Wrong. Cartoon child pornography *is* illegal in the US, but it is under a law passed with such routine that it didn't even get a catchy acronym for the media.
--- 18 USC 1466A extract:
Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that— (1) (A) depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and (B) is obscene; or (2) (A) depicts an image that is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in graphic bestiality, sadistic or masochistic abuse, or sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; and (B) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value; or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be subject to the penalties provided in section 2252A (b)(1), including the penalties provided for cases involving a prior conviction. (b) Additional Offenses.— Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly possesses a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that— (1) (A) depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and (B) is obscene; or (2) (A) depicts an image that is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in graphic bestiality, sadistic or masochistic abuse, or sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; and (B) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value; or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be subject to the penalties provided in section 2252A (b)(2), including the penalties provided for cases involving a prior conviction. (c) Nonrequired Element of Offense.— It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
No, not a bit of memory that can only be written by the bootloader. A bit of memory that can only be written by the firmware itsself. That's easy to do. It could be done in a trivial amount of hardware (it's a couple of gates, stick it on the southbridge or something), and many motherboards already have it for storing things like the boot password. The TPM found in most computers now also includes such functionality. A simple latch that the firmware sets to read-only before booting the OS, and which can only be reset to read-write by power cycle.
Try to collide SHA1. It's computationally impractical. That's the whole point of a cryptographic hash. If someone does find a way, then yes, computers would be vulnerable - but it could be fixed with a simple firmware update. There's no need to issue new keys or revoke old ones, because there are no keys.
Geeks tend to view the law as some sort of digital code that says what is and what is not permitted clearly in all circumstances, enforced by a police and court system dedicated to upholding that law in every specific. As there are rules, those who play within them can be considered law-abiding.
The real world bears little resemblence to this view. It's much more subjective, and often comes down to the enforcers (be they police forces or civil lawyers) balancing the cost of enforcement and resource constraints against the estimated severity of the crime, while taking into account political pressure they may face to be particually harsh or lenient on specific circumstances, individuals or offences.
Would it matter? Even if he still has the original media, copying a DVD is only possible by illegally breaking the encryption. If you're going to be doing something illegal anyway, you might as well go all the way and skip buying the DVD entirely, just download a torrent.
Full-on piracy is actually better, legally. It's just nice simple civil copyright infringement. Ripping your (legally-purchased) DVD is not just civil copyright infringement, but a criminal offence too: Trafficking in a tool for circumventing a 'technological protection measure', a crime under the DMCA section 1201 punishable by five years in jail, fine and civil liability.
Obviously no court is going to impose the maximum five (ten, for a second offence) year sentence for a home DVD collection, the the point remains: Legally, it's much less serious to download a torrent and not pay for a legal copy at all than it would be to buy a DVD and rip it. Only civil, rather than civil *and* criminal.
That's the great thing about my design. It doesn't have any secrets! All you need is a small amount of memory (32-bytes should be plenty) which can only be written to by the UEFI firmware. That's easily done. No code signing, no PKI, no secret keys, and the only crypto you need is a very well-tested hash function. Which can even be replaced with ease, in the event someone ever finds a good attack on SHA1.
UEFI is the replacement for the aging BIOS boot process. Secure Boot is an optional extension to UEFI to boot only cryptographically signed bootloaders. Macs do boot using UEFI, but they do not use the Secure Boot extension.
You got the mouse backwards. Three-button mice were common on unix workstations (This was long before scroll wheels). It was IBM that lead the switch to two buttons with their PC design. Microsoft didn't invent the three-button mouse any more than they invented the key of disputeable name - it was a long-disused capability that just underwent a revival. I know the Windows key caught on because MS required it for Windows OEM certification, but I'm not sure why the third button built into the wheel made its reappearance.
If I were designing it, I'd base it on a hash only. Firmware hashes the bootloader each boot, and compares the hash against a stored hash. If they match, boot. If not, refuse to boot and display a warning notice informing the user that their bootloader has been modified and asking them to confirm the change. If they select 'confirm' then save the computed hash over the stored hash so it won't ask in future. Easy. And obvious.
Needs more political buzzwords, and some empty reassurances. Make sure to include something about how important the technology industry is to the American economy, and how many American jobs it has created free from the heavy hand of regulation. Don't be afraid to stick 'American' in a lot - the people love patriotism.
Conspiracy? Well, yes. This is *Microsoft* we're talking about here. The company convicted of antitrust violations by both US and EU regulators. The company which has a history of using every dirty trick in the book to get ahead, and which for many years waged a campaign against open source that seemed at times like some sort of personal vendetta. And the company which has now announced they are building a big 'Kill linux' button which they can press by revising a single clause in a contract. Based simply on the past actions of the company, it would seem a very bad idea to trust them with such power.
It's an issue for new users. Right now it's moderatly difficult for a newbie to try linux. They can set it up as a dualboot, or install it on an older PC after buying a replacement. If MS does at some point mandate secure boot be locked on (And given the company history, this is a very serious threat), then you're right: There will be server motherboards and niche companies. But installing linux will go from something that can be done in a few hours on old hardware to requiring the purchase of a new and very expensive motherboard or entire computer, possibly followed by the complicated process or motherboard replacement. This is not something the typical newbie wants to go through. It also defeats one of Linux's main advantages, zero direct cost, if you need to buy new hardware to run it.
Not merely OK. The MS certification agreement specifies that there must be some way to disable secure boot on x86, but also says that there must *not* be any way to disable secure boot on ARM. Microsoft need only change a single word of a contract to effectively make it impossible to install linux on any store-purchased PC, and I would not be remotely surprised if that is exactly what they do in a few years, once they are satisfied they can get away with it.
Step 3 is practically impossible. Motherboard manufacturers already have an existing business relationship with the BIOS developers, and that relationship goes beyond just 'hand over some firmware we can burn into the chip.' The BIOS has to be customised slightly for each model of board. They aren't going to trust Coreboot purely on a business basis - the open-source development model cannot provide guaranteed deadline compliance, will not respect NDAs covering proprietary electronics design, and provides no-one to sue in the event of a serious flaw. They'd have to set up their own in-house development team to work on coreboot customisations - a difficult and thus risky prospect, as well as expensive.
1) Not inherently, no. But it does have a bias towards whatever the OEMs consider to be worth permitting. Obviously they will have to permit Windows. They *can* also permit GRUB and thus linux. If they want to. But they have no incentive to. It's hard enough getting driver support when so many manufacturers don't care about linux, this will just make it worse.
2) Secureboot was written as an optional feature of the UEFI spec four years ago, but there was no indication it was going to be used in non-server equipment until Microsoft announced they would be mandating it for Windows 8 OEM certification.
3) And there lies the problem. A trusted signature, but trusted by who? Not the equipment owner, but the equipment manufacturer.
4) Not so much 'bad relations' as 'no relations.' Outside of the server, Linux is a very niche OS. Its market share is measured in single-digit percentage. BIOS and hardware makers aren't so much hostile as apathetic - they see no reason to perform any testing under linux. So long as it works under Windows, which the vast majority of their customers use, it's considered done.
You forget about the presence of another force on the internet: The assholes. The people who will see that you insulted their favorite politician/cause/team/singer and, with an anger immune to reason or self-preservation, proceed to email your boss to inform him of your hidden criminal past and create a blog in your name calling for the legalisation of child porn.
It mentioned owners manuals. I gather from comments higher up that all cars do have some sort of backup means of operation, but that it isn't always obvious. You happened to know that you have a short-range transponder system located behind the ignition button - but how many owners of your model are completely unaware of that feature? It isn't something you'd guess.
There have been two attempts to introduce gender-neutral pronouns, but neither caught on outside of hardcore feminists.
Amusingly, Greek (At least ancient, I don't know about modern) does have a gender-neutral pronoun. It's used many times in the new testament. Translators into english have long converted this into the male pronouns for simple readability. There was an announcement earlier this year that the newest edition of the NIV is going to switch these into the 'he or she' form in order to remain more accurate to the original text*. This resulted in a serious backlash from Christians, with many denouncing the 'changes' as either a corruption of God's message or a sign that liberal feminists had infiltrated the NIV translation committee.
*Itsself a translation. Jesus spoke in Hebrew, but the words were translated into Greek before being written down.
Li-ion batteries are killed by a complete discharge. A problem solved by simply putting a circuit in the battery that detects when it is dangerously low, and disconnects the battery. Coincidentialy I'm designing one myself right now for a project. It's still possible to kill a li-ion that way, but only via self-discharge. Which, as you point out, is achieved by parking the car for a few months without charging.
I wonder if it'd be possible for manufacturers to build a small solar panel into the roof. It wouldn't provide any significant contribution to running the car, but it would probably be enough to avert death-by-self-discharge. At least so long as the car were not stored indoors.
I'm guessing you're both wrong - because the burgler usually won't know if there is a gun in the house, it isn't a factor. You might find a correlation due to the impact of local crime rate on gun ownership, but that's the closest you'll see.
Unless you're specifically aiming to steal guns. I've no experience trading in the criminal underground, but I would guess a stolen and thus untraceable gun has to be worth something.
Food shortage is an economic issue. The problem isn't an inability to grow enough food - there's enough to around. It's just that the starving population of Elbonia can only afford to pay so much for the food they need to live, while the more wealthy populations of the world will happily spend far more on food for luxury purposes like producing far more meat than the human diet really needs. Or making ethanol.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. Cartoon child pornography *is* illegal in the US, but it is under a law passed with such routine that it didn't even get a catchy acronym for the media.
---
18 USC 1466A extract:
Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that—
(1)
(A) depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
(B) is obscene; or
(2)
(A) depicts an image that is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in graphic bestiality, sadistic or masochistic abuse, or sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; and
(B) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value;
or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be subject to the penalties provided in section 2252A (b)(1), including the penalties provided for cases involving a prior conviction.
(b) Additional Offenses.— Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly possesses a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that—
(1)
(A) depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
(B) is obscene; or
(2)
(A) depicts an image that is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in graphic bestiality, sadistic or masochistic abuse, or sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; and
(B) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value;
or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be subject to the penalties provided in section 2252A (b)(2), including the penalties provided for cases involving a prior conviction.
(c) Nonrequired Element of Offense.— It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
---
And yes, this is enforced at times: http://classic.tcj.com/tag/title-18-u-s-c-1466a/
No, not a bit of memory that can only be written by the bootloader. A bit of memory that can only be written by the firmware itsself. That's easy to do. It could be done in a trivial amount of hardware (it's a couple of gates, stick it on the southbridge or something), and many motherboards already have it for storing things like the boot password. The TPM found in most computers now also includes such functionality. A simple latch that the firmware sets to read-only before booting the OS, and which can only be reset to read-write by power cycle.
Try to collide SHA1. It's computationally impractical. That's the whole point of a cryptographic hash. If someone does find a way, then yes, computers would be vulnerable - but it could be fixed with a simple firmware update. There's no need to issue new keys or revoke old ones, because there are no keys.
Geeks tend to view the law as some sort of digital code that says what is and what is not permitted clearly in all circumstances, enforced by a police and court system dedicated to upholding that law in every specific. As there are rules, those who play within them can be considered law-abiding.
The real world bears little resemblence to this view. It's much more subjective, and often comes down to the enforcers (be they police forces or civil lawyers) balancing the cost of enforcement and resource constraints against the estimated severity of the crime, while taking into account political pressure they may face to be particually harsh or lenient on specific circumstances, individuals or offences.
Would it matter? Even if he still has the original media, copying a DVD is only possible by illegally breaking the encryption. If you're going to be doing something illegal anyway, you might as well go all the way and skip buying the DVD entirely, just download a torrent.
Full-on piracy is actually better, legally. It's just nice simple civil copyright infringement. Ripping your (legally-purchased) DVD is not just civil copyright infringement, but a criminal offence too: Trafficking in a tool for circumventing a 'technological protection measure', a crime under the DMCA section 1201 punishable by five years in jail, fine and civil liability.
Obviously no court is going to impose the maximum five (ten, for a second offence) year sentence for a home DVD collection, the the point remains: Legally, it's much less serious to download a torrent and not pay for a legal copy at all than it would be to buy a DVD and rip it. Only civil, rather than civil *and* criminal.
That's the great thing about my design. It doesn't have any secrets! All you need is a small amount of memory (32-bytes should be plenty) which can only be written to by the UEFI firmware. That's easily done. No code signing, no PKI, no secret keys, and the only crypto you need is a very well-tested hash function. Which can even be replaced with ease, in the event someone ever finds a good attack on SHA1.
UEFI is the replacement for the aging BIOS boot process. Secure Boot is an optional extension to UEFI to boot only cryptographically signed bootloaders. Macs do boot using UEFI, but they do not use the Secure Boot extension.
You got the mouse backwards. Three-button mice were common on unix workstations (This was long before scroll wheels). It was IBM that lead the switch to two buttons with their PC design. Microsoft didn't invent the three-button mouse any more than they invented the key of disputeable name - it was a long-disused capability that just underwent a revival. I know the Windows key caught on because MS required it for Windows OEM certification, but I'm not sure why the third button built into the wheel made its reappearance.
If I were designing it, I'd base it on a hash only. Firmware hashes the bootloader each boot, and compares the hash against a stored hash. If they match, boot. If not, refuse to boot and display a warning notice informing the user that their bootloader has been modified and asking them to confirm the change. If they select 'confirm' then save the computed hash over the stored hash so it won't ask in future. Easy. And obvious.
And entirely unlike Secure Boot.
Needs more political buzzwords, and some empty reassurances. Make sure to include something about how important the technology industry is to the American economy, and how many American jobs it has created free from the heavy hand of regulation. Don't be afraid to stick 'American' in a lot - the people love patriotism.
Conspiracy? Well, yes. This is *Microsoft* we're talking about here. The company convicted of antitrust violations by both US and EU regulators. The company which has a history of using every dirty trick in the book to get ahead, and which for many years waged a campaign against open source that seemed at times like some sort of personal vendetta. And the company which has now announced they are building a big 'Kill linux' button which they can press by revising a single clause in a contract. Based simply on the past actions of the company, it would seem a very bad idea to trust them with such power.
It's an issue for new users. Right now it's moderatly difficult for a newbie to try linux. They can set it up as a dualboot, or install it on an older PC after buying a replacement. If MS does at some point mandate secure boot be locked on (And given the company history, this is a very serious threat), then you're right: There will be server motherboards and niche companies. But installing linux will go from something that can be done in a few hours on old hardware to requiring the purchase of a new and very expensive motherboard or entire computer, possibly followed by the complicated process or motherboard replacement. This is not something the typical newbie wants to go through. It also defeats one of Linux's main advantages, zero direct cost, if you need to buy new hardware to run it.
Because if you need advanced knowledge of hardware engineering and specialist tools to install linux, then linux is dead.
Not merely OK. The MS certification agreement specifies that there must be some way to disable secure boot on x86, but also says that there must *not* be any way to disable secure boot on ARM. Microsoft need only change a single word of a contract to effectively make it impossible to install linux on any store-purchased PC, and I would not be remotely surprised if that is exactly what they do in a few years, once they are satisfied they can get away with it.
Step 3 is practically impossible. Motherboard manufacturers already have an existing business relationship with the BIOS developers, and that relationship goes beyond just 'hand over some firmware we can burn into the chip.' The BIOS has to be customised slightly for each model of board. They aren't going to trust Coreboot purely on a business basis - the open-source development model cannot provide guaranteed deadline compliance, will not respect NDAs covering proprietary electronics design, and provides no-one to sue in the event of a serious flaw. They'd have to set up their own in-house development team to work on coreboot customisations - a difficult and thus risky prospect, as well as expensive.
1) Not inherently, no. But it does have a bias towards whatever the OEMs consider to be worth permitting. Obviously they will have to permit Windows. They *can* also permit GRUB and thus linux. If they want to. But they have no incentive to. It's hard enough getting driver support when so many manufacturers don't care about linux, this will just make it worse.
2) Secureboot was written as an optional feature of the UEFI spec four years ago, but there was no indication it was going to be used in non-server equipment until Microsoft announced they would be mandating it for Windows 8 OEM certification.
3) And there lies the problem. A trusted signature, but trusted by who? Not the equipment owner, but the equipment manufacturer.
4) Not so much 'bad relations' as 'no relations.' Outside of the server, Linux is a very niche OS. Its market share is measured in single-digit percentage. BIOS and hardware makers aren't so much hostile as apathetic - they see no reason to perform any testing under linux. So long as it works under Windows, which the vast majority of their customers use, it's considered done.
You forget about the presence of another force on the internet: The assholes. The people who will see that you insulted their favorite politician/cause/team/singer and, with an anger immune to reason or self-preservation, proceed to email your boss to inform him of your hidden criminal past and create a blog in your name calling for the legalisation of child porn.
It mentioned owners manuals. I gather from comments higher up that all cars do have some sort of backup means of operation, but that it isn't always obvious. You happened to know that you have a short-range transponder system located behind the ignition button - but how many owners of your model are completely unaware of that feature? It isn't something you'd guess.
There have been two attempts to introduce gender-neutral pronouns, but neither caught on outside of hardcore feminists.
Amusingly, Greek (At least ancient, I don't know about modern) does have a gender-neutral pronoun. It's used many times in the new testament. Translators into english have long converted this into the male pronouns for simple readability. There was an announcement earlier this year that the newest edition of the NIV is going to switch these into the 'he or she' form in order to remain more accurate to the original text*. This resulted in a serious backlash from Christians, with many denouncing the 'changes' as either a corruption of God's message or a sign that liberal feminists had infiltrated the NIV translation committee.
*Itsself a translation. Jesus spoke in Hebrew, but the words were translated into Greek before being written down.
Li-ion batteries are killed by a complete discharge. A problem solved by simply putting a circuit in the battery that detects when it is dangerously low, and disconnects the battery. Coincidentialy I'm designing one myself right now for a project. It's still possible to kill a li-ion that way, but only via self-discharge. Which, as you point out, is achieved by parking the car for a few months without charging.
I wonder if it'd be possible for manufacturers to build a small solar panel into the roof. It wouldn't provide any significant contribution to running the car, but it would probably be enough to avert death-by-self-discharge. At least so long as the car were not stored indoors.
I'm guessing you're both wrong - because the burgler usually won't know if there is a gun in the house, it isn't a factor. You might find a correlation due to the impact of local crime rate on gun ownership, but that's the closest you'll see.
After you've 'lost' your third gun, I imagine the computers at the ATF are going to start sounding some warnings.
Unless you're specifically aiming to steal guns. I've no experience trading in the criminal underground, but I would guess a stolen and thus untraceable gun has to be worth something.
Give it, oh, five more versions.
Food shortage is an economic issue. The problem isn't an inability to grow enough food - there's enough to around. It's just that the starving population of Elbonia can only afford to pay so much for the food they need to live, while the more wealthy populations of the world will happily spend far more on food for luxury purposes like producing far more meat than the human diet really needs. Or making ethanol.