I kind of feel sorry for them. I've worked as an IT professional for small companies for my entire career so far, so I can understand the frustration that could come from rampant piracy, particularly for such a nice market company that probably doesn't have much in it's bottom line to begin with. Whilst it doesn't entirely excuse any bullying tactics they did against Reddit.. given some of the vitriol (and I'd even go so far as to say "rabid" for some comments I've seen) is so excessive that I could understand how upset it could make them.
Keeping in mind that even in the "furore" from back in February, whilst they did distribute malware in one of their packs, my recollection is that it was explicitly designed to only activate for a single specific user that had been rampantly pirating and distributing their software. I can understand how frustrated that piracy could make them, particularly if they were unable to identify the culprit any other way. Let's face it.. law enforcement agencies like the FBI (or their country's equivalent) likely wouldn't make piracy done against small companies a major priority. I'm not saying that it wasn't ill advised, but it seems like all too many people are using the instances to jump on a "let's insult them / they're the bad guys" bandwagon.
It wouldn't work, or otherwise the DOJ would have set up an automated cloning of the phone and trying 10 password attempts at a time. What I've gathered from reading the various articles is that each IPhone has it's decryption key stored in hardware, with no way to copy it. Easily, that is, I suppose they could break open the chip and try and chart the pathways using a scanning tunneling microscope, but that would take a great deal of effort, and it would be easy to accidentally destroy the key doing so.
So what they're trying to do is get Apple to create a signed version of IOS which when installed, won't wipe the phone after 10 failed password attempts. They obviously have a way to install new versions of IOS even without a user entering a password. Which is actually sensible, if you think about it.. when an IPhone accidentally gets bricked when an update fails (or deliberately, witness the recent "Error 53"), it makes sense for there to be a way to force reload a fresh version from scratch without destroying the user's phone. The only reaason the DOJ needs Apple's help is, likely, that there's protection in place on IPhones to prevent unsigned code from being installed. Hence they want Apple to create the "poisoned" version of IOS that, when installed, makes doing a brute-force cracking of the phone easier.
I haven't RTFA yet, but If the analysis is solely based on network delays, then a VPN company could simply introduce randomized delays to all it's users, even the local ones. Then an analysing service wouldn't be able to definitively say whether any given user is geo-spoofing or not. The best they could say is that the connecting service is likely a VPN.
It's an unfortunate sign of the times, but I've read far too many articles about people being arrested and jailed for unknowingly violating the technicalities of various different laws.. consenting partners under 18 being jailed as sex offenders and being listed for life, insulting heads of state or reporting on human rights abuses, jailed for having cartoon porn / weird tentacle thing stuff from Japan that still gets branded as child pornography, or even for whistle-blowing. And particularly for America, reading in recent times, the attitude of border agents that they're outside the law and no-one has any constitutional rights.. frankly, if you are a journalist reporting about things your government (either American or elsewhere) are doing, you'd be a fool not to have everything strongly encrypted, and give them the leisure to browse through your stuff to find something to charge you with.
Even from reading TFA, I'm not sure I understand.. I take it that that version of Windows 10 comes with Bing hardcoded, but only for Internet Explorer (or whatever it is that they're calling the Windows 10 replacement)? I presume there's still nothing stopping users, once they get it, from installing Chrome or Firefox, and choosing whatever search engine they want?
Some cases I've used them for that I didn't feel dirty about are: * checking for failure conditions from calls to sub-methods, and jumping to a common cleanup and exit code block. Difficult to replicate cleanly without massive if blocks, or abusing exceptions. * Cleanly breaking out of multiple nested loops * I've used them for an implementation of coroutines, which simulates threading for systems which don't have threads. In this case the GOTOs were nested inside macros and stub classes for holding context, but the whole scheme wouldn't have worked without them.
Amen to that. It's like the old argument of the GOTO keyword. Sure it can easily be abused. But for certain limited cases, it's a godsend for making clean code. As the OP says, if someone's a bad programmer, they're going to write bad code no matter what language is used. Straight-jacketing people as to what they can use may help newbies, but you end up constraining what experienced programmers can do.
Wouldn't be possible. Believe it or not, Lego bricks are produced with a high degree of precision, with tolerances less than 10 micro-metres in order to be able to have the pieces 'snap' together properly (see the Wikipedia Lego article). Currently available 3D printers simply can't do that degree of accuracy. Don't know about these new "faster" printers, but I'd suspect that they've concentrated more on "fast" than "precise".
What I would have loved to see in C would be a different keyword for break for exiting a loop versus ending a switch case. 90% of the times in recent years that I've been tempted to use goto have been when I've written a switch statement in a loop, and need to break out of the loop from one of the cases. I have to steel myself and either rewrite the particular case as an if statement before the switch (nasty), or fiddle around with flags to break out of the loop after the switch statement, or check it as part of the loop condition.
If anyone's particularly interested in coroutines, we in the ScummVM project, which provides a reimplementation of lots of old classic adventure games, implemented a fairly clean C++ coroutine implementation, which we already use for two different games were originally threaded. ScummVM runs on a variety of different hardware, not all of which support threading, so we had to come up with a way to run these games using only a single thread. See https://github.com/scummvm/scu... and coroutines.cpp if you're interested.
If that's the case, then a possible solution would be an encryption that unlocks on one specific finger's fingerprint, but deletes all phone data for the other nine fingers. Since the ruling says you have to provide your fingerprints fine, but the knowledge of which finger's fingerprint is the correct one is knowledge in your brain, which doesn't have to be divulged. This would also, obviously, need to be combined with secure hardware that prevents the cops from simply copying the data and trying the fingerprints one at a time with the copy.
That way, you still have the convenience of a fingerprint unlock, but extra security against seisure, since the cops would only have a 10% chance of guessing the right finger.
That's what I don't understand about this whole DRM-in-the-browsers thing. It's all well and good to have the data sent as an encrypted stream, but when it hits the browser, even if it the decryption is run in a sandbox, as per TFA, eventually it needs to render the data on the browser window. And since since the browser source is open, what's to stop someone very easily building their own executable with extra code to intercept video and sound output and saving it as a video file? As far as I can see, in-browser DRM doesn't seem to make all that much difference as to whether people could steal content.
I think it's funny how this is listed at $24,999, as if someone is going to say "Well, $25,000 is simply too much, take a dollar off and I'll consider it".:-)
Why not? It works. There's a reason why prices everywhere are always ending in '.95', or '.99' in countries that still have cents. Even if only subconsciously, it makes a difference to people's perception of the cost. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing
According to previous articles, it was to prevent him either directly using his 'leet' computer skills to destroy evidence relevant to the case, or co-ordinating with others to do so. Which I thought was a bit of a croc. After all, they could always monitor any computer use to ensure that he didn't, and if he was going to conspire with any others to destroy any purported evidence, he could do so just as easily through his mother as in person.
I can't help but feel that it seems like, more and more, we're seeing cases around the world where prosecutors abusing pre-trial incarceration to make it a de-facto sentence irrespective of a person's eventual guilt or innocence. But I also recognise that I don't know the full details of the case, so it's always possible that the prosecutor fears were legitimate.
I agree. I know it's just being released, but I'm eager to hear if the communications with the controller are encrypted or not, and whether it uses 'off the shelf' parts/protocols that would be easy to duplicate. Just as lots of homebrew coolness has come out of the Wii controller, it'd be interesting to find out if something similar can be done for the Wii U controller. Not just for being a portable media player, but other cool things. Maybe even implement a PC display driver so people could use it as a cheap extra screen for their home computer.
Of course, part of the problem is just how you define 'Just ahead of'. Part of the problem in the last cycle with the PS3 particularly, from what I undestand, was the complexity of developing the software for the multi-core Cell processor architecture. Even if the speed of the Wii U overall isn't much better overall, the fact that the architecture is simpler may make it easier for developers to wring better performance out of their games. The fastest system in the world isn't going to matter if it's so hard to develop for that you end up writing poorly performant code.
We'll have to wait and see how well newly released titles post-launch are able to do with the new hardware.
I'm part of the ScummVM group, a cross platform software for playing various classic adventure games, and the question of Download.com came up when we released the next version of our software. There were some arguments for including it on such sites, such as giving greater visibility to the project. However, the issue of the bundled 'crapware' was considered too big a downside. We weren't that desperate for wider coverage of our software, and we certainly didn't want people to adversely associate our software with malware.
These days I wouldn't touch download.com even if you paid me.
It really depends on the data. Remember that a large part of the protests against the Wikileaks release of Afghanistan info was the potential to endanger the lives of civilian informants. Such computer crimes as we see these days can have the potential to hurt a lot of people. Not that a terrorist couldn't also hurt a lot of people using a stolen car. It just depends on what's actually done.
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I kind of feel sorry for them. I've worked as an IT professional for small companies for my entire career so far, so I can understand the frustration that could come from rampant piracy, particularly for such a nice market company that probably doesn't have much in it's bottom line to begin with. Whilst it doesn't entirely excuse any bullying tactics they did against Reddit.. given some of the vitriol (and I'd even go so far as to say "rabid" for some comments I've seen) is so excessive that I could understand how upset it could make them.
Keeping in mind that even in the "furore" from back in February, whilst they did distribute malware in one of their packs, my recollection is that it was explicitly designed to only activate for a single specific user that had been rampantly pirating and distributing their software. I can understand how frustrated that piracy could make them, particularly if they were unable to identify the culprit any other way. Let's face it.. law enforcement agencies like the FBI (or their country's equivalent) likely wouldn't make piracy done against small companies a major priority. I'm not saying that it wasn't ill advised, but it seems like all too many people are using the instances to jump on a "let's insult them / they're the bad guys" bandwagon.
I was thinking more Seaquest DSV
According to Snopes, this is an urban legend: http://www.snopes.com/autos/te...
It wouldn't work, or otherwise the DOJ would have set up an automated cloning of the phone and trying 10 password attempts at a time. What I've gathered from reading the various articles is that each IPhone has it's decryption key stored in hardware, with no way to copy it. Easily, that is, I suppose they could break open the chip and try and chart the pathways using a scanning tunneling microscope, but that would take a great deal of effort, and it would be easy to accidentally destroy the key doing so.
So what they're trying to do is get Apple to create a signed version of IOS which when installed, won't wipe the phone after 10 failed password attempts. They obviously have a way to install new versions of IOS even without a user entering a password. Which is actually sensible, if you think about it.. when an IPhone accidentally gets bricked when an update fails (or deliberately, witness the recent "Error 53"), it makes sense for there to be a way to force reload a fresh version from scratch without destroying the user's phone. The only reaason the DOJ needs Apple's help is, likely, that there's protection in place on IPhones to prevent unsigned code from being installed. Hence they want Apple to create the "poisoned" version of IOS that, when installed, makes doing a brute-force cracking of the phone easier.
I haven't RTFA yet, but If the analysis is solely based on network delays, then a VPN company could simply introduce randomized delays to all it's users, even the local ones. Then an analysing service wouldn't be able to definitively say whether any given user is geo-spoofing or not. The best they could say is that the connecting service is likely a VPN.
It's an unfortunate sign of the times, but I've read far too many articles about people being arrested and jailed for unknowingly violating the technicalities of various different laws.. consenting partners under 18 being jailed as sex offenders and being listed for life, insulting heads of state or reporting on human rights abuses, jailed for having cartoon porn / weird tentacle thing stuff from Japan that still gets branded as child pornography, or even for whistle-blowing. And particularly for America, reading in recent times, the attitude of border agents that they're outside the law and no-one has any constitutional rights.. frankly, if you are a journalist reporting about things your government (either American or elsewhere) are doing, you'd be a fool not to have everything strongly encrypted, and give them the leisure to browse through your stuff to find something to charge you with.
Yes. "Software Patents".
I also chuckled at the classic literary reference in the article title.. "from the mice-of-nimh dept" :)
Ah. That makes sense. So yes, it's history repeating itself all over again. :P.
Even from reading TFA, I'm not sure I understand.. I take it that that version of Windows 10 comes with Bing hardcoded, but only for Internet Explorer (or whatever it is that they're calling the Windows 10 replacement)? I presume there's still nothing stopping users, once they get it, from installing Chrome or Firefox, and choosing whatever search engine they want?
Some cases I've used them for that I didn't feel dirty about are:
* checking for failure conditions from calls to sub-methods, and jumping to a common cleanup and exit code block. Difficult to replicate cleanly without massive if blocks, or abusing exceptions.
* Cleanly breaking out of multiple nested loops
* I've used them for an implementation of coroutines, which simulates threading for systems which don't have threads. In this case the GOTOs were nested inside macros and stub classes for holding context, but the whole scheme wouldn't have worked without them.
Amen to that. It's like the old argument of the GOTO keyword. Sure it can easily be abused. But for certain limited cases, it's a godsend for making clean code. As the OP says, if someone's a bad programmer, they're going to write bad code no matter what language is used. Straight-jacketing people as to what they can use may help newbies, but you end up constraining what experienced programmers can do.
Wouldn't be possible. Believe it or not, Lego bricks are produced with a high degree of precision, with tolerances less than 10 micro-metres in order to be able to have the pieces 'snap' together properly (see the Wikipedia Lego article). Currently available 3D printers simply can't do that degree of accuracy. Don't know about these new "faster" printers, but I'd suspect that they've concentrated more on "fast" than "precise".
What I would have loved to see in C would be a different keyword for break for exiting a loop versus ending a switch case. 90% of the times in recent years that I've been tempted to use goto have been when I've written a switch statement in a loop, and need to break out of the loop from one of the cases. I have to steel myself and either rewrite the particular case as an if statement before the switch (nasty), or fiddle around with flags to break out of the loop after the switch statement, or check it as part of the loop condition.
If anyone's particularly interested in coroutines, we in the ScummVM project, which provides a reimplementation of lots of old classic adventure games, implemented a fairly clean C++ coroutine implementation, which we already use for two different games were originally threaded. ScummVM runs on a variety of different hardware, not all of which support threading, so we had to come up with a way to run these games using only a single thread. See https://github.com/scummvm/scu... and coroutines.cpp if you're interested.
If that's the case, then a possible solution would be an encryption that unlocks on one specific finger's fingerprint, but deletes all phone data for the other nine fingers. Since the ruling says you have to provide your fingerprints fine, but the knowledge of which finger's fingerprint is the correct one is knowledge in your brain, which doesn't have to be divulged. This would also, obviously, need to be combined with secure hardware that prevents the cops from simply copying the data and trying the fingerprints one at a time with the copy.
That way, you still have the convenience of a fingerprint unlock, but extra security against seisure, since the cops would only have a 10% chance of guessing the right finger.
That's what I don't understand about this whole DRM-in-the-browsers thing. It's all well and good to have the data sent as an encrypted stream, but when it hits the browser, even if it the decryption is run in a sandbox, as per TFA, eventually it needs to render the data on the browser window. And since since the browser source is open, what's to stop someone very easily building their own executable with extra code to intercept video and sound output and saving it as a video file? As far as I can see, in-browser DRM doesn't seem to make all that much difference as to whether people could steal content.
Hmm.. I wonder if this wasn't the inspiration of the previous season's NCIS episode "Need to Know" where the victim was killed in exactly that manner.
I think it's funny how this is listed at $24,999, as if someone is going to say "Well, $25,000 is simply too much, take a dollar off and I'll consider it". :-)
Why not? It works. There's a reason why prices everywhere are always ending in '.95', or '.99' in countries that still have cents. Even if only subconsciously, it makes a difference to people's perception of the cost. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing
According to previous articles, it was to prevent him either directly using his 'leet' computer skills to destroy evidence relevant to the case, or co-ordinating with others to do so. Which I thought was a bit of a croc. After all, they could always monitor any computer use to ensure that he didn't, and if he was going to conspire with any others to destroy any purported evidence, he could do so just as easily through his mother as in person.
I can't help but feel that it seems like, more and more, we're seeing cases around the world where prosecutors abusing pre-trial incarceration to make it a de-facto sentence irrespective of a person's eventual guilt or innocence. But I also recognise that I don't know the full details of the case, so it's always possible that the prosecutor fears were legitimate.
I agree. I know it's just being released, but I'm eager to hear if the communications with the controller are encrypted or not, and whether it uses 'off the shelf' parts/protocols that would be easy to duplicate. Just as lots of homebrew coolness has come out of the Wii controller, it'd be interesting to find out if something similar can be done for the Wii U controller. Not just for being a portable media player, but other cool things. Maybe even implement a PC display driver so people could use it as a cheap extra screen for their home computer.
Of course, part of the problem is just how you define 'Just ahead of'. Part of the problem in the last cycle with the PS3 particularly, from what I undestand, was the complexity of developing the software for the multi-core Cell processor architecture. Even if the speed of the Wii U overall isn't much better overall, the fact that the architecture is simpler may make it easier for developers to wring better performance out of their games. The fastest system in the world isn't going to matter if it's so hard to develop for that you end up writing poorly performant code.
We'll have to wait and see how well newly released titles post-launch are able to do with the new hardware.
I'm part of the ScummVM group, a cross platform software for playing various classic adventure games, and the question of Download.com came up when we released the next version of our software. There were some arguments for including it on such sites, such as giving greater visibility to the project. However, the issue of the bundled 'crapware' was considered too big a downside. We weren't that desperate for wider coverage of our software, and we certainly didn't want people to adversely associate our software with malware.
These days I wouldn't touch download.com even if you paid me.
And just like that we've got a wonderful outline for a sequel to Finding Nemo, as they try to recover coral eggs that the humans have stolen. :)
It really depends on the data. Remember that a large part of the protests against the Wikileaks release of Afghanistan info was the potential to endanger the lives of civilian informants. Such computer crimes as we see these days can have the potential to hurt a lot of people. Not that a terrorist couldn't also hurt a lot of people using a stolen car. It just depends on what's actually done.