How come that such a simple, reasonable request, clothed in polite terms, was rejected?
Simple? Yes. Polite terms? Yes. Reasonable? Not even close, if my understanding of the situation is correct. As I understand it, the guy who doesn't want them to use his SSH trademark anymore is the same guy who was involved in the development of the protocol/standard in the first place. At best, he's guilty of deciding way after the fact that he didn't want them using SSH as a name. At worst, he's trying to delibrately use a "submarine trademark" to monopolize the name recognition SSH has gained, in no small part due to the standard itself.
Had I nevered played Metal Gear Solid, I would not only have agreed with you 100%, but would've gone as far to say that using 3D in an RPG is an awful idea (I wasn't a fan of Ultima Underworld). However, MGS has shown us that you can take an existing 2D game concept, preserve both the 2D game play and the 2D appearance, and still come out with something better.
So while some uses of 3D are just "shiny new technology" and jumping on the bandwagon, others instances are what can be described as no less than art. I honestly can't tell you which UO2 would've been, but I could imagine them doing it right -- leave the core game as what appears to be 2D but is rendered via a 3D engine and then really show off that engine (by shifting the camera around to a more first-person angle) when you want to do something to advance the story.
On the other hand, it's entirely possible that they were trying to cash in on what Everquest does, in which case I'd agree with your comments 140%.
I'm not aware of any censorware available for Linux, Solaris, BeOS, *BSD, AIX, IRIX, etc.
Junkbuster! All someone has to do is spend 15 minutes writing a script to feed Junkbuster the links from a few of the bigger adult site directories. It's not perfect and it'll have a higher false negative rate than the commercial stuff, but it'll also have a lower false positive rate and it's free.
Fortunately, the law makes no claims as to how effective the censorware has to be, especially given that the commercial products generally have false negatives, as well.
Does your script evaluate the necessity and/or possible damage that an update might cause?
Nope. However, the process is split across two scripts: One to grab the new files and another to do the actual update. I manually trigger it and keep an eye on what it's doing. However, there is a certain degree of "might as well just mindlessly apply the update", especially when there're no errata details to give me a clue as to what was changed. Also, if it's something major, I'll generally do a quick check afterward to make sure it's still working. And I still have to manually fix any config files that get moved to.rpmsave. But it's certainly quicker and easier than manually grabbing the updates (especially in the case where there aren't any).
The problem in this case is that there's a clear deliniation of which entity is which. Unlike the random number archive example, one can point to the RIAA's web page and say, "Obviously, your honor, our index.html existed first and was used to encrypt a copy of decss.c."
I wouldn't know how to express such a concept as a formal proof or even as legalese, but it's something that's intuitively easy for humans to grasp. I suppose that's not the best way to put it, but that's part of why the law is evaluated by humans rather than machines. A human is capable, for example, of saying, "Yes, Ted violated all the verbage of the law against running red lights, but given that his car was being pushed by the raving psychopath in the truck behind him, no rational person could consider him guilty of a crime." Humans make fuzzy judgements about guilt, intent, and cause/effect all the time.
The xor method is indeed very good, I wonder why it has not yet been used by filesharing networks? (My guess: it is too expensive to generate high quality random files of the necessary size. Also it doubles b/w requirements).
As far as the randomness goes, in practice I suppose it doesn't have to be cryptographically good randomness. Both the key and the encrypted file would then have a pattern to them, but it'd still be impossible to determine which one was generated pseudo-randomly and which one was the result of an XOR, unless you knew when they were created.
As for the bandwidth requirements, that's part of the magic that would get fixed by peer-to-peer or similar technologies. If you cut the old Napster in half, that's still more than the 60% userbase reduction from the RIAA-mandated filtering (assuming, of course, a uniform distribution of traffic, which obviously isn't the case).
I suppose the big kicker is that, if nothing else, they could always go after the person distributing the file recreation recipe. It doesn't matter if I've managed to distribute a given pirated mp3 across the XOR of 500 files all served by other people -- someone has to say, "'Metallica - Sandman.mp3' is Bob's file #274 XORed with Ted's file #714 XORed with..." Imagine if, instead, the recipe were something like "Take byte #27 from Bob's file #274 and byte #18 from Ted's file #714." Now imagine if, instead, it were "Take entry #77 from the ASCII table. Take entry #90 from the ASCII table."
And if you don't make the recreation recipe public, then you might as well just PGP encrypt the files, throw them on a web server, and only give the decryption key to your closest friends. That's the sort of piracy that's a lot closer in scope to the traditional "fair use" notion that the pro-Napster crowd keeps pointing towards, anyway. It's also the sort of piracy that probably isn't worth the time and the effort for the RIAA to pursue. It's the "available for 2.4 million of my dearest and closest friends" that really worries them.
The phone allows just as much time-wasting, doesn't it?
It depends. With a phone, the sender has to pay a significant time cost for each recipient. With email, there is virtually no cost for the sender to instantly send a given joke or other inane forward to 200 of his/her closest acquaintances.
It's just too easy for someone to flood out the signal with noise. Someone you hardly know might not call you up to say, "Wazzup???", but there's a much lower treshold before they put you on their "Wazzup???", "All your base", "FW: FUNNY JOKES!!!", "Re: re: re: MISSING CHILD" mailing list.
"Nix gurus" don't necessarily have time to check for, download, and install every single RPM.
What kind of a Unix guru doesn't script this process? It's really just a matter of grabbing any updates in Redhat's 'updates/(versionnumber)/(arch)' and 'updates/(versionnumber)/noarch' directories and then applying an 'rpm -F (downloaded rpms)'. Not necessarily doable by the stereotypical RedHat user, but certainly not a problem for a Unix guru.
I've even got my own ugly, ugly, homebrew, hacked-up solution that, while not 100% automated, lets me do an update (for my desktop machine and all 3 servers) in the background with only ~30 seconds of manual intervention. Automating the last little bit wouldn't be too much harder.
The fact that RedHat's charging money for such a service amazes me. I understand that they provide value, I understand that it costs them money to provide this value, and I wish them the best of luck at making a buck, but it seems that their business model in this case can be devasted by someone willing to do a bit of scripting. Even Kirk Bauer's autorpm provides a free alternative (that has existed since before RedHat's update agent.
There're two things that I can think of that make RedHat's business model potentially viable:
Lack of information - John Q. User will probably go with the quick-and-easy update process that's readily visible after installing RedHat.
Priority updates - RedHat could hypothetically decide to offer updates via the update agent service before they're available via FTP. Depending on how this gets done, it could be delibrate (such as it appearing on the update agent a week before FTP) or just an artifact of bandwidth and priority (it may appear on the FTP site as soon as the update agent starts pushing, but connection limits and mirroring delays may mean it's not readily available until a day or two later).
This sounds like an awesome idea until you realize that only 8 or 9 people get to play SimCity4000 because there aren't enough Sims players to populate anymore cities.
The solution would be to fill in gaps with AI-driven people. However, if most or all of the people are AI-driven, you start to lose the point of player-populated cities. Even worse, what happens to the player-driven people in a city "owned" by someone who quits? What happens if a grief player becomes mayor? (Let's run the city into debt and trigger all the natural disasters.) I do have a few ideas on how to pull it off:
Replication -- the population filling a given SimCity is "cloned" from the SimsOnline population; a given house built on an area that's zoned residential might resemble the house of a SimsOnline house, but bulldozing it won't destroy the SimsOnline version.
SimsOnline self-rule -- let SimsOnline manage itself on its own with some SimCity-like issues being controlled by some sort of democratic glob of the SimsOnline players in that community. For example, if they need a local police station, it would be the responsibility of the city council (composed of multiple players) to do something about it.
Of course, I still think there's a certain amount of inanity in going so far to simulate real life. I never saw the point in Ultima Online (where a character had to actually spend a lot of time "working" to make money) and that, at least, had the excuse that it was a fantasy world.
Artists are required create games these days, not your average, innovative programmer.
I find it funny that nearly the exact same comment was made here by someone who was working at Origin when Dungeon Master came out.
The interesting thing was that the other comment was not in the context of originality being killed off, but rather that it was in the context of the bar being raised as far as what kinds of quality people expect. Even more importantly, the game that prompted his comments was extremely innovative -- it more or less birthed a subgenre of 3D, real-time RPGs with drag-and-drop inventory management. Even Diablo, which most people call a graphical version of Hack, also has a clear Dungeon Master influence in it.
But to get back to the subject at hand, it's unfair to cite graphics as one of the "originality killers". I love pure, text-based, non-graphical Nethack as much as the next true geek, but there's something to be said for including graphics to drool over. They help immerse you in the world. Consider "Out of this World" and "Ultima VI". Both were innovative (OOTW provided a platform game that completely revolved around the story, included puzzle solving, and avoided lots of cut-and-paste level design. U6 created a giant above-ground world that was all one scale.), both have graphics that would be considered so-so by today's standard, but both have graphics that you can still point at and go, "That's more than just programming. That's art." (As a random aside, OOTW probably isn't the best example, given that there are only two names in the credits, with the second guy only helping with sound effects and doing the music, IIRC. But it still illustrates the point of good art.)
So yes, some people will use gee-whiz graphics as a means to avoid producing something original, but you also have people using gee-whiz graphics as a means to produce something both original and beautiful.
Your recipient has the message and all you transferred was two completely unrelated numbers.
You seem to have an odd definition of "unrelated". "Extract a sequence of pi starting at position X and continuing to position Y." is a fairly simple function, that can be defined as a decryption scheme. The numbers you find into that scheme are your encoded message and the result is your message. Just because your formula uses pi doesn't make your input unrelated to your output.
On the other hand, XOR does allow for some confusion. Imagine I take a purely random file (based off of measuring radioactive decay or some such) and then XOR it with DeCSS. Now I've got my random file and my encrypted DeCSS -- the catch is that there's no way to tell which is which. If I've got both files, I can XOR them and get DeCSS, but otherwise both files look like random noise and both files are treated "equally" by the decryption process.
To make things even more interesting, imagine two people, named Bob and Ted, who have online collections of files with random numbers in them. Now let's say Ted's a bit of a free speech advocate. So he takes a copy of DeCSS, XORs it with one of Bob's random number files, and posts it to his site as a collection of random numbers. How do you prove that it's Ted who's hosting the copy of DeCSS and not Bob? What if you force Bob to remove his set of random numbers, when someone else had used that set as an XOR decryption key for something else? What if that person had both the encrypted and unencrypted versions available (say, as a demonstration of using XOR to encrypt a file)? Using the encrypted and unencrypted versions for the third party, you could recreate Bob's (removed) key. Then you could use that key to decrypt Ted's encrypted DeCSS.
I'm of the opinion that there is no NSA backdoor in Windows, because it would have been found and exploited by now.
Let's not forget the whole NSA backdoor key in Win2k debacle. There were, of course, reports from Microsoft denying that this was a key for the NSA. There is, at least, sufficient doubt to make it impossible to rule out the presence of a delibrate NSA backdoor.
Even if that weren't enough, one could argue that such a backdoor, if found, might be (or possibly has already been) classified as a bug instead of a backdoor.
I meant i dumped the game after one hour and at the cost of a lot of disappointment. Molyneux's games are always higly awaited for their originality and often really bad on the playability area.
I find this comment especially interesting, given that my first take on the fact that "Black and White" has gone gold is more a kudos to the people responsible for advertising and hyping the game, rather than a credit to the game itself.
Hell, look at the people who went nuts trying to get tickets to Phantom Menance, only to find themselves subjected to a few hours of Jar-Jar Binks.
I certainly hope I'm wrong and that there're a lot of very happy gamers out there, but I can easily imagine both very good and very bad games that fit within the hype and details I've heard about "Black & White". (And I mean that in a qualitative sense, not a moral one, so no jokes about the very bad game being the one that ships in the black box.)
So in general, I just find it hard to get excited about a game that hasn't been released, yet. It's too easy to get burned and you really don't gain anything from the anticipation (unless you like sitting around going, "Let's see: If I save an extra 4 percent of my income, I should be able to buy the necessary extra top-of-the-line 3D cards and monitors to support the rumored Quake 5 360-degree continual view feature.").
We'll never know if the old Slashdot would have fought off the religion-for-profit crowd, and some people on here are going to say Andover had a negative effect.
While Slashdot chose not to fight a questionable legal battle, I'd argue that they are fighting off Scientology in general. They replaced a single censored comment that's a week old (practically ancient in Slashdot time) with a rather length front-page article that included a link to a site that contains a legal (at least so far) copy of the censored text. And then they added more links to anti-scientology sites. And on top of that, you've got all the comments posted by other people.
why the DMCA, rushed through by entertainment lawyers and hurriedly signed by President Clinton without any serious thought or even much debate, is a dreadful law
Err, color me skeptical, but hadn't the Scientologists been clamping down on posting of material they've got copyrighted even before the DMCA?
I dislike the DMCA as much as the next Slashdotter, but what about this incident makes it significantly relevant to the DMCA? Was the comment something that would've fallen under "fair use" prior to the DMCA?
While I am not the person who moderated it (and for better or worse, the moderator can't directly defend his/her moderation without undoing said moderation), it does strike me that reposting text to Slashdot that Slashdot is receiving cease-and-desist letters over is just asking for trouble and creating more work for the people who run this site.
It's also worth pointing out that the initial post that this entire thread is built off of, which got moderated up to (+5, Informative), should really be (-1, Redundant) as anyone capable of reading paragraph 6 of the main Slashdot article can see.
From their site it looked like it was running afoul of the DMCA laws, but it didn't give any details.
I believe the DMCA state dates back to the claim that Napster supposedly (for, IMO, extremely farsical values of supposedly) couldn't attempt to circumvent Aimster's pig-latin scheme without violating the DMCA.
So then a user can ONLY use the wireless LAN if they authenticate through a browser? What about people with devices (phones, PDAs) that can get email but not surf the www?
You're wondering how a cell phone would use the 802.11-based wireless LAN? I think PDAs would be in the same boat -- something powerful enough to do 802.11 should also be powerful enough to run a light-weight web browser. The only email-only PDAs I can think of are those two-way beeper-type deals.
Am I being overly optimistic, or does everyone win with this deal?
One could argue that it does make piracy of Playstation games more viable -- running a pre-packaged emulator is less involved than mod-chipping a Playstation.
Then there are others who argue that rampant software piracy helps promote the platform.
Then the first group points out that if everyone's pirating the software, no one's making money.
Then it starts to devolve into the typical arguments heard in the Napster threads and a fist-fight breaks out.
So if I were Sony, I'd probably fight like hell to stop emulation of the Playstation. But if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Nonono. There is but one answer to the editor flamewar:
ed
If someone says, "vi", someone else will inevitably reply, "emacs". If someone says, "emacs", someone else will inevitably reply, "vi". If someone says, "ed", everyone else tends to get quiet and assume that the person is either a Unix guru, an escaped mental patient, or both. Either way, they realize that they probably shouldn't argue the point further.
TV commercials are a similar market to the masses, but at least I can opt-out by not watchng tv.
Even more important is the fact that TV commercials fund the programming we watch. Either we have commercials to pay for content (US broadcast TV), we pay through the content directly (premium cable channels and countries with a TV tax), or we voluntarily donate money for the content (PBS).
Spam, on the other hand, has the exact opposite effect. Instead of reducing or eliminating the cost of "entertaining" email, it actually raises the cost across the board, due to higher bandwidth considerations and storage costs.
It's nice to see that some jerks may do hard time for that, but it would be even nicer if they are punished becaause of the actual act of spamming.
Yes, but we are getting closer. The last "Spammers Jailed" story seemed to imply they might've been jailed because of the scam rather than the spam. In today's case, however, the crime was a direct consequence of the spamming -- even if the item being spammed was something that would've been totally legal/legit to sell via normal means.
Also, the things that bumped the crime up to a felony were things that weren't direct actions of the spammer but rather the consequences of their actions. From the POV of the spammer, it was just generically spamming through an open-relay.
So it's not ideal, but it's still Pretty Damn Good, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple? Yes. Polite terms? Yes. Reasonable? Not even close, if my understanding of the situation is correct. As I understand it, the guy who doesn't want them to use his SSH trademark anymore is the same guy who was involved in the development of the protocol/standard in the first place. At best, he's guilty of deciding way after the fact that he didn't want them using SSH as a name. At worst, he's trying to delibrately use a "submarine trademark" to monopolize the name recognition SSH has gained, in no small part due to the standard itself.
Had I nevered played Metal Gear Solid, I would not only have agreed with you 100%, but would've gone as far to say that using 3D in an RPG is an awful idea (I wasn't a fan of Ultima Underworld). However, MGS has shown us that you can take an existing 2D game concept, preserve both the 2D game play and the 2D appearance, and still come out with something better.
So while some uses of 3D are just "shiny new technology" and jumping on the bandwagon, others instances are what can be described as no less than art. I honestly can't tell you which UO2 would've been, but I could imagine them doing it right -- leave the core game as what appears to be 2D but is rendered via a 3D engine and then really show off that engine (by shifting the camera around to a more first-person angle) when you want to do something to advance the story.
On the other hand, it's entirely possible that they were trying to cash in on what Everquest does, in which case I'd agree with your comments 140%.
Junkbuster! All someone has to do is spend 15 minutes writing a script to feed Junkbuster the links from a few of the bigger adult site directories. It's not perfect and it'll have a higher false negative rate than the commercial stuff, but it'll also have a lower false positive rate and it's free.
Fortunately, the law makes no claims as to how effective the censorware has to be, especially given that the commercial products generally have false negatives, as well.
Nope. However, the process is split across two scripts: One to grab the new files and another to do the actual update. I manually trigger it and keep an eye on what it's doing. However, there is a certain degree of "might as well just mindlessly apply the update", especially when there're no errata details to give me a clue as to what was changed. Also, if it's something major, I'll generally do a quick check afterward to make sure it's still working. And I still have to manually fix any config files that get moved to .rpmsave. But it's certainly quicker and easier than manually grabbing the updates (especially in the case where there aren't any).
The problem in this case is that there's a clear deliniation of which entity is which. Unlike the random number archive example, one can point to the RIAA's web page and say, "Obviously, your honor, our index.html existed first and was used to encrypt a copy of decss.c."
I wouldn't know how to express such a concept as a formal proof or even as legalese, but it's something that's intuitively easy for humans to grasp. I suppose that's not the best way to put it, but that's part of why the law is evaluated by humans rather than machines. A human is capable, for example, of saying, "Yes, Ted violated all the verbage of the law against running red lights, but given that his car was being pushed by the raving psychopath in the truck behind him, no rational person could consider him guilty of a crime." Humans make fuzzy judgements about guilt, intent, and cause/effect all the time.
As far as the randomness goes, in practice I suppose it doesn't have to be cryptographically good randomness. Both the key and the encrypted file would then have a pattern to them, but it'd still be impossible to determine which one was generated pseudo-randomly and which one was the result of an XOR, unless you knew when they were created.
As for the bandwidth requirements, that's part of the magic that would get fixed by peer-to-peer or similar technologies. If you cut the old Napster in half, that's still more than the 60% userbase reduction from the RIAA-mandated filtering (assuming, of course, a uniform distribution of traffic, which obviously isn't the case).
I suppose the big kicker is that, if nothing else, they could always go after the person distributing the file recreation recipe. It doesn't matter if I've managed to distribute a given pirated mp3 across the XOR of 500 files all served by other people -- someone has to say, "'Metallica - Sandman.mp3' is Bob's file #274 XORed with Ted's file #714 XORed with ..." Imagine if, instead, the recipe were something like "Take byte #27 from Bob's file #274 and byte #18 from Ted's file #714." Now imagine if, instead, it were "Take entry #77 from the ASCII table. Take entry #90 from the ASCII table."
And if you don't make the recreation recipe public, then you might as well just PGP encrypt the files, throw them on a web server, and only give the decryption key to your closest friends. That's the sort of piracy that's a lot closer in scope to the traditional "fair use" notion that the pro-Napster crowd keeps pointing towards, anyway. It's also the sort of piracy that probably isn't worth the time and the effort for the RIAA to pursue. It's the "available for 2.4 million of my dearest and closest friends" that really worries them.
It depends. With a phone, the sender has to pay a significant time cost for each recipient. With email, there is virtually no cost for the sender to instantly send a given joke or other inane forward to 200 of his/her closest acquaintances.
It's just too easy for someone to flood out the signal with noise. Someone you hardly know might not call you up to say, "Wazzup???", but there's a much lower treshold before they put you on their "Wazzup???", "All your base", "FW: FUNNY JOKES!!!", "Re: re: re: MISSING CHILD" mailing list.
What kind of a Unix guru doesn't script this process? It's really just a matter of grabbing any updates in Redhat's 'updates/(versionnumber)/(arch)' and 'updates/(versionnumber)/noarch' directories and then applying an 'rpm -F (downloaded rpms)'. Not necessarily doable by the stereotypical RedHat user, but certainly not a problem for a Unix guru.
I've even got my own ugly, ugly, homebrew, hacked-up solution that, while not 100% automated, lets me do an update (for my desktop machine and all 3 servers) in the background with only ~30 seconds of manual intervention. Automating the last little bit wouldn't be too much harder.
The fact that RedHat's charging money for such a service amazes me. I understand that they provide value, I understand that it costs them money to provide this value, and I wish them the best of luck at making a buck, but it seems that their business model in this case can be devasted by someone willing to do a bit of scripting. Even Kirk Bauer's autorpm provides a free alternative (that has existed since before RedHat's update agent.
There're two things that I can think of that make RedHat's business model potentially viable:
The solution would be to fill in gaps with AI-driven people. However, if most or all of the people are AI-driven, you start to lose the point of player-populated cities. Even worse, what happens to the player-driven people in a city "owned" by someone who quits? What happens if a grief player becomes mayor? (Let's run the city into debt and trigger all the natural disasters.) I do have a few ideas on how to pull it off:
Replication -- the population filling a given SimCity is "cloned" from the SimsOnline population; a given house built on an area that's zoned residential might resemble the house of a SimsOnline house, but bulldozing it won't destroy the SimsOnline version.
SimsOnline self-rule -- let SimsOnline manage itself on its own with some SimCity-like issues being controlled by some sort of democratic glob of the SimsOnline players in that community. For example, if they need a local police station, it would be the responsibility of the city council (composed of multiple players) to do something about it.
Of course, I still think there's a certain amount of inanity in going so far to simulate real life. I never saw the point in Ultima Online (where a character had to actually spend a lot of time "working" to make money) and that, at least, had the excuse that it was a fantasy world.
I find it funny that nearly the exact same comment was made here by someone who was working at Origin when Dungeon Master came out.
The interesting thing was that the other comment was not in the context of originality being killed off, but rather that it was in the context of the bar being raised as far as what kinds of quality people expect. Even more importantly, the game that prompted his comments was extremely innovative -- it more or less birthed a subgenre of 3D, real-time RPGs with drag-and-drop inventory management. Even Diablo, which most people call a graphical version of Hack, also has a clear Dungeon Master influence in it.
But to get back to the subject at hand, it's unfair to cite graphics as one of the "originality killers". I love pure, text-based, non-graphical Nethack as much as the next true geek, but there's something to be said for including graphics to drool over. They help immerse you in the world. Consider "Out of this World" and "Ultima VI". Both were innovative (OOTW provided a platform game that completely revolved around the story, included puzzle solving, and avoided lots of cut-and-paste level design. U6 created a giant above-ground world that was all one scale.), both have graphics that would be considered so-so by today's standard, but both have graphics that you can still point at and go, "That's more than just programming. That's art." (As a random aside, OOTW probably isn't the best example, given that there are only two names in the credits, with the second guy only helping with sound effects and doing the music, IIRC. But it still illustrates the point of good art.)
So yes, some people will use gee-whiz graphics as a means to avoid producing something original, but you also have people using gee-whiz graphics as a means to produce something both original and beautiful.
There's a partial fix for the case dependency available in the message boards here.
You seem to have an odd definition of "unrelated". "Extract a sequence of pi starting at position X and continuing to position Y." is a fairly simple function, that can be defined as a decryption scheme. The numbers you find into that scheme are your encoded message and the result is your message. Just because your formula uses pi doesn't make your input unrelated to your output.
On the other hand, XOR does allow for some confusion. Imagine I take a purely random file (based off of measuring radioactive decay or some such) and then XOR it with DeCSS. Now I've got my random file and my encrypted DeCSS -- the catch is that there's no way to tell which is which. If I've got both files, I can XOR them and get DeCSS, but otherwise both files look like random noise and both files are treated "equally" by the decryption process.
To make things even more interesting, imagine two people, named Bob and Ted, who have online collections of files with random numbers in them. Now let's say Ted's a bit of a free speech advocate. So he takes a copy of DeCSS, XORs it with one of Bob's random number files, and posts it to his site as a collection of random numbers. How do you prove that it's Ted who's hosting the copy of DeCSS and not Bob? What if you force Bob to remove his set of random numbers, when someone else had used that set as an XOR decryption key for something else? What if that person had both the encrypted and unencrypted versions available (say, as a demonstration of using XOR to encrypt a file)? Using the encrypted and unencrypted versions for the third party, you could recreate Bob's (removed) key. Then you could use that key to decrypt Ted's encrypted DeCSS.
Let's not forget the whole NSA backdoor key in Win2k debacle. There were, of course, reports from Microsoft denying that this was a key for the NSA. There is, at least, sufficient doubt to make it impossible to rule out the presence of a delibrate NSA backdoor.
Even if that weren't enough, one could argue that such a backdoor, if found, might be (or possibly has already been) classified as a bug instead of a backdoor.
I find this comment especially interesting, given that my first take on the fact that "Black and White" has gone gold is more a kudos to the people responsible for advertising and hyping the game, rather than a credit to the game itself.
Hell, look at the people who went nuts trying to get tickets to Phantom Menance, only to find themselves subjected to a few hours of Jar-Jar Binks.
I certainly hope I'm wrong and that there're a lot of very happy gamers out there, but I can easily imagine both very good and very bad games that fit within the hype and details I've heard about "Black & White". (And I mean that in a qualitative sense, not a moral one, so no jokes about the very bad game being the one that ships in the black box.)
So in general, I just find it hard to get excited about a game that hasn't been released, yet. It's too easy to get burned and you really don't gain anything from the anticipation (unless you like sitting around going, "Let's see: If I save an extra 4 percent of my income, I should be able to buy the necessary extra top-of-the-line 3D cards and monitors to support the rumored Quake 5 360-degree continual view feature.").
While Slashdot chose not to fight a questionable legal battle, I'd argue that they are fighting off Scientology in general. They replaced a single censored comment that's a week old (practically ancient in Slashdot time) with a rather length front-page article that included a link to a site that contains a legal (at least so far) copy of the censored text. And then they added more links to anti-scientology sites. And on top of that, you've got all the comments posted by other people.
Err, color me skeptical, but hadn't the Scientologists been clamping down on posting of material they've got copyrighted even before the DMCA?
I dislike the DMCA as much as the next Slashdotter, but what about this incident makes it significantly relevant to the DMCA? Was the comment something that would've fallen under "fair use" prior to the DMCA?
While I am not the person who moderated it (and for better or worse, the moderator can't directly defend his/her moderation without undoing said moderation), it does strike me that reposting text to Slashdot that Slashdot is receiving cease-and-desist letters over is just asking for trouble and creating more work for the people who run this site.
It's also worth pointing out that the initial post that this entire thread is built off of, which got moderated up to (+5, Informative), should really be (-1, Redundant) as anyone capable of reading paragraph 6 of the main Slashdot article can see.
I believe the DMCA state dates back to the claim that Napster supposedly (for, IMO, extremely farsical values of supposedly) couldn't attempt to circumvent Aimster's pig-latin scheme without violating the DMCA.
You're wondering how a cell phone would use the 802.11-based wireless LAN? I think PDAs would be in the same boat -- something powerful enough to do 802.11 should also be powerful enough to run a light-weight web browser. The only email-only PDAs I can think of are those two-way beeper-type deals.
Georgia Tech isn't a private institution.
If I'm not mistaken, some of the Imperial administrative-types had little hand-held touch-screen datapads.
One could argue that it does make piracy of Playstation games more viable -- running a pre-packaged emulator is less involved than mod-chipping a Playstation.
Then there are others who argue that rampant software piracy helps promote the platform.
Then the first group points out that if everyone's pirating the software, no one's making money.
Then it starts to devolve into the typical arguments heard in the Napster threads and a fist-fight breaks out.
So if I were Sony, I'd probably fight like hell to stop emulation of the Playstation. But if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Nonono. There is but one answer to the editor flamewar:
ed
If someone says, "vi", someone else will inevitably reply, "emacs".
If someone says, "emacs", someone else will inevitably reply, "vi".
If someone says, "ed", everyone else tends to get quiet and assume that the person is either a Unix guru, an escaped mental patient, or both. Either way, they realize that they probably shouldn't argue the point further.
Even more important is the fact that TV commercials fund the programming we watch. Either we have commercials to pay for content (US broadcast TV), we pay through the content directly (premium cable channels and countries with a TV tax), or we voluntarily donate money for the content (PBS).
Spam, on the other hand, has the exact opposite effect. Instead of reducing or eliminating the cost of "entertaining" email, it actually raises the cost across the board, due to higher bandwidth considerations and storage costs.
Yes, but we are getting closer. The last "Spammers Jailed" story seemed to imply they might've been jailed because of the scam rather than the spam. In today's case, however, the crime was a direct consequence of the spamming -- even if the item being spammed was something that would've been totally legal/legit to sell via normal means.
Also, the things that bumped the crime up to a felony were things that weren't direct actions of the spammer but rather the consequences of their actions. From the POV of the spammer, it was just generically spamming through an open-relay.
So it's not ideal, but it's still Pretty Damn Good, IMO.