You can see how the prize has become nothing more than a tool for political leverage -- albeit very poorly. This is true even when you consider the more recent recipient Liu Xiaobo. While he may be deserving of the prize, it is hard to ignore the political aspect -- i.e. getting China to make changes with respect to human rights. It almost feels as though this was actually the real intent of the prize, and that Liu Xiaobo was a nominee who happened to be an appropriate face for the prize.
In the years before, the prize was generally given to those who had greatly contributed toward peace (and that their contributions had already happened). That isn't to say that politics was completely out of the picture. However, it was mainly to recognize those who fought for a noble cause, and everything else (politics) came second. Now, it has been completely reversed. The prize is now just a political leverage that happens to also (sometimes) recognize the efforts of individuals/organizations toward peace. What a pity.
You are right. The last prize was given to Liu Xiaobo. That does not change the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize is really just a political tool. In fact, when you consider Liu Xiaobo as a winner, and the fact that his name was essentially blotted out of the news in China, it only confirms what I wrote earlier. In the country in which that prize SHOULD have mattered most, the citizens were likely not even aware of it.
The last prize was given to a man (Obama) as a tool to promote peace, and not because of past contributions of the recipient toward peace. The world was tired of the Bush administration and their pro-war foreign policy, and the committee was banking on Obama making a change by giving him a major incentive to do so. Now it has become even more of a political tool with the nomination of Wikileaks. I cannot see how people can remain objective when it comes to considering Wikileaks as a candidate for the peace prize given the political controversy surrounding it.
In light of the recent incident in Egypt, it seems that the real purpose of such a kill switch is more useful as a means of censorship (a la big scandals that could make the US look bad, like Wikileaks). On a local scale, if I know my network is about to be attacked, I would cut off the main entrance into my network, while leaving the inside up and running. If they insist on a kill switch, why not just implement a similar scheme for all the "gateways" into government networks? As for each citizen's own access, I don't need the government to unplug my computer for me -- I can do that by myself, and am capable of making the decision to do so myself.
I find it hard to see how such a device would be successful in the current market. In order to be on par with the expansive libraries currently available on the Nintendo DS, the Sony PSP, and Gameboy systems, they would pretty much have to have some sort of backward compatibility with the current PSP. But then, what's the point of spending money on a new handheld if all you get (by the time they plan to launch) are rehashes of games you may already own? On top of that, there is nothing in the specs that screams "I must have that because it has this new cool feature" -- in fact, there is really nothing in the specs list that impressive. I read and say "yeah, so what.. most smart phones will be as if not more powerful" by that time.
"In our opinion," the authors of the study conclude, "the success of BitTorrent lies in the availability of popular content which is typically protected by copyright law, and people who take the risk of publishing that content do it because they receive an economic benefit. If in the future these users lose their incentive, either because of a decrease in advertising income or due to having to pay very expensive fines, BitTorrent would very likely cease to offer this content, which would make people stop using the application on a massive scale."
These people have no clue how torrents and seeding works. When someone completes a torrent, they can choose to then seed that download. There is no economic incentive there whatsoever. The seeder gets absolutely nothing out of seeding. All it takes is one person to make an initial seed, and then if each downloader joins in seeding that content, then the number of seeds grows exponentially. Anyone can create a torrent, and anyone can seed. These guys make it sound like there is some sort of main repository from which all other downloaders get their torrents.
I read the article and tested if the code works -- and it does. However, the article is somewhat misleading -- or at least I found that it was not as clear as it should have been with "logged in."
For example, I logged into my gmail account, and close the tab without logging out. The code from the article shows that I am still logged in -- true from a technical standpoint, but I closed out the gmail tab already. Likewise with facebook. However, all the code can really do is test whether or not the current computer you are using had previously had an account logged in (and is still logged in). It does not know that it is my account, or my wife's account, etc.
To use this code to check a user's online status -- well, you run into the same problem as aforementioned. So you can't even use the information to get useful browsing information about the current user. At best, you can say that the current user is using a machine that has had a gmail account logged into it, etc.
It is rather pointless to get this information and perhaps dangerous. Things said in-game could be construed by others to mean things other than what they intended. While undoubtedly Loughtner is guilty, it sets a disturbing precedent where people will be judged out of context for what they said. I mean, whats next? Arresting someone because they said in the middle of a Call of Duty game that they were going to shoot someone (referring to the game)?
Are you serious? Please; at least use your head a bit. You assume too much when you think a court will simply accept that Player John Doe saying he wants to shoot someone in the game actually translates to wanting to kill someone in the real world. The prosecution would have to provide enough evidence proving without-a-doubt that your game chats indicate suspicious behavior. Unless you have vigilante lawyers, what is more likely to happen is that they would easily decide whether anything said in-game AND WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE GAME is pertinent to the case. So unless you say anything remotely related to the shootings, they really couldn't care less about you since they already have the guy they want to nail.
While I can understand the desire to have the network of medical devices converge with data networks due to ease of management, sometimes it is safer, and better, to keep them separated at the cost of lower ease of use. For one, a network outage would not take out access to the medical devices that keep people alive. The last thing we need is for someone to hack into hospitals and mess around with medical equipment.
The article points out many issues with such convergence: network outages, security, spectrum limitations (for wireless networks), increased overhead and regulation, etc. All this simply to make management of such networks easier? Are you kidding me?
I would like to know more about the consequences which the lawyers who wanted Wakefield to produce the falsified study will face. From the article, Wakefield has been stripped of his medical license. So what about the lawyers?
Or rather, DMCA lawsuits specifically related to custom firmware. I'd be interested to know how the courts (or a jury) would side on issues specific to hardware. Then again, FTFA it says the guy wont be publicly releasing the update, just the tools to build it yourself.
Unless custom firmware is completely devoid of Sony's firmware, anyone releasing "custom" firmware is probably going to lose in court. However, I wonder if Sony might try to sue based on him releasing tools that enable circumventing Sony's official firmware.
This is why i don't understand that so many people are so obsessed with the idea of running homebrew or emulators or w/e on their consoles...
Why can't you just use your PC? Everything you need is available there...
If you're talking about gaming, nothing beats a huge screen and full surround sound. Most people have an entertainment system that includes a large, HD TV and an equivalently expensive speaker system. While you could run the emulators on your PCs, most people prefer to make use of their entertainment system for their gaming, and their PC for "real work" (whatever that may mean).
It's hosted Exchange with the enterprise addons, it's not like their file and backoffice operations are moving into the cloud (Azure). The only critical thing that would possibly go down during an attack is email and that can be brought down by an attack no matter where it's hosted because by definition it must be open to the Internet writ large.
But that's precisely the problem with "the cloud" because all your services (sure, in this case it may just be email, but that's not really the issue) are only available so long as your connection to the cloud is available. (This also raises the question: is the quality of the service only as good as your connection to the cloud?) An in-house setup would mean that you're still up and running internally. Your remote users might have trouble accessing the internal system, but you aren't completely cut off from whatever service the cloud was supposed to provide.
I am a bit concerned that what appears to be an entire agency moving its operations toward complete dependency on a single commercial entity. It doesn't matter if the USDA were to use Google's cloud, or anyone else's cloud. What happens when said cloud "runs out of steam" so to speak -- meaning if there are problems with the cloud itself, you've essentially got an entire agency dead in the water. At least with the current setup, there are natural stop-gaps that prevent complete technical disasters. The operations of one department theoretically would not shut down the entire agency.
There is a lot of short-sightedness in thinking that the short-term savings on IT costs will outweigh the cost of recovering from even one day of said cloud being inaccessible. Of course, I write this with absolutely no consideration for any redundancy systems that are built into the cloud. But what good is the redundancy when the cloud becomes the target of a massive attack. Who/what do you rely on so as to continue your daily operations?
You know, for someone with enough skills to "jailbreak" their PS3, you'd think they would also be savvy enough to operate a camera and produce a quality video. I guess my expectations are a tad too high.
While this is one possible outcome, I highly doubt it will ever happen as you describe it. Your typical computer user is not even going to be aware of how companies mine data on them, let alone be able to "game" the system through fake histories and cookies. Sure, they might be aware that "companies" are collecting personal information about them -- but only in the general sense. The only real safe way to prevent this is to keep internet usage to a minimum -- which will never happen.
The only way your scenario will even be partially realized is when a company makes that process of faking histories and cookies as easy as installing a plugin. And then it will be said company that might have to face any related circumvention laws.
It's no different than what guys like George Soros do...
How is this any different than Ticketmaster scooping up all the good seats and auctioning them off on their own?
The difference would be that these guys are using a botnet and cause what is in essence a denial of service attack. Ticketmaster, on the other hand, probably has a deal with the vendors; these guys do not.
One of the problems I often have with electronics whose parts swivel (in particular LCDs) is that over time, the electrical components that have to be wired through the point of swiveling often wears out too fast. I wonder how durable such a machine would be -- hopefully they are as sturdy as an IBM (not Lenovo) Thinkpad.
The connector you're referring to works ONLY for keynote a small number of applications. From one of the highlighted reviews:
[quote]I teach high school and thought the vga iPad dock connector would allow me to project everything I see while using the iPad, but alas there are severe limitations to which applications will show on the classroom LCD projector. I wish I had known this before purchasing the connector. The Apple Store description says the connector will display slideshows and movies, but I didn't realize that was it...[/quote]
Further research (i.e. reading more reviews) indicates that it DOES NOT just redirect video output that normally gets sent to the iPad's screen. So it's actually a ripoff for $29 since it only works for a small number of applications (for now). So unless you ONLY plan to do presentations through keynote, show pictures, or movies, this isn't the device for you. If I want to include a demo of, say, Mathematica in my presentation, or maybe make use of a web page as a quick aside during my talk, tough luck.
If it's thieves he's worried about, then he and the rest of the "marketing" industry should just take salary cuts (i.e. be happy with 5-digit salary like the rest of us) and give the rest of the profits to the actual creators of the intellectual property. Until they are willing to do that, they are just as much as thieves as the pirates. So we're just trading for legislation that protects one group of thieves as opposed to another.
A killswitch means we no longer get instantaneous information, either, should we have to use it. Cell phones don't necessarily reach all parts of the world. I'm not so sure I'm willing to give up being able to get news right as it happens just because of threat of cyberwar. People can unhook their own machines from the net -- that's fine. That's the last line of defense that anyone can implement for themselves. Just don't cut me off because you feel it protects you better.
While a bot will certainly be able to macro and micro better than a human, human players are closing the gap and I don't think that the current gap is all that much between humans and machines.
On the other hand, the creativity gap between humans and machines is always in the favor of humans. At best (as of now), machines can only be designed to react, and their "creativity" is limited to a book of plays. Once you know the machine's playbook, you can easily defeat them. So they are only as good as how well their playbooks can be kept secret. Their ability to make a gamble during the heat of the battle (be it in attacks, build switching, etc) is still limited compared to humans (in my opinion). And this is often where tides turn in such games.
For there to be so many flaws (and I actually spent a good 30 mins searching for other reviews), you have to wonder what the hell happened during alpha and beta testing. It almost seems as though all their beta testers were using PS3s and not PCs. How else could such a clunky interface have been overlooked? Or did they not really take their beta reports seriously?
So now it's ok to be tracked with this sort of device simply because the target is boring? While I can appreciate the increased efforts to deal with terrorism, I can't say I agree with the methods.
He should have just destroyed it after posting about it. Since he didn't know what it was, how could he be held legally responsible for destroying the device?
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You can see how the prize has become nothing more than a tool for political leverage -- albeit very poorly. This is true even when you consider the more recent recipient Liu Xiaobo. While he may be deserving of the prize, it is hard to ignore the political aspect -- i.e. getting China to make changes with respect to human rights. It almost feels as though this was actually the real intent of the prize, and that Liu Xiaobo was a nominee who happened to be an appropriate face for the prize.
In the years before, the prize was generally given to those who had greatly contributed toward peace (and that their contributions had already happened). That isn't to say that politics was completely out of the picture. However, it was mainly to recognize those who fought for a noble cause, and everything else (politics) came second. Now, it has been completely reversed. The prize is now just a political leverage that happens to also (sometimes) recognize the efforts of individuals/organizations toward peace. What a pity.
You are right. The last prize was given to Liu Xiaobo. That does not change the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize is really just a political tool. In fact, when you consider Liu Xiaobo as a winner, and the fact that his name was essentially blotted out of the news in China, it only confirms what I wrote earlier. In the country in which that prize SHOULD have mattered most, the citizens were likely not even aware of it.
The last prize was given to a man (Obama) as a tool to promote peace, and not because of past contributions of the recipient toward peace. The world was tired of the Bush administration and their pro-war foreign policy, and the committee was banking on Obama making a change by giving him a major incentive to do so. Now it has become even more of a political tool with the nomination of Wikileaks. I cannot see how people can remain objective when it comes to considering Wikileaks as a candidate for the peace prize given the political controversy surrounding it.
In light of the recent incident in Egypt, it seems that the real purpose of such a kill switch is more useful as a means of censorship (a la big scandals that could make the US look bad, like Wikileaks). On a local scale, if I know my network is about to be attacked, I would cut off the main entrance into my network, while leaving the inside up and running. If they insist on a kill switch, why not just implement a similar scheme for all the "gateways" into government networks? As for each citizen's own access, I don't need the government to unplug my computer for me -- I can do that by myself, and am capable of making the decision to do so myself.
I find it hard to see how such a device would be successful in the current market. In order to be on par with the expansive libraries currently available on the Nintendo DS, the Sony PSP, and Gameboy systems, they would pretty much have to have some sort of backward compatibility with the current PSP. But then, what's the point of spending money on a new handheld if all you get (by the time they plan to launch) are rehashes of games you may already own? On top of that, there is nothing in the specs that screams "I must have that because it has this new cool feature" -- in fact, there is really nothing in the specs list that impressive. I read and say "yeah, so what.. most smart phones will be as if not more powerful" by that time.
"In our opinion," the authors of the study conclude, "the success of BitTorrent lies in the availability of popular content which is typically protected by copyright law, and people who take the risk of publishing that content do it because they receive an economic benefit. If in the future these users lose their incentive, either because of a decrease in advertising income or due to having to pay very expensive fines, BitTorrent would very likely cease to offer this content, which would make people stop using the application on a massive scale."
These people have no clue how torrents and seeding works. When someone completes a torrent, they can choose to then seed that download. There is no economic incentive there whatsoever. The seeder gets absolutely nothing out of seeding. All it takes is one person to make an initial seed, and then if each downloader joins in seeding that content, then the number of seeds grows exponentially. Anyone can create a torrent, and anyone can seed. These guys make it sound like there is some sort of main repository from which all other downloaders get their torrents.
I read the article and tested if the code works -- and it does. However, the article is somewhat misleading -- or at least I found that it was not as clear as it should have been with "logged in."
For example, I logged into my gmail account, and close the tab without logging out. The code from the article shows that I am still logged in -- true from a technical standpoint, but I closed out the gmail tab already. Likewise with facebook. However, all the code can really do is test whether or not the current computer you are using had previously had an account logged in (and is still logged in). It does not know that it is my account, or my wife's account, etc.
To use this code to check a user's online status -- well, you run into the same problem as aforementioned. So you can't even use the information to get useful browsing information about the current user. At best, you can say that the current user is using a machine that has had a gmail account logged into it, etc.
It is rather pointless to get this information and perhaps dangerous. Things said in-game could be construed by others to mean things other than what they intended. While undoubtedly Loughtner is guilty, it sets a disturbing precedent where people will be judged out of context for what they said. I mean, whats next? Arresting someone because they said in the middle of a Call of Duty game that they were going to shoot someone (referring to the game)?
Are you serious? Please; at least use your head a bit. You assume too much when you think a court will simply accept that Player John Doe saying he wants to shoot someone in the game actually translates to wanting to kill someone in the real world. The prosecution would have to provide enough evidence proving without-a-doubt that your game chats indicate suspicious behavior. Unless you have vigilante lawyers, what is more likely to happen is that they would easily decide whether anything said in-game AND WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE GAME is pertinent to the case. So unless you say anything remotely related to the shootings, they really couldn't care less about you since they already have the guy they want to nail.
While I can understand the desire to have the network of medical devices converge with data networks due to ease of management, sometimes it is safer, and better, to keep them separated at the cost of lower ease of use. For one, a network outage would not take out access to the medical devices that keep people alive. The last thing we need is for someone to hack into hospitals and mess around with medical equipment.
The article points out many issues with such convergence: network outages, security, spectrum limitations (for wireless networks), increased overhead and regulation, etc. All this simply to make management of such networks easier? Are you kidding me?
I would like to know more about the consequences which the lawyers who wanted Wakefield to produce the falsified study will face. From the article, Wakefield has been stripped of his medical license. So what about the lawyers?
Or rather, DMCA lawsuits specifically related to custom firmware. I'd be interested to know how the courts (or a jury) would side on issues specific to hardware. Then again, FTFA it says the guy wont be publicly releasing the update, just the tools to build it yourself.
Unless custom firmware is completely devoid of Sony's firmware, anyone releasing "custom" firmware is probably going to lose in court. However, I wonder if Sony might try to sue based on him releasing tools that enable circumventing Sony's official firmware.
This is why i don't understand that so many people are so obsessed with the idea of running homebrew or emulators or w/e on their consoles...
Why can't you just use your PC? Everything you need is available there...
If you're talking about gaming, nothing beats a huge screen and full surround sound. Most people have an entertainment system that includes a large, HD TV and an equivalently expensive speaker system. While you could run the emulators on your PCs, most people prefer to make use of their entertainment system for their gaming, and their PC for "real work" (whatever that may mean).
It's hosted Exchange with the enterprise addons, it's not like their file and backoffice operations are moving into the cloud (Azure). The only critical thing that would possibly go down during an attack is email and that can be brought down by an attack no matter where it's hosted because by definition it must be open to the Internet writ large.
But that's precisely the problem with "the cloud" because all your services (sure, in this case it may just be email, but that's not really the issue) are only available so long as your connection to the cloud is available. (This also raises the question: is the quality of the service only as good as your connection to the cloud?) An in-house setup would mean that you're still up and running internally. Your remote users might have trouble accessing the internal system, but you aren't completely cut off from whatever service the cloud was supposed to provide.
I am a bit concerned that what appears to be an entire agency moving its operations toward complete dependency on a single commercial entity. It doesn't matter if the USDA were to use Google's cloud, or anyone else's cloud. What happens when said cloud "runs out of steam" so to speak -- meaning if there are problems with the cloud itself, you've essentially got an entire agency dead in the water. At least with the current setup, there are natural stop-gaps that prevent complete technical disasters. The operations of one department theoretically would not shut down the entire agency.
There is a lot of short-sightedness in thinking that the short-term savings on IT costs will outweigh the cost of recovering from even one day of said cloud being inaccessible. Of course, I write this with absolutely no consideration for any redundancy systems that are built into the cloud. But what good is the redundancy when the cloud becomes the target of a massive attack. Who/what do you rely on so as to continue your daily operations?
Has the government really been sold on The Emperor's New Cloud
You know, for someone with enough skills to "jailbreak" their PS3, you'd think they would also be savvy enough to operate a camera and produce a quality video. I guess my expectations are a tad too high.
While this is one possible outcome, I highly doubt it will ever happen as you describe it. Your typical computer user is not even going to be aware of how companies mine data on them, let alone be able to "game" the system through fake histories and cookies. Sure, they might be aware that "companies" are collecting personal information about them -- but only in the general sense. The only real safe way to prevent this is to keep internet usage to a minimum -- which will never happen. The only way your scenario will even be partially realized is when a company makes that process of faking histories and cookies as easy as installing a plugin. And then it will be said company that might have to face any related circumvention laws.
It's no different than what guys like George Soros do...
How is this any different than Ticketmaster scooping up all the good seats and auctioning them off on their own?
The difference would be that these guys are using a botnet and cause what is in essence a denial of service attack. Ticketmaster, on the other hand, probably has a deal with the vendors; these guys do not.
One of the problems I often have with electronics whose parts swivel (in particular LCDs) is that over time, the electrical components that have to be wired through the point of swiveling often wears out too fast. I wonder how durable such a machine would be -- hopefully they are as sturdy as an IBM (not Lenovo) Thinkpad.
You need to do more research. The connector is a measly $29. http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC552ZM/A
The connector you're referring to works ONLY for keynote a small number of applications. From one of the highlighted reviews: [quote]I teach high school and thought the vga iPad dock connector would allow me to project everything I see while using the iPad, but alas there are severe limitations to which applications will show on the classroom LCD projector. I wish I had known this before purchasing the connector. The Apple Store description says the connector will display slideshows and movies, but I didn't realize that was it...[/quote] Further research (i.e. reading more reviews) indicates that it DOES NOT just redirect video output that normally gets sent to the iPad's screen. So it's actually a ripoff for $29 since it only works for a small number of applications (for now). So unless you ONLY plan to do presentations through keynote, show pictures, or movies, this isn't the device for you. If I want to include a demo of, say, Mathematica in my presentation, or maybe make use of a web page as a quick aside during my talk, tough luck.
If it's thieves he's worried about, then he and the rest of the "marketing" industry should just take salary cuts (i.e. be happy with 5-digit salary like the rest of us) and give the rest of the profits to the actual creators of the intellectual property. Until they are willing to do that, they are just as much as thieves as the pirates. So we're just trading for legislation that protects one group of thieves as opposed to another.
A killswitch means we no longer get instantaneous information, either, should we have to use it. Cell phones don't necessarily reach all parts of the world. I'm not so sure I'm willing to give up being able to get news right as it happens just because of threat of cyberwar. People can unhook their own machines from the net -- that's fine. That's the last line of defense that anyone can implement for themselves. Just don't cut me off because you feel it protects you better.
I didn't realize Square-Enix's MMO developers posted here.
While a bot will certainly be able to macro and micro better than a human, human players are closing the gap and I don't think that the current gap is all that much between humans and machines.
On the other hand, the creativity gap between humans and machines is always in the favor of humans. At best (as of now), machines can only be designed to react, and their "creativity" is limited to a book of plays. Once you know the machine's playbook, you can easily defeat them. So they are only as good as how well their playbooks can be kept secret. Their ability to make a gamble during the heat of the battle (be it in attacks, build switching, etc) is still limited compared to humans (in my opinion). And this is often where tides turn in such games.
For there to be so many flaws (and I actually spent a good 30 mins searching for other reviews), you have to wonder what the hell happened during alpha and beta testing. It almost seems as though all their beta testers were using PS3s and not PCs. How else could such a clunky interface have been overlooked? Or did they not really take their beta reports seriously?
So now it's ok to be tracked with this sort of device simply because the target is boring? While I can appreciate the increased efforts to deal with terrorism, I can't say I agree with the methods. He should have just destroyed it after posting about it. Since he didn't know what it was, how could he be held legally responsible for destroying the device?