I hate to reply to myself, but I have to note that I have no idea if the cash in this slashdot article is at all like Chaum's system. I'm just pointing out that there is a pretty cool system for ecash out there.
Someone could just probably figure out how money is "stored" and just keep on replenishing. Note the card is anonymous.
David Chaum's digicash system was a good solution to this problem. He developed a system of completely anonymous (even to the bank) e-cash. The executive summary is: using techniques common in encryption, the cash is unforgeable and can be spent once. If you spend the cash twice, there's a random challenge-response sequence you have to go through each time, and you will have now revealed enough information that you're no longer anonymous, and the fact that the money is being double-billed is detected and prevented.
Googling for "Chaum" and "digicash" gets you a lot of articles which explain the system (which is quite complex) in a level of detail beyond that which is appropriate for slashdot.:) It's a bit hard to believe (at least without going through the math yourself) that it's both anonymous and unforgeable, but that's the beauty of it. There are also quite a few articles about Chaum's company "Digicash" which appears to have been poorly managed. That doesn't change the fact that the mathematics behind digicash are sound.
i hate to be a cynical bastard, but i can't get past the fact that the columbia tragedy is little more than a glorified car accident
Astronauts risk their lives for the best of motivations-- they want to advance science. You can question if the space shuttle is the best way to do this, but I don't think you can question the motivations. And maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but the advancement of science is a great thing. NASA wants to make the world a better place by furthering our understanding of the universe. They want to expand the notion of what it means to be human. They want to visit the stars, and this is the first step.
And when the space program suffers a setback, when these men who are carrying the hopes and dreams of a better future for everyone die, it's pretty discouraging, and worthy of my grief. There's that moment of doubt -- maybe we are just glorified fucking monkeys who should give up and stop trying to be anything more.
But I'm convinced that man has done great things, and these great things always started with men and women willing to push the notions of what these monkeys can do. We need a hero? We already have them.
Why/How Re:I'm more amazed....
on
Baked Apple
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'll bet you dollars to donuts this is how it happened: A lot of people get the bright idea to hide their valuables in the oven. They either forget that they've done this, or forget to inform their housemates that they've done this. Then, somebody gets a hankerin' for a frozen pizza, and preheats the oven....
"When it gets down to it--talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries... there's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery." -- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash.
Unfortunately, Neal was wrong, and software is moving to India, movies are moving to Australia, and our music sucks right now. But thank god, at least we still have the high-speed pizza delivery, and we probably always will.
I've always wondered. Is making the FBI warning unskippable actually legally useful? Is there some dude in China who copied thousands of DVDs, got arrested, but then got off because "I fast forwarded past the FBI warning, I didn't realize that it was a crime to copy the DVDs."
If you say yes, I want a link. I can't belive that having the warning but making it unskippable makes any difference at all (except to annoy me.)
No, the real REAL problem is that because of Disney, copyright lengths keep getting extended and extended. At the current rate, Mickey Mouse will never be public domain. This is actually unconstitutional, since Congress is enabled to grant exclusive rights for "limited times" only. But it's the way things are.
I'd just like to point out that this is the third story from Wired to show up on slashdot today. And it's not even that bad of a story. I think this must mean Wired is cool again.
Penny Arcade is the worst comic I ever read. Tycho and Gabe are stupid characters. A couple of stoners who spout dumb-ass catch-phrases like a third rate 'Cheech and Chong' or 'Bill and Ted'. Fuck Tycho and Gabe. Fuck them up their stupid asses.
P.S. Please, please let there be some Kevin Smith fans amoung the moderators.
It would not defeat the purpose of switching. He would be carrying forward a piece of X, but only for the X thing he refuses to give up, xemacs. That's it. In almost every other respect he could ignore the fact that X Windows is running. He would have video watching tools. He would have video editing tools. He would have an environment that many consider to be quite useable. He would even have a pretentious little industrial-themed titanium notebook that matches his nightclub's decor. He would be moving forward, one step at a time. Would he be done moving forward? No. But baby steps, man, baby steps.
You are completly ignoring the fact that he thinks running X of any sort on Mac OS X defeats the purpose.
I am guessing (and maybe I'm wrong) that he's really against running X as his only window manager. I suspect he has not considered running a rootless X server so that he can have his xemacs window and still eat his OS X cake, too. This is actually a pretty nice solution; it is a bit of a hack, so it might offend JWZ's touchy sensibilities, but in practice, I like it.
Another poster suggests that rootless X performance is bad. It does have problems, but if you use it to run a small set of apps, it's good enough for me.
I know he poo-poos this idea, but he really should go to OS X. JWZ highly prizes usability, and so do most Mac developers (quicktime viewer aside), so it seems like a good match. He wants xemacs; he can get xemacs with fink and run it on a rootless X server, and thus get the best of both worlds. All the video stuff is likely trivial on a Mac.
And admit it, any time you see someone with hair like his, you immediately think, "Mac user".
This doesn't really solve your precise problem, but at least makes some html spam less annoying.
1: Preferences->Privacy&Security->Images->" Do not load remote images in Mail..." should be checked.
2: In Mail, "View->Message Body As->Simple HTML" should or even "Plaintext"
This won't help you filter the spam, but will prevent web-bugged email from confirming that you are a valid spam target, and makes the spam that does get through be far less annoying.
If you're walking down 5th Avenue in Manhattan and some homeless guy is beating away at a drum and chanting "Fuck the USA. Don't bomb Iraq" you cannot sue him because it would breech the freedom of speech laws.
Yeah, but that's a public street owned by the govenment. If he tried to go into, say, the superbowl and march out onto the field doing the same thing, he would not be allowed.
There's also the argument that he's specifically trying to disrupt other people's conversation. If he's more interested in stopping the others from talking (rather than "more interested in expressing his opinion") he's actually harming freedom of speech, not excercising it.
For example, I, for one, [wonder ] just how long the battery on that super 1337 Alienware notebook lasts. It's probably not anywhere close to the Powerbook.
I suspect that you should probably think of the battery as a UPS, becuase I think the time can be as bad as half an hour. But to agree with your point, the Alienware notebooks aren't really targetting the the same market as the powerbook.
Unless your recovery efforts involve custom hardware, the disk image obtained with "dd", together with bad block information and drive geometry, contains every bit of information you are ever going to get out of that drive. Any software-based recovery working on that image is going to be equivalent to recovery working on the original drive.
Not so! Remember, when you're using dd, you're still using a relatively high level protocol to talk to the drive. If you can get the drive into a "test" mode, where you can talk to the actual registers on the drive, there's a heck of a lot more you can do. For example, on some drives, you could tweak the positional calibration registers and move the head fractional tracks, reading the data at each step, and maybe pick up some data at the edges of the track that wouldn't be picked up in the center. (You're hoping that there was a slight positional drift from when the data was written to when the data was erased).
Now actually getting the drive into "test" mode, talking to the registers, and knowing what the hell the registers actually do is very difficult; you're basicallly talking about documentation that only an engineer working at a drive manufacturer would have. (And of course, this stuff is all non-standard, since it's never supposed to be directly accessed...so each model or family of drives would have different capablilties) This is pretty much the definition of "deep magic." But for the select few who have access to that documentation, some amazing tricks are possible.
"Please, sign me up for this new technology. It offers me no benefits, costs me money, and gives up my rights." -- You. At least, you in the eyes of Hollywood.
What about intent? When you post an mp3 file on gnutella, your intent is not the same as lending a DVD to a friend.
I never said it was. The problem is that current laws, content formats, whatever, which aim to prevent that mass distribution also prevent me from doing all sorts of legitimate things. If you can come up with a scheme that prevents mass copying of a product but does not infringe upon my fair use rights, everybody would love to hear it. But right now, nobody has, and that's the problem.
DISTRIBUTING COPIES OF COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL SO THAT PEOPLE CAN KEEP THAT MATERIAL WITHOUT PAYING FOR IT IS ILLEGAL.
No need to shout. And I haven't disagreed with this point.
(pro-digital copy protection),
Once again, I must reinforce that your "copy protection" has now robbed me of a lot of the rights I had with the physical object. Your "pro-digital copy protection" is also "anti-fair-use", which is just one of the reasons it's unpopular. People dislike when you take their rights away. ("Hey Bob, listen to this song I just got." "Well, it depends, am I in the same room as you, or am I on the same chatroom as you. One's legal, one's not.")
If your stuff is just going to get distributed for free, then you either stop making your music (or movies, or whatever) or you change how you distribute it (so that you can insure you get your props).
Are you against free public libraries? I bet that you are not. But your argument seems to be against them, seeing as how libraries distribute copyrighted materials for free and decreasing the market for the material.
LENDING isn't the problem. It's your friends COPYING them when you lend them.
In the physical realm, these are two distinct things. In the digital, information realm, I simply cannot lend information without copying it. The way current laws are written, I can't even lend the information. As you point out, "LENDING isn't the problem," so why are current laws being written to prevent it?
When you acquire something that has value without compensating the owner, that is Stealing.
Really? I have a small collection of DVDs. I frequently loan them to my friends. Are they stealing? If not, why is it ok for me to lend them the DVD, but not ok for me to lend them only the information that resides on the DVD?
The problem with our current laws (and the way laws appear to be going) is that they fail to acknowledge that ANY use of pure information requires copying of that information, and all copying seems like it's going to be made illegal. There are all sorts of "fair use" things that you can do with a physical object that are ruled right out when you're talking about "just the information". I can borrow a book from a library, but I can't get any rights (even temporary) to read that book online, and that pisses me off. When I try to move into the online world, I've actually lost some freedom, which seems like a giant step backwards.
So in other words, MS Office's preloader is like Mozilla's, right?
Except Mozilla's preloader is off by default, it's not hidden from the user, and it only exists in the first place because so many people complained "IE loads faster than Mozilla." IE and Office cheat by getting loaded even if you don't need or want them. I guess Mozilla is also sort of cheating, but at least they're up front about it.
I don't like your argument. By the same logic, Bill Gates, "whatever his faults, [...] has contributed significantly to the software community in general." But I'm not about to stop Billybashing, because his contributions don't excuse him from scrutiny and criticism.
Am I comparing RMS to Billy? No, of course not. I like RMS. What I am saying is that I acknowledge RMS's contributions, but I think he's also done some things that rightfully get him a little crap from the community.
And speaking of that, I'm not too keen on Edison, either. Read one of the books about Tesla and Edison, and you'll probably stop holding up Edison as an example of a genius.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to reply to myself, but I have to note that I have no idea if the cash in this slashdot article is at all like Chaum's system. I'm just pointing out that there is a pretty cool system for ecash out there.
Someone could just probably figure out how money is "stored" and just keep on replenishing. Note the card is anonymous.
David Chaum's digicash system was a good solution to this problem. He developed a system of completely anonymous (even to the bank) e-cash. The executive summary is: using techniques common in encryption, the cash is unforgeable and can be spent once. If you spend the cash twice, there's a random challenge-response sequence you have to go through each time, and you will have now revealed enough information that you're no longer anonymous, and the fact that the money is being double-billed is detected and prevented.
Googling for "Chaum" and "digicash" gets you a lot of articles which explain the system (which is quite complex) in a level of detail beyond that which is appropriate for slashdot. :) It's a bit hard to believe (at least without going through the math yourself) that it's both anonymous and unforgeable, but that's the beauty of it. There are also quite a few articles about Chaum's company "Digicash" which appears to have been poorly managed. That doesn't change the fact that the mathematics behind digicash are sound.
i hate to be a cynical bastard, but i can't get past the fact that the columbia tragedy is little more than a glorified car accident
Astronauts risk their lives for the best of motivations-- they want to advance science. You can question if the space shuttle is the best way to do this, but I don't think you can question the motivations. And maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but the advancement of science is a great thing. NASA wants to make the world a better place by furthering our understanding of the universe. They want to expand the notion of what it means to be human. They want to visit the stars, and this is the first step.
And when the space program suffers a setback, when these men who are carrying the hopes and dreams of a better future for everyone die, it's pretty discouraging, and worthy of my grief. There's that moment of doubt -- maybe we are just glorified fucking monkeys who should give up and stop trying to be anything more.
But I'm convinced that man has done great things, and these great things always started with men and women willing to push the notions of what these monkeys can do. We need a hero? We already have them.
I'll bet you dollars to donuts this is how it happened: A lot of people get the bright idea to hide their valuables in the oven. They either forget that they've done this, or forget to inform their housemates that they've done this. Then, somebody gets a hankerin' for a frozen pizza, and preheats the oven....
"When it gets down to it--talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries... there's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery." -- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash.
Unfortunately, Neal was wrong, and software is moving to India, movies are moving to Australia, and our music sucks right now. But thank god, at least we still have the high-speed pizza delivery, and we probably always will.
I've always wondered. Is making the FBI warning unskippable actually legally useful? Is there some dude in China who copied thousands of DVDs, got arrested, but then got off because "I fast forwarded past the FBI warning, I didn't realize that it was a crime to copy the DVDs."
If you say yes, I want a link. I can't belive that having the warning but making it unskippable makes any difference at all (except to annoy me.)
No, the real REAL problem is that because of Disney, copyright lengths keep getting extended and extended. At the current rate, Mickey Mouse will never be public domain. This is actually unconstitutional, since Congress is enabled to grant exclusive rights for "limited times" only. But it's the way things are.
I'd just like to point out that this is the third story from Wired to show up on slashdot today. And it's not even that bad of a story. I think this must mean Wired is cool again.
Penny Arcade is the worst comic I ever read. Tycho and Gabe are stupid characters. A couple of stoners who spout dumb-ass catch-phrases like a third rate 'Cheech and Chong' or 'Bill and Ted'. Fuck Tycho and Gabe. Fuck them up their stupid asses.
P.S. Please, please let there be some Kevin Smith fans amoung the moderators.
It would not defeat the purpose of switching. He would be carrying forward a piece of X, but only for the X thing he refuses to give up, xemacs. That's it. In almost every other respect he could ignore the fact that X Windows is running. He would have video watching tools. He would have video editing tools. He would have an environment that many consider to be quite useable. He would even have a pretentious little industrial-themed titanium notebook that matches his nightclub's decor. He would be moving forward, one step at a time. Would he be done moving forward? No. But baby steps, man, baby steps.
From what I've read JWZ absolutly hates X.
Yeah, but he has to have learned to live with it; it's what he's doing now on linux.
You are completly ignoring the fact that he thinks running X of any sort on Mac OS X defeats the purpose.
I am guessing (and maybe I'm wrong) that he's really against running X as his only window manager. I suspect he has not considered running a rootless X server so that he can have his xemacs window and still eat his OS X cake, too. This is actually a pretty nice solution; it is a bit of a hack, so it might offend JWZ's touchy sensibilities, but in practice, I like it.
Another poster suggests that rootless X performance is bad. It does have problems, but if you use it to run a small set of apps, it's good enough for me.
I know he poo-poos this idea, but he really should go to OS X. JWZ highly prizes usability, and so do most Mac developers (quicktime viewer aside), so it seems like a good match. He wants xemacs; he can get xemacs with fink and run it on a rootless X server, and thus get the best of both worlds. All the video stuff is likely trivial on a Mac.
And admit it, any time you see someone with hair like his, you immediately think, "Mac user".
I hate to remind everyone but it is still January of 2003
It's just my sense of humor, but the fact that this got modded as "informative" is awesome.
This doesn't really solve your precise problem, but at least makes some html spam less annoying.
1: Preferences->Privacy&Security->Images->" Do not load remote images in Mail..." should be checked.
2: In Mail, "View->Message Body As->Simple HTML" should or even "Plaintext"
This won't help you filter the spam, but will prevent web-bugged email from confirming that you are a valid spam target, and makes the spam that does get through be far less annoying.
If you're walking down 5th Avenue in Manhattan and some homeless guy is beating away at a drum and chanting "Fuck the USA. Don't bomb Iraq" you cannot sue him because it would breech the freedom of speech laws.
Yeah, but that's a public street owned by the govenment. If he tried to go into, say, the superbowl and march out onto the field doing the same thing, he would not be allowed.
There's also the argument that he's specifically trying to disrupt other people's conversation. If he's more interested in stopping the others from talking (rather than "more interested in expressing his opinion") he's actually harming freedom of speech, not excercising it.
For example, I, for one, [wonder ] just how long the battery on that super 1337 Alienware notebook lasts. It's probably not anywhere close to the Powerbook.
I suspect that you should probably think of the battery as a UPS, becuase I think the time can be as bad as half an hour. But to agree with your point, the Alienware notebooks aren't really targetting the the same market as the powerbook.
Unless your recovery efforts involve custom hardware, the disk image obtained with "dd", together with bad block information and drive geometry, contains every bit of information you are ever going to get out of that drive. Any software-based recovery working on that image is going to be equivalent to recovery working on the original drive.
Not so! Remember, when you're using dd, you're still using a relatively high level protocol to talk to the drive. If you can get the drive into a "test" mode, where you can talk to the actual registers on the drive, there's a heck of a lot more you can do. For example, on some drives, you could tweak the positional calibration registers and move the head fractional tracks, reading the data at each step, and maybe pick up some data at the edges of the track that wouldn't be picked up in the center. (You're hoping that there was a slight positional drift from when the data was written to when the data was erased).
Now actually getting the drive into "test" mode, talking to the registers, and knowing what the hell the registers actually do is very difficult; you're basicallly talking about documentation that only an engineer working at a drive manufacturer would have. (And of course, this stuff is all non-standard, since it's never supposed to be directly accessed...so each model or family of drives would have different capablilties) This is pretty much the definition of "deep magic." But for the select few who have access to that documentation, some amazing tricks are possible.
At least, that what's the RIAA is going to say.
"Please, sign me up for this new technology. It offers me no benefits, costs me money, and gives up my rights."
-- You. At least, you in the eyes of Hollywood.
What about intent? When you post an mp3 file on gnutella, your intent is not the same as lending a DVD to a friend.
I never said it was. The problem is that current laws, content formats, whatever, which aim to prevent that mass distribution also prevent me from doing all sorts of legitimate things. If you can come up with a scheme that prevents mass copying of a product but does not infringe upon my fair use rights, everybody would love to hear it. But right now, nobody has, and that's the problem.
DISTRIBUTING COPIES OF COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL SO THAT PEOPLE CAN KEEP THAT MATERIAL WITHOUT PAYING FOR IT IS ILLEGAL.
No need to shout. And I haven't disagreed with this point.
(pro-digital copy protection),
Once again, I must reinforce that your "copy protection" has now robbed me of a lot of the rights I had with the physical object. Your "pro-digital copy protection" is also "anti-fair-use", which is just one of the reasons it's unpopular. People dislike when you take their rights away. ("Hey Bob, listen to this song I just got." "Well, it depends, am I in the same room as you, or am I on the same chatroom as you. One's legal, one's not.")
If your stuff is just going to get distributed for free, then you either stop making your music (or movies, or whatever) or you change how you distribute it (so that you can insure you get your props).
Are you against free public libraries? I bet that you are not. But your argument seems to be against them, seeing as how libraries distribute copyrighted materials for free and decreasing the market for the material.
LENDING isn't the problem. It's your friends COPYING them when you lend them.
In the physical realm, these are two distinct things. In the digital, information realm, I simply cannot lend information without copying it. The way current laws are written, I can't even lend the information. As you point out, "LENDING isn't the problem," so why are current laws being written to prevent it?
When you acquire something that has value without compensating the owner, that is Stealing.
Really? I have a small collection of DVDs. I frequently loan them to my friends. Are they stealing? If not, why is it ok for me to lend them the DVD, but not ok for me to lend them only the information that resides on the DVD?
The problem with our current laws (and the way laws appear to be going) is that they fail to acknowledge that ANY use of pure information requires copying of that information, and all copying seems like it's going to be made illegal. There are all sorts of "fair use" things that you can do with a physical object that are ruled right out when you're talking about "just the information". I can borrow a book from a library, but I can't get any rights (even temporary) to read that book online, and that pisses me off. When I try to move into the online world, I've actually lost some freedom, which seems like a giant step backwards.
So in other words, MS Office's preloader is like Mozilla's, right?
Except Mozilla's preloader is off by default, it's not hidden from the user, and it only exists in the first place because so many people complained "IE loads faster than Mozilla." IE and Office cheat by getting loaded even if you don't need or want them. I guess Mozilla is also sort of cheating, but at least they're up front about it.
I don't like your argument. By the same logic, Bill Gates, "whatever his faults, [...] has contributed significantly to the software community in general." But I'm not about to stop Billybashing, because his contributions don't excuse him from scrutiny and criticism.
Am I comparing RMS to Billy? No, of course not. I like RMS. What I am saying is that I acknowledge RMS's contributions, but I think he's also done some things that rightfully get him a little crap from the community.
And speaking of that, I'm not too keen on Edison, either. Read one of the books about Tesla and Edison, and you'll probably stop holding up Edison as an example of a genius.