In your nutcase fantasy world. Where you invent the strawman that the post that just says WcCain is aiding and abetting terrorists by giving them Obama's confidential itinerary is somehow saying that's election fraud instead.
The "old fashioned" way that post is talking about "manipulating elections" is to get the opponent killed.
But you voted for Bush twice, so why should you care about people getting killed in Iraq, or WcCain "winning" a 3rd Bush term. Your nutcase fantasy world just keeps giving.
Let's say that Childs did indeed build an excellent network. Let's say that he was indeed the only one competent to run it. Let's say that his SF city bosses did indeed let him run everything and keep it's operating and access details secret from them. The second his bosses, who own the network say he has to give them access, he has to give them access.
Childs doesn't get to decide the policy controlling that network. Even if the city managers and/or their other sysadmins are going to screw it up, it's theirs to screw up.
It doesn't matter that there's more to this story. Unless the back-back story is that Childs is secretly the mayor of San Francisco, he's got to give up the password.
Really I'm talking about adopting the model, not necessarily the current software, from PGP's PKI trust network. Though as much as possible would be good to reuse. And maybe even the same authorities for trusting for both SSL certificates and for PGP keys.
If I were Firefox, I would ship the browser with a trust web set to trust only the standard CAs.
If I were me (and I am, trust me;), I would then pick some other independent CAs that I trust. Like if CERT had a CA. Or if my crypto PhD friends had a CA and let me connect to it. That last one I'd like to see override the official CAs. Some independent CAs could get a contract from my bank, and my bank could recommend them. Or I could just trust my bank's CA, which might only trust some other CAs. I might even trust my insurance company's CA, which did something similar, and see my insurance rates go down.
And if I were my mom (I'm not, as far as you know), I might just trust only me, and let that control all my certificate authentication.
The system would take any of my trusted independent networks telling me that a site is untrustworthy as a lockout. Or maybe it might take a vote among conflicting trust messages from my trusted CAs. If saying "untrustworthy", it could offer to show the reason, which I could chose to ignore and trust anyway (onetime/duration/permanent). Or it might treat a site getting a "untrustworthy" message as untrustworthy, while sending a confirmation request to whichever CA says so, and await an investigation or something, which might issue a retraction (or not).
I don't see how your attack would succeed. Why would anyone trust someone they don't know they can trust? Whether they're desperate homeless people or just CS grad students with crushing gambling debts. If you're trusting strangers, it's not a trust web, it's just a sucker web. The use of a trust web is not to have a lot of trusted authorities, but just to have as few as possible, without having to trust all the same ones as everyone else, or having to choose exclusively between both trusting all the official ones and not trusting those at all.
They don't have to do anything. The system will work just as it does now. And even the greater flexibility is just a more precise way to modify who they trust, which they can already screw up. But there's no epidemic now, and so there's no reason to believe there will be an epidemic later.
You obviously don't even know how to read a simple description of a fairly straightforward upgrade to a tried and proven technology.
Don't ever pretend that you can talk to me about security, or anything else, ever again. Or use the word "seriously" as if you've got any credentials on it.
What you summarized is exactly what I'm talking about.
And the hole you're complaining about already exists right now. People can choose to accept as CAs anyone who they wish. They can choose to ignore warnings that sites aren't trusted.
The unsophisticated people would just leave the defaults alone like they do now. Or they'd mess them up, like they can do right now.
Maybe you still don't get what I'm talking about. But I'm not going to explain it again, especially if you insist on complaining about something you don't even understand, though it's not so hard.
Instead of relying on centralized CAs, and implicitly trusting these privileged monopolies, we could shift to trust webs.
It's like a social network. You trust who your "friends" trust, and distrust who they don't. With weightings, so some friends' and enemies' associations (and dissociations) count more than others Because some people you trust in their content, but not their judgement of who to trust (and vice versa, but probably more rarely).
Trust webs can perfectly simulate the current centralized trust model. You can just set your trust web to always trust whoever, say, VeriSign trusts, and ignore everyone else, which is what we get by default today. But you could tweak your trust web to say "If my grad student distrusts a site, then ignore whether VeriSign trusts it".
Such a trust web could therefore just ship set up with the current CAs the only trusted authorities, and work exactly the same as now. But we'd each have the freedom (or our sysadmins, who could lock the trust web changes away from normal users) to emphasize whoever we actually trust to influence our automated trust.
Independent authorities could "watch the watchers". So investigators with a reliable track record could become important "second guessers" to the "offical" CAs. People could make their reputation by proving a trusted authority has less than 100% good judgement. And the whole system can become more robust, instead of fracturing as soon as different CAs have different trust levels for different sites.
The technique and some SW is already available, for apps like PGP and others that rely on a Public Key Infrastructure. What's necessary for the critical mass that makes such a system work is for a browser like Firefox to upgrade to a trust web, with an easy and reliable UI with sensible defaults. Then we're as strong as the trust network in which we embed ourselves.
So you need to look out for what looks like ice, because it could really be water? Even though ice gets stuff wet by default? The metaphor doesn't work at all.
No, the problem is not in the MP3. Watching out for MP3 isn't going to help. Watching out for Windows is going to help.
Well, ASF is really a structured container format for multimedia. The audio format is supposed to be WMA or something similar. The links are contained along with the separate audio in the ASF file. If an app or the OS is going to coordinate the audio with some other content pointed to (whether HTML via HTTP or otherwise), then there's going to be something that has both the way that ASF does.
The problem is the way that ASF does the combination, and the way that Windows does the access - and just Windows' misleading truncation of filenames that are clues to whether the content could be executable. There are more secure ways of doing all of that, and Windows has bugs and design flaws in every layer. As usual.
Is there a GNOME (Ubuntu) screensaver that shows a realistic model (in scale, accurate surfaces) of the Earth and Moon orbiting each other?
I'd like to see our system from an alien's perspective whenever I've stopped working for a few minutes. Really give me the feeling of being "away from my desk".
Windows lets the unsafe ASF files appear to the operator to be safe MP3.
The last time I opened a file in Windows Media Player that had an incorrect extension it warned me of the fact, giving me the option of not playing it.
This report says that safeguard fails.
But of course, we can't say that Windows and ASF and IE are the security monsters. We have to blame MP3.
I don't see anything in the summary or article that blames mp3s, so I'm really not sure what you mean by that.
The title of this story is "Worm Transcodes MP3s To Infect PCs, not "Worm Infects PCs with ASFs". How much more clear could that be?
How about sealing in quartz (like the Apollo spacecraft windows) a series of pictures of people touching the entombed object and horribly dying? Embed some radioactive material against some phosphor or other light emitting elements charged up by the nuke waste.
Or we could just keep doing what we're doing, and eventually poison our whole society to death, and just let the legends of the "apocalypse" grow for a few millennia.
The buggy format is not MP3. The MP3 files are perfectly safe.
This worm transcodes them into ASF files. The ASF files are the threat. The ASF files pretend to be safe MP3s, but they include links that Windows automatically opens. MP3 files don't do that.
Of course, it's really Windows that's buggy (duh). Windows allows the worm to enter and run. Windows lets the unsafe ASF files appear to the operator to be safe MP3. Windows opens the ASF links to the bad sites. Windows then runs whatever the bad sites deliver to the browser (which the user could have just clicked to from another page, without the MP3/ASF worm at all, and just blown their system by Web surfing).
But of course, we can't say that Windows and ASF and IE are the security monsters. We have to blame MP3. Even though this exploit requires converting the file into something that's not MP3 before it can get started attacking you.
Bush's NASA is part of the Star Wars "missile defense" programme, as per Bush's current space policy that it support "space supremacy" by the Pentagon and the intel services. That's why Bush' put Star Wars engineer Michael Griffin in charge. Since Bush has sold Star Wars to the Czech Republic, and NASA is flailing, it's clear that Griffin is "doing a heckuva job".
This corporate handout that rips off the people is exactly the kind of EU tyranny that makes people vote to stop the current versions of the European Constitution whenever the people actually get to vote on it. Like the people of Ireland just did to stop the "Lisbon Treaty" that is the latest package of "merde".
The "Redundant" downmod should require at least one URL of an earlier post that's claimed to be redundant to be supplied in the downmod justification. The comment submission parser should both parse the justification for a valid clickable Slashdot URL format (and ensure that it's marked up clickable), and actually see that the specified URL points at a comment in the same story actually posted earlier. Then the metamoderator has to only click and read to see that the downmodded post really is redundant in content. That is exactly a case where the "justification" system would eliminate quite a lot of trollModding.
Everyone should get mod points unless they abuse them. Metamoderation is our way of flagging abusers, even though metamoderation is an even shabbier system than moderation. But all users "in good standing" should get metamod points. "Funny" meta/mods are a good example: humor fails when lots of reasonable people don't get the joke. That failure is the joker maker's fault. Your metamod is acceptable even if wrong, because you probably represent a lot of people who didn't get the joke, either.
All moderation and metamoderation is a statistical democracy. Democracy is not better because more heads are the best way to make the decision. But rather because of all the many ways to decide wrong (and they're all going to have some percentage of decisions wrong), democracy is the least bad. Because at least it makes an individual responsible for a decision (or their contribution to it), rather than divorce them from responsibility with some "official" role that numbs their conscience. And because by participating in the system as deciders, it makes those people accept the decisions others make about them, when the cycle turns around.
Of course, if the system is more a sham that's easier to abuse than to use, it creates merely disrespect by the people who are asked to do it to others, both as deciders and as the subject of the decisions. Metamoderation is just such a mockery. That's why I think that requiring more participation from downmodders would balance the cost:benefit ratio of moderating a little better, and so get more benefit by making the cost of nonbeneficial downmodding more prohibitive.
Slashdot Mirror
In your nutcase fantasy world. Where you invent the strawman that the post that just says WcCain is aiding and abetting terrorists by giving them Obama's confidential itinerary is somehow saying that's election fraud instead.
The "old fashioned" way that post is talking about "manipulating elections" is to get the opponent killed.
But you voted for Bush twice, so why should you care about people getting killed in Iraq, or WcCain "winning" a 3rd Bush term. Your nutcase fantasy world just keeps giving.
Let's say that Childs did indeed build an excellent network. Let's say that he was indeed the only one competent to run it. Let's say that his SF city bosses did indeed let him run everything and keep it's operating and access details secret from them. The second his bosses, who own the network say he has to give them access, he has to give them access.
Childs doesn't get to decide the policy controlling that network. Even if the city managers and/or their other sysadmins are going to screw it up, it's theirs to screw up.
It doesn't matter that there's more to this story. Unless the back-back story is that Childs is secretly the mayor of San Francisco, he's got to give up the password.
Because you summarized it correctly, said you didn't understand it, and then demonstrated that you didn't.
Just because my dog can learn to let me hold its paw and "smile" while I move it around doesn't mean it understands shaking my hand.
And now you've demonstrated that you don't even understand that basic reality. Even though you just executed it all by yourself.
Goodbye.
Really I'm talking about adopting the model, not necessarily the current software, from PGP's PKI trust network. Though as much as possible would be good to reuse. And maybe even the same authorities for trusting for both SSL certificates and for PGP keys.
If I were Firefox, I would ship the browser with a trust web set to trust only the standard CAs.
If I were me (and I am, trust me ;), I would then pick some other independent CAs that I trust. Like if CERT had a CA. Or if my crypto PhD friends had a CA and let me connect to it. That last one I'd like to see override the official CAs. Some independent CAs could get a contract from my bank, and my bank could recommend them. Or I could just trust my bank's CA, which might only trust some other CAs. I might even trust my insurance company's CA, which did something similar, and see my insurance rates go down.
And if I were my mom (I'm not, as far as you know), I might just trust only me, and let that control all my certificate authentication.
The system would take any of my trusted independent networks telling me that a site is untrustworthy as a lockout. Or maybe it might take a vote among conflicting trust messages from my trusted CAs. If saying "untrustworthy", it could offer to show the reason, which I could chose to ignore and trust anyway (onetime/duration/permanent). Or it might treat a site getting a "untrustworthy" message as untrustworthy, while sending a confirmation request to whichever CA says so, and await an investigation or something, which might issue a retraction (or not).
I don't see how your attack would succeed. Why would anyone trust someone they don't know they can trust? Whether they're desperate homeless people or just CS grad students with crushing gambling debts. If you're trusting strangers, it's not a trust web, it's just a sucker web. The use of a trust web is not to have a lot of trusted authorities, but just to have as few as possible, without having to trust all the same ones as everyone else, or having to choose exclusively between both trusting all the official ones and not trusting those at all.
They don't have to do anything. The system will work just as it does now. And even the greater flexibility is just a more precise way to modify who they trust, which they can already screw up. But there's no epidemic now, and so there's no reason to believe there will be an epidemic later.
You obviously don't even know how to read a simple description of a fairly straightforward upgrade to a tried and proven technology.
Don't ever pretend that you can talk to me about security, or anything else, ever again. Or use the word "seriously" as if you've got any credentials on it.
What you summarized is exactly what I'm talking about.
And the hole you're complaining about already exists right now. People can choose to accept as CAs anyone who they wish. They can choose to ignore warnings that sites aren't trusted.
The unsophisticated people would just leave the defaults alone like they do now. Or they'd mess them up, like they can do right now.
Maybe you still don't get what I'm talking about. But I'm not going to explain it again, especially if you insist on complaining about something you don't even understand, though it's not so hard.
That's why the browsers should ship with the defaults that all work exactly like they do now: trust only and always the official CAs.
And even now people can ignore the "bad certificate" warnings. There is no decrease in security, or in abusable UI, in what I described.
Which was all evident and clearly explained in my post. So I tend to agree with your Carlin quote. Which is why I like the way I described doing it.
If you don't have Windows, you're even more safe, even if you do have MP3s.
It's clearly the Windows that's the problem, as if that were ever in doubt.
Moderation -1
100% Troll
TrollMods would rather people get nuked to death rather than warned of the truth.
Instead of relying on centralized CAs, and implicitly trusting these privileged monopolies, we could shift to trust webs.
It's like a social network. You trust who your "friends" trust, and distrust who they don't. With weightings, so some friends' and enemies' associations (and dissociations) count more than others Because some people you trust in their content, but not their judgement of who to trust (and vice versa, but probably more rarely).
Trust webs can perfectly simulate the current centralized trust model. You can just set your trust web to always trust whoever, say, VeriSign trusts, and ignore everyone else, which is what we get by default today. But you could tweak your trust web to say "If my grad student distrusts a site, then ignore whether VeriSign trusts it".
Such a trust web could therefore just ship set up with the current CAs the only trusted authorities, and work exactly the same as now. But we'd each have the freedom (or our sysadmins, who could lock the trust web changes away from normal users) to emphasize whoever we actually trust to influence our automated trust.
Independent authorities could "watch the watchers". So investigators with a reliable track record could become important "second guessers" to the "offical" CAs. People could make their reputation by proving a trusted authority has less than 100% good judgement. And the whole system can become more robust, instead of fracturing as soon as different CAs have different trust levels for different sites.
The technique and some SW is already available, for apps like PGP and others that rely on a Public Key Infrastructure. What's necessary for the critical mass that makes such a system work is for a browser like Firefox to upgrade to a trust web, with an easy and reliable UI with sensible defaults. Then we're as strong as the trust network in which we embed ourselves.
Which is why the title is misleading because it doesn't reflect the damage that ASFs do, but implies that MP3s are dangerous.
So you need to look out for what looks like ice, because it could really be water? Even though ice gets stuff wet by default? The metaphor doesn't work at all.
No, the problem is not in the MP3. Watching out for MP3 isn't going to help. Watching out for Windows is going to help.
Well, ASF is really a structured container format for multimedia. The audio format is supposed to be WMA or something similar. The links are contained along with the separate audio in the ASF file. If an app or the OS is going to coordinate the audio with some other content pointed to (whether HTML via HTTP or otherwise), then there's going to be something that has both the way that ASF does.
The problem is the way that ASF does the combination, and the way that Windows does the access - and just Windows' misleading truncation of filenames that are clues to whether the content could be executable. There are more secure ways of doing all of that, and Windows has bugs and design flaws in every layer. As usual.
Is there a GNOME (Ubuntu) screensaver that shows a realistic model (in scale, accurate surfaces) of the Earth and Moon orbiting each other?
I'd like to see our system from an alien's perspective whenever I've stopped working for a few minutes. Really give me the feeling of being "away from my desk".
I know what it means, as I explained in detail.
But the headline says "MP3s" and "Infect PCs", but not ASF. That's how headlines work: the effect is to associate MP3s with the infection.
It's like a headline "Virus Infects Gays to Plague Nation". Gays are the victims, but "AIDS is the Gay Disease".
"Worm Transcodes MP3s To Infect PCs"
That seems pretty clearly to say "MP3s". And not to say "ASFs".
This report says that safeguard fails.
The title of this story is "Worm Transcodes MP3s To Infect PCs, not "Worm Infects PCs with ASFs". How much more clear could that be?
How about sealing in quartz (like the Apollo spacecraft windows) a series of pictures of people touching the entombed object and horribly dying? Embed some radioactive material against some phosphor or other light emitting elements charged up by the nuke waste.
Or we could just keep doing what we're doing, and eventually poison our whole society to death, and just let the legends of the "apocalypse" grow for a few millennia.
Though that's probably failed before.
The buggy format is not MP3. The MP3 files are perfectly safe.
This worm transcodes them into ASF files. The ASF files are the threat. The ASF files pretend to be safe MP3s, but they include links that Windows automatically opens. MP3 files don't do that.
Of course, it's really Windows that's buggy (duh). Windows allows the worm to enter and run. Windows lets the unsafe ASF files appear to the operator to be safe MP3. Windows opens the ASF links to the bad sites. Windows then runs whatever the bad sites deliver to the browser (which the user could have just clicked to from another page, without the MP3/ASF worm at all, and just blown their system by Web surfing).
But of course, we can't say that Windows and ASF and IE are the security monsters. We have to blame MP3. Even though this exploit requires converting the file into something that's not MP3 before it can get started attacking you.
Bush's NASA is part of the Star Wars "missile defense" programme, as per Bush's current space policy that it support "space supremacy" by the Pentagon and the intel services. That's why Bush' put Star Wars engineer Michael Griffin in charge. Since Bush has sold Star Wars to the Czech Republic, and NASA is flailing, it's clear that Griffin is "doing a heckuva job".
This corporate handout that rips off the people is exactly the kind of EU tyranny that makes people vote to stop the current versions of the European Constitution whenever the people actually get to vote on it. Like the people of Ireland just did to stop the "Lisbon Treaty" that is the latest package of "merde".
MOLEY!
+1 Insightful :).
The "Redundant" downmod should require at least one URL of an earlier post that's claimed to be redundant to be supplied in the downmod justification. The comment submission parser should both parse the justification for a valid clickable Slashdot URL format (and ensure that it's marked up clickable), and actually see that the specified URL points at a comment in the same story actually posted earlier. Then the metamoderator has to only click and read to see that the downmodded post really is redundant in content. That is exactly a case where the "justification" system would eliminate quite a lot of trollModding.
Everyone should get mod points unless they abuse them. Metamoderation is our way of flagging abusers, even though metamoderation is an even shabbier system than moderation. But all users "in good standing" should get metamod points. "Funny" meta/mods are a good example: humor fails when lots of reasonable people don't get the joke. That failure is the joker maker's fault. Your metamod is acceptable even if wrong, because you probably represent a lot of people who didn't get the joke, either.
All moderation and metamoderation is a statistical democracy. Democracy is not better because more heads are the best way to make the decision. But rather because of all the many ways to decide wrong (and they're all going to have some percentage of decisions wrong), democracy is the least bad. Because at least it makes an individual responsible for a decision (or their contribution to it), rather than divorce them from responsibility with some "official" role that numbs their conscience. And because by participating in the system as deciders, it makes those people accept the decisions others make about them, when the cycle turns around.
Of course, if the system is more a sham that's easier to abuse than to use, it creates merely disrespect by the people who are asked to do it to others, both as deciders and as the subject of the decisions. Metamoderation is just such a mockery. That's why I think that requiring more participation from downmodders would balance the cost:benefit ratio of moderating a little better, and so get more benefit by making the cost of nonbeneficial downmodding more prohibitive.
Moderation -1
100% Troll
Case in point.