These filters are completly useless against anyone actively trying to subvert them. CGI proxies, SSH tunnels, VPNs, and the plain old 'google until you find something that slips through.' Children do know these tricks, or know a friend who will show them - they pick it up at school, finding games to play during lessons. Plus it only filters websites - there is still p2p, files exchanged with friends on IM, sexually explicit zones on social platforms*. It's almost useless. The best a filter can hope for is to stop people from accidentally stumbling across porn while looking for something else - and that is something we just don't need. While certain elements of government and pressure group may believe that glimpsing a penis traumatises children for life, there is no real evidence for this. Children are just not that fragile. A better approach is to just explain to them that there are naughty pictures on the internet and they should just close the tab.
How recreational is it? There's nothing to do - literally, nothing around you except the ship itsself. The equipment is cumbersome. I could see it working on the moon, possibly*, but not just in orbit. If you want to go floating free for fun, you'd be better off taking a huge inflatable structure of some sort so you can keep atmosphere in. Much more comfortable, and flexible enough for zero-g sports.
The US government isn't as unified. The feds alone have many different agencies concerned with finance and law enforcement, which are often pushing differing agendas. The states all have their own, too. It's not at all uncommon for different parts of the government to be acting in opposition to one another.
Not just yet, please. I'm just about to mine some myself. Not because I think I've a snowball's hope in hell of making a profit off it - I'll be lucky to pay for the power. I'm just interested to see how the maths works, and a good way to find out what this technology can do is to play with it.
There may still be a niche in informal transfers: Party A buys coin, sends to party B, B sells coin. Potentially handy for those who are unable to deal with conventional payment processors (Criminals, activist groups under government oppression, those affected by international sanctions, people in obscure countries where Paypal does no operate) or who are just unwilling (Anti-corporate idealists, paranoid activists, people worried about the many paypal stories of those who struggled to get their money out).
As a medium of long-term storage, or even something you could price goods in, it's just too volatile.
Self-financing police departments create a conflict of interest. It pressures the police to go for the crimes that bring them the most money - ones that are easy and cheap to detect, even if they don't actually cause any time - and to resort to dirty tricks to increase the profit further. There's a simple solution to this: Don't give the fines to the departments (or, in this case, contracted companies) who actually enforce the law. Put them into a big state-wide pot, and each year divide it up between departments in the ratio of population (Possibly adjusted for crime rate). Likewise to any proceeds from police auctions and asset seizures.
It may have been better to update BIOS (new partition table format, minor things like that). Keep it simple, and doing what BIOS does: Boot the OS then get out of the way. Instead EFI got some serious scope creep, to the point it has to boot a whole operating system (including drivers stored on disk and IP stack!) just in order to load the real OS.
Be warned: The hardware in the Retinas is somewhat dubiously EFI and ACPI complient. You can get it running linux, but it takes a fair amount of hackery to deal with the weirdness.
The purpose of the envelope is to keep people from touching the halogen lamp envelope. Those things run very hot. Even the slightest brush of fingertips to it would cause blistering, so it gets an extra outer envelope too.
What he proposes, best I can see, is moving website login away from strictly the domain of HTTP where it is separate from TLS, and instead making it part of the cryptographic authentication. So when you log into slashdot, your password acts as a shared secret - even if an attacker is able to intercept and modify all communications, without the shared secret they couldn't generate the appropriate shared key and so couldn't decrypt or impersonate.
Obvious weaknesses that I see: - Completly reworking the TLS/HTTP authentication stack with significent architectural changes in browser, server and website scripts. - All websites require an account to authenticate, leading to massive proliferation of passwords and inevitable reuse. - Provides security only after signup over secure channel - the initial account creation process would still be very vulnerable to impersonation attacks.
So tell us, what else do you propose? CAs are useless as defending against intelligence services, but they do a pretty good job against your basic internet crime. There have been instances of fraudsters getting certificates incorrectly signed by social engineering and things like that, but such events are quite rare. A WoT model might work too, but it isn't going to offer much security against intelligence agencies either - it wouldn't be hard to influence various well-connected companies to endorse anything.
The problem with any sort of trust model is that it's impossible to authenticate a service without either a pre-shared secret or a trusted third party. Mathematically, it's not solveable, at least in a general sense.
A lot of people are. We saw what looked like some crazy flash-in-the-pan project. By the time we realised this might actually be worth taking seriously, it was already too late to make the mega-bucks.
I've looked at it, but by the time I did it was already at the point where GPU mining was barely covering the cost of power. ASICs still turn a profit, but that's a big investment in something that might well collapse any day now. It's a bubble, everyone knows it, and when it bursts it'll burst fast.
I can easily envision three ways in which it could become worthless: 1. A mathematical weakness in the protocol is found allowing for effective fraud. Not super-fast mining, but something like coin duplication or impersonation. 2. A systematic crackdown by one or more major governments renders it impractical to openly accept bitcoins as payment. Right now, governments tolerate bitcoin because it's not really a force of any note. If it really took off? You can count on them to ban bitcoin in commercial operations. Later on, they will declare that posesssion of bitcoins is a sign of intent to purchase drugs or commit fraud, much in the same way that carrying around $10,000 in a briefcase might get you an interview with police today. Even if the crackdown was only half-effective, the fear would lead to a collapse in value - those $1000 coins would be selling for $5 each. 3. Confidence crash. Bitcoin currently has value not so much because it can be spent (There isn't a great deal you can buy with it) as it does because of speculation. That's a dangerous situation - it's a perfect bubble. If the price should drop, even a little, then a lot of people are going to fear a decline and start selling off their coins - which will cause exactly the decline they fear. It's happened before many times. Ask anyone who's traded Noxcium in EVE.
I thought no-one noticed because the propagation time of sound across a stadium makes it impossible to keep everyone in sync - all most people can hear is a slurred vaguely voice-like sound.
The term 'Orwellian' tends to be overused a bit these days. But, having read 1984, this is something straight out of that book. The adjective is appropriate in this situation: Go ahead and use it.
Slashdot Mirror
These filters are completly useless against anyone actively trying to subvert them. CGI proxies, SSH tunnels, VPNs, and the plain old 'google until you find something that slips through.' Children do know these tricks, or know a friend who will show them - they pick it up at school, finding games to play during lessons. Plus it only filters websites - there is still p2p, files exchanged with friends on IM, sexually explicit zones on social platforms*. It's almost useless. The best a filter can hope for is to stop people from accidentally stumbling across porn while looking for something else - and that is something we just don't need. While certain elements of government and pressure group may believe that glimpsing a penis traumatises children for life, there is no real evidence for this. Children are just not that fragile. A better approach is to just explain to them that there are naughty pictures on the internet and they should just close the tab.
* There's some really kinky stuff on Second Life.
How recreational is it? There's nothing to do - literally, nothing around you except the ship itsself. The equipment is cumbersome. I could see it working on the moon, possibly*, but not just in orbit. If you want to go floating free for fun, you'd be better off taking a huge inflatable structure of some sort so you can keep atmosphere in. Much more comfortable, and flexible enough for zero-g sports.
*There would, of course, be a golf course.
Not that I've got much hardware. I'm not going to throw money into this.
Bubbles sometimes need a nudge to burst. Just a small one. This story could be that nudge.
If it hadn't been this, it'd be something else eventually.
The US government isn't as unified. The feds alone have many different agencies concerned with finance and law enforcement, which are often pushing differing agendas. The states all have their own, too. It's not at all uncommon for different parts of the government to be acting in opposition to one another.
It's only going to get bigger. Bit of a flaw in the system, that.
Not just yet, please. I'm just about to mine some myself. Not because I think I've a snowball's hope in hell of making a profit off it - I'll be lucky to pay for the power. I'm just interested to see how the maths works, and a good way to find out what this technology can do is to play with it.
There may still be a niche in informal transfers: Party A buys coin, sends to party B, B sells coin. Potentially handy for those who are unable to deal with conventional payment processors (Criminals, activist groups under government oppression, those affected by international sanctions, people in obscure countries where Paypal does no operate) or who are just unwilling (Anti-corporate idealists, paranoid activists, people worried about the many paypal stories of those who struggled to get their money out).
As a medium of long-term storage, or even something you could price goods in, it's just too volatile.
They *made* it mainstream.
Self-financing police departments create a conflict of interest. It pressures the police to go for the crimes that bring them the most money - ones that are easy and cheap to detect, even if they don't actually cause any time - and to resort to dirty tricks to increase the profit further. There's a simple solution to this: Don't give the fines to the departments (or, in this case, contracted companies) who actually enforce the law. Put them into a big state-wide pot, and each year divide it up between departments in the ratio of population (Possibly adjusted for crime rate). Likewise to any proceeds from police auctions and asset seizures.
It may have been better to update BIOS (new partition table format, minor things like that). Keep it simple, and doing what BIOS does: Boot the OS then get out of the way. Instead EFI got some serious scope creep, to the point it has to boot a whole operating system (including drivers stored on disk and IP stack!) just in order to load the real OS.
That's what you get for outsourcing your propaganda to the private sector.
Be warned: The hardware in the Retinas is somewhat dubiously EFI and ACPI complient. You can get it running linux, but it takes a fair amount of hackery to deal with the weirdness.
Maybe. But once you reach about 80% efficient, it's going to hit a point of diminishing returns.
George Boole. He invented the formal mathematical system of boolean logic.
It's probably where they hide the money for the *really* secret projects.
There's a wide variation in life expecency depending upon usage pattern, quality of manufacture, temperature, supplied voltage and sheer luck.
And hardly ever need replacing. The margin may be higher, but they'll seriously drop in volume sold.
The purpose of the envelope is to keep people from touching the halogen lamp envelope. Those things run very hot. Even the slightest brush of fingertips to it would cause blistering, so it gets an extra outer envelope too.
What he proposes, best I can see, is moving website login away from strictly the domain of HTTP where it is separate from TLS, and instead making it part of the cryptographic authentication. So when you log into slashdot, your password acts as a shared secret - even if an attacker is able to intercept and modify all communications, without the shared secret they couldn't generate the appropriate shared key and so couldn't decrypt or impersonate.
Obvious weaknesses that I see:
- Completly reworking the TLS/HTTP authentication stack with significent architectural changes in browser, server and website scripts.
- All websites require an account to authenticate, leading to massive proliferation of passwords and inevitable reuse.
- Provides security only after signup over secure channel - the initial account creation process would still be very vulnerable to impersonation attacks.
So tell us, what else do you propose? CAs are useless as defending against intelligence services, but they do a pretty good job against your basic internet crime. There have been instances of fraudsters getting certificates incorrectly signed by social engineering and things like that, but such events are quite rare. A WoT model might work too, but it isn't going to offer much security against intelligence agencies either - it wouldn't be hard to influence various well-connected companies to endorse anything.
The problem with any sort of trust model is that it's impossible to authenticate a service without either a pre-shared secret or a trusted third party. Mathematically, it's not solveable, at least in a general sense.
A lot of people are. We saw what looked like some crazy flash-in-the-pan project. By the time we realised this might actually be worth taking seriously, it was already too late to make the mega-bucks.
I've looked at it, but by the time I did it was already at the point where GPU mining was barely covering the cost of power. ASICs still turn a profit, but that's a big investment in something that might well collapse any day now. It's a bubble, everyone knows it, and when it bursts it'll burst fast.
I can easily envision three ways in which it could become worthless:
1. A mathematical weakness in the protocol is found allowing for effective fraud. Not super-fast mining, but something like coin duplication or impersonation.
2. A systematic crackdown by one or more major governments renders it impractical to openly accept bitcoins as payment. Right now, governments tolerate bitcoin because it's not really a force of any note. If it really took off? You can count on them to ban bitcoin in commercial operations. Later on, they will declare that posesssion of bitcoins is a sign of intent to purchase drugs or commit fraud, much in the same way that carrying around $10,000 in a briefcase might get you an interview with police today. Even if the crackdown was only half-effective, the fear would lead to a collapse in value - those $1000 coins would be selling for $5 each.
3. Confidence crash. Bitcoin currently has value not so much because it can be spent (There isn't a great deal you can buy with it) as it does because of speculation. That's a dangerous situation - it's a perfect bubble. If the price should drop, even a little, then a lot of people are going to fear a decline and start selling off their coins - which will cause exactly the decline they fear. It's happened before many times. Ask anyone who's traded Noxcium in EVE.
I thought no-one noticed because the propagation time of sound across a stadium makes it impossible to keep everyone in sync - all most people can hear is a slurred vaguely voice-like sound.
The term 'Orwellian' tends to be overused a bit these days. But, having read 1984, this is something straight out of that book. The adjective is appropriate in this situation: Go ahead and use it.