Thanks for the link. Unfortunately, they provide virtually no information about how it actually works, just what they claim to provide.
To be acceptable to consumers, I think you should be able to (1) make use of the content even while offline, (2) transfer content between various devices you own, (3) transfer ownership of the content to somebody else. CDs, tapes, and MP3s all satisfy these contraints. I'm not sure consumers are willing to go for something that doesn't--- and I'm not convinced any anti-piracy scheme can satisfy them.
If you were going to be turned off due to technical glitches, it might as have well been at the "factoring large primes" mention--- no need to get all the way to Japan.:)
My understanding was that Rudy could break the one-time pad not just because of the nonuniform key distribution, but also because some of the members of unit 2072 reused the same pads. He didn't break out _all_ the messages, just enough to figure out what they were up to.
The biggest logical flaw I found was that all the encrypted messages (except for one example) were in English. Is this really accurate? Wouldn't Randy have to know German or Japanese to decrypt their messages? I'd have a hard time believing they'd choose English as a common language.
Bleh. I finished "Infinite Jest", but there's no way I would start it over again soon; it's just too freaking huge. Any humor the book had rapidly got tiresome, which makes me wonder how many of the reviewers who called it a "comic" novel actually read the whole thing.
I'll admit it's well constructed, and well written, but ultimately unsatisfying. Books need to have endings so that you know when to go on to the next one.:)
I believe he states somewhere along the line that "Nippon" is more common among those who have actually spent time in the far East. I have no idea whether this is actually true or not.
Cold Fusion proponents have been claiming for almost ten years now that their work has been "just about" ready, that "the evidence" will prove them right, and that "the establishment" is trying to suppress them.
It's not as if scientists haven't looked at cold fusion research--- the experiments have been duplicated many, many times and there is "excess heat" in only a very few cases. One experiment, contrary to belief, is not enough to cause the theory to be thrown out--- one _repeatable_ experiment is. If the accepted level of error in an experiment is 1%, then 1% of experiments will produce false results. 100 researchers are bound to turn up evidence.
Finally, the amount of heat we're talking about is very, very small. If cold fusion is real and practical, you won't _need_ a calorimeter accurate to thousandths of a degree to measure it.
I've skimmed over the white paper on Enron's web site, and here's my impression of how they think this will work.
Every bandwidth consumer must be connected to a "pooling point" at both ends. A pooling point is a router or group of routers, and all bandwidth sold in the commodity market is between pooling points.
When the consumer reaches an agreement with a provider, both parties contact the pooling point operator and receive a/30 range of IP addresses. (That is, 4 of them.) If the bandwidth changes hands, the IP addresses are assigned to the party that receives it.
Then, when it's time to actually deliver the bandwidth, the routers must be configured to send traffic like this: (The last two bits are not actually specified in the document, just here as an example) Consumer (source) | | local, "fixed" network (leased line?) V IP xxxxxxx00 San Jose pool IP xxxxxxx01 | | provider network V IP xxxxxxx10 Wash, DC. pool IP xxxxxxx11 | | local, "fixed" network V Consumer (destination)
So, what the bandwidth provider is selling is a promise to route traffic coming out of IP xxxx01 through IP xxxx10 (and the other way around, presumably), and the consumer must direct all traffic it wants to go on that link through the corresponding IP addresses. In other words, the consumer treats the "middle section" like a router with connections to both of his sites.
The problem I see with this is it makes routing tables huge. Every connection you sell needs a separate routing entry, since they're unlikely to be aggregateable. Plus, you'd have to either have a dedicated line between the two ends you provided, or do tunnelling, to guarantee that you treated the packets as the contract specified. (Otherwise, how can you distinguish between packets on your network from one contract and another? Remember, the original contractee can resell the bandwidth to anybody, so you don't know what the actual source and destination addresses are until the packets actually start flowing.) The bandwidth provider has to do routing based on the gateway address, not the source and destination.
No, actually I don't agree with software patents in general, and think they've been abused horribly. I just disagree with the notion that being "mathematical" somehow gives them special status (or lack thereof).
You are entirely correct to say that society must weigh the benefits (and ethics) of enforcing patents, if any, versus the benefits that free use of those ideas provides. I'm as yet undecided on that...
I wager that anyone who's studied mathematics will agree with me that RSA is as natural a property of this universe as the law of gravity.
I'll disagree with you on that one, but you can keep your money. It's just as natural a property of this universe that any given mechanical device works correctly--- say, a laser or a videocasette recorder ---as that RSA works. When you find cryptographic operations being performed in nature, let me know.
Yes, RSA is mathematical "truth". (In that way, it's more natural than Newton's Law of Gravity, which is just an approximation of the real behavior of the universe.) But is RSA somehow "present" in the universe in a way that the transistor is not?
All patents (well, maybe not business models) are ultimately processes that work because of natural law. Mathematics is a blend of invention and discovery, as are the physical sciences and engineering--- none are "pure" discovery or "pure" invention.
I'm not trying to be a deconstructionist here and claim that all science is arbitrary cultural invention. I believe in mathematical truth and observable reality. But the recognition of what that truth is, what parts of it are interesting, and the presentation of that truth are all creative acts.
Stanford University has a "class A" 36.0.0.0/8, but this is (supposedly) being phased out and returned to IANA. Since we also have 171.64.0.0/18, there's no problem fitting all existing hosts back in. Are other universities that were granted "class A"s behaving similarly?
Doubtful. There are already millions of second-level domain names; if all the top-level organizations stopped handing out names, the owners of appropriate second-level names could step in. Like "www.yournamehere.biz.com".
Also, if expansion of the "big three" (com, net, and org) stopped, there's always national domain names, of which there are many more. You can easily buy a ".nu", ".co", or ".to" address today.
A third tactic that could be used in this case is redirections. Even if you get a crummy name, you can pay somebody to put a web page up in a better named domain that redirects to your web page. The owners of "come.to" do exactly this; moving naming from the DNS into the rest of the URL.
While competition for specific domain names may be fierce, the domain name system itself is by no means a resource-scarce market.
I think the core principle of a "bot" is autonomy. But it's not clear what autonomy is--- saying that it's "acting only in response to environmental inputs and current state", for example, is misleading. An object in C++ could be said to do the same thing, or a web server.
Perhaps, like the Jargon file says, it's the masquerading as "human" (or at least as a "character") that makes a bot different from any other state machine.
If I was _able_ to write comprehensive documentation for a piece of software, I'd have much less motivation to do so. By the time I've acquired sufficient mastery to write help, the "itch" is no longer there.
I think this is a valid criticism; those most interested in having help are least able to provide it, right? It requires not only the desire for help at the time, but also the determination to learn _anyway_, and the continuing motivation to write down what you've learned.
I'm not saying this is insoluble--- the existence of Linux HOWTOs is a counterexample. But I think it'd be interesting to look at how many of these were written out of a desire to see "their" piece of code get used rather than a desire for documentation.
You might want to check out the following paper: Designing an Academic Firewall". It's kinda dated, but tries to address some of the policy issues. The basic idea is to do firewalling on a per-group basis, in an attempt to partition the network according to trust.
In this model, publicly accessible hosts are considered "expendable", and their contents are recreated regularly through the firewall.
It doesn't address the issue of how to secure residential networks, unfortunately.
This brings up a question I have--- if RMS agitating for the terms "GNU/FreeBSD"? "GNU/NetBSD"? What's the difference here, other than Linux envy? If I use BSD tools, should I call it "BSD/Linux"?
Last year Jim Gray (now at Microsoft Research, bleh) was out here at Stanford giving a talk on what he thought the future of computing was. He seemed to think that clusters were the way to go--- when I asked him about the latency issue, he seemed to be of the opinion that all the interesting computational tasks of the future _were_ "embarassingly parallel", and that anything that wasn't was pretty much good already.
I'm not sure I agree with that assessment... But I'm just a dumb systems researcher. What do I know about applications?:)
I'm afraid I don't see the distinction between "discovering" an efficient algorithm for solving, say, the Travelling Salesman Problem and "inventing" some physical mechanism which does so. Theorems may very well be "discovered", but mathematical proofs are quite definitely invented; I'd argue that algorithms are closer to the latter.
Even for inventions, what is patented is _not_ a physical manifestation, but rather the plans, processes, or ideas involved--- the _algorithm_. Otherwise the concept is meaningless; somebody building a different widget with the same plan wouldn't fall under the patent.
Further, the idea of algorithms as "discovery" is less convincing when you realize that many published algorithms (and theorems) turn out to be incorrect. If I have really "discovered" something in the Platonic realm, wouldn't it be correct? Proof gives only better certainty, not absolute certainty.
I found the following quote from the article very interesting: "Microsoft's Windows 2000 is going to come out, and it's not going to run on those $500 computers. And these machines are not going to be used."
Sounds like an opportunity for Linux on the desktop if I ever heard one.
No, I believe you can still query their root name servers, just not download the entire database at once. DNS caching is still valid--- it's "prefetching" the entries that you need permission for. The downside for NSI is that they may see increased load on the root servers if fewer sites have up-to-date databases.
Good points. The processor ID can only be used for online identification by going through software. As soon as some web site starts requiring them for access, somebody will write a patch to Mozilla that will spew out any random number you care to enter.
Intel's brain-damaged comments about this increasing security for online commerce are just hot air. The web site is only going to hear what your browser tells it. Worse, there's no way of changing a compromised serial number, so that "honest" consumers are screwed if that's the basis of authentication.
The only effective use would appear to be software licensing, which I don't oppose quite as much. (And tracking stolen chips, which Intel has said they aren't going to do....)
Bad idea. Currently, DNS looks at your local (ISP, college, company, whatever) server rather than sending the request halfway across the Internet. That way the root servers don't melt down from having to service zillions of requests, since info is cached locally.
The only way to change this that's feasible is to have your organization point to somebody else as a root name server.
Slashdot Mirror
To be acceptable to consumers, I think you should be able to (1) make use of the content even while offline, (2) transfer content between various devices you own, (3) transfer ownership of the content to somebody else. CDs, tapes, and MP3s all satisfy these contraints. I'm not sure consumers are willing to go for something that doesn't--- and I'm not convinced any anti-piracy scheme can satisfy them.
If you were going to be turned off due to technical glitches, it might as have well been at the "factoring large primes" mention--- no need to get all the way to Japan. :)
My understanding was that Rudy could break the one-time pad not just because of the nonuniform key distribution, but also because some of the members of unit 2072 reused the same pads. He didn't break out _all_ the messages, just enough to figure out what they were up to.
The biggest logical flaw I found was that all the encrypted messages (except for one example) were in English. Is this really accurate? Wouldn't Randy have to know German or Japanese to decrypt their messages? I'd have a hard time believing they'd choose English as a common language.
Bleh. I finished "Infinite Jest", but there's no way I would start it over again soon; it's just too freaking huge. Any humor the book had rapidly got tiresome, which makes me wonder how many of the reviewers who called it a "comic" novel actually read the whole thing.
:)
I'll admit it's well constructed, and well written, but ultimately unsatisfying. Books need to have endings so that you know when to go on to the next one.
I believe he states somewhere along the line that "Nippon" is more common among those who have actually spent time in the far East. I have no idea whether this is actually true or not.
It's not as if scientists haven't looked at cold fusion research--- the experiments have been duplicated many, many times and there is "excess heat" in only a very few cases. One experiment, contrary to belief, is not enough to cause the theory to be thrown out--- one _repeatable_ experiment is. If the accepted level of error in an experiment is 1%, then 1% of experiments will produce false results. 100 researchers are bound to turn up evidence.
Finally, the amount of heat we're talking about is very, very small. If cold fusion is real and practical, you won't _need_ a calorimeter accurate to thousandths of a degree to measure it.
Every bandwidth consumer must be connected to a "pooling point" at both ends. A pooling point is a router or group of routers, and all bandwidth sold in the commodity market is between pooling points.
When the consumer reaches an agreement with a provider, both parties contact the pooling point operator and receive a /30 range of IP addresses. (That is, 4 of them.) If the bandwidth changes hands, the IP addresses are assigned to the party that receives it.
Then, when it's time to actually deliver the bandwidth, the routers must be configured to send traffic like this: (The last two bits are not actually specified in the document, just here as an example)
Consumer (source)
|
| local, "fixed" network (leased line?)
V
IP xxxxxxx00
San Jose pool
IP xxxxxxx01
|
| provider network
V
IP xxxxxxx10
Wash, DC. pool
IP xxxxxxx11
|
| local, "fixed" network
V
Consumer (destination)
So, what the bandwidth provider is selling is a promise to route traffic coming out of IP xxxx01 through IP xxxx10 (and the other way around, presumably), and the consumer must direct all traffic it wants to go on that link through the corresponding IP addresses. In other words, the consumer treats the "middle section" like a router with connections to both of his sites.
The problem I see with this is it makes routing tables huge. Every connection you sell needs a separate routing entry, since they're unlikely to be aggregateable. Plus, you'd have to either have a dedicated line between the two ends you provided, or do tunnelling, to guarantee that you treated the packets as the contract specified. (Otherwise, how can you distinguish between packets on your network from one contract and another? Remember, the original contractee can resell the bandwidth to anybody, so you don't know what the actual source and destination addresses are until the packets actually start flowing.) The bandwidth provider has to do routing based on the gateway address, not the source and destination.
The enron.net web site has a white paper, too, but you need to register to download it.
You are entirely correct to say that society must weigh the benefits (and ethics) of enforcing patents, if any, versus the benefits that free use of those ideas provides. I'm as yet undecided on that...
I'll disagree with you on that one, but you can keep your money. It's just as natural a property of this universe that any given mechanical device works correctly--- say, a laser or a videocasette recorder ---as that RSA works. When you find cryptographic operations being performed in nature, let me know.
Yes, RSA is mathematical "truth". (In that way, it's more natural than Newton's Law of Gravity, which is just an approximation of the real behavior of the universe.) But is RSA somehow "present" in the universe in a way that the transistor is not?
All patents (well, maybe not business models) are ultimately processes that work because of natural law. Mathematics is a blend of invention and discovery, as are the physical sciences and engineering--- none are "pure" discovery or "pure" invention.
I'm not trying to be a deconstructionist here and claim that all science is arbitrary cultural invention. I believe in mathematical truth and observable reality. But the recognition of what that truth is, what parts of it are interesting, and the presentation of that truth are all creative acts.
Stanford University has a "class A" 36.0.0.0/8, but this is (supposedly) being phased out and returned to IANA. Since we also have 171.64.0.0/18, there's no problem fitting all existing hosts back in. Are other universities that were granted "class A"s behaving similarly?
Also, if expansion of the "big three" (com, net, and org) stopped, there's always national domain names, of which there are many more. You can easily buy a ".nu", ".co", or ".to" address today.
A third tactic that could be used in this case is redirections. Even if you get a crummy name, you can pay somebody to put a web page up in a better named domain that redirects to your web page. The owners of "come.to" do exactly this; moving naming from the DNS into the rest of the URL.
While competition for specific domain names may be fierce, the domain name system itself is by no means a resource-scarce market.
I think the core principle of a "bot" is autonomy. But it's not clear what autonomy is--- saying that it's "acting only in response to environmental inputs and current state", for example, is misleading. An object in C++ could be said to do the same thing, or a web server.
Perhaps, like the Jargon file says, it's the masquerading as "human" (or at least as a "character") that makes a bot different from any other state machine.
You've got it completely backwards.
If I was _able_ to write comprehensive documentation for a piece of software, I'd have much less motivation to do so. By the time I've acquired sufficient mastery to write help, the "itch" is no longer there.
I think this is a valid criticism; those most interested in having help are least able to provide it, right? It requires not only the desire for help at the time, but also the determination to learn _anyway_, and the continuing motivation to write down what you've learned.
I'm not saying this is insoluble--- the existence of Linux HOWTOs is a counterexample. But I think it'd be interesting to look at how many of these were written out of a desire to see "their" piece of code get used rather than a desire for documentation.
In this model, publicly accessible hosts are considered "expendable", and their contents are recreated regularly through the firewall.
It doesn't address the issue of how to secure residential networks, unfortunately.
The horror! The horror! :)
Itsy isn't wearable, but it already offers speech recognition, and some enterprising soul already ported Doom to it. Not a commercial product, though.
This brings up a question I have--- if RMS agitating for the terms "GNU/FreeBSD"? "GNU/NetBSD"? What's the difference here, other
than Linux envy? If I use BSD tools, should I
call it "BSD/Linux"?
Last year Jim Gray (now at Microsoft Research, bleh) was out here at Stanford giving a talk on what he thought the future of computing was. He seemed to think that clusters were the way to go--- when I asked him about the latency issue, he seemed to be of the opinion that all the interesting computational tasks of the future _were_ "embarassingly parallel", and that anything that wasn't was pretty much good already.
:)
I'm not sure I agree with that assessment... But I'm just a dumb systems researcher. What do I know about applications?
I'm afraid I don't see the distinction between "discovering" an efficient algorithm for solving, say, the Travelling Salesman Problem and "inventing" some physical mechanism which does so. Theorems may very well be "discovered", but mathematical proofs are quite definitely invented; I'd argue that algorithms are closer to the latter.
Even for inventions, what is patented is _not_ a physical manifestation, but rather the plans, processes, or ideas involved--- the _algorithm_.
Otherwise the concept is meaningless; somebody building a different widget with the same plan wouldn't fall under the patent.
Further, the idea of algorithms as "discovery" is less convincing when you realize that many published algorithms (and theorems) turn out to be incorrect. If I have really "discovered" something in the Platonic realm, wouldn't it be correct? Proof gives only better certainty, not absolute certainty.
I found the following quote from the article very interesting: "Microsoft's Windows 2000 is going to come out, and it's not going to run on those $500 computers. And these machines are not going to be used."
Sounds like an opportunity for Linux on the desktop if I ever heard one.
No, I believe you can still query their root name servers, just not download the entire database at once. DNS caching is still valid--- it's "prefetching" the entries that you need permission for. The downside for NSI is that they may see increased load on the root servers if fewer sites have up-to-date databases.
Good points. The processor ID can only be used for online identification by going through software. As soon as some web site starts requiring them for access, somebody will write a patch to Mozilla that will spew out any random number you care to enter.
Intel's brain-damaged comments about this increasing security for online commerce are just hot air. The web site is only going to hear what your browser tells it. Worse, there's no way of changing a compromised serial number, so that "honest" consumers are screwed if that's the basis of authentication.
The only effective use would appear to be software licensing, which I don't oppose quite as much.
(And tracking stolen chips, which Intel has said they aren't going to do....)
Bad idea. Currently, DNS looks at your local
(ISP, college, company, whatever) server rather
than sending the request halfway across the
Internet. That way the root servers don't melt
down from having to service zillions of requests,
since info is cached locally.
The only way to change this that's feasible is
to have your organization point to somebody else
as a root name server.