We won't know until someone demonstrates this one way or another. One way might be to try using this UNFUCK.EXE on a system that has no software that can read the protected file. Then it can't hijack the playback mechanism and siphon off the unencrypted bits.
Another way would be for Dimension to actually release more details on how their "crack" works.
What, then, do you make of ESR's notion that open source improves bugfixing by adding lots more eyes to look for bugs? Open protocols don't help there.
I'll go ahead and enumerate some of the theoretical pitfalls in trying to "make bugs shallow" in this manner:
Even in the Open Source community a large proportion of the users are just users; they won't look at the source. These people's contribution to bugfixing consists solely in acting as a test team - finding the bugs and maybe reporting them. But in this situation open source is less than relevant - closed-source users can report bugs too.
Amongst those users who do look at the source for bugs, there's often not much global coordination, so a certain amount of the effort is redundant - the most obvious bugs get looked at by lots of people.
On the other end of the spectrum, some bugs are fundamentally not shallow, no matter how many eyes are involved - they may involve some obscure input sequence that is almost never tripped, but may cause disastrous consequences if it is.
I'm inexperienced in serious software design, so the above may be less relevant than it seems. In particular, the last objection almost seems to apply equally to all software. So take the whole list with one or more grains of salt.
Oh yes, the so-called Christian Reconstructionists. Isn't Gary North the "Y2K-will-kill-us-all-there's-no-way-we-can-save-o urselves" loony associated with them, too?
Oh, yeah, that. Well, I don't insist that it have a "soul". If any given species can tell me one good reason why I shouldn't eat it, I won't. (No fair getting another species to say it for you, you have to say it yourself.)
So far, only humans have taken me up on that, but it's worth a try.
I'm of the opinion that the study of human physiology is a far less mature science than the physical and earth sciences. Thus, I take anything pertaining to human health with rather more of a grain of salt than I would something pertaining to physics. This isn't to disparage those who're studying human health; far from it, they've taken on a far harder topic and I salute them for the solid results they have managed to achieve.
And I'll still take the advice of a competent doctor over any so-called "alternative" practitioner any day, unless said "alternative" practice is subjected to the scientific method and shown to be valid -- but then, if it passes scientific muster it becomes mainstream medicine anyway.:)
Flamebait. Perfectly sensible can still be religious. I don't happen to be such a person, but I know several. I'll ask you please not to make the rest of us atheists look like moral midgets; that just plays into the hands of the would-be theocrats.
Or Potassium/Argon (K/Ar). Though there you have to be careful to determine if there's been any opportunity for the argon gas to leak out; if it does, that resets the clock (and the rock is actually OLDER than it looks).
Incidentally, I'll add to point 2 here by noting that what you do to calibrate C14/C12 dating scales is that you use samples with known ages to tell you what ratios you should expect for what ages. Living trees give you an excellent calibration up through the age of the tree (date the tree rings); you can use dead trees when their lifetime overlaps with a known part of the C14/C12 chronology (date the outer rings; if they match a date we have a calibration for, you can get dates all the way up through the tree's early life).
Lastly, an additional point on carbon dating. Deep ocean waters do not interact freely with atmospheric carbon, and thus the carbon (in carbon dioxide) in these waters ages. Thus, any life form which incorporates oceanic carbon into its structures will date as older than it really is. This includes shellfish, and anything whose primary diet is shellfish, including seals. If you see a creationist claiming that some recently dead organism dated to 2000 years or something, ask them if it came from the ocean; they will almost certainly have to answer yes.
I'll correct that subtly and say that there are some atheists who are saying that no god or gods had any part in evolution. However, you are correct insofar as evolution itself does not exclude god(s).
What he is saying is that there are features, such as the structure of the inner ear, that are the same in all mammals, and not shared in any other creatures, and that have nothing whatsoever to do with any of the other things that mammals have in common (the chief of these being the milk-producing organs, mammary glands, from which the name of the group derives).
Apart from saying "X did it, and X moves in mysterious ways," for some (powerful, but not necessarily divine) value of X, there is no reasonable explanation for the earbones to have the same structure in all mammals except that they have a common ancestor.
But it's as true as the theory of general relativity. American science education is often guilty of teaching science as The Truth (tm)... but that's the case across the board. To single out evolution implies there's something uniquely uncertain about it... and there isn't.
We still have protozoa, every example I've heard of of a half-bird/half-reptile mix has turned out to be either a hoax, a bird, or a reptile, more and more species are going extinct, and I bet you can't show me exactly what bats evolved from.
Why should we not have protozoa? It fills a niche that can't be filled by anything else without that something else also be something we could call protozoa.
Archaeopteryx is not a forgery; Hoyle et al were wrong.
If you had moderator points, and saw a 1000-comment board, would you bother?
Plus which, just as the comments seem to be astonishingly even on both sides of the issue, so the moderator points are probably similarly distributed. I'm guessing that there's more than a few moderator wars on this board.
I'm curious as to whether www.windows2000test.com and crack.linuxppc.org were under similar loads.
If the W2K box was getting 500 times the amount of traffic or something, it stands to reason that it would go down more often, quite aside from the relative stability of W2K vs. LinuxPPC; on the other hand, if the loads were similar, then this is a slam-dunk result in favor of Linux with regard to stability.
Either way, of course, it doesn't prove anything about the relative security of the OSes.
On the other hand, suppose some freak catastrophe eliminated all canine species except for the chihuahua and the Great Dane. Could we really say that they were the same species? They certainly can't interbreed directly...
And furthermore, consider the fossil record that would result. Considering how rare fossilization is, what you'd have is you'd have a lot of wolf-skeletons, maybe a few intermediates if you're lucky, and then a bunch of chihuahua and Great Dane skeletons. It would look as if the wolf species split into two species.
On top of all that, the transition will appear to be almost instant. That's what punctuated equilibrium is all about - that significant changes in species can happen faster than the fossil record can record them.
No, seriously, hear me out. I'm not saying that evolution is wrong; it isn't. I'm saying that it's too high-level a topic for the American high school system.
Evolution is overwhelmingly the best theory we have for the origin of species. However, given that:
Reasonably well-educated people have a hard time understanding the evidence for evolution (read the posts on Slashdot if you're in any doubt).
Public schools have a poor record of teaching subjects as complex as evolution in an accurate or reasonable manner (some teachers undoubtedly do well; others don't).
It could be that evolution is just more than our public schools can reasonably handle right now.
Instead, focus on teaching critical thinking skills (another area in which our public school system has a spotty record), and provide enough of a factual background (DNA and such) that college intro to biology courses have a foundation on which to discuss evolution.
Which isn't to say that many of the specific evidence that supports evolution shouldn't be taught. For example, by all means discuss radioactive dating in geology; that area is not only absolutely solid science, but should be easily comprehended with a high school education.
If you think I'm wrong about this, by all means say so. I'd love to think that evolution is a high-school-level topic. But given that colleges these days are having to teach basic algebra, I'm not so confident.
And if you think about it a little more, you'll understand that evolution has evidence for it, whereas creation doesn't have any evidence for it. Creation only has evidence against evolution, and that doesn't hold up under serious scrutiny.
Slashdot Mirror
Another way would be for Dimension to actually release more details on how their "crack" works.
I'll go ahead and enumerate some of the theoretical pitfalls in trying to "make bugs shallow" in this manner:
- Even in the Open Source community a large proportion of the users are just users; they won't look at the source. These people's contribution to bugfixing consists solely in acting as a test team - finding the bugs and maybe reporting them. But in this situation open source is less than relevant - closed-source users can report bugs too.
- Amongst those users who do look at the source for bugs, there's often not much global coordination, so a certain amount of the effort is redundant - the most obvious bugs get looked at by lots of people.
- On the other end of the spectrum, some bugs are fundamentally not shallow, no matter how many eyes are involved - they may involve some obscure input sequence that is almost never tripped, but may cause disastrous consequences if it is.
I'm inexperienced in serious software design, so the above may be less relevant than it seems. In particular, the last objection almost seems to apply equally to all software. So take the whole list with one or more grains of salt.Queen Maeve, by the way, is the divine cat that created the universe last Tuesday. Go to talk.origins for more info.
Take your homophobia elsewhere, bucko.
Oh yes, the so-called Christian Reconstructionists. Isn't Gary North the "Y2K-will-kill-us-all-there's-no-way-we-can-save-o urselves" loony associated with them, too?
So far, only humans have taken me up on that, but it's worth a try.
Anonymous Coward (and how appropriate that designation is here), I don't think you would know compassion if it hit you on the road to Damascus.
What's a soul?
And I'll still take the advice of a competent doctor over any so-called "alternative" practitioner any day, unless said "alternative" practice is subjected to the scientific method and shown to be valid -- but then, if it passes scientific muster it becomes mainstream medicine anyway. :)
Flamebait. Perfectly sensible can still be religious. I don't happen to be such a person, but I know several. I'll ask you please not to make the rest of us atheists look like moral midgets; that just plays into the hands of the would-be theocrats.
Or Potassium/Argon (K/Ar). Though there you have to be careful to determine if there's been any opportunity for the argon gas to leak out; if it does, that resets the clock (and the rock is actually OLDER than it looks).
Lastly, an additional point on carbon dating. Deep ocean waters do not interact freely with atmospheric carbon, and thus the carbon (in carbon dioxide) in these waters ages. Thus, any life form which incorporates oceanic carbon into its structures will date as older than it really is. This includes shellfish, and anything whose primary diet is shellfish, including seals. If you see a creationist claiming that some recently dead organism dated to 2000 years or something, ask them if it came from the ocean; they will almost certainly have to answer yes.
I'll correct that subtly and say that there are some atheists who are saying that no god or gods had any part in evolution. However, you are correct insofar as evolution itself does not exclude god(s).
Actually, the way I heard this was:
They came out recently with a low-fat substitute for Communion wafers. They're marketing it under the brand name "I Can't Believe It's Not Jesus".
What he is saying is that there are features, such as the structure of the inner ear, that are the same in all mammals, and not shared in any other creatures, and that have nothing whatsoever to do with any of the other things that mammals have in common (the chief of these being the milk-producing organs, mammary glands, from which the name of the group derives).
Apart from saying "X did it, and X moves in mysterious ways," for some (powerful, but not necessarily divine) value of X, there is no reasonable explanation for the earbones to have the same structure in all mammals except that they have a common ancestor.
Then what theory were you proposing we teach instead? Last Tuesdayism? (All hail Queen Maeve!)
Seriously, what theory besides evolution is there that comes anywhere near explaining so many different phenomena? Name ONE.
But it's as true as the theory of general relativity. American science education is often guilty of teaching science as The Truth (tm)... but that's the case across the board. To single out evolution implies there's something uniquely uncertain about it... and there isn't.
Yeah, well, www.windows2000test.com was st00pid first. :)
Why should we not have protozoa? It fills a niche that can't be filled by anything else without that something else also be something we could call protozoa.
Archaeopteryx is not a forgery; Hoyle et al were wrong.
Species are indeed going extinct, but new species continue to evolve.
We may not know about bats, but we do know about birds (see above), whales and dolphins, and... well, the list goes on.
Check out the above links, and get back to us.
If you had moderator points, and saw a 1000-comment board, would you bother?
Plus which, just as the comments seem to be astonishingly even on both sides of the issue, so the moderator points are probably similarly distributed. I'm guessing that there's more than a few moderator wars on this board.
You will, of course, allow those of us who think otherwise to have our own, and reversed, opinions of Denton and Dawkins.
I'm curious as to whether www.windows2000test.com and crack.linuxppc.org were under similar loads.
If the W2K box was getting 500 times the amount of traffic or something, it stands to reason that it would go down more often, quite aside from the relative stability of W2K vs. LinuxPPC; on the other hand, if the loads were similar, then this is a slam-dunk result in favor of Linux with regard to stability.
Either way, of course, it doesn't prove anything about the relative security of the OSes.
And furthermore, consider the fossil record that would result. Considering how rare fossilization is, what you'd have is you'd have a lot of wolf-skeletons, maybe a few intermediates if you're lucky, and then a bunch of chihuahua and Great Dane skeletons. It would look as if the wolf species split into two species.
On top of all that, the transition will appear to be almost instant. That's what punctuated equilibrium is all about - that significant changes in species can happen faster than the fossil record can record them.
Evolution is overwhelmingly the best theory we have for the origin of species. However, given that:
It could be that evolution is just more than our public schools can reasonably handle right now.
Instead, focus on teaching critical thinking skills (another area in which our public school system has a spotty record), and provide enough of a factual background (DNA and such) that college intro to biology courses have a foundation on which to discuss evolution.
Which isn't to say that many of the specific evidence that supports evolution shouldn't be taught. For example, by all means discuss radioactive dating in geology; that area is not only absolutely solid science, but should be easily comprehended with a high school education.
If you think I'm wrong about this, by all means say so. I'd love to think that evolution is a high-school-level topic. But given that colleges these days are having to teach basic algebra, I'm not so confident.
And if you think about it a little more, you'll understand that evolution has evidence for it, whereas creation doesn't have any evidence for it. Creation only has evidence against evolution, and that doesn't hold up under serious scrutiny.