If I'm supporting someone's website, and they call me and say their ISP says they're running a phishing website, and I look and find that someone's found a hole in an old CGI script and off in an obscure subdirectory there's a page that looks like the Bank of America's home page and it's set up to forward people's account information to a drop box, then it sounds like I pretty much need a PI license to do my job because that's evidence of a crime right there.
Chris Payne, a Microsoft manager, wanted Bill Gates to go ahead with an Overture acquisition. The deal made sense for both companies. Overture needed to hedge against setbacks in court and Microsoft needed to get into paid-search. Surprisingly, Bill Gates rejected the deal. Bill Gates must have seen the Overture deal primarily as a patent play and realized that Microsoft could not afford to enforce the '361 patent because of antitrust issues.
* Windows-only. * Can't "walk" in your avatar, you can only teleport to waypoints and drag your avatar with the mouse. * There is no personal view, either first person or following-the-avatar third-person. * Chat is either a window that almost obscures the view of the game, or chat bubbles that make it impossible to follow conversation. * Downloading the scene takes longer than Second Life, and that's already way too long. * There's no in-game building. * There's almost no avatar customization, and what there is is basically clothes (including body paint and wigs in that category). * There's very little room customization - basically furniture, that's it. * There's no connection between one "room" and another, and no global in-world presence. * The camera is completely unconstrained, and it's trivial to move the camera so that all you can see is a wall. * Camera motion is almost as clumsy as avatar motion.
About the only way to use it effectively as a chat system is to open up the chat history window and ignore the 3d aspect completely.
Actually, the OED is a descriptive dictionary, and historically has had a habit of picking up words that prescriptivists would rather not see listed. It may be a little less likely to acknowledge gratuitous verbogeny than Webster, but the staff of the OED has always taken their job to be the documentation of English as it is actually used.
Anyway, can someone shed some light on how this is different than binary serialization I've been using to pass C# objects around for quite some time now?
Don't forget that the W3C came up with a standard that included among other things a much better version of embedded images (the FIG tag), and even had a browser built demonstrating them (Arena), that demonstrated a clean browser-invariant mechanism for metadata, captions, and complex alternative content... and absolutely none of it was picked up by proprietary browsers. They were trying to specify stuff ahead of the implementations, and the implementers ignored them.
So now they're trying to coordinate things with the browser implementers, and what happens, they're going too slow?
I think you understand the graph, the presentation is just non-intuitive.
What the graph is saying is that if 0 photons come in, the maximum probability is around 4.5 millivolts. If 1 photon comes in, the maximum probability is about 7.5 mV, and the high end tail of the curve for the 1 photon case is negligible over 11 mV. If 2 photons come in the peak is at 12 mV, and the low end tail of the curve for 2 photons is negligible at 7.5 mV.
In which case what is being shown is that the resting output is around 5mV, and that the pulse height depends on the number of simultaneous photons.
Yep.
If the reading is 7.5 mV, you almost certainly received one photon. If the reading is 12 mV, you almost certainly received two photons. If the reading is 9.8 mV, you're 50% likely to have received one or two.
The area under the dark curve can be used to get an idea of the probabilities of any given reading, and most readings are going to be outside the range (from, say, 9 to 10.5) where they're ambiguous.
Normally, unused blocks on a drive have whatever data pattern the formatting software puts there (typically something like "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF..." or "55AAAA5555AAAA55..."), or remnants of other files, or parts of free block lists and empty extents and the like. If you have a big chunk of random noise in the middle that's an indication that you've got an encrypted volume in there somewhere.
It's a small subset of the Facebook usership that forwards almost everything they receive to everyone they know. Pandering to that particular crowd is a Facebook developer's foremost goal, because they are the ones who will drive exponential growth, if it's going to happen at all.
So basically Facebook selects for applications that are attractive to the kind of people who forward spam.
The original site is down, but as I recall the case... she didn't impersonate a real person, she used a pseudonym. When I go to a restaurant and they ask my name, and I say "Mike Check" instead of "Peter da Silva", so they call me with "Mike Check, your table is ready", that's not "impersonation". The use of pseudonyms is not impersonation, and it's not even illegal unless it's done with intent to defraud (as in your example of the bank). It may even be necessary, for example if one is being stalked online.
The issue is not whether she should be punished for what she did, but that she's being charged with an action that is not of itself harmful, because they can't find a way to charge her for the actions she took that caused actual harm. The problem is that in charging her for something that is both common and harmless in and of itself creates a bad precedent.
The square of the circle for AV kits is identification of malware. There is no "such and such is malware because it does this or that" book.
Indeed. As I implied, any realistic behavioral definition of malware would classify antivirus software as malware. The only useful thing antivirus software can do is to perform signature checks on data before it is executed. For this to be reliable, the computer software has to be designed so that execution of new code can not happen until it has been scanned. For THAT to be possible, execution of new code has to be a rare operation that only happens by explicit user request *after* the entirety of the node code has been acquired.
For Windows, this requires some fundamental design changes...
If you have any better idea, I'm really interested.
Don't design in avenues for automatic execution of untrusted software outside a hard sandbox (one that prevents the encapsulated code from making any non-volatile changes to storage or software, or acquiring any information from outside the sandbox). If you do this, then the only ways for malware to penetrate the system in the first place are (1) the user explicitly requests the execution of the malware, or (2) a bug in the sandbox. For case (1), people have to learn not to be phishable... and this is possible! For case (2), fixing a bug in the sandbox is possible... fixing design flaws that other software the user wants to run depends on isn't.
Of course it's possible to design secure electronic voting systems. People have been saying that all along. The pessimism isn't about the idea of electronic voting, it's about the fact that inherently auditable voting systems never seem to get off the drawing board. For example:
Let me give you an example of a system that is software-independent. You have a system where voters use a touch screen to make their selections and the touch-screen machine, when they're done, prints out a paper ballot that they look at and has all the candidate choices that they made. The voter then takes the completed, printed ballot, and they put it into a scanner. The scanner tallies the ballots up and keeps counts of all the votes. Now if the software on that system fails, they wouldn't get a printed-out ballot that they could then accept and approve.
That is the classic "this is how an electronic voting system should work" example. It's not new, it's something that could have and should have been built into the model from the start: using the software to handle the part that's most subject to human error (marking up the ballots) and not the part that's most subject to software error (maintaining the audit trail).
The only optimistic bit in there about "electronic voting" is that the NIST has weighed in in favor of this kind of inherently auditable design. Most of the optimism is that almost all the states have opted out of "electronic voting".
I tried using a PDA as a laptop replacement. The keyboard is the big problem: anything less than a latop keyboard with a full set of physical keys is a pain in the neck (as well as fingers, wrists, forearm, elbow, and shoulder).
The best one was the stowaway portable keyboard, unfortunately when they came out with a bluetooth model they abandoned this almost-full-sized keyboard and replaced it with one that didn't have a full set of keys, and even though it was slightly smaller it more or less failed to serve the intended purpose.
Of course most of these "laptops of 2005" have appallingly bad keyboards as well.
What I'd really like is what I asked for in 2000... the computer itself has a minimal display, PDA sized or smaller, and larger displays and better input devices are connected as needed. Give it a USB device+host port and a video-out port, in a form factor so you can plug it into a standardized layout of a video-USB-power socket in a "docking station" or mix and match.
The whole thing shouldn't be any bigger than a thin CDROM drive or a paperback book. and potentially as small as a pen or keychain fob.
Which is why I stick to open source games, pretty much.
This is working in my interest, since I do not want a potential trojan being able to disable my protection against it.
Security is like sex: once you're penetrated, you're ****ed.
If the malware's launched itself, the antivirus software has already failed. If it "has to" put in checks for rootkits inside the kernel because it can't block malware at input, then it's broken as designed.
I don't use antivirus software because I have too much experience with antivirus software ****ing me and my users (it's malware, after all). I'd much rather have to take a couple of extra steps now and then or miss out on some k3wl website, because I'm using a more paranoid browser with more paranoid settings and an external firewall that doesn't allow incoming connections, than have everything on my computer slowed down so I can feel better about using Internet Explorer with ActiveX set to "Prompt".
Been at least fifteen years since I've had to deal with a virus on my own PC.
So AV kits don't "have to" dig into the system, because you don't "have to" run them at all. And when evaluating them for my users, I always pick the one that's got least malware tentacles.
I'm pretty sure that the red squiggly underline for spelling mistakes was implemented in Office after 2000.
I know it was in Office 2000, and I'm pretty sure it was in Office 95/97 and Word 7. I don't think it goes all the way back to Word 6, but it's certainly been around a while.
There's plenty of examples of dual-licensing being used to retain control of an open source product, including Ghostscript and Qt. ANd this is not automatically a bad thing (as proof, I cite my examples).
As for projects deliberately using embrace and extend tactics, well, the poster boy for that is gcc. For most of the '90s one of the biggest problem for people using other compilers was keeping up with gratuitous gcc-isms like "conditional ?: alternative" in open source projects. Gcc didn't deprecate crud like that until the other open source C compilers were pretty much dead, and until it was deprecated patches removing crud like that were pretty much always knocked back upstream.
Gcc these days is a pretty good neighbor, but it wasn't always thus.
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm supporting someone's website, and they call me and say their ISP says they're running a phishing website, and I look and find that someone's found a hole in an old CGI script and off in an obscure subdirectory there's a page that looks like the Bank of America's home page and it's set up to forward people's account information to a drop box, then it sounds like I pretty much need a PI license to do my job because that's evidence of a crime right there.
This is why there are so many conservative radio talk shows and blogs that bash the Democrats.
So basically you're saying that the media has a conservative bias?
What happened to the antitrust issue?
Here's what the article says about that:
But "Bill Gates has left the building" now...
How is this different from Activeworlds
Activeworlds sucks about 99.4% less.
On the other hand, Activeworlds rate of improvement in their product is about 99.4% less than anything Google has released, so there is hope.
* Windows-only.
* Can't "walk" in your avatar, you can only teleport to waypoints and drag your avatar with the mouse.
* There is no personal view, either first person or following-the-avatar third-person.
* Chat is either a window that almost obscures the view of the game, or chat bubbles that make it impossible to follow conversation.
* Downloading the scene takes longer than Second Life, and that's already way too long.
* There's no in-game building.
* There's almost no avatar customization, and what there is is basically clothes (including body paint and wigs in that category).
* There's very little room customization - basically furniture, that's it.
* There's no connection between one "room" and another, and no global in-world presence.
* The camera is completely unconstrained, and it's trivial to move the camera so that all you can see is a wall.
* Camera motion is almost as clumsy as avatar motion.
About the only way to use it effectively as a chat system is to open up the chat history window and ignore the 3d aspect completely.
Why isn't there any OpenSource/Open Community virtual world yet.
That would be OpenSim using the open source Second Life client for the user interface.
Actually, the OED is a descriptive dictionary, and historically has had a habit of picking up words that prescriptivists would rather not see listed. It may be a little less likely to acknowledge gratuitous verbogeny than Webster, but the staff of the OED has always taken their job to be the documentation of English as it is actually used.
Anyway, can someone shed some light on how this is different than binary serialization I've been using to pass C# objects around for quite some time now?
It's portable and language-independent?
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy by the worst abuser.
Don't forget that the W3C came up with a standard that included among other things a much better version of embedded images (the FIG tag), and even had a browser built demonstrating them (Arena), that demonstrated a clean browser-invariant mechanism for metadata, captions, and complex alternative content... and absolutely none of it was picked up by proprietary browsers. They were trying to specify stuff ahead of the implementations, and the implementers ignored them.
So now they're trying to coordinate things with the browser implementers, and what happens, they're going too slow?
I think you understand the graph, the presentation is just non-intuitive.
What the graph is saying is that if 0 photons come in, the maximum probability is around 4.5 millivolts. If 1 photon comes in, the maximum probability is about 7.5 mV, and the high end tail of the curve for the 1 photon case is negligible over 11 mV. If 2 photons come in the peak is at 12 mV, and the low end tail of the curve for 2 photons is negligible at 7.5 mV.
In which case what is being shown is that the resting output is around 5mV, and that the pulse height depends on the number of simultaneous photons.
Yep.
If the reading is 7.5 mV, you almost certainly received one photon.
If the reading is 12 mV, you almost certainly received two photons.
If the reading is 9.8 mV, you're 50% likely to have received one or two.
The area under the dark curve can be used to get an idea of the probabilities of any given reading, and most readings are going to be outside the range (from, say, 9 to 10.5) where they're ambiguous.
Normally, unused blocks on a drive have whatever data pattern the formatting software puts there (typically something like "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF..." or "55AAAA5555AAAA55..."), or remnants of other files, or parts of free block lists and empty extents and the like. If you have a big chunk of random noise in the middle that's an indication that you've got an encrypted volume in there somewhere.
It's a small subset of the Facebook usership that forwards almost everything they receive to everyone they know. Pandering to that particular crowd is a Facebook developer's foremost goal, because they are the ones who will drive exponential growth, if it's going to happen at all.
So basically Facebook selects for applications that are attractive to the kind of people who forward spam.
Thanks for the warning.
If you have to worry about it being torture-proof, you're almost certainly dead anyway.
All it needs to be, for most people, is audit-proof.
And for that you need a business case for having it. Porn is probably not a good choice.
Or is my arm somehow non-physical?
13x13x13 = 2197, or do they still keep the feature layers the same thickness?
It's only 13x smaller. :)
or this innocent woman goes to jail
That word, I don't think it means what you think it means.
The original site is down, but as I recall the case... she didn't impersonate a real person, she used a pseudonym. When I go to a restaurant and they ask my name, and I say "Mike Check" instead of "Peter da Silva", so they call me with "Mike Check, your table is ready", that's not "impersonation". The use of pseudonyms is not impersonation, and it's not even illegal unless it's done with intent to defraud (as in your example of the bank). It may even be necessary, for example if one is being stalked online.
The issue is not whether she should be punished for what she did, but that she's being charged with an action that is not of itself harmful, because they can't find a way to charge her for the actions she took that caused actual harm. The problem is that in charging her for something that is both common and harmless in and of itself creates a bad precedent.
The square of the circle for AV kits is identification of malware. There is no "such and such is malware because it does this or that" book.
Indeed. As I implied, any realistic behavioral definition of malware would classify antivirus software as malware. The only useful thing antivirus software can do is to perform signature checks on data before it is executed. For this to be reliable, the computer software has to be designed so that execution of new code can not happen until it has been scanned. For THAT to be possible, execution of new code has to be a rare operation that only happens by explicit user request *after* the entirety of the node code has been acquired.
For Windows, this requires some fundamental design changes...
If you have any better idea, I'm really interested.
Don't design in avenues for automatic execution of untrusted software outside a hard sandbox (one that prevents the encapsulated code from making any non-volatile changes to storage or software, or acquiring any information from outside the sandbox). If you do this, then the only ways for malware to penetrate the system in the first place are (1) the user explicitly requests the execution of the malware, or (2) a bug in the sandbox. For case (1), people have to learn not to be phishable... and this is possible! For case (2), fixing a bug in the sandbox is possible... fixing design flaws that other software the user wants to run depends on isn't.
Of course it's possible to design secure electronic voting systems. People have been saying that all along. The pessimism isn't about the idea of electronic voting, it's about the fact that inherently auditable voting systems never seem to get off the drawing board. For example:
That is the classic "this is how an electronic voting system should work" example. It's not new, it's something that could have and should have been built into the model from the start: using the software to handle the part that's most subject to human error (marking up the ballots) and not the part that's most subject to software error (maintaining the audit trail).
The only optimistic bit in there about "electronic voting" is that the NIST has weighed in in favor of this kind of inherently auditable design. Most of the optimism is that almost all the states have opted out of "electronic voting".
I tried using a PDA as a laptop replacement. The keyboard is the big problem: anything less than a latop keyboard with a full set of physical keys is a pain in the neck (as well as fingers, wrists, forearm, elbow, and shoulder).
The best one was the stowaway portable keyboard, unfortunately when they came out with a bluetooth model they abandoned this almost-full-sized keyboard and replaced it with one that didn't have a full set of keys, and even though it was slightly smaller it more or less failed to serve the intended purpose.
Of course most of these "laptops of 2005" have appallingly bad keyboards as well.
What I'd really like is what I asked for in 2000... the computer itself has a minimal display, PDA sized or smaller, and larger displays and better input devices are connected as needed. Give it a USB device+host port and a video-out port, in a form factor so you can plug it into a standardized layout of a video-USB-power socket in a "docking station" or mix and match.
The whole thing shouldn't be any bigger than a thin CDROM drive or a paperback book. and potentially as small as a pen or keychain fob.
Most game software comes with malware these days.
Which is why I stick to open source games, pretty much.
This is working in my interest, since I do not want a potential trojan being able to disable my protection against it.
Security is like sex: once you're penetrated, you're ****ed.
If the malware's launched itself, the antivirus software has already failed. If it "has to" put in checks for rootkits inside the kernel because it can't block malware at input, then it's broken as designed.
I don't use antivirus software because I have too much experience with antivirus software ****ing me and my users (it's malware, after all). I'd much rather have to take a couple of extra steps now and then or miss out on some k3wl website, because I'm using a more paranoid browser with more paranoid settings and an external firewall that doesn't allow incoming connections, than have everything on my computer slowed down so I can feel better about using Internet Explorer with ActiveX set to "Prompt".
Been at least fifteen years since I've had to deal with a virus on my own PC.
So AV kits don't "have to" dig into the system, because you don't "have to" run them at all. And when evaluating them for my users, I always pick the one that's got least malware tentacles.
I'm pretty sure that the red squiggly underline for spelling mistakes was implemented in Office after 2000.
I know it was in Office 2000, and I'm pretty sure it was in Office 95/97 and Word 7. I don't think it goes all the way back to Word 6, but it's certainly been around a while.
Cite your sources, please.
There's plenty of examples of dual-licensing being used to retain control of an open source product, including Ghostscript and Qt. ANd this is not automatically a bad thing (as proof, I cite my examples).
As for projects deliberately using embrace and extend tactics, well, the poster boy for that is gcc. For most of the '90s one of the biggest problem for people using other compilers was keeping up with gratuitous gcc-isms like "conditional ?: alternative" in open source projects. Gcc didn't deprecate crud like that until the other open source C compilers were pretty much dead, and until it was deprecated patches removing crud like that were pretty much always knocked back upstream.
Gcc these days is a pretty good neighbor, but it wasn't always thus.