
It just seems kinda silly to me that we repeat this same silly duplication of old interfaces each time. When cars were first invented people tried to put reigns on them along with many other examples I can't remember. I'm just surprised we haven't learned yet that new technologies generally demand new interfaces...then again since it usually takes a generation to become familiar with the new interfaces it may be too much to hope that the designers would ever see this.
(Note this isn't a real criticism just a general observation and nit picking)
Prejudice, Preconceptions and Expectations
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Pornified
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· Score: 1
Just from a review it would be hasty for me to accuse the author of approaching the topic with concious prejudice or negative feelings though since porn is one of those areas like abortion which almost everyone has a strong opinion about most articles about it have this problem in one way or another. However, even if this author did their best to present an objective balanced view our inherent social preconceptions.
Consider for instance the claims that porn elicits responses that resemble addiction. What doubtlessly true it is also misleading, like quoting the college graduation rates of blacks in a discussion of racial differences without mentioning socioeconomic differences. Once you realize that studies are continually published showing similarities in behavior and brain response between eating sugar, chocolate and virtually all rewarding behaviors and addiction. After all adictive drugs don't work by magic, they exploit our pre-existing brain mechanisms. So while porn may in fact cause some addictive type behavior so too does love, romance, and particularly religious faith. Thus this isn't really so much an argument against porn but a restatement of our prejudices that the self-reinforcing behaviors of love, faith, and tasty foods are worthwhile in moderation but that porn is not.
While the support for the various other accusations wasn't explored enough in the review for a full rebutall I am quite skeptical that there are rigorous scientific results establishing what the statements seem to imply. For instance I don't doubt there are many relationships where excesive porn causes difficulty or adult virgins who spend time watching porn rather than having rewarding relationships but it is exceptionally difficult to disentangle the underlying psychological causes of the porn viewing from the effects of the porn itself. Looking at large amounts of porn is seen as socially unacceptable so just as with drinking alone (even at the same level that others drink socially) those that do it are likely to have some psychological or at least social issues.
Moreover, the results of many of this media research is framed in a misleadingly suggestive way. I don't know about this but many experiments purporting to show that violence movies/TV lead to violence in children are simply reporting the obvious fact that kids are more likely to do pretend karate moves on each other after seeing an episode of power rangers and says nothing about the real question of long term effects (yes this was a real study). It would be completely unsurprising and untroubling if people were less empathetic after having *just* watched porn. I expect sexual arousal makes people less empathetic in general as they are more focused on their needs and desires but this could reverse after they masturbate or as a long term effect. Remember we are interested in the effects of porn not simply how people behave diferently when aroused then not aroused.
In order to really test if porn damages relationships or has these other harmful effects you would need to randomly subject people to pornographic content and not just for short periods of time as I expect the studies mentioned were about. It is absurd to suggest that looking a porn a few times causes long term damage to relationships or empathy and unfortunatly long term studies regularly expousing people to porn haven't and can't be done. Even then the results would be somewhat suspect as the problems that porn causes in relationship may be the effect of a partners negative views on pornography rather than porn itself.
The statement about causing dehumanization made every skeptical bone in my body throb. Despite frequent attempts I have yet to get anyone to offer an adequate definition of dehumanization (one that doesn't apply equally to everyday activities like asking someone to hold things) much less propose a rigorous test to see if it is happening. The personal ancedots were particularly troubling. Talking about people graduating to more henious stuff is only ma
Representing this conflict as one of stylized representation versus realism is highly misleading. It was not *that* wind walker was stylized that made wind walker bad but *how* it was stylized. Wind walker was done in a particular style that in the US is reserved for very young children's cartoons and hence associated with childishness and a lack of substance. Conversly the new zelda is hardly trying to maximize realism. I think many zelda fans would be just as disappointed if the game was rendered in a photo-realistic type manner like that often used for thrillers/detective games.
Suggesting that the failure of wind walker shows a dislike of stylized representation is like saying my hatred of Kazinski (sp) paintings means I won't like Monet. In reality the difference between the US and Japanese market in this matter is just a preference for different types of style as one would expect from two distinct cultures.
As an aside I think the low popularity of adult comics/graphic novels in the US is mostly a combination of embarassment and a puritanical streak in our culture as any stylistic objections. Adults in the US are reluctant to be seen reading graphic novels least people think they are reading stuff for children. Furthermore most books for adults whether they are Charlotte Simons or something by Tom Clancy include some sex scenes. Americans seem able to tell themselves they don't have any purient interests when reading written word but not when looking at pictures.
While I agree that the people who write desktop apps are unlikey to start explicitly coding threads into their applications this doesn't mean the apps won't end up being multi-threaded. For instance with the OS X model for graphical applications (core ?) you already create seperate user interface code and core application code and communicate between them with a message passing style model. As CPUs start to emphasize multi-core/multi-thread features I expect the development assistance tools to automatically seperate applications into threads more and more in the future.
Good practice for most desktop apps is to write them in a modular architecture with various pieces communicating in well defined ways. I fully expect in the future many development aids will formalize/assist in this process and automatically break some of these components into seperate threads. In short I simply disagree that having threads always means increased complexity. With the right sort of tools it can even be an organizing principle for a great deal of code.
Also between word processing, graphics, and web browsing you probably have a fair chunk of the desktop application usage all of which either do or would benefit from multiple threads in multi-core enviornments (I think despite what you say photoshop is already multi-threaded or something similar to take advantage of multiple processors). Additionally network based apps are quite well suited to a multiple thread model (seperate the data/network handling part or parts from the core program).
Perhaps because of DRM? Apple can't release OS X for x86 until they have some kind of trusted hardware system to prevent the OS from being used on other hardware. Intel probably offered assurances about their trusted computing hardware.
Besides, I expect as before apple boxes will be kinda pricey for their performance thus it doesn't make sense for them to take risks to slice off a bit in processor price. AMD is producing some good chips now but will it still be at the top of the market in several years? Intel is huge and even if AMD keeps the pressure on them their market domination, capital and massive store of chip knowledge and patents guarantees that they will stay competitive for years.
In short it makes sense for apple to cut a deal with the market leader rather than the flashy new competitor.
I find it interesting that IBM choose to distort the date in their biometric scanners before storage. Since the type of distortion is likely to be secret, proprietary, or just plain difficult to duplicate it effectively locks in any organization into the IBM scanners. Since their system database would only contain IBMs hashes of biometric data buying even one none IBM scanner would require rescanning every user.
Now perhaps I am jumping to conclusions and IBM has implemented some kind of removable card interface for hashing but I find that doubtful. Moreover, hashing biometric data is of questionable benefit in any case. Most biometric data is more easily collectable by simple investagatory techniques (covert photography, dusting for prints) than reconstructing a face from the security data. Moreover, since biometric characteristics are necessarily unchangeable potential hackers could merely use the data from some other less secure biometric security system one of your users also uses. Heck, creating a fake biometric id system and using social engineering to get someone to use it would be way easier than reversing these hashes.
Furthermore designing a secure hash to accomodate the inexact nature of biometric identification seems difficult. By it's very nature a secure hash cannot be guaranteed to map similar inputs to similar hashs. Thus either the hash will be insecure, the system too prone to false negatives to be usefull, or the biometric data must first be rounded to exact values (or for borderline cases just hash both possible ways to round). Yet a rounding scheme which avoids too many false negatives will significantly reduce the 'password' space.
In a normal system the sensor would report all the biometric measurments to the authorization server which would compare the measurements to the stored measurements and see if they are sufficently close to an authorized user. Since a secure hash can't be 'close enough' the measurements must be rounded sufficently to always give the same value for the same user. The net result will be a reduction, not increase, in security. I actually suspect IBM isn't using a secure hash in the cryptographic sense.
A more promising option in my opinion would be to implement a distinct algorithm in the sensor to check that the person had normal human features. Thus even if a hacker steals the biometric info and attempts to produce a fake he must not only duplicate those particular measurements but incorporate them into an image/texture which is otherwise human normal. Since these two algorithms can use different information it would be difficult to defeat. Furthermore since the human detection can be isolated in the sensor no vendor incompatibility issues arise and the algorithm can even be upgraded.
First of all I have to say I entierly support the people writing/running the online poker bots. They have found a clever way of winning and I find the intellectual competition between various bot writers far more stimulating than people just playing poker (I also think all those rules in F1 racing to reduce the benefits from creative engineering are horrible especially as this undermines the supposed purpose of racing as fueling research).
While some people might argue that using poker bots is wrong because it is a violation of some user agreement with the casino consitancy requires us to give no more credance to the casino liscensce agreement than any other clickwrap. Even if the Casino has a EULA type agreement preventing bots how is this really any different than a hypothetical clause in the MS EULA requiring that you won't dual boot linux or use OSS in general? In both cases the company is demanding you not use your own computers in the way you choose so as to protect their profits. We should treat both cases exactly the same.
Of course this isn't to say that the online casinos shouldn't do what they can to detect and evict bots (though seizing their money goes too far...you can ban whoever you like from your sight but stealing their money is a whole other matter). This brings me to the title of this post. No, I don't think that this poker bot or even poker playing in general will create significant advances in AI.
However, the battle between the automated bots and those trying to detect (or even take advantage of) the bots does offer real promise. Online casinos are only the tip of the iceberg, I fully expect the war between bots and anti-bots to only get more ferocious and spread from casinos and MMPOGs to more and more online activities. Finally their will be competitive pressure to develop incrimentally more and more sophisticated AIs dealing with more and more types of situations.
Unfortunatly, the academic community is particularly ill-suited toward developing integrated human like AI. We know from brain research and evolution that incrementally equipping and improving a system gradually with pragmatic hacks and adding specialized functional subunits can create human-like intelligence (it made us). Moreover, the continued difficulties faced by AI research suggests that no simple elegant algorithm will serve. If you want a computer to do all the things a person does you you need to program that computer with all hundreds of specialized sub-functions our brains posses. In short no clever idea will allow us to circumvent the fact that human like AI will take a massive number of lines of code.
Unfortunatly, while the academic community is very apt at creating algorithms for well specified functions, e.g., computer vision, it is very poor at creating massive integrated applications. While the core concepts and algorithms for the OS, database and the like have often come from academia it isn't a coincedence that the complex fully featured non-reasearch versions are either commercial or open-source. Quite simply academia rewards novelty and creativity not dilligence and the quality of the final product. As a CS prof you are far better off (and have more fun) testing your own pet idea or at best creating a demonstration app with a few other research group members than incrimentally contributing small features to a massive code base.
Only the commercial software companies and open source communities have the sort of reward structures suitable to creating usefull AI. In these communities it is overall product usefullness that is rewarded and many people are happy to make incrimental improvements even if they won't make for a good paper. I just hope these bot wars provide the begining baby steps necessery to get some of these projects rolling.
Look this is a perfectly reasonable response. Suppose someone started using your personal webserver to constantly test their bandwidth, i.e., put up a page which invited people to measure the speed they could download your entire site.
Also it doesn't look like any of the other sites are in trouble. If you read the notice they asked them to take it down because it encourages non-personal use of google maps. Basically I take that to mean it encouraged people to put it in the background rather than actively using it. Alot like the example with the webpage. I mean how would you feel if people started using your webpage as a background and made you go over yout transfer quota.
I TA college mathematics courses and it is quite clear that by the time students are in college they are convinced mathematics is just about blindly memorizing algorithmic routines. Nothing could be further from the case and I don't think it is a coincedence that many math grad students are horribly doing arithmetic. I for one almost failed 2nd grade because I couldn't do my multiplication tables fast and accurately enough (I thought it was a waste of time to memorize this stuff and I was right)
Learning to do things *efficently* by hand (as you would in a standardized test) does not really give understanding. Instead the students should be asked to reason about the process of changing decimals into fractions or heck just teach them basic logic instead. Spending time drilling algorithms into their heads that they can always just turn to calculators to do anyway is a real waste of time and turns kids off math and science.
Besides, knowledge of the algorithm is easy once you have understanding. However, not only does this empahsis on rote learning waste time it actually seems to give kids a mental block to real understanding. By the time these kids reach college they expect that courses (or at least math courses) will be just rote learning. Not only do they expect it but they will flounder if this safe pattern is broken making it nearly impossible to teach anything but rote facts. Indeed the students will usually prefer a huge amount of memorization to something requiring real understanding.
Look not everyone is running networks for fortune 500 companies or government agencies. For most of us we don't need any more computer security than the security we have for our house.
If you keep your passwords in a drawer at home the only vulnerability you face is someone breaking in to steal them or sneaking a look. Yet anyone who could break in or seriptitously look in your computer drawer could probably just plant a keyboard sniffer.
For low security home use, and especially if the hardware would only cause a network outage, the expense and difficulty of losing passwords more than outweighs the risk of writing them down comprimising them.
Besides, if you can write down the passwords you can make them very random as you don't need to remember them. This means you gain *more* security from purely remote attacks and for most people this is all they are concerned about.
This is kinda a dumb worry. It asks us to believe that in the future people will start using a genetic test without figuring out what it tests for.
If we identify a gene for autism what we would do is run the tests on a bunch of people like Bill Gates and see if it only identified people with severe disabilities. If it also identified geniuses I doubt many people would make use of the test. The deciscion to termininate a pregnancy is a pretty emotional one as it is and I doubt a test which may mean your kid has autism but may mean he will be an intellectual superstar would encourage people to get abortions.
Well for such a system to work you would need to automatically replicate files in some manner. Otherwise files might disappear if computers go down . If such a system became truly popular then one might well integrate it into the webbrowser or a similar program and that would essentially keep it running all the time.
The real problems are not replication but allocation of resources. What prevents someone from flooding all the disk space with junk? Presumably you would need some sort of credit system where you could only upload new material proportional to the disk space you are donating and your time online, some sort of cryptographic authentication of this or something. Just as difficult is dealing with file ownership and revision (do you merge changes when it is simultaneously modified).
Yah I understand about the papers. It's a pet peeve of mine whenever I am doing research and the authors can't post their papers because the journal has copyright. At least they get to be posted sometime.
Maybe I don't know enough about how BT works but does it do any sort of coordination to make sure the file stays availible if the seed nodes go offline? In particular I thought the tracker needed to have a reference to some seed node which will have the full file. So if you really want to eliminate the necessity of having a server for a file it would seem you would need to build logic into the network that guarantees a certain level of redundancy for files of a certain popularity.
I agree that they are mostly used for illegal material. However, I would argue that for ilicit material the current systems are pretty good at getting people mp3s. Sure trying to make everything encrypted and so that no source knows what file they are serving are primarily to facilitate IP theft (and somewhat for freedom for disidents in repressive regimes).
However, the question here is whether going trackerless is just a benefit for illicit activity. I suggest not.
Read my above posts for a full explanation but basically by becoming trackerless for the first time P2P offers a benefit to legal users. Right now if you are hosting legal material what motivation do you have to put it up on a P2P network rather than hosting it on your computer in a moral normal fashion? Sure some really popular big downloads might benefit from BT but these are few and far between.
However, once you make the system trackerless all the sudden it makes sense to put up legal files on the system. People who want to turn their computers off or use laptops and don't want to pay for webhosting would find such a system quite attractive.
While I agree that currently the only substantial use for trackerless P2P is IP theft. Sure it helps people a little because when they are getting their linux ISOs they don't need to worry if the server goes down. Realistically though for any popular download it isn't too hard to find a server to host the tracker which is pretty reliable.
However, there apparently isn't any lack of trackers for ilegal content. On the other hand the potential uses of trackerless P2P for legal purposes are huge. We just don't see these applications yet because we don't yet have working trackerless P2P. Dismissing trackerless P2P as only being good for illicit activity before we see what develops is the same error as dismissing the VCR as only useful for illegal copying because the media companies couldn't predict the rise of video sales.
Truly trackerless P2P completely changes the game. At the moment P2P offers few benefits besides a certain degree of anonymity so it is mostly used for people who want to share mp3s but wouldn't put them up on their webserver. If P2P goes trackerless if can REPLACE your webserver. Rather than posting your media to a website or single server you can post it directly to the P2P network.
The potential applications are huge. Home users who don't have or want websites can easily use such a system to share files without worrying about keeping their computer always on. Popular, legal but socially akward material can be easily hosted. Right now if I want to share my pornographic home movies I either need to pay money to an ISP which allows porno (most wont and I face the danger of huge bandwidth fees) or keep my computer always on to run a tracker.
In the future if some form of file ownership/change could be implemented P2P could replace webhosting. Imagine if sites like wikipedia could be started up without needing a foundation to pay for bandwidth because everyone who uses it contributes some of their bandwidth. This would finally realize the true potential of the web as equalizing sources of media.
As I understand it this, like the Azureas(sp) DHT technology, is simply a secondary protocol one can use on top of BT. Thus even if you are correct and decentralized searching imposes a large performance hit you can still go ahead and use the original BT without any of this additional crap.
Moreover, I expect the speed difference is really caused by two factors. First simple algorithmic efficency, BT seems better than the earlier generation of P2P clients (people learned something. Secondly, previous decentralized search engines worked by essentially propograting your query through the entire network.
That is if I wanted to find "asian porn" it would send out a request to all nearby machines telling them if they knew where any asian porn was located. These then would replicate these requests to the machines they know about and so forth. As you might guess this is horribly inefficent and slow. In fact I imagine searching might use almost as much if not more bandwidth than downloading (add up all the bandwidth from all the queried machines).
This is the whole point of this guys Ph.D thesis. The system I just described above is alot like shouting in a big room, "anyone know where I can get some asian porn" and then since not everyone can hear you everyone else repeats your question and relays the results back to you. This guy wants to implement the more efficent system where you go find the guy you know who likes asian porn and ask him where you can find some, or if you don't know anyone like that you can find someone who will point you in the right direction.
If it works I bet it would address the performance issues with decentralized searching.
Well I haven't tried out this program but the papers on his website describe the searching being done on XML metadata which can include file, format as well as things like director, or genre.
Well perhaps not quite. However, this is where web technology is headed.
While one benefit of P2P is psuedo-anonymous file hosting. That is if I wish to spread some information I need not set up a webserver and be easily traceable (ideally once everything goes trackerless). Another one is the fact that the consumers of information can provide the bandwidth for the resources they consume.
The benefits for open sourceesque projects cannot be underestimated. Running community sites like wikipedia is very difficult as they need to pay for lots of bandwidth and server space. A well designed P2P system would turn every user of a resource into a partial server. This means it is no more expensive to provide information a million people want than to provide information 10 people want.
Of course some issues such as file ownership permissions need to be dealt with. However, this is exactly the sort of technology that is needed to realize the great leveling capacity of the internet and turn non-profit groups and individuals into just as important media distribution entities as major corporations.
This is very interesting (though I would really like to see more info on how it works I only saw one paper). However while perfect for a PhD demo it seems in the long run it would be better to build a fully distributed system from the groun up. I seem to remember freenet doing something similar but I don't think they ever implemented searching.
In particular by building both searching and trackerlessness into such a system from the groun up one could benefit from a clean elegant metaphor (both searching and the components of file retrieval could be retrieving a key from the p2p network). Of course the math of making sure queries are done efficently is pretty damn hard (I expect each node would need to keep a map of the nearby nodes and the network 'distances' between them and some weighting).
However, if you could make it work it would be great (and not just for illegal activity). This essentially realizes the dream of allowing content access to subsidize server bandwidth.
Actually I woul argue just the opposite. It is most definatly unethical to try and keep knowledge secret just to maintain your economic superiority. After all letting them have the knowledge (assuming it is only economiclly usefull and not militarily) is in and of itself no skin off your back and the fact that it stops you from exploiting them in return for this knowledge or its fruits is irrelevant.
As an analogy suppose you were visiting a poor diabetic for dinner. On your way in you scan the room trying to memorize everything you see as you have trained yourself to do at great effort because you often find it gives you an advantage. In so doing you spot his insulin hiding out of the way under a pillow. After dinner his blood sugar shoots up and he can't find his insulin. Now you could demand to garnish his already small wages in return for telling him where the insulin is hiding. After all you did make an investment to gain this information and it isn't your fault he lost the insulin. However it would still be morally wrong to do so.
In general when helping someone costs you very little and aids them greatly you have a moral obligation to help. This is just as true when the other person is in another country as when they are in your neighborhood. Furthermore it is hard to think of an example where the benefit is potentially so great relative to the cost. The information itself costs nothing and at worst we improve the standard of living in these other countries and lose our supply of cheap labour (more likely though everyone gains because as these countries become rich they too produce scientific and engineering knowledge). Conversely this information offers the possibility for these countries to pull out of poverty and go from horrible suffering to a comfortable existance.
Finally, why should countries be the relevant units? Why is it that other americans should have the right to this knowledge but not Indians or Iraqis? Is there something special that makes americans more worthy?
Sure you might reply it matters because it is the result of US scientists (which isn't even necesserily true). However, this doesn't answer anything. Why isn't it the children of all scientists who should have the right to this information, or perhaps only the people in the state it was discovered? Or if you want to make the taxpayer funding argument shouldn't only the rich be given access, the poor after all are on net recieving resources from the government and hence can't be said to be funding the research.
The choice of countries as the relevant group of people who should benefit is merely a selfish choice or just an emotional one. We do it out of warm feelings of nationalism or because this lets us extract the most money from other groups. However, it is morally irrelevant and wrong. There is no relevant moral difference between someone born 100feet south of the US-Mexico border and one born 100feet north.
I understand that we all get used to and expect a certain quality of life. We start feeling we deserve this high paying (relative to other countries) job or such a good salary. However, if your salary drops by half you still have hospitals to treat you, indoor plumbing, water, police, fire, a TV, radio, and cellphone (though less minutes). Allowing this sort of information and jobs to migrate to the third world makes the difference for them between abject poverty and a minimal level of comfort and health. If you really believe all men are made equal the fact you were born an american can't mean you deserve these things and they don't, who your parents were shouldn't make a difference. So it is clear the only moral thing to do is not try and block this flow of expertise and jobs.
Of course we should implement a massive government insurance scheme so that one segment of society is not bearing the brunt of this cost alone but this is a topic for another day.
Was it for reasons that takes more than five seconds to describe? Most likely
Lets be clear on what we mean by 'the reasons something happens'. Surely we don't expect a complete account of facts in the world giving sufficent conditions for the event to occur.
Suppose I throw a rock a your window and break it. What is the reason your window is broken. Simple, I threw a rock at it. However, if you wanted to argue that there isn't any simple reason your window broke you could. After all it isn't just that I threw a rock at it, it is also that no one else blocked the rock from hitting the window, that your window was made in the common fashion and not with extra thickness, that experiences in childhood and millions of years of evolution endowed me with sufficent aim to hit your window. If you want you can also throw in all sorts of other facts to explain why it was that window and not some other window.
So to be clear when we ask what the reason something happened is we aren't asking for a complete account of what made it happen. Rather we are asking for an explanation of why it behaved differently than we might have thought if we hadn't seen the result. That is when you want to know the reason your window is broken you want to know what makes that window different than all those other windows that don't break. To be precisce what we want when we ask for a reason something happened is something like the following.
We have in mind some background model of how we expect things to behave. Things that require an explanation or we can provide a reason for are those things which we wouldn't expect on this model (or at least aren't guaranteed on this model). What we want as a reason is some additional fact which is causally related to the effect we wish to explain and knowledge of which significantly increases the probability of the effect. Of course social context will determine which of these reasons is appropriate. One could equally well cite "a rock hit it", "some guy on slashdot threw a rock at it", or "this guy on slashdot is a crazy philosophy grad student who thought it would be amusing to illustrate his example" as reasons your window broke but which one is the desired reason is context dependent.
Of course there are situations where there is no one simple reason which works on it's own (at least if we exclude the 'reason' things were in a state which had the property of causing the result). For instance you might have many small facts which iniviually raise the probability of the result only slightly but together do raise it significantly. However, it is far from clear to me that the US/muslim issue is of this kind.
In particular as you note the four facts you present do not significantly increase our probability of suicide bombers. Thus while they may be necessery conditions, just as with the nothing blocked my rock example, they need not be part of the reason. So the question becomes is there any small set of simple facts which would increase this probability greatly?
I don't know but it is possible. For instance consider the three contributing circumstances below.
1) Many muslims view the US as evil for it's support of israel. Also this conflict has both demonstrated the effectiveness of suicide bombers and publicly connected them with righteous causes as well as giving them an alluring air.
2) The culture accompaning the muslim faith respects force as a religously and politically acceptable tool. They also are not particularly accepting of other faiths. (These are features shared by christianity. I mention them to distinguish these religions from ones like buddhism, hinduism and some others which aren't as likely to feel the need to convert others to their way of life)
3) There is a great deal of pride in the islamic world and many their still would like to think of themselves as the center of civilization. As such american cultural, scientific and milatary dominance is particularly galling.
Even if we suppose that foreign students are not granted the constitutional protections of free speech and free association (which they are) US professor certainly have these rights. As such assuming they are dealing with unclassified data they have a constitutionally protected right to explain/convey/tell the students the concepts in question.
Also it simply won't work. Aside from classified programs US scientists regularly rush off to foreign countries to explain their results at conferences. Hell a large fraction of the profs coming up with this stuff are (or were) foreign nationals. Do you really think they are going to abide by such a law or seek ways around it. As a graduate student and soon to be professor I know I would try and circumvent this rule except in very rare circumstances (the students seems to be specifically looking for milatary information or the data is stuff that should have been clasifie but was overlooked) and I bet many other people would do the same.
Why the fuck are people so stupid when it comes to security. It is like they are constitutionally unable to realize that it does not good to spend a great deal of resources patching one avenue of attack when others are left wide open. Whether it be plane travel or graduate students learning information they could just as well have read from a journal in their home country.
Moreover since the same information can be easily found in other countries's universities like the UK this won't decrease the amount of military technology lost. In fact since many of these people contribute important ideas which are used in milatary applications it will only reduce our security.
How the hell can anyone be dumb enough to believe this is a good idea?
So let me get this straight. You are worried that some sophisticated criminal is going to construct a reader for whatever protocol is used in these cards. Chase down the cryptographic flaws in the algorithm, walk around with a broadcasting reader to copy information (which could be detected by police or the credit card company) and then manufacture some fake card as a duplicate of yours?
Don't you think it would be alot simpler to just put a hidden camera on your person and photograph people's credit card numbers when they use a normal card. I mean cmon current credit cards offer virtually no security, anything else has to be an imporovement.
Also I think the dangers of a rogue person going around reading cards and hacking them is overrated. Given the specialized challenge-response part reading these cards probably would require specialized hardware so it isn't going to be like every script kiddy can do this and law enforcement can help prevent script kiddy kits from being sold.
Also I imagine one could easliy implement a limit on how fast you can query the card. Keep some charge in a capacitor when read and can't be read again until the capacitor discharges (add a counter to this if you want a valid reader to be able to read 2-3 times). Lets say the capicitor can hold charge for 30 secs (it is just maintaing a number in memory) you could reasonably limit the reads to 3 in that period thus at best you can do 6 reads a minute. If you use a 128 bit key and the card is so insecure you can read 1 bit per read that is still 20 minutes to copy your ID. You would probably notice someone staying close to you for that long. On the other hand the higher strength reading signal used and the more often the easier it is to be located by police.
Finally if they embeded an authorization to read secret in their proprietary readers it could be made quite difficult to make a remote reader.
Yes it is true that various standards used for RFID have been shown to be insecure but this doesn't mean this new card will be insecure as well. That makes about as much sense as noting that most computer programs are insecure, or even that a large collection share the common vulnerability of caching cryptographic data to swap, and deducing that therefore gpg isn't secure.
There are no algorithmic challenges to making such a system work. Challenge response protocols are well studied. The primary problem is providing enough power for the cryptographic chip while not coupling it too tightly to the reader/broadcaster. If the cryptographic computation is closely connected and powered by the broadcasting circuit then power usage and RF fluctuation can be potentially used (and some attacks demonstrated I believe) to steal secrets.
Still this problem is hardly insurmountable. One could do alot of research into masking the computations or more simply seperate the computation for the broadcast/reception (of course you would need your own antenna or battery as a power source).
So just like a computer program it could be done well or poorly all depending on who designes it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to say I really like the idea and think it's great. However, making an object a paint brush seems to be just an unimaginative copy of the tool for the physical world. It would seem to me that the brush interface would just be silly at best and interfere with usage at worst.
Sure if the idea of this brush is to sell it to artists or other adults mimicking an interface they are comfortable with might be best. However, this is a limitation of adults they project onto children thinking of them like limited innocent versions of adults. Children are exceptionally good at learning new interfaces and ways of controlling things and it is probably a good experience for them as well.
It just seems kinda silly to me that we repeat this same silly duplication of old interfaces each time. When cars were first invented people tried to put reigns on them along with many other examples I can't remember. I'm just surprised we haven't learned yet that new technologies generally demand new interfaces...then again since it usually takes a generation to become familiar with the new interfaces it may be too much to hope that the designers would ever see this.
(Note this isn't a real criticism just a general observation and nit picking)
Just from a review it would be hasty for me to accuse the author of approaching the topic with concious prejudice or negative feelings though since porn is one of those areas like abortion which almost everyone has a strong opinion about most articles about it have this problem in one way or another. However, even if this author did their best to present an objective balanced view our inherent social preconceptions.
Consider for instance the claims that porn elicits responses that resemble addiction. What doubtlessly true it is also misleading, like quoting the college graduation rates of blacks in a discussion of racial differences without mentioning socioeconomic differences. Once you realize that studies are continually published showing similarities in behavior and brain response between eating sugar, chocolate and virtually all rewarding behaviors and addiction. After all adictive drugs don't work by magic, they exploit our pre-existing brain mechanisms. So while porn may in fact cause some addictive type behavior so too does love, romance, and particularly religious faith. Thus this isn't really so much an argument against porn but a restatement of our prejudices that the self-reinforcing behaviors of love, faith, and tasty foods are worthwhile in moderation but that porn is not.
While the support for the various other accusations wasn't explored enough in the review for a full rebutall I am quite skeptical that there are rigorous scientific results establishing what the statements seem to imply. For instance I don't doubt there are many relationships where excesive porn causes difficulty or adult virgins who spend time watching porn rather than having rewarding relationships but it is exceptionally difficult to disentangle the underlying psychological causes of the porn viewing from the effects of the porn itself. Looking at large amounts of porn is seen as socially unacceptable so just as with drinking alone (even at the same level that others drink socially) those that do it are likely to have some psychological or at least social issues.
Moreover, the results of many of this media research is framed in a misleadingly suggestive way. I don't know about this but many experiments purporting to show that violence movies/TV lead to violence in children are simply reporting the obvious fact that kids are more likely to do pretend karate moves on each other after seeing an episode of power rangers and says nothing about the real question of long term effects (yes this was a real study). It would be completely unsurprising and untroubling if people were less empathetic after having *just* watched porn. I expect sexual arousal makes people less empathetic in general as they are more focused on their needs and desires but this could reverse after they masturbate or as a long term effect. Remember we are interested in the effects of porn not simply how people behave diferently when aroused then not aroused.
In order to really test if porn damages relationships or has these other harmful effects you would need to randomly subject people to pornographic content and not just for short periods of time as I expect the studies mentioned were about. It is absurd to suggest that looking a porn a few times causes long term damage to relationships or empathy and unfortunatly long term studies regularly expousing people to porn haven't and can't be done. Even then the results would be somewhat suspect as the problems that porn causes in relationship may be the effect of a partners negative views on pornography rather than porn itself.
The statement about causing dehumanization made every skeptical bone in my body throb. Despite frequent attempts I have yet to get anyone to offer an adequate definition of dehumanization (one that doesn't apply equally to everyday activities like asking someone to hold things) much less propose a rigorous test to see if it is happening. The personal ancedots were particularly troubling. Talking about people graduating to more henious stuff is only ma
Representing this conflict as one of stylized representation versus realism is highly misleading. It was not *that* wind walker was stylized that made wind walker bad but *how* it was stylized. Wind walker was done in a particular style that in the US is reserved for very young children's cartoons and hence associated with childishness and a lack of substance. Conversly the new zelda is hardly trying to maximize realism. I think many zelda fans would be just as disappointed if the game was rendered in a photo-realistic type manner like that often used for thrillers/detective games.
Suggesting that the failure of wind walker shows a dislike of stylized representation is like saying my hatred of Kazinski (sp) paintings means I won't like Monet. In reality the difference between the US and Japanese market in this matter is just a preference for different types of style as one would expect from two distinct cultures.
As an aside I think the low popularity of adult comics/graphic novels in the US is mostly a combination of embarassment and a puritanical streak in our culture as any stylistic objections. Adults in the US are reluctant to be seen reading graphic novels least people think they are reading stuff for children. Furthermore most books for adults whether they are Charlotte Simons or something by Tom Clancy include some sex scenes. Americans seem able to tell themselves they don't have any purient interests when reading written word but not when looking at pictures.
While I agree that the people who write desktop apps are unlikey to start explicitly coding threads into their applications this doesn't mean the apps won't end up being multi-threaded. For instance with the OS X model for graphical applications (core ?) you already create seperate user interface code and core application code and communicate between them with a message passing style model. As CPUs start to emphasize multi-core/multi-thread features I expect the development assistance tools to automatically seperate applications into threads more and more in the future.
Good practice for most desktop apps is to write them in a modular architecture with various pieces communicating in well defined ways. I fully expect in the future many development aids will formalize/assist in this process and automatically break some of these components into seperate threads. In short I simply disagree that having threads always means increased complexity. With the right sort of tools it can even be an organizing principle for a great deal of code.
Also between word processing, graphics, and web browsing you probably have a fair chunk of the desktop application usage all of which either do or would benefit from multiple threads in multi-core enviornments (I think despite what you say photoshop is already multi-threaded or something similar to take advantage of multiple processors). Additionally network based apps are quite well suited to a multiple thread model (seperate the data/network handling part or parts from the core program).
Perhaps because of DRM? Apple can't release OS X for x86 until they have some kind of trusted hardware system to prevent the OS from being used on other hardware. Intel probably offered assurances about their trusted computing hardware.
Besides, I expect as before apple boxes will be kinda pricey for their performance thus it doesn't make sense for them to take risks to slice off a bit in processor price. AMD is producing some good chips now but will it still be at the top of the market in several years? Intel is huge and even if AMD keeps the pressure on them their market domination, capital and massive store of chip knowledge and patents guarantees that they will stay competitive for years.
In short it makes sense for apple to cut a deal with the market leader rather than the flashy new competitor.
I find it interesting that IBM choose to distort the date in their biometric scanners before storage. Since the type of distortion is likely to be secret, proprietary, or just plain difficult to duplicate it effectively locks in any organization into the IBM scanners. Since their system database would only contain IBMs hashes of biometric data buying even one none IBM scanner would require rescanning every user.
Now perhaps I am jumping to conclusions and IBM has implemented some kind of removable card interface for hashing but I find that doubtful. Moreover, hashing biometric data is of questionable benefit in any case. Most biometric data is more easily collectable by simple investagatory techniques (covert photography, dusting for prints) than reconstructing a face from the security data. Moreover, since biometric characteristics are necessarily unchangeable potential hackers could merely use the data from some other less secure biometric security system one of your users also uses. Heck, creating a fake biometric id system and using social engineering to get someone to use it would be way easier than reversing these hashes.
Furthermore designing a secure hash to accomodate the inexact nature of biometric identification seems difficult. By it's very nature a secure hash cannot be guaranteed to map similar inputs to similar hashs. Thus either the hash will be insecure, the system too prone to false negatives to be usefull, or the biometric data must first be rounded to exact values (or for borderline cases just hash both possible ways to round). Yet a rounding scheme which avoids too many false negatives will significantly reduce the 'password' space.
In a normal system the sensor would report all the biometric measurments to the authorization server which would compare the measurements to the stored measurements and see if they are sufficently close to an authorized user. Since a secure hash can't be 'close enough' the measurements must be rounded sufficently to always give the same value for the same user. The net result will be a reduction, not increase, in security. I actually suspect IBM isn't using a secure hash in the cryptographic sense.
A more promising option in my opinion would be to implement a distinct algorithm in the sensor to check that the person had normal human features. Thus even if a hacker steals the biometric info and attempts to produce a fake he must not only duplicate those particular measurements but incorporate them into an image/texture which is otherwise human normal. Since these two algorithms can use different information it would be difficult to defeat. Furthermore since the human detection can be isolated in the sensor no vendor incompatibility issues arise and the algorithm can even be upgraded.
First of all I have to say I entierly support the people writing/running the online poker bots. They have found a clever way of winning and I find the intellectual competition between various bot writers far more stimulating than people just playing poker (I also think all those rules in F1 racing to reduce the benefits from creative engineering are horrible especially as this undermines the supposed purpose of racing as fueling research).
While some people might argue that using poker bots is wrong because it is a violation of some user agreement with the casino consitancy requires us to give no more credance to the casino liscensce agreement than any other clickwrap. Even if the Casino has a EULA type agreement preventing bots how is this really any different than a hypothetical clause in the MS EULA requiring that you won't dual boot linux or use OSS in general? In both cases the company is demanding you not use your own computers in the way you choose so as to protect their profits. We should treat both cases exactly the same.
Of course this isn't to say that the online casinos shouldn't do what they can to detect and evict bots (though seizing their money goes too far...you can ban whoever you like from your sight but stealing their money is a whole other matter). This brings me to the title of this post. No, I don't think that this poker bot or even poker playing in general will create significant advances in AI.
However, the battle between the automated bots and those trying to detect (or even take advantage of) the bots does offer real promise. Online casinos are only the tip of the iceberg, I fully expect the war between bots and anti-bots to only get more ferocious and spread from casinos and MMPOGs to more and more online activities. Finally their will be competitive pressure to develop incrimentally more and more sophisticated AIs dealing with more and more types of situations.
Unfortunatly, the academic community is particularly ill-suited toward developing integrated human like AI. We know from brain research and evolution that incrementally equipping and improving a system gradually with pragmatic hacks and adding specialized functional subunits can create human-like intelligence (it made us). Moreover, the continued difficulties faced by AI research suggests that no simple elegant algorithm will serve. If you want a computer to do all the things a person does you you need to program that computer with all hundreds of specialized sub-functions our brains posses. In short no clever idea will allow us to circumvent the fact that human like AI will take a massive number of lines of code.
Unfortunatly, while the academic community is very apt at creating algorithms for well specified functions, e.g., computer vision, it is very poor at creating massive integrated applications. While the core concepts and algorithms for the OS, database and the like have often come from academia it isn't a coincedence that the complex fully featured non-reasearch versions are either commercial or open-source. Quite simply academia rewards novelty and creativity not dilligence and the quality of the final product. As a CS prof you are far better off (and have more fun) testing your own pet idea or at best creating a demonstration app with a few other research group members than incrimentally contributing small features to a massive code base.
Only the commercial software companies and open source communities have the sort of reward structures suitable to creating usefull AI. In these communities it is overall product usefullness that is rewarded and many people are happy to make incrimental improvements even if they won't make for a good paper. I just hope these bot wars provide the begining baby steps necessery to get some of these projects rolling.
Look this is a perfectly reasonable response. Suppose someone started using your personal webserver to constantly test their bandwidth, i.e., put up a page which invited people to measure the speed they could download your entire site.
Also it doesn't look like any of the other sites are in trouble. If you read the notice they asked them to take it down because it encourages non-personal use of google maps. Basically I take that to mean it encouraged people to put it in the background rather than actively using it. Alot like the example with the webpage. I mean how would you feel if people started using your webpage as a background and made you go over yout transfer quota.
I TA college mathematics courses and it is quite clear that by the time students are in college they are convinced mathematics is just about blindly memorizing algorithmic routines. Nothing could be further from the case and I don't think it is a coincedence that many math grad students are horribly doing arithmetic. I for one almost failed 2nd grade because I couldn't do my multiplication tables fast and accurately enough (I thought it was a waste of time to memorize this stuff and I was right)
Learning to do things *efficently* by hand (as you would in a standardized test) does not really give understanding. Instead the students should be asked to reason about the process of changing decimals into fractions or heck just teach them basic logic instead. Spending time drilling algorithms into their heads that they can always just turn to calculators to do anyway is a real waste of time and turns kids off math and science.
Besides, knowledge of the algorithm is easy once you have understanding. However, not only does this empahsis on rote learning waste time it actually seems to give kids a mental block to real understanding. By the time these kids reach college they expect that courses (or at least math courses) will be just rote learning. Not only do they expect it but they will flounder if this safe pattern is broken making it nearly impossible to teach anything but rote facts. Indeed the students will usually prefer a huge amount of memorization to something requiring real understanding.
Look not everyone is running networks for fortune 500 companies or government agencies. For most of us we don't need any more computer security than the security we have for our house.
If you keep your passwords in a drawer at home the only vulnerability you face is someone breaking in to steal them or sneaking a look. Yet anyone who could break in or seriptitously look in your computer drawer could probably just plant a keyboard sniffer.
For low security home use, and especially if the hardware would only cause a network outage, the expense and difficulty of losing passwords more than outweighs the risk of writing them down comprimising them.
Besides, if you can write down the passwords you can make them very random as you don't need to remember them. This means you gain *more* security from purely remote attacks and for most people this is all they are concerned about.
This is kinda a dumb worry. It asks us to believe that in the future people will start using a genetic test without figuring out what it tests for.
If we identify a gene for autism what we would do is run the tests on a bunch of people like Bill Gates and see if it only identified people with severe disabilities. If it also identified geniuses I doubt many people would make use of the test. The deciscion to termininate a pregnancy is a pretty emotional one as it is and I doubt a test which may mean your kid has autism but may mean he will be an intellectual superstar would encourage people to get abortions.
Well for such a system to work you would need to automatically replicate files in some manner. Otherwise files might disappear if computers go down . If such a system became truly popular then one might well integrate it into the webbrowser or a similar program and that would essentially keep it running all the time.
The real problems are not replication but allocation of resources. What prevents someone from flooding all the disk space with junk? Presumably you would need some sort of credit system where you could only upload new material proportional to the disk space you are donating and your time online, some sort of cryptographic authentication of this or something. Just as difficult is dealing with file ownership and revision (do you merge changes when it is simultaneously modified).
Yah I understand about the papers. It's a pet peeve of mine whenever I am doing research and the authors can't post their papers because the journal has copyright. At least they get to be posted sometime.
Maybe I don't know enough about how BT works but does it do any sort of coordination to make sure the file stays availible if the seed nodes go offline? In particular I thought the tracker needed to have a reference to some seed node which will have the full file. So if you really want to eliminate the necessity of having a server for a file it would seem you would need to build logic into the network that guarantees a certain level of redundancy for files of a certain popularity.
However, maybe I just don't understand BT.
I agree that they are mostly used for illegal material. However, I would argue that for ilicit material the current systems are pretty good at getting people mp3s. Sure trying to make everything encrypted and so that no source knows what file they are serving are primarily to facilitate IP theft (and somewhat for freedom for disidents in repressive regimes).
However, the question here is whether going trackerless is just a benefit for illicit activity. I suggest not.
Read my above posts for a full explanation but basically by becoming trackerless for the first time P2P offers a benefit to legal users. Right now if you are hosting legal material what motivation do you have to put it up on a P2P network rather than hosting it on your computer in a moral normal fashion? Sure some really popular big downloads might benefit from BT but these are few and far between.
However, once you make the system trackerless all the sudden it makes sense to put up legal files on the system. People who want to turn their computers off or use laptops and don't want to pay for webhosting would find such a system quite attractive.
While I agree that currently the only substantial use for trackerless P2P is IP theft. Sure it helps people a little because when they are getting their linux ISOs they don't need to worry if the server goes down. Realistically though for any popular download it isn't too hard to find a server to host the tracker which is pretty reliable.
However, there apparently isn't any lack of trackers for ilegal content. On the other hand the potential uses of trackerless P2P for legal purposes are huge. We just don't see these applications yet because we don't yet have working trackerless P2P. Dismissing trackerless P2P as only being good for illicit activity before we see what develops is the same error as dismissing the VCR as only useful for illegal copying because the media companies couldn't predict the rise of video sales.
Truly trackerless P2P completely changes the game. At the moment P2P offers few benefits besides a certain degree of anonymity so it is mostly used for people who want to share mp3s but wouldn't put them up on their webserver. If P2P goes trackerless if can REPLACE your webserver. Rather than posting your media to a website or single server you can post it directly to the P2P network.
The potential applications are huge. Home users who don't have or want websites can easily use such a system to share files without worrying about keeping their computer always on. Popular, legal but socially akward material can be easily hosted. Right now if I want to share my pornographic home movies I either need to pay money to an ISP which allows porno (most wont and I face the danger of huge bandwidth fees) or keep my computer always on to run a tracker.
In the future if some form of file ownership/change could be implemented P2P could replace webhosting. Imagine if sites like wikipedia could be started up without needing a foundation to pay for bandwidth because everyone who uses it contributes some of their bandwidth. This would finally realize the true potential of the web as equalizing sources of media.
As I understand it this, like the Azureas(sp) DHT technology, is simply a secondary protocol one can use on top of BT. Thus even if you are correct and decentralized searching imposes a large performance hit you can still go ahead and use the original BT without any of this additional crap.
Moreover, I expect the speed difference is really caused by two factors. First simple algorithmic efficency, BT seems better than the earlier generation of P2P clients (people learned something. Secondly, previous decentralized search engines worked by essentially propograting your query through the entire network.
That is if I wanted to find "asian porn" it would send out a request to all nearby machines telling them if they knew where any asian porn was located. These then would replicate these requests to the machines they know about and so forth. As you might guess this is horribly inefficent and slow. In fact I imagine searching might use almost as much if not more bandwidth than downloading (add up all the bandwidth from all the queried machines).
This is the whole point of this guys Ph.D thesis. The system I just described above is alot like shouting in a big room, "anyone know where I can get some asian porn" and then since not everyone can hear you everyone else repeats your question and relays the results back to you. This guy wants to implement the more efficent system where you go find the guy you know who likes asian porn and ask him where you can find some, or if you don't know anyone like that you can find someone who will point you in the right direction.
If it works I bet it would address the performance issues with decentralized searching.
Well I haven't tried out this program but the papers on his website describe the searching being done on XML metadata which can include file, format as well as things like director, or genre.
Well perhaps not quite. However, this is where web technology is headed.
While one benefit of P2P is psuedo-anonymous file hosting. That is if I wish to spread some information I need not set up a webserver and be easily traceable (ideally once everything goes trackerless). Another one is the fact that the consumers of information can provide the bandwidth for the resources they consume.
The benefits for open sourceesque projects cannot be underestimated. Running community sites like wikipedia is very difficult as they need to pay for lots of bandwidth and server space. A well designed P2P system would turn every user of a resource into a partial server. This means it is no more expensive to provide information a million people want than to provide information 10 people want.
Of course some issues such as file ownership permissions need to be dealt with. However, this is exactly the sort of technology that is needed to realize the great leveling capacity of the internet and turn non-profit groups and individuals into just as important media distribution entities as major corporations.
I fully expect this to change the world.
This is very interesting (though I would really like to see more info on how it works I only saw one paper). However while perfect for a PhD demo it seems in the long run it would be better to build a fully distributed system from the groun up. I seem to remember freenet doing something similar but I don't think they ever implemented searching.
In particular by building both searching and trackerlessness into such a system from the groun up one could benefit from a clean elegant metaphor (both searching and the components of file retrieval could be retrieving a key from the p2p network). Of course the math of making sure queries are done efficently is pretty damn hard (I expect each node would need to keep a map of the nearby nodes and the network 'distances' between them and some weighting).
However, if you could make it work it would be great (and not just for illegal activity). This essentially realizes the dream of allowing content access to subsidize server bandwidth.
Actually I woul argue just the opposite. It is most definatly unethical to try and keep knowledge secret just to maintain your economic superiority. After all letting them have the knowledge (assuming it is only economiclly usefull and not militarily) is in and of itself no skin off your back and the fact that it stops you from exploiting them in return for this knowledge or its fruits is irrelevant.
As an analogy suppose you were visiting a poor diabetic for dinner. On your way in you scan the room trying to memorize everything you see as you have trained yourself to do at great effort because you often find it gives you an advantage. In so doing you spot his insulin hiding out of the way under a pillow. After dinner his blood sugar shoots up and he can't find his insulin. Now you could demand to garnish his already small wages in return for telling him where the insulin is hiding. After all you did make an investment to gain this information and it isn't your fault he lost the insulin. However it would still be morally wrong to do so.
In general when helping someone costs you very little and aids them greatly you have a moral obligation to help. This is just as true when the other person is in another country as when they are in your neighborhood. Furthermore it is hard to think of an example where the benefit is potentially so great relative to the cost. The information itself costs nothing and at worst we improve the standard of living in these other countries and lose our supply of cheap labour (more likely though everyone gains because as these countries become rich they too produce scientific and engineering knowledge). Conversely this information offers the possibility for these countries to pull out of poverty and go from horrible suffering to a comfortable existance.
Finally, why should countries be the relevant units? Why is it that other americans should have the right to this knowledge but not Indians or Iraqis? Is there something special that makes americans more worthy?
Sure you might reply it matters because it is the result of US scientists (which isn't even necesserily true). However, this doesn't answer anything. Why isn't it the children of all scientists who should have the right to this information, or perhaps only the people in the state it was discovered? Or if you want to make the taxpayer funding argument shouldn't only the rich be given access, the poor after all are on net recieving resources from the government and hence can't be said to be funding the research.
The choice of countries as the relevant group of people who should benefit is merely a selfish choice or just an emotional one. We do it out of warm feelings of nationalism or because this lets us extract the most money from other groups. However, it is morally irrelevant and wrong. There is no relevant moral difference between someone born 100feet south of the US-Mexico border and one born 100feet north.
I understand that we all get used to and expect a certain quality of life. We start feeling we deserve this high paying (relative to other countries) job or such a good salary. However, if your salary drops by half you still have hospitals to treat you, indoor plumbing, water, police, fire, a TV, radio, and cellphone (though less minutes). Allowing this sort of information and jobs to migrate to the third world makes the difference for them between abject poverty and a minimal level of comfort and health. If you really believe all men are made equal the fact you were born an american can't mean you deserve these things and they don't, who your parents were shouldn't make a difference. So it is clear the only moral thing to do is not try and block this flow of expertise and jobs.
Of course we should implement a massive government insurance scheme so that one segment of society is not bearing the brunt of this cost alone but this is a topic for another day.
Was it for reasons that takes more than five seconds to describe? Most likely
Lets be clear on what we mean by 'the reasons something happens'. Surely we don't expect a complete account of facts in the world giving sufficent conditions for the event to occur.
Suppose I throw a rock a your window and break it. What is the reason your window is broken. Simple, I threw a rock at it. However, if you wanted to argue that there isn't any simple reason your window broke you could. After all it isn't just that I threw a rock at it, it is also that no one else blocked the rock from hitting the window, that your window was made in the common fashion and not with extra thickness, that experiences in childhood and millions of years of evolution endowed me with sufficent aim to hit your window. If you want you can also throw in all sorts of other facts to explain why it was that window and not some other window.
So to be clear when we ask what the reason something happened is we aren't asking for a complete account of what made it happen. Rather we are asking for an explanation of why it behaved differently than we might have thought if we hadn't seen the result. That is when you want to know the reason your window is broken you want to know what makes that window different than all those other windows that don't break. To be precisce what we want when we ask for a reason something happened is something like the following.
We have in mind some background model of how we expect things to behave. Things that require an explanation or we can provide a reason for are those things which we wouldn't expect on this model (or at least aren't guaranteed on this model). What we want as a reason is some additional fact which is causally related to the effect we wish to explain and knowledge of which significantly increases the probability of the effect. Of course social context will determine which of these reasons is appropriate. One could equally well cite "a rock hit it", "some guy on slashdot threw a rock at it", or "this guy on slashdot is a crazy philosophy grad student who thought it would be amusing to illustrate his example" as reasons your window broke but which one is the desired reason is context dependent.
Of course there are situations where there is no one simple reason which works on it's own (at least if we exclude the 'reason' things were in a state which had the property of causing the result). For instance you might have many small facts which iniviually raise the probability of the result only slightly but together do raise it significantly. However, it is far from clear to me that the US/muslim issue is of this kind.
In particular as you note the four facts you present do not significantly increase our probability of suicide bombers. Thus while they may be necessery conditions, just as with the nothing blocked my rock example, they need not be part of the reason. So the question becomes is there any small set of simple facts which would increase this probability greatly?
I don't know but it is possible. For instance consider the three contributing circumstances below.
1) Many muslims view the US as evil for it's support of israel. Also this conflict has both demonstrated the effectiveness of suicide bombers and publicly connected them with righteous causes as well as giving them an alluring air.
2) The culture accompaning the muslim faith respects force as a religously and politically acceptable tool. They also are not particularly accepting of other faiths. (These are features shared by christianity. I mention them to distinguish these religions from ones like buddhism, hinduism and some others which aren't as likely to feel the need to convert others to their way of life)
3) There is a great deal of pride in the islamic world and many their still would like to think of themselves as the center of civilization. As such american cultural, scientific and milatary dominance is particularly galling.
4) Quick o
Even if we suppose that foreign students are not granted the constitutional protections of free speech and free association (which they are) US professor certainly have these rights. As such assuming they are dealing with unclassified data they have a constitutionally protected right to explain/convey/tell the students the concepts in question.
Also it simply won't work. Aside from classified programs US scientists regularly rush off to foreign countries to explain their results at conferences. Hell a large fraction of the profs coming up with this stuff are (or were) foreign nationals. Do you really think they are going to abide by such a law or seek ways around it. As a graduate student and soon to be professor I know I would try and circumvent this rule except in very rare circumstances (the students seems to be specifically looking for milatary information or the data is stuff that should have been clasifie but was overlooked) and I bet many other people would do the same.
Why the fuck are people so stupid when it comes to security. It is like they are constitutionally unable to realize that it does not good to spend a great deal of resources patching one avenue of attack when others are left wide open. Whether it be plane travel or graduate students learning information they could just as well have read from a journal in their home country.
Moreover since the same information can be easily found in other countries's universities like the UK this won't decrease the amount of military technology lost. In fact since many of these people contribute important ideas which are used in milatary applications it will only reduce our security.
How the hell can anyone be dumb enough to believe this is a good idea?
So let me get this straight. You are worried that some sophisticated criminal is going to construct a reader for whatever protocol is used in these cards. Chase down the cryptographic flaws in the algorithm, walk around with a broadcasting reader to copy information (which could be detected by police or the credit card company) and then manufacture some fake card as a duplicate of yours?
Don't you think it would be alot simpler to just put a hidden camera on your person and photograph people's credit card numbers when they use a normal card. I mean cmon current credit cards offer virtually no security, anything else has to be an imporovement.
Also I think the dangers of a rogue person going around reading cards and hacking them is overrated. Given the specialized challenge-response part reading these cards probably would require specialized hardware so it isn't going to be like every script kiddy can do this and law enforcement can help prevent script kiddy kits from being sold.
Also I imagine one could easliy implement a limit on how fast you can query the card. Keep some charge in a capacitor when read and can't be read again until the capacitor discharges (add a counter to this if you want a valid reader to be able to read 2-3 times). Lets say the capicitor can hold charge for 30 secs (it is just maintaing a number in memory) you could reasonably limit the reads to 3 in that period thus at best you can do 6 reads a minute. If you use a 128 bit key and the card is so insecure you can read 1 bit per read that is still 20 minutes to copy your ID. You would probably notice someone staying close to you for that long. On the other hand the higher strength reading signal used and the more often the easier it is to be located by police.
Finally if they embeded an authorization to read secret in their proprietary readers it could be made quite difficult to make a remote reader.
Yes it is true that various standards used for RFID have been shown to be insecure but this doesn't mean this new card will be insecure as well. That makes about as much sense as noting that most computer programs are insecure, or even that a large collection share the common vulnerability of caching cryptographic data to swap, and deducing that therefore gpg isn't secure.
There are no algorithmic challenges to making such a system work. Challenge response protocols are well studied. The primary problem is providing enough power for the cryptographic chip while not coupling it too tightly to the reader/broadcaster. If the cryptographic computation is closely connected and powered by the broadcasting circuit then power usage and RF fluctuation can be potentially used (and some attacks demonstrated I believe) to steal secrets.
Still this problem is hardly insurmountable. One could do alot of research into masking the computations or more simply seperate the computation for the broadcast/reception (of course you would need your own antenna or battery as a power source).
So just like a computer program it could be done well or poorly all depending on who designes it.