Call me crazy (go ahead, do it) but I see a rocket going up really fast, turning over, coming down really fast in order to build up the speed to go down even faster (2 kilometers per second) and then it hits the ground (or whatever). Isn't anyone concerned about a system that has no uplink at all, using only internal instruments for navigation, with this kind of power? There's no way to turn it off once the launch pad umbilical is cut, and even if things go right, 2km/sec is faster than anything else I've ever seen hit the ground. Even the terminal velocity of meteors is often slower, because they aren't falling and pushing at the same time.
This is terrible. First off, what happens if it can't detect a GPS signal at all? Will it operate? I know GPS doesn't come through many buildings, or any basements.
If the GPS system hiccups, or there's a bug like the 'thousandth week' GPS bug that could have wreaked havoc in 1999, do the boxen all go kaflooey?
Worse yet, considering DGPS uses ground stations, could someone set up a few local area transmitters to give out false readings, selectively destroying hardware in a localized region?
Even worse, what would stop a foreign power from doing the same thing, sending out false GPS from a few of their sattelietes at a specific moment before an attack. When a pager sattelite went down in 1998, US productivity went down 6% (if you really want me to find the link, I will, but this is an statistic). what happens if 70% of the cellphones, radios and televisions all went out at the same time? This sounds like just the FUD tactic any superpower or terrorist organization would love to have.
Bomb an embassy? Bad. Knock out half the TVs in the continental US and you'll have serious consequences.
I'd be as likely to buy something with one of these cips inside it as I would to install a utility on my Linux box that wipes the drive if someone tries to SSH in with the wrong password.
DVDs will work in any geographic area. They just wont work on players made for that region. If I have a portable Panasonic DVD player, I can take it with me to Europe and still watch my Region 1 discs. If I had one with a zap chip in it, I couldn't use the unit at all outside the area (and depending on how you interpret the article, anywhere else after attempting to do so).
The article states that the reason the system is 'absolutely secure' is because the datastrem of the 'public one-time pad' being streamed down from the satellite is coming at too high a bitrate to be captured for the time needed to decrypt the 'start' key.
This is hardly impossible to overcome. There are three fronts when, applied together, will over time increase the probability of cracking the message.
First, storage technologies improve. Just as there is now distributed computing, there could just as easily be distributed archiving, where 100, 1,000, or 1 million computers share the task of striping data from the cipherstream for later retrieval, once the start code is hacked.
Second, the start code itself is vulnerable. With quantum cracking, even a 128-bit key may fall within moments, in which case the resulting datastream will be insecure. (This is the 'weakest link' approach, as the whole system relies on the impracticality of decrypting a conventional crypto system in a given timeframe and is therefore not 'impenetrable')
Third, given that the sending and receiving computers will be using a relatively short piece of the cipher datastream (from the satellite, or wherever), it's feasable to combine the above two, simply storing the specific few seconds of cipherstream for later use in decryption.
Vulnerabilities abound. If you can create a man in the middle attack on the start key, both parties are fucked and you can read their messages in realtime, insert false messages, and take advantage of the fact that they believe that their communication is 'absolutely, provably secure.'
The argument that an arbitrarily fast datastream would eliminate the ability to record it is similarly bogus, as an arbitrarily large array of recording devices would be able to accomplish the task.
A little cryptography is a dangerous thing, and this represents only a little cryptography...
Without question, the MAIN reason I bought my current PDA (Handspring Visor, PalmOS) is beacuse of the ease of use of Graffiti.
Is there an open source equivalent?
Well, Graffiti's been ported from Newton to Palm, and the strokes themselves aren't patented. I don't see any obstacle to an implementation in Linux. After all, just because it's an open-source platform doesn't mean that it will only run open-source software.
I'm curious to see how they handle presenting the "future's past." Star Wars Ep I did a pretty bad job of making the past feel like it was actually earlier. As CGI techniques improve, it's harder to apply them without making things look more futuristic. Even the DS-9 tribbles timewarp episode spent half its efforts in getting the color palette right and making up for series discrepencies.
I bet they go for an earlier time, somewhere between first contact and The Enterprise. It could make for an interesting series, where more impactful discoveries are made than just another 'subspace anomaly.' It's been a long time since I watched an ST creation and actually felt like they were "boldly going where noone has gone before."
Will they change it back to "no man" since it's set earlier? Will Guinan guest star? Will Q?
The real cost of an attack is the cost of spending days to months monitoring a network, and then the time analyzing the data.
Yes, but as the Berkeley vulnerability paper states, the 'dictionary attack' method will gather the full set of cipher possibilities in a matter of about 48 hours, recording them to a 12 gigabyte disk. from then its' simple search and replace on a packet-by-packet basis. No brainwork or months of computational power required.
The "Reply from the Chair" states several times that the prohibitive cost of an attack is a rationale for saying there is a low risk of such an attack, especially in a residential or other low-security setting. The logic used to reach this conclusion is flawed.
One thing to be clear on here is that the efforts used by the Berkeley group to find these shortcomings, while significant, were not only not extraordinarily expensive, but they were also one-time costs. The legwork has been done, and replicating this work to sniff new networks would not be expensive, beyond using the proper software, a slightly modified Orinoco card, and a 12 gig hard drive. This is hardly beyond the means of someone even casually interested in another's data.
From the article: "Possible applications for the memory include hand-held computers and mobile phones, which require large amounts of memory in a compact form."
Funny, I don't think of PDAs and cellphones as requiring large amounts of memory. My PDA has 2 megs, not 10 terabytes. My phone has about 32K, not 32 trillion K. Yet both seem to do their jobs pretty well...
Besides, cellphones, by definition, have wireless connectivity. What do they need gigs and terrs of storage for?
Just checked: seems the icky "before you buy" stuff is gone. Seems that google really has a clue: they actually managed to make the site less icky than it used to be!;-)
They sold it to Half.com just after it was bought by eBay. And the cosmic dance cotinues, wtih companies going supernova and recoalescing into new companies...
True, Inktomi was basically a technology, and was licensed to may companies, including HotBot (later acquired by Lycos, BTW). But AltaVista was also licensed to Yahoo, yet became a portal anyhow.
Seems to me that if Google is buying companies like Deja, and is implementing posting and threading from their site, this becomes a destination site and not just a place to "demonstrate and test their search engine technology." I'd be surprised if Google packages threading and posting into a tack-on search product for portals like Yahoo.
Yes, protals are dead, but so is the illusion of a banner-ad-based revenue stream. How does Google expect to show profitability? My guess it's by doing something that users will find intrusive and diversionary and a portal, or a googlfication of the concept, is a likely place to start.
I'm not counting my checkens yet. 'Stupid portalness' seems to be a disease that comes with age. AltaVista used to be pure, then went the portal route. The same goes for Lycos, Inktomi, and Infoseek.
We'll see how Google goes about creating a profit model, but I loved Deja and yet they had to downsize and eventually sell themselves out, so it remains to be seen if Google will do something icky and commercial to avoid the same fate.
Yes, they crash a 200 lb probe that was supposed to go into orbit, but we'll trust them with an asteroid large enough to shift Earth to a higher orbit?
Seriously though, in response to those who ask 'how would we move something big enough to move the Earth?" Well, we'd do it the same way. Move a pebble, that slingshots another larger pebble into a course that influences a big rock to go by a boulder, past a mountain, etc. At least that way we'd get 10 or 12 slingshots to make sure our calculations tend to be accurate before the next one.
Why would Sega pledge to port their games to PS2 if they were planning on licensing production of DC consoles to someone else? They'd be poking themselves in the foot.
More to the point: Why would anyone else be willing to make a DC console, admittledly "the least profitable part of the whole proposition"? Without perks like high-margin peripherals or games driving the profit model, a third party building consoles (not to mention paying royalties to Sega) would lose money faster than Amazon.
Kiss DC goodbye unless someone comes out with a virtual machine for existing hardware.
Anyone has the right to sue anyone over anything. That's the basis of the US civil court. A patent gives added basis for winning a suit. It does not grant them a capability to sue that they did not otherwise have.
ou can't build an online community that isn't there already, at least potentially. that is, maybe all grandmas already talk to each other, and you let them do it on the web, too. or maybe all grandmas *would* talk to each other if only they could.
I agree for the most part, but one exception to this would be where the medium is the community, as is the case with WebTV and Blogger. The service that facilitates the comunication and community in these cases is the exact interest that binds the community together.
Slashdot Mirror
Call me crazy (go ahead, do it) but I see a rocket going up really fast, turning over, coming down really fast in order to build up the speed to go down even faster (2 kilometers per second) and then it hits the ground (or whatever). Isn't anyone concerned about a system that has no uplink at all, using only internal instruments for navigation, with this kind of power? There's no way to turn it off once the launch pad umbilical is cut, and even if things go right, 2km/sec is faster than anything else I've ever seen hit the ground. Even the terminal velocity of meteors is often slower, because they aren't falling and pushing at the same time.
I'm worried, but I wanna see...
Kevin Fox
--
/an statistic/an accurate statistic/
Kevin Fox
--
This is terrible. First off, what happens if it can't detect a GPS signal at all? Will it operate? I know GPS doesn't come through many buildings, or any basements.
If the GPS system hiccups, or there's a bug like the 'thousandth week' GPS bug that could have wreaked havoc in 1999, do the boxen all go kaflooey?
Worse yet, considering DGPS uses ground stations, could someone set up a few local area transmitters to give out false readings, selectively destroying hardware in a localized region?
Even worse, what would stop a foreign power from doing the same thing, sending out false GPS from a few of their sattelietes at a specific moment before an attack. When a pager sattelite went down in 1998, US productivity went down 6% (if you really want me to find the link, I will, but this is an statistic). what happens if 70% of the cellphones, radios and televisions all went out at the same time? This sounds like just the FUD tactic any superpower or terrorist organization would love to have.
Bomb an embassy? Bad. Knock out half the TVs in the continental US and you'll have serious consequences.
I'd be as likely to buy something with one of these cips inside it as I would to install a utility on my Linux box that wipes the drive if someone tries to SSH in with the wrong password.
Kevin Fox
--
DVDs will work in any geographic area. They just wont work on players made for that region. If I have a portable Panasonic DVD player, I can take it with me to Europe and still watch my Region 1 discs. If I had one with a zap chip in it, I couldn't use the unit at all outside the area (and depending on how you interpret the article, anywhere else after attempting to do so).
Kevin Fox
--
If you'd prefer that they slow down the release cycle and include more changes in each release, then just install every other kernel.
Staying on the bleeding edge does sting, that's why they call it that...
Kevin Fox
--
The article states that the reason the system is 'absolutely secure' is because the datastrem of the 'public one-time pad' being streamed down from the satellite is coming at too high a bitrate to be captured for the time needed to decrypt the 'start' key.
This is hardly impossible to overcome. There are three fronts when, applied together, will over time increase the probability of cracking the message.
First, storage technologies improve. Just as there is now distributed computing, there could just as easily be distributed archiving, where 100, 1,000, or 1 million computers share the task of striping data from the cipherstream for later retrieval, once the start code is hacked.
Second, the start code itself is vulnerable. With quantum cracking, even a 128-bit key may fall within moments, in which case the resulting datastream will be insecure. (This is the 'weakest link' approach, as the whole system relies on the impracticality of decrypting a conventional crypto system in a given timeframe and is therefore not 'impenetrable')
Third, given that the sending and receiving computers will be using a relatively short piece of the cipher datastream (from the satellite, or wherever), it's feasable to combine the above two, simply storing the specific few seconds of cipherstream for later use in decryption.
Vulnerabilities abound. If you can create a man in the middle attack on the start key, both parties are fucked and you can read their messages in realtime, insert false messages, and take advantage of the fact that they believe that their communication is 'absolutely, provably secure.'
The argument that an arbitrarily fast datastream would eliminate the ability to record it is similarly bogus, as an arbitrarily large array of recording devices would be able to accomplish the task.
A little cryptography is a dangerous thing, and this represents only a little cryptography...
Kevin Fox
--
Without question, the MAIN reason I bought my current PDA (Handspring Visor, PalmOS) is beacuse of the ease of use of Graffiti.
Is there an open source equivalent?
Well, Graffiti's been ported from Newton to Palm, and the strokes themselves aren't patented. I don't see any obstacle to an implementation in Linux. After all, just because it's an open-source platform doesn't mean that it will only run open-source software.
Kevin Fox
--
"Kill us both, Spock."
Kevin Fox
I'm curious to see how they handle presenting the "future's past." Star Wars Ep I did a pretty bad job of making the past feel like it was actually earlier. As CGI techniques improve, it's harder to apply them without making things look more futuristic. Even the DS-9 tribbles timewarp episode spent half its efforts in getting the color palette right and making up for series discrepencies.
I bet they go for an earlier time, somewhere between first contact and The Enterprise. It could make for an interesting series, where more impactful discoveries are made than just another 'subspace anomaly.' It's been a long time since I watched an ST creation and actually felt like they were "boldly going where noone has gone before."
Will they change it back to "no man" since it's set earlier? Will Guinan guest star? Will Q?
Kevin Fox
The real cost of an attack is the cost of spending days to months monitoring a network, and then the time analyzing the data.
Yes, but as the Berkeley vulnerability paper states, the 'dictionary attack' method will gather the full set of cipher possibilities in a matter of about 48 hours, recording them to a 12 gigabyte disk. from then its' simple search and replace on a packet-by-packet basis. No brainwork or months of computational power required.
Kevin Fox
The "Reply from the Chair" states several times that the prohibitive cost of an attack is a rationale for saying there is a low risk of such an attack, especially in a residential or other low-security setting. The logic used to reach this conclusion is flawed.
One thing to be clear on here is that the efforts used by the Berkeley group to find these shortcomings, while significant, were not only not extraordinarily expensive, but they were also one-time costs. The legwork has been done, and replicating this work to sniff new networks would not be expensive, beyond using the proper software, a slightly modified Orinoco card, and a 12 gig hard drive. This is hardly beyond the means of someone even casually interested in another's data.
Kevin Fox
SPACE HACKER 1: Cool.. Um, let's land it again!!
SPACE HACKER 2: yeah! I bet I can get it right in that big crater.
SPACE HACKER 1: Let's see how low an orbit we can keep it in without it hitting!
SPACE HACKER 2: Let's take it reeeally far out, then turn it around and ram the asteroid!
Kevin Fox
As you (and I) said, not useless, but hardly "required" That's all I'm sayin'. And my pint about cellphones still holds true.
Kevin Fox
From the article: "Possible applications for the memory include hand-held computers and mobile phones, which require large amounts of memory in a compact form."
Funny, I don't think of PDAs and cellphones as requiring large amounts of memory. My PDA has 2 megs, not 10 terabytes. My phone has about 32K, not 32 trillion K. Yet both seem to do their jobs pretty well...
Besides, cellphones, by definition, have wireless connectivity. What do they need gigs and terrs of storage for?
Kevin Fox
Can you back that up? Privately held companies don't often release financials. If it's true, great!
Kevin Fox
Just checked: seems the icky "before you buy" stuff is gone. Seems that google really has a clue: they actually managed to make the site less icky than it used to be! ;-)
They sold it to Half.com just after it was bought by eBay. And the cosmic dance cotinues, wtih companies going supernova and recoalescing into new companies...
Kevin Fox
True, Inktomi was basically a technology, and was licensed to may companies, including HotBot (later acquired by Lycos, BTW). But AltaVista was also licensed to Yahoo, yet became a portal anyhow.
Seems to me that if Google is buying companies like Deja, and is implementing posting and threading from their site, this becomes a destination site and not just a place to "demonstrate and test their search engine technology." I'd be surprised if Google packages threading and posting into a tack-on search product for portals like Yahoo.
Yes, protals are dead, but so is the illusion of a banner-ad-based revenue stream. How does Google expect to show profitability? My guess it's by doing something that users will find intrusive and diversionary and a portal, or a googlfication of the concept, is a likely place to start.
Kevin Fox
The feeling you've seen this before...
Kevin Fox
"Are they planning to restore the threaded interface?"
That's what it says on their home page...
Kevin Fox
I'm not counting my checkens yet. 'Stupid portalness' seems to be a disease that comes with age. AltaVista used to be pure, then went the portal route. The same goes for Lycos, Inktomi, and Infoseek.
We'll see how Google goes about creating a profit model, but I loved Deja and yet they had to downsize and eventually sell themselves out, so it remains to be seen if Google will do something icky and commercial to avoid the same fate.
Kevin Fox
Yes, they crash a 200 lb probe that was supposed to go into orbit, but we'll trust them with an asteroid large enough to shift Earth to a higher orbit?
Seriously though, in response to those who ask 'how would we move something big enough to move the Earth?" Well, we'd do it the same way. Move a pebble, that slingshots another larger pebble into a course that influences a big rock to go by a boulder, past a mountain, etc. At least that way we'd get 10 or 12 slingshots to make sure our calculations tend to be accurate before the next one.
Kevin Fox
is probably the best example of a non-zero-sum arcade game.
Kevin Fox
Kiss DC goodbye unless someone comes out with a virtual machine for existing hardware.
Kevin Fox
Anyone has the right to sue anyone over anything. That's the basis of the US civil court. A patent gives added basis for winning a suit. It does not grant them a capability to sue that they did not otherwise have.
Kevin Fox
ou can't build an online community that isn't there already, at least potentially. that is, maybe all grandmas already talk to each other, and you let them do it on the web, too. or maybe all grandmas *would* talk to each other if only they could.
I agree for the most part, but one exception to this would be where the medium is the community, as is the case with WebTV and Blogger. The service that facilitates the comunication and community in these cases is the exact interest that binds the community together.
Kevin Fox