The only problem? None of the unenlightened seem to get what he's saying.
I agree. Hacking skills can be used for criminal activity. So can police skills, accounting skills, and (in this case) journalism skills.
I was disappointed at their entire feature. From their hacking "primer":
Hackers come in many varieties. The term "hacker" usually brings to mind three of these -- people who break the security of computer networks, people who break the security on application software, and people who create malicious programs like viruses. These aren't mutually exclusive, but it's a simple way to divide the activities that fall under "hacking."
If they'd actually interviewed any number of hackers properly, they should have known that "hacker" was the wrong word for what they were talking about.
If I can't do anything else, I'm going here and submitting some feedback to CNN expressing this, politely of course. Here's what I'm posting and I hope others can say something similar:
I was reading your interviews with Emmanuel Goldstein and Dr. Charles Palmer, but I was quite disappointed at the standard of journalism.
Most importantly, the definition of the word "hacker" is inconsistent between the two interviews.
Dr Palmer's definition of "hacker" is primarily criminal, including breaking and entering along with generally illegal activities. Goldstein's definition is completely different. What Dr Palmer considers a "hacker", Goldstein considers a "cracker" - more correct in my opinion since both these definitions go back to the early 80's when hacking and cracking were in their infancy.
The rest of your feature did little more than associate the word "hacker" with criminal activity, but what got to me most was that you repeatedly asked Goldstein criminal-implying questions, regardless of what he said. I'm disappointed that the three definitions in your "hacking primer" were all criminal definitions. If the research of David Mandeville had involved actually talking to more people such as Goldstein, he might have realised that the main defintion of a *real* hacker is about pulling things apart and understanding how they work.
Can hacking skills be used for illegal activities? Sure. So can police skills, teaching skills, accounting skills, corporate executive skills, and journalism skills. When hacking is ised for illegal purposes, it's called cracking. Please try to make this distinction in the future.
I can think of four: "Nothing", "Null", "Empty" and "Missing". Oh, and if you declare a variant array like this:.....
I haven't coded in VB for ages, but the three I was thinking of were null, 0, and I think an empty string translates to null in some circumstances. So I guess there's more than 6 in an ambiguous sort of way.:)
I almost never write anything in BASIC unless I'm forced to, but the only fundamental thing I really have against BASIC as a language is what MS Visual BASIC has turned it into.
If KBasic avoids the same trend and doesn't do everything possible to do what learner programmers mean at the expense of language integrity, it might not be so bad... and thankfully in an open source model, there's probably not much chance of this happening.
Come to think of it, as long as it doesn't end up with six different ways to specify NULL, I probably won't be too offended by it. (Off the top of my head I can only think of 3 in VB, but someone told me there were 6.)
They *are* providing a very valuable and free service. Who cares if they're having fun, and sharpening their skills as "payment" for the service? Would you rather they sent you a bill for $50,000? Or would you rather they NOT be ethical and sell your information for $100,000?
Personally? I'd rather people who broke in were honest about it and told me and I'd appreciate knowing about it.
I also think that they shouldn't be taking and paying for a "service" that isn't for sale. If they were caught and someone wanted to press charges for having their back door knocked down followed by helpful instructions on how to make a better door, I have no problem with it at all.
Yeah I do partly see what you're getting at and to a point, I can't disagree with you. Like I said it's a gray area.
Virtually everyone who's replied to what I said mentioned that I should be grateful if people who noticed the car door unlocked would point it out to me. Of course I would. I already said that I would. What I just don't want though, is people deliberately trying to break in if I didn't want them to.
Obviously it won't stop people from actively trying to break in, but they shouldn't be let off because they didn't state their intention. Anyone with a sledgehammer could break into my house. I already know that, and they could probably come in any other number of ways I haven't thought of, too. But I don't want them knocking my door down just to prove it.
You say that it's important for ethical people to examine the security of public venues. If the people were really ethical, they shouldn't try to invade where they're not invited, irrespective of whether the site owner doesn't know what's "best for them". It's not ensuring my freedom to make my own decisions, it's trampling on it. Nobody should have the right to decide what's ethically correct for someone else. That's what govco does day and night.
As it is, I don't think I'd mind people trying to break in if they would be honest about it and let me know without breaking anything. I think it's a good strategy, and I probably wouldn't press any charges if they actually got caught. I also think everyone using MS Outlook should replace it with something better. I mean, someone's just going to seriously exploit it again within the next six months anyway. But does this give me the right to change it over "for them"?
I don't think anyone's particularly happy that people are poking around their websites. However, if a stranger comes by and leaves a note that says "your front door was open", that is more helpful than nothing.
I know what you're getting at and sometimes I do feel that way. Also though, I think it can be a very gray area and IMHO it's risky the way you're going with it.
I'll use the car-in-the-parking-lot scenario. Would I mind someone leaving a note on my car if they noticed one of the doors was unlocked? Within reason, probably not. But do I think people have the right to walk around the parking lot trying to open car doors, just to see which ones aren't locked? Of course not.
There are metaphors everywhere. I can encrypt my email to prevent people reading it. Do I want anonymous strangers to try to decrypt it as long as they promise not to read it? Not really. If I say I don't mind, it gives anyone who wants to break it an easy back-door out of being prosecuted. Imagine what it would be like if govco could get away with saying "we were only trying to show you that your cryptography was faulty. Oh and by the way, we stumbled on this evidence which we're going to use against you.". It always starts with small things, and I can't see why it wouldn't lead to that.
Obviously I'd like to know if anyone stumbles on a way in accidently or sees something by chance, but I'd like to arrange for it to be tested on my own, thank you.
So I guess my point is that if it's ethically okay to try to crack websites etc in the interests of improving security, it suddenly makes it ethically okay to crack them. As long as someone hasn't actually stolen the credit card numbers yet, it makes it okay.
Sure some crackers mean well, but it shouldn't be an excuse to let them off. If they really want to test a site that way they should ask permission first. Let sites decide whether they want everyone trying to break them or not. Most of them will say no, and at that point, what right does anyone else have to force their "better" opinion on another person or company regardless? I've had enough of that from govco and I don't want to start getting it from random unidentified script kiddies.
I'm not sure what it's like in Europe, but one thing that becomes a lot more relevant as soon as you leave the US is the traffic cost of the net.
The vast majority of info is hosted in the US, which is why even at my university we have only very restricted access outside New Zealand, unless we're really nice to the sysadmins. If you want a better connection you have to pay extra for it, and the cost is usually traffic based.
At the library down the road from here the net is freely available (when it works), but it's not cheap for the city to pay for. I can completely understand why they want to restrict people from using services that are going to cause people to hang around and use what they probably don't need. If people want better access there are lots of cybercafe's up and down the road.
Perhaps we need to switch to a true democracy, with no representative middlemen. We have the technology now to ensure every single fucker can vote on an issue. Then we'll really know what the majority rule is.
I won't completely disagree with you but please don't go for a perfect democracy where everyone can vote on every issue.
The problem with this is that the only people who would bother to vote after the first few weeks are the people who actually care about changing things. This breaks down to a subset of people who have a particular personality, so such a system would ultimately give control to these people.
Most people couldn't care less about most issues, but many people take a stand on things they know little or nothing about. Usually this stand comes from being manipulated by annoying people with loud voices who know how to mix key patriotic manipulative words into sentances to hit irrationally on large blocks of population.
People have voted away "true" freedom in nearly every democratic country in the world, in favour of having a government to "protect" them from things they don't have time to understand. How long do you think it would take for people to do it again?
It's easy to vote to allocate money to helping the homeless. It's not easy to organise how this is done. It's easy to vote to replace the people who were responsible for organizing something. It's not easy to appoint someone who has a hope in hell of doing any better.
The central problem with democracy is the side of it that is nothing more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
When our people can literally out-think people from other countries what will that do for our ability to compete with those countries?
They wouldn't be able to afford to buy anything made in America. That's for sure! Thus there would be nobody to sell anything to and so nobody to compete with.
Besides, if all the good IT workers were centered in one part of the world, wouldn't it eventually create a narrow, in-bred culture? Ideas could get one-sided, boring, and centered on what the USA thinks it wants instead of what it discovers it can use and adapt from other places.
To use a similar example, if other contries didn't have their own TV production, half of the top rating U.S. shows wouldn't exist. (Which isn't to say they're worth watching.)
I haven't read it anywhere officially, but I'm pretty sure that IE does this to check for version updates. ie. Every x times you run IE, it'll go to the redirection page instead of directly to your homepage. If a new version has been released it'll redirect to a microsoft announcement/download page instead of where you normally start.
To turn it off, go to tools / internet options / advanced, and tell it not to automatically check for Internet Explorer updates.
The current Harris Interactive situation is a perfect example of why the government, and not self-appointed private groups, must create the rules which govern Internet communications. Essentially, Mail Abuse Prevention System, LLC (MAPS), and other like groups, are permitted, without any due process of law or even a fair process, to restrict companies' rights to conduct legitimate business over the Internet. These restrictions are based on complaints that may be economically motivated by our competitors.
Personally I think it's a perfect example of why the government should not create rules which govern Internet communications.
If it did we'd have technicalities causing the government to force us to pay for and eat spam day and night because some idiot corporation wants us to read it. MAPS on the other hand is a good example of the general population deciding whether they want to respect a certain organisation's judgement or not.
MAPS definitely has it's down side. If all the companies known to not use double opt-in were listed, nobody would use it. But that's also the strongest thing about it. If MAPS gets indiscriminite and lazy about listing organisations as spammers, nobody would use it.
===
Re:NEVER VOTE FOR SLIME
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 2
But if enough votes go to third party candidates, then a couple of things can happen. First, the slimers can see the lost votes and try to get us back. Secondly, if they fail, other voters see
the third parties, believe they can make a difference, vote them in, and you get third-party
officers. Self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm glad someone said this. I don't live in America but I do live in a democracy. (New Zealand to be specific). If you don't vote, you're not recording an opinion. If you don't record an opinion, whoever wins will paint an opinion on you. Usually it's an image of someone too lazy to get up and walk to the ballot box. For most non-voters (I think) this is completely untrue. But people believe it, because you've never said anything to the contrary on the record.
When I vote, I don't even vote for anyone serious. I vote for the joke party that has policies of making all the straight roads curved, introducing a law that says 1/3 of the population has to be gay, and initiating the great leap backwards.
Often when people find this out they tell me I'm wasting my vote and try to look down on me as if I'm an immature inexperienced person who doesn't care about the "real issues". This couldn't be further from the truth. I'm casting it as a protest vote, because in my eyes a joke party is the only one that's actually believable before the election.
If enough non-voters would get up and register their opinion so it was visible in creative and organized ways, it would at least make it more obvious that there's something seriously wrong with the system.
Democracy: Two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
What's wrong with a digital signature? They're providing it to you and they should be able to do exactly what they want with it as long as it reaches you, including stamping a registration on it stating that the broadcast was originally prepared for you. As long as they don't hide from you the fact that it's there.
If you choose to re-broadcast it then go ahead. Just be prepared to take some responsibility if they trace it back to you and possibly prosecute you under an assortment of rebroadcast laws.
On the other hand if someone reverse engineers their system and works out how to remove the signature, it's their (MPAA) own fault.
...when they can just purchase the information they want from any number of private organisations that monitor traffic every day? All carnivore does is to put an idiotically suspiscious sounding name on the process.
If people want to protect information over the net they should encrypt it, which unfortunately is very infeasible at the moment because 99% of people don't have the right software installed to use it on the other end. (In short, the current infrastructure is dismal.)
That said, the net is an open system like it or not. The concept of privacy by regulation (government or otherwise) is as unfeasible as expecting information to be automatically delivered to the place it was sent without any end-to-end intervention to check the correct information actually got there. This is why TCP is used so much, because it creates reliable information streams over an open system.
If net privacy is going to go anywhere seriously, it has to be end-to-end. Relying on anyone, government included, to turn their back because you ask nicely doesn't make much sense in the long term. Encryption needs to be opened and standardised fast. It also needs to be more decentralised, so nobody can take control of it. (At the moment my favourite idea for email decentralisation is if ISP's began running their own public key servers for email addresses on their domains.)
Other useful things to happen would be if web providers started using secure connections automatically. This would be much easier to get going if browser makers would stop popping up annoying dialog boxes that "warn" people when they're entering a secure session by default.
Warning about entering an insecure session is understandable, even though this almost never happens unless the user was in a secure session first. Otherwise all the dialog boxes do is provide an incentive for web designers not to make things secure until they absolutely have to.
The MPAA said it doesn't want to destroy the ability of consumers to "time-shift," or record a program for later viewing.
Think about how the net is getting more common and easier and faster to use. Everything (including broadcasts) is getting more and more native to it every day.
They're probably most worried about the possibility that someone could purchase a device that would allow them to plug their cable box into the net (directly or indirectly), and broadcast the digital signals around for free.
Personally I think a better way around this would be to encrypt digital signatures into the broadcasts from their end that are unique to each viewer. That way whenever an unauthorised broadcast gets out onto the net, they can trace it back to who it came from.
I was just going from ancient memories of some short story I read ages ago. Isaac Asimov meant whatever he meant. I don't know if I remembered it right or not, but there was probably something in there about how it was predicting what would happen if the cops didn't intervene beforehand.
I didn't think it was worth mentioning at the time.
So the ultimate laptop, one that has converted all its mass-energy to radiation, would be able to carry out a mind-boggling 1051 operations per second. Compare this with today's standard laptop, which has a clock speed of about 500 megahertz and carries out up to 1000 parallel operations each cycle--a total of about 1012 operations per second.
Um, okay.. but personally I prefer today's 1kg laptop which doesn't nuke itself and everything in a mind boggling radius to total oblivion as part of the calculation process. It's more effective for getting useful results.:)
That's not quite the point of the article though, because it's really talking about having a 1kg power source and the rest of the article seems to go into more detail.
This thing makes me think of some old Isaac Asimov stories about a supercomputer called multivac. It did heaps of cool Orwellian stuff.. like calculate crimes people would commit each day so they could be arrested before they were committed.
I wish I could remember where, but I heard somewhere that in some places like Japan (I think), people get a new phone every 6 months for no other reason except to have the latest phone.
Maybe the bulk of new cellular technology markets are just going to stay in the regions of the world where image is so important in that way. To be honest I hope that never happens here. I hate mobile phones enough without them draining my bank account even more so I can look trendy in front of potential employers (who incidently can go to hell if they judge me on my phone.:)
The most annoying problem with gnutella (that I find) is getting hit with so many searches, most of which are for porn.
I guess this is necessary to a point if there's not going to be a central directory that could be shut down. IMHO though, the next step would be to have a distributed system that would organise itself into branches based on relevant keywords. (It wouldn't be too difficult for clients to connect themselves to more than one branch.)
This way searches could work more intelligently instead of by brute force, by only looking down the most relevant branches where the searches are most likely to succeed.
Sounds like fun but to be honest I hope it doesn't happen. Specifically because it wouldn't set a good example for the cause.
If in the very one dimensional, ignorant and manipulatable public eye, decss was more associated with virus-spreading crackers and script kiddees than it already is, it would only provide ethical ammo to lawsuits that are against it.
I guess the alternative is a polite self-propogating worm that asks the user's permission before it propogates itself. It wouldn't have nearly the same effect, though.:(
I can't for the life of me find a link anywhere, but I vaguely remember something about IBM having a major website design problem with the Atlanta Olympics, 4 years ago.
From memory it had something to do with some of the event logo's wanting to be changed, and it turned out to be a serious and very expensive problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah, you're right. Thanks for pointing that out.
===
I agree. Hacking skills can be used for criminal activity. So can police skills, accounting skills, and (in this case) journalism skills.
I was disappointed at their entire feature. From their hacking "primer":
If they'd actually interviewed any number of hackers properly, they should have known that "hacker" was the wrong word for what they were talking about.
If I can't do anything else, I'm going here and submitting some feedback to CNN expressing this, politely of course. Here's what I'm posting and I hope others can say something similar:
===
I haven't coded in VB for ages, but the three I was thinking of were null, 0, and I think an empty string translates to null in some circumstances. So I guess there's more than 6 in an ambiguous sort of way. :)
===
I almost never write anything in BASIC unless I'm forced to, but the only fundamental thing I really have against BASIC as a language is what MS Visual BASIC has turned it into.
If KBasic avoids the same trend and doesn't do everything possible to do what learner programmers mean at the expense of language integrity, it might not be so bad... and thankfully in an open source model, there's probably not much chance of this happening.
Come to think of it, as long as it doesn't end up with six different ways to specify NULL, I probably won't be too offended by it. (Off the top of my head I can only think of 3 in VB, but someone told me there were 6.)
===
Personally? I'd rather people who broke in were honest about it and told me and I'd appreciate knowing about it.
I also think that they shouldn't be taking and paying for a "service" that isn't for sale. If they were caught and someone wanted to press charges for having their back door knocked down followed by helpful instructions on how to make a better door, I have no problem with it at all.
===
Yeah I do partly see what you're getting at and to a point, I can't disagree with you. Like I said it's a gray area.
Virtually everyone who's replied to what I said mentioned that I should be grateful if people who noticed the car door unlocked would point it out to me. Of course I would. I already said that I would. What I just don't want though, is people deliberately trying to break in if I didn't want them to.
Obviously it won't stop people from actively trying to break in, but they shouldn't be let off because they didn't state their intention. Anyone with a sledgehammer could break into my house. I already know that, and they could probably come in any other number of ways I haven't thought of, too. But I don't want them knocking my door down just to prove it.
You say that it's important for ethical people to examine the security of public venues. If the people were really ethical, they shouldn't try to invade where they're not invited, irrespective of whether the site owner doesn't know what's "best for them". It's not ensuring my freedom to make my own decisions, it's trampling on it. Nobody should have the right to decide what's ethically correct for someone else. That's what govco does day and night.
As it is, I don't think I'd mind people trying to break in if they would be honest about it and let me know without breaking anything. I think it's a good strategy, and I probably wouldn't press any charges if they actually got caught. I also think everyone using MS Outlook should replace it with something better. I mean, someone's just going to seriously exploit it again within the next six months anyway. But does this give me the right to change it over "for them"?
===
I know what you're getting at and sometimes I do feel that way. Also though, I think it can be a very gray area and IMHO it's risky the way you're going with it.
I'll use the car-in-the-parking-lot scenario. Would I mind someone leaving a note on my car if they noticed one of the doors was unlocked? Within reason, probably not. But do I think people have the right to walk around the parking lot trying to open car doors, just to see which ones aren't locked? Of course not.
There are metaphors everywhere. I can encrypt my email to prevent people reading it. Do I want anonymous strangers to try to decrypt it as long as they promise not to read it? Not really. If I say I don't mind, it gives anyone who wants to break it an easy back-door out of being prosecuted. Imagine what it would be like if govco could get away with saying "we were only trying to show you that your cryptography was faulty. Oh and by the way, we stumbled on this evidence which we're going to use against you.". It always starts with small things, and I can't see why it wouldn't lead to that.
Obviously I'd like to know if anyone stumbles on a way in accidently or sees something by chance, but I'd like to arrange for it to be tested on my own, thank you.
So I guess my point is that if it's ethically okay to try to crack websites etc in the interests of improving security, it suddenly makes it ethically okay to crack them. As long as someone hasn't actually stolen the credit card numbers yet, it makes it okay.
Sure some crackers mean well, but it shouldn't be an excuse to let them off. If they really want to test a site that way they should ask permission first. Let sites decide whether they want everyone trying to break them or not. Most of them will say no, and at that point, what right does anyone else have to force their "better" opinion on another person or company regardless? I've had enough of that from govco and I don't want to start getting it from random unidentified script kiddies.
===
I'm not sure what it's like in Europe, but one thing that becomes a lot more relevant as soon as you leave the US is the traffic cost of the net.
The vast majority of info is hosted in the US, which is why even at my university we have only very restricted access outside New Zealand, unless we're really nice to the sysadmins. If you want a better connection you have to pay extra for it, and the cost is usually traffic based.
At the library down the road from here the net is freely available (when it works), but it's not cheap for the city to pay for. I can completely understand why they want to restrict people from using services that are going to cause people to hang around and use what they probably don't need. If people want better access there are lots of cybercafe's up and down the road.
Email seems a bit over the top though.
===
I won't completely disagree with you but please don't go for a perfect democracy where everyone can vote on every issue.
The problem with this is that the only people who would bother to vote after the first few weeks are the people who actually care about changing things. This breaks down to a subset of people who have a particular personality, so such a system would ultimately give control to these people.
Most people couldn't care less about most issues, but many people take a stand on things they know little or nothing about. Usually this stand comes from being manipulated by annoying people with loud voices who know how to mix key patriotic manipulative words into sentances to hit irrationally on large blocks of population.
People have voted away "true" freedom in nearly every democratic country in the world, in favour of having a government to "protect" them from things they don't have time to understand. How long do you think it would take for people to do it again?
It's easy to vote to allocate money to helping the homeless. It's not easy to organise how this is done. It's easy to vote to replace the people who were responsible for organizing something. It's not easy to appoint someone who has a hope in hell of doing any better.
The central problem with democracy is the side of it that is nothing more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
===
They wouldn't be able to afford to buy anything made in America. That's for sure! Thus there would be nobody to sell anything to and so nobody to compete with.
Besides, if all the good IT workers were centered in one part of the world, wouldn't it eventually create a narrow, in-bred culture? Ideas could get one-sided, boring, and centered on what the USA thinks it wants instead of what it discovers it can use and adapt from other places.
To use a similar example, if other contries didn't have their own TV production, half of the top rating U.S. shows wouldn't exist. (Which isn't to say they're worth watching.)
===
I haven't read it anywhere officially, but I'm pretty sure that IE does this to check for version updates. ie. Every x times you run IE, it'll go to the redirection page instead of directly to your homepage. If a new version has been released it'll redirect to a microsoft announcement/download page instead of where you normally start.
To turn it off, go to tools / internet options / advanced, and tell it not to automatically check for Internet Explorer updates.
===
The original (and understandably biased) Harris Interactive press release which can be found at http://www.harrisinteractive.com/news/index.asp?Ne wsID=127&HI_election=HarrisInterac tive says:
Personally I think it's a perfect example of why the government should not create rules which govern Internet communications.
If it did we'd have technicalities causing the government to force us to pay for and eat spam day and night because some idiot corporation wants us to read it. MAPS on the other hand is a good example of the general population deciding whether they want to respect a certain organisation's judgement or not.
MAPS definitely has it's down side. If all the companies known to not use double opt-in were listed, nobody would use it. But that's also the strongest thing about it. If MAPS gets indiscriminite and lazy about listing organisations as spammers, nobody would use it.
===
I'm glad someone said this. I don't live in America but I do live in a democracy. (New Zealand to be specific). If you don't vote, you're not recording an opinion. If you don't record an opinion, whoever wins will paint an opinion on you. Usually it's an image of someone too lazy to get up and walk to the ballot box. For most non-voters (I think) this is completely untrue. But people believe it, because you've never said anything to the contrary on the record.
When I vote, I don't even vote for anyone serious. I vote for the joke party that has policies of making all the straight roads curved, introducing a law that says 1/3 of the population has to be gay, and initiating the great leap backwards.
Often when people find this out they tell me I'm wasting my vote and try to look down on me as if I'm an immature inexperienced person who doesn't care about the "real issues". This couldn't be further from the truth. I'm casting it as a protest vote, because in my eyes a joke party is the only one that's actually believable before the election.
If enough non-voters would get up and register their opinion so it was visible in creative and organized ways, it would at least make it more obvious that there's something seriously wrong with the system.
===
Aren't there intelligent vending machines in some places that bump up the price of cold drinks on hot days, and when they're selling a lot?
===
What's wrong with a digital signature? They're providing it to you and they should be able to do exactly what they want with it as long as it reaches you, including stamping a registration on it stating that the broadcast was originally prepared for you. As long as they don't hide from you the fact that it's there.
If you choose to re-broadcast it then go ahead. Just be prepared to take some responsibility if they trace it back to you and possibly prosecute you under an assortment of rebroadcast laws.
On the other hand if someone reverse engineers their system and works out how to remove the signature, it's their (MPAA) own fault.
===
If people want to protect information over the net they should encrypt it, which unfortunately is very infeasible at the moment because 99% of people don't have the right software installed to use it on the other end. (In short, the current infrastructure is dismal.)
That said, the net is an open system like it or not. The concept of privacy by regulation (government or otherwise) is as unfeasible as expecting information to be automatically delivered to the place it was sent without any end-to-end intervention to check the correct information actually got there. This is why TCP is used so much, because it creates reliable information streams over an open system.
If net privacy is going to go anywhere seriously, it has to be end-to-end. Relying on anyone, government included, to turn their back because you ask nicely doesn't make much sense in the long term. Encryption needs to be opened and standardised fast. It also needs to be more decentralised, so nobody can take control of it. (At the moment my favourite idea for email decentralisation is if ISP's began running their own public key servers for email addresses on their domains.)
Other useful things to happen would be if web providers started using secure connections automatically. This would be much easier to get going if browser makers would stop popping up annoying dialog boxes that "warn" people when they're entering a secure session by default.
Warning about entering an insecure session is understandable, even though this almost never happens unless the user was in a secure session first. Otherwise all the dialog boxes do is provide an incentive for web designers not to make things secure until they absolutely have to.
===
Think about how the net is getting more common and easier and faster to use. Everything (including broadcasts) is getting more and more native to it every day.
They're probably most worried about the possibility that someone could purchase a device that would allow them to plug their cable box into the net (directly or indirectly), and broadcast the digital signals around for free.
Personally I think a better way around this would be to encrypt digital signatures into the broadcasts from their end that are unique to each viewer. That way whenever an unauthorised broadcast gets out onto the net, they can trace it back to who it came from.
===
I was just going from ancient memories of some short story I read ages ago. Isaac Asimov meant whatever he meant. I don't know if I remembered it right or not, but there was probably something in there about how it was predicting what would happen if the cops didn't intervene beforehand.
I didn't think it was worth mentioning at the time.
===
Um, okay.. but personally I prefer today's 1kg laptop which doesn't nuke itself and everything in a mind boggling radius to total oblivion as part of the calculation process. It's more effective for getting useful results. :)
That's not quite the point of the article though, because it's really talking about having a 1kg power source and the rest of the article seems to go into more detail.
This thing makes me think of some old Isaac Asimov stories about a supercomputer called multivac. It did heaps of cool Orwellian stuff.. like calculate crimes people would commit each day so they could be arrested before they were committed.
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There was a thread about the problems with open source and hacked clients in an earlier discussion. I'm not sure if it's much help.
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I wish I could remember where, but I heard somewhere that in some places like Japan (I think), people get a new phone every 6 months for no other reason except to have the latest phone.
Maybe the bulk of new cellular technology markets are just going to stay in the regions of the world where image is so important in that way. To be honest I hope that never happens here. I hate mobile phones enough without them draining my bank account even more so I can look trendy in front of potential employers (who incidently can go to hell if they judge me on my phone. :)
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making him and Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), the only two actors to appear in all of the Star Wars movies to date."
I guess you can really judge the geekiness of a movie when the only two guys that have a social life are a couple of robots. :)
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The most annoying problem with gnutella (that I find) is getting hit with so many searches, most of which are for porn.
I guess this is necessary to a point if there's not going to be a central directory that could be shut down. IMHO though, the next step would be to have a distributed system that would organise itself into branches based on relevant keywords. (It wouldn't be too difficult for clients to connect themselves to more than one branch.)
This way searches could work more intelligently instead of by brute force, by only looking down the most relevant branches where the searches are most likely to succeed.
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Sounds like fun but to be honest I hope it doesn't happen. Specifically because it wouldn't set a good example for the cause.
If in the very one dimensional, ignorant and manipulatable public eye, decss was more associated with virus-spreading crackers and script kiddees than it already is, it would only provide ethical ammo to lawsuits that are against it.
I guess the alternative is a polite self-propogating worm that asks the user's permission before it propogates itself. It wouldn't have nearly the same effect, though. :(
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I can't for the life of me find a link anywhere, but I vaguely remember something about IBM having a major website design problem with the Atlanta Olympics, 4 years ago.
From memory it had something to do with some of the event logo's wanting to be changed, and it turned out to be a serious and very expensive problem.
Can anyone possibly confirm or deny this?
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