My favourite was an old p2p network - I think it was called OFF? It never caught on, but it had a very interesting concept.
Let's say you have a copyright-infringing file - call it Bieber-generic-love-song.mp3. You don't share it directly. When you put it into OFF, the client will see if it has a block of data of matching size or a little larger. If not, it'll create one - full of completely random bits: Garbage1.bin. Now, it takes your Bieber-generic-love-song.mp3 and XORs that with Garbage1.bin. That gives you Garbage2.bin... which is also purely random, because it's a result of an XOR with uncorrelated random bits. Now you have two chunks of data, Garbage1.bin and Garbage2.bin, both of which are utterly random - they can't possibly be infringing upon copyright in any way, because they contain no meaningful information. But the network also has a search function - and if someone were to search for Bieber, your client would answer: "I know of Bieber-generic-love-long.mp3. To get it, use Garbage1.bin and Garbage2.bin, truncate to X bytes."
The searcher than goes and downloads Garbage1.bin and Garbage2.bin - both of which are, on their own, nothing but random bits. And from those, through the magic of mathematics, out pops the latest vapid ode to an unnamed girl from a manufactured pop star.
The overhead is bad - up to 100%.
It never really caught on because of the overhead and because better, though more legally-dangerous, networks also existed. But it shows an interesting approach to using mathematical trickery to subvert the law. Somehow I doubt it would stand up in court - judges tend to frown upon people who find creative ways to avoid infringing the letter of the law while making an obvious mockery of the intent.
The wikipedia page still exists, but the website of the software doesn't.
2006 was a time of great optimism for the pirate community - I was in university at the time. Napster had been shut down, but countless successors were blooming and it really felt like we would bring down 'The Man' and usher in a new age of free access to knowledge and unconstrained international flow of communication. The future felt inevitable. Turns out we were wrong. I wonder if this is what the hippies felt like as they grew older, realised the flaws in their youthful vision and watched their movement fade.
You just described Freenet. And a few others, though Freenet might be the best-known.
They never caught on outside of the paranoid-and-activist community, for practical reasons. When everything has to be proxied multiple times, performance utterly sucks - it's dialup-bad.
I've become something of a fan of IPFS. It's not designed to actively thwart monitoring and censorship efforts, so performance on it is actually... well, not great. But a whole lot better than Freenet. It is fully distributed and any content published is done so irrevocably. You should look in to it.
I have considered it, but it's a lot of effort to just get faster backups.
I'd stick in an infiniband card if I could, since the other server already has a free port, but there's only one model of card I could confirm works for Windows 10, and it's an expensive one.
It's a well-established business practice. Market segmentation. They've always kept a few restrictions in certain Windows versions to keep them from displacing more expensive versions. Home cannot join a domain, for example.
To my annoyance, Windows 10 is unable (kernel level stuff) to handle link teaming. It's an issue to people who purchased Intel quad-port ethernet cards for that purpose, because even with the Intel drivers it just can't do that. Windows 2012 server can, so it must be a deliberate restriction to stop people from using Windows 10 of any version in a server role.
Not yet, but remember MS owns a lot of game studios - they might apply pressure to develop Windows 10 exclusives in future. When the transition is far enough along that they can afford to lose the 7/8 holdouts.
If Microsoft is halfway competent in their security - which is questionable - they'll be using SSL, so you can't impersonate one of their servers. Almost everything I monitored was SSL. Except for the start menu tile updates, which were plain http. From a bing subdomain.
I made a list too - but my list was made on a fresh-out-the-box, no-third-party Windows 10 device. This is the list I got from observation. https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmREmfNtA...
Windows made money selling copies because every few years a new version came out, and thanks to the rapid pace of technological advancement everyone had to upgrade.
Then advancement slowed, and it took MS the better part of a decade to abandon XP. How can you continue to sell people new operating systems when your last product was 'good enough' that no-one wants to stop using it?
So MS has applied the obvious business solution: Transition from selling an OS to selling the OS and then profiting off of the ancillary services that support it, like an app store.
6. has changed a lot in recent years, thanks to Valve - they pushed a lot of studios into supporting linux, with the promise that doing so would mean an easy port to their Steam console. It's worked - even a lot of major titles are linux-native now. Go play Half Life 2, or Left 4 Dead 2.
I have, though my own testing, confirmed this fact.
My working theory is that services running as 'system' are exempt from the firewall, but I might be wrong on that detail. What I do know is that even if you put in block-everything-no-exceptions rules and a default deny, the traffic still flows both ways.
I can also confirm the hosts situation, though I believe this might be a security measure to stop malware from disabling the update mechanism.
Ha ha not serious about promising to pay the legal costs of any supporter who assaulted a protester at one of his rallies. American politics has reached the point of Poe: The non-joking comments are routinely so silly that you cannot construct a joke that will not be mistaken for a serious claim.
He uses the Putin Denial sometimes too - like claiming he did not mock a reporter for his disability even when he did so on national TV, and the footage is readily available. Because he knows that his supporters aren't going to do any fact-checking.
The media has two overriding objectives: 1. Report the news that'll get ratings. 2. Report it quick, before the rival news organisations.
Trump is getting a lot of press coverage, mostly negative. But it's not because of any conspiracy: It's because he has a habit of making outrageous statements. Every time he opens his mouth and says something ridiculous even by the standards of US politics, that's a story that people will want to hear about.
There's no conflict in the t-shirt: It means he opposes Trump in a contest with the other Republican candidates, but supports Trump over any Democratic candidates. Thus he gets to wear the shirt up until the very instant Trump's victory in the primary is confirmed. At that point he can change his shirt, and give Trump his full (if somewhat reluctant) support.
Putin and Russia are to some extent the same thing right now: He has centralised a lot of power to himself, both formerly and via informal influence. What Putin says, Russia does.
Don't try to make this look too symmetric. The DNC surely has a few homophobes, sexists and racists, but they are not even close to the level of their Republican counterparts in that contest.
If I were an evil Microsoft manager, I'd go for the next DirectX version. Games need that, especially as DirectX is sure to eventually have features for handling VR.
DirectX 13, Windows 10 and UWP apps only. Easy. Just devote no resources to the win32 api, declare it 'legacy' for gaming and unsupported. Now every games publisher will have to develop using the new API, which also means no running the game on Windows 7 so MS can kill off their stubbonly-refuses-to-die OS. It won't hurt Steam directly, but once you have publishers having to use UWP anyway you are half-way to getting them to sell in the Microsoft store.
There was an old British sitcom, The Good Life, about a couple who tried to go self-sustaining. It's really very funny, you should watch it.
The final episode was unusual. Most of the series was very upbeat - the Good's faced up to all the problems that came their way, fighting for their dream with ingenuity and determination. They turned their garden into a miniature farm, made contacts to barter their excess production for what they couldn't make, and learned many new skills - until the last episode, when two disasters strike at once, destroying their garden farm and most of their possessions. The episode ends with the couple desperately trying to retain their cheerful optimism and commitment to their dream even in the face of impossibility.
People want to live forever. Once they realise that the afterlife is a lie, they'll put their hopes in even a slim hope like technology that doesn't exist yet but may one day be possible, like uploading or cryonics.
Sure, the chances of waking up again after the dying an freezing is one in a million. But the chance of waking up from the crematorium is zero, so clutch at that straw and hope luck is on your side.
Slashdot Mirror
My favourite was an old p2p network - I think it was called OFF? It never caught on, but it had a very interesting concept.
Let's say you have a copyright-infringing file - call it Bieber-generic-love-song.mp3. You don't share it directly. When you put it into OFF, the client will see if it has a block of data of matching size or a little larger. If not, it'll create one - full of completely random bits:
Garbage1.bin.
Now, it takes your Bieber-generic-love-song.mp3 and XORs that with Garbage1.bin. That gives you Garbage2.bin... which is also purely random, because it's a result of an XOR with uncorrelated random bits.
Now you have two chunks of data, Garbage1.bin and Garbage2.bin, both of which are utterly random - they can't possibly be infringing upon copyright in any way, because they contain no meaningful information. But the network also has a search function - and if someone were to search for Bieber, your client would answer: "I know of Bieber-generic-love-long.mp3. To get it, use Garbage1.bin and Garbage2.bin, truncate to X bytes."
The searcher than goes and downloads Garbage1.bin and Garbage2.bin - both of which are, on their own, nothing but random bits. And from those, through the magic of mathematics, out pops the latest vapid ode to an unnamed girl from a manufactured pop star.
The overhead is bad - up to 100%.
It never really caught on because of the overhead and because better, though more legally-dangerous, networks also existed. But it shows an interesting approach to using mathematical trickery to subvert the law. Somehow I doubt it would stand up in court - judges tend to frown upon people who find creative ways to avoid infringing the letter of the law while making an obvious mockery of the intent.
The wikipedia page still exists, but the website of the software doesn't.
2006 was a time of great optimism for the pirate community - I was in university at the time. Napster had been shut down, but countless successors were blooming and it really felt like we would bring down 'The Man' and usher in a new age of free access to knowledge and unconstrained international flow of communication. The future felt inevitable. Turns out we were wrong. I wonder if this is what the hippies felt like as they grew older, realised the flaws in their youthful vision and watched their movement fade.
You just described Freenet. And a few others, though Freenet might be the best-known.
They never caught on outside of the paranoid-and-activist community, for practical reasons. When everything has to be proxied multiple times, performance utterly sucks - it's dialup-bad.
I've become something of a fan of IPFS. It's not designed to actively thwart monitoring and censorship efforts, so performance on it is actually... well, not great. But a whole lot better than Freenet. It is fully distributed and any content published is done so irrevocably. You should look in to it.
It's physical at any one instant. It has to exist in some form - written in matter, or encoded in fluctuating electromagnetic fields.
I have considered it, but it's a lot of effort to just get faster backups.
I'd stick in an infiniband card if I could, since the other server already has a free port, but there's only one model of card I could confirm works for Windows 10, and it's an expensive one.
It's a well-established business practice. Market segmentation. They've always kept a few restrictions in certain Windows versions to keep them from displacing more expensive versions. Home cannot join a domain, for example.
To my annoyance, Windows 10 is unable (kernel level stuff) to handle link teaming. It's an issue to people who purchased Intel quad-port ethernet cards for that purpose, because even with the Intel drivers it just can't do that. Windows 2012 server can, so it must be a deliberate restriction to stop people from using Windows 10 of any version in a server role.
Not yet, but remember MS owns a lot of game studios - they might apply pressure to develop Windows 10 exclusives in future. When the transition is far enough along that they can afford to lose the 7/8 holdouts.
If Microsoft is halfway competent in their security - which is questionable - they'll be using SSL, so you can't impersonate one of their servers. Almost everything I monitored was SSL. Except for the start menu tile updates, which were plain http. From a bing subdomain.
I made a list too - but my list was made on a fresh-out-the-box, no-third-party Windows 10 device. This is the list I got from observation.
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmREmfNtA...
Windows made money selling copies because every few years a new version came out, and thanks to the rapid pace of technological advancement everyone had to upgrade.
Then advancement slowed, and it took MS the better part of a decade to abandon XP. How can you continue to sell people new operating systems when your last product was 'good enough' that no-one wants to stop using it?
So MS has applied the obvious business solution: Transition from selling an OS to selling the OS and then profiting off of the ancillary services that support it, like an app store.
6. has changed a lot in recent years, thanks to Valve - they pushed a lot of studios into supporting linux, with the promise that doing so would mean an easy port to their Steam console. It's worked - even a lot of major titles are linux-native now. Go play Half Life 2, or Left 4 Dead 2.
I have, though my own testing, confirmed this fact.
My working theory is that services running as 'system' are exempt from the firewall, but I might be wrong on that detail. What I do know is that even if you put in block-everything-no-exceptions rules and a default deny, the traffic still flows both ways.
I can also confirm the hosts situation, though I believe this might be a security measure to stop malware from disabling the update mechanism.
I have notes, though they are a bit dated: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmREmfNtA...
Ha ha not serious about promising to pay the legal costs of any supporter who assaulted a protester at one of his rallies.
American politics has reached the point of Poe: The non-joking comments are routinely so silly that you cannot construct a joke that will not be mistaken for a serious claim.
He uses the Putin Denial sometimes too - like claiming he did not mock a reporter for his disability even when he did so on national TV, and the footage is readily available. Because he knows that his supporters aren't going to do any fact-checking.
The media has two overriding objectives:
1. Report the news that'll get ratings.
2. Report it quick, before the rival news organisations.
Trump is getting a lot of press coverage, mostly negative. But it's not because of any conspiracy: It's because he has a habit of making outrageous statements. Every time he opens his mouth and says something ridiculous even by the standards of US politics, that's a story that people will want to hear about.
When doing long-term strategic planning, you don't plan against your adversary now - you plan for what they might be in a future worst-case.
There's no conflict in the t-shirt: It means he opposes Trump in a contest with the other Republican candidates, but supports Trump over any Democratic candidates. Thus he gets to wear the shirt up until the very instant Trump's victory in the primary is confirmed. At that point he can change his shirt, and give Trump his full (if somewhat reluctant) support.
Putin and Russia are to some extent the same thing right now: He has centralised a lot of power to himself, both formerly and via informal influence. What Putin says, Russia does.
Don't try to make this look too symmetric. The DNC surely has a few homophobes, sexists and racists, but they are not even close to the level of their Republican counterparts in that contest.
I haven't purchased a card for gaming since about 2010, so I may be a bit behind the times.
If I were an evil Microsoft manager, I'd go for the next DirectX version. Games need that, especially as DirectX is sure to eventually have features for handling VR.
DirectX 13, Windows 10 and UWP apps only. Easy. Just devote no resources to the win32 api, declare it 'legacy' for gaming and unsupported. Now every games publisher will have to develop using the new API, which also means no running the game on Windows 7 so MS can kill off their stubbonly-refuses-to-die OS. It won't hurt Steam directly, but once you have publishers having to use UWP anyway you are half-way to getting them to sell in the Microsoft store.
Don't buy new GPUs.
Buy ones that a little behind the cutting edge, ones from a few months ago.
80% of the performance at 30% of the price.
There was an old British sitcom, The Good Life, about a couple who tried to go self-sustaining. It's really very funny, you should watch it.
The final episode was unusual. Most of the series was very upbeat - the Good's faced up to all the problems that came their way, fighting for their dream with ingenuity and determination. They turned their garden into a miniature farm, made contacts to barter their excess production for what they couldn't make, and learned many new skills - until the last episode, when two disasters strike at once, destroying their garden farm and most of their possessions. The episode ends with the couple desperately trying to retain their cheerful optimism and commitment to their dream even in the face of impossibility.
So that's not unused land, it's the land required to feet the huge cities.
People want to live forever. Once they realise that the afterlife is a lie, they'll put their hopes in even a slim hope like technology that doesn't exist yet but may one day be possible, like uploading or cryonics.
Sure, the chances of waking up again after the dying an freezing is one in a million. But the chance of waking up from the crematorium is zero, so clutch at that straw and hope luck is on your side.