This of this as an e-mail client. Kinda like PGP but easier.
I write an e-mail. I click "send". My e-mail client checks the "encryption" server. It
finds a match for the e-mail recipient I'm sending to and downloads the PGP file and
encrypts the e-mail to the recipients specifications. I did not have to do anything. If
no PGP key is found then it will be sent unencrypted and let you know that it is
doing so.
I used to work for a company that created an email app that worked exactly as you describe here (except with a proprietary encryption alg instead of PGP). It worked as a proxy instead of a client so that you could plug it in to pretty much any mail client you wanted (Netscape messenger, Pegasus, Eudora, Outlook, etc). It was a pretty neat product, and extremely easy to use, but it did have a couple of major disadvantages:
Central server. If the certificate server was down, no one could send encrypted mail.
Related to the above, having one central server wouldn't scale very well. If millions of people had started using our product, our poor little key server would have been overloaded.
In the end, the product failed miserably. The crypto community (rightly) scorned us for using a proprietary, closed source algorithm. However, the idea itself was pretty cool, and certainly much easier to use than any existing email encryption system.
According to the details of their study, they took images from Ebay and scanned them for steganographic content using statistical analysis. Out of the two million images they scanned from Ebay, they determined that about 17000 seemed to have steganographic content. They then used a dictionary attack to try and extract any encrypted messages that may be contained within. They failed on all 17000 images. Their report indicates one of three possible explanations for this:
There is no significant use of steganography on the Internet.
Nobody uses steganographic systems that we can find.
All users of steganographic systems carefully choose passwords that are not susceptible to dictionary attacks. (emphasis mine)
In response to number 3, I'd like to say, "well, duh". Anyone clever enough to transmit messages via steganography is not going to be stupid enough to potentially compromise themselves by choosing a simple password.
But beyond that, this search is limited to one small part (Ebay) of the entire Internet. There are certainly many other places where images can be transmitted inconspicuously (certain usenet groups come to mind).
To me, this seems like a "feel good" story designed to put people at ease. It has little actual merit.
It's about trust. By tracking your kid's movements like this, you're telling him that you don't trust him. How is the kid supposed to react to that? Children are not property, and should not be considered as such. They are human beings in need of guidance, not control. By removing their privacy you dehumanize them, the message you send is that they are no better than pets, or prisoners. There is nothing appealing about this plan at all.
Ahem... no, they have patented a system for creating, storing, and using the checksum. An entire system, not just the storage of a checksum.
That doesn't make it any less stupid or frivolous. Just because it's an "entire system" that uses old, well-known technology doesn't mean it's patentable (or should be). This is just another stupid corporation trying to make profit with their legal department instead of their R&D department.
Initial tests of flying aircraft by computer had poor results. In a non fly-by-wire aircraft - be it helicopter or fixed wing - the pilot can feel what the vehicle is doing at all times by placing his (or her - hi Jane:) hands on the controls. You can't feel that when computers are added to the equation.
What about adding force feedback to the pilot's controls, to try and simulate what the pilot would feel if the computer wasn't there? I believe that something like that was done with the CF-105 here in Canada (a long time ago).
I'd be really worried about burning out if I had to constantly code with at least one person looking over my shoulder. Personally, I like to code alone. I couldn't last too long with somebody else nagging/checking my work.
I also (usually) prefer to code alone, but in my last job, I had an opportunity to try pair programming, and I must say it was surprisingly good. One programmer sits at the keyboard and makes code changes while the other programmer sits beside him, hands off the keyboard, and just sits, watches, and comments. You'd be amazed how well this can work at times, the programmer who isn't at the keyboard will have a slightly more objective view, and will be quick to spot any errors that the other makes. Personally, I think it works so well because you've got one guy concentrating on the small picture (the guy at the keyboard) and the other thinking about the big picture.
However, having said that, I found that pair programming can be tiring at times (having someone watch over your shoulder can be taxing), and it can also be boring if you're the one away from the keyboard. Like all things, I think it's best when used in moderation.
The reason why the automotive industry isn't falling all over itself to adopt these compressed air powered cars is that they're dangerous. Think about it - you're riding around on a tank of compressed air, what happens if the tank is punctured? One benefit of conventional, gas powered cars is that gasoline is actually fairly stable. Despite what you may have seen in Hollywood movies, getting into a car accident, even at high speed, doesn't usually result in exploding fuel tanks. But what if both cars had compressed air tanks? Things could get messy.
Another reason, which I'll mention here even though it's already been mentioned several times on this topic, is that this kind of car really doesn't offer any environmental benefit. Sure, the car spits out air instead of exhaust, but you need a generator to power the air compressor that refills it, so where does that electricity come from?
The only "alternative" fuel powered cars that produce zero total emissions are solar powered cars, which are pretty useless in most parts of the world, and even then are very weather dependant. Batteries, compressed air, fuel cells, all of these solutions produce secondary emissions, and so can't really be considered environmentally friendly.
so pages load faster. also probably gives more banner space or something.
Sorry, wrong answer. I have a 14.4 dialup connection at home (I know, I know) and I can tell you from experience that it's a lot quicker to load one big page than to load several small pages. I do think you may be on to something with the advertising banner thing, though.
Nintendo's business is to make games that can only be played on Nintendo systems. Nintendo's games only run on Nintendo's consoles, and no one else's. Our aim is to get people to think Nintendo's games are the greatest, the best in the world.
Attitudes like this irritate me. Why focus on the hardware when, really, all the interesting stuff is in the software? Contrast to the computer industry in the 1980's: IBM figured they could make billions by making better hardware (i.e. PS2) when all the money turned out to be in the software (i.e. Micro$oft). It seems to me that hardware is becoming less and less relevant, it's the software that will really drive innovation in the games industry, especially if cross-platform console games start to get developed en masse. Nintendo's attitude of "if you want to play a Nintendo game, you must buy a Nintendo system!" seems really backwards.
[Off Topic]: on an unrelated note, what the hell is with the page layout in this article? Why display only two or three questions and answers on a page, and then provide a link to the next page? Why not just put the entire interview on one page? I hate when web sites do that!
Of course, there are many factors that alter this, chief of which is that we'll probably hit theoretical limits on Moore's Law by then. Ross Anderson speculates that the AES may *never* be replaced.
"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible." [Lord Kelvin, 1895]
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." [Commissioner, US Patent Office, 1899]
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." [Yale Economics professor, 1929]
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." [IBM Chairman, 1943]
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." [Bill Gates, 1981]
128 bits is a very very large key space (to put it mildly), but the phrase "AES may *never* be replaced" seems destined to end up on someone's "stupid predictions made by historical figures" list sooner or later. (I'm not trying to insult Ross Anderson here, in fact I have a great deal of respect for the work he's done in the field of cryptography, it's just that whenever I hear the word "never" an alarm is triggered in the back of my head).
Several wiping programs are available that will overwrite data multiple times with binary patterns - checkerboards, solid 0's, solid 1's, random patterns, etc. Even after all of that, it is still possible for an organization with lots of resources such as a data recovery service or a three-letter agency to recover the residual remains of the data, though it would be very difficult.
About a year ago I worked for a company (which shall remain nameless) that tasked me with writing a secure disk wiping algorithm. I did a little homework, and found that the US Department of Defense had a recommended 7-pass algorithm. A little more homework, and I discovered a crypto guru named Peter Gutmann who had a 35-pass algorithm. I implemented both of those, and then took it a step further and allowed the user to create a custom wiping algorithm, up to 99 passes (I figured any more than that would probably be overkill). We had a professional cryptographer on staff who assured me that even after 99 passes of overwriting the data on disk with different patterns, the NSA or some other such agency could still recover the data if they wanted to badly enough. I had my doubts, but then I've never ventured into the field of electron microscopy.
Anyway, the project was killed due to management/marketing cluelessness, so we never actually shipped it, but it sure was educational to implement. I had been under the impression that simply overwriting a file even once with 0's and 1's would be enough to render it unrecoverable, how naive I was.
I suspect I've been trolled, but... are you serious? Permanent copyright? Are you honestly telling me that in your idea of a perfect world, people would have to pay Shakespeare's descendants royalties to read a copy of "Romeo and Juliet"? Or that religious types would have to pay royalties to the church to read a bible?
Copyright was intended to foster innovation in science and the arts, by granting the artist control over his/her/their works for a limited time, after which, the works enter the public domain for all to enjoy. "Permanent copyright" would pretty much guarantee that innumerable works, both scientific and literary, would be lost to future generations.
I mean, I'm sitting in front of a powerful general-purpose computing machine which is connected in well-known ways to millions of other general-purpose computing machines. You come along with your patent application saying "I can do X" [not the windowing system]. Am I supposed to be surprised? If it's not obvious, it's probably stupid.
And that, in a nutshell, is the thrust of the argument against software patents. No one should be able to patent something that is obvious. Period. If this means that we see a dramatic drop in the number of patent applications that get approved, great.
I consider using function calls cheating in a way. Did you write any of those standard C functions that you are using? If not, did you really write that program, or did you simply arrange the smaller programs of others (functions) in such a way that they work differently than the particular arrangement of another person's program.
When you build a house, did you create all the building materials yourself? If not, did you really build that house, or are you just rearranging things (lumber, concrete, etc) that were already there?
When you write a song, did you invent all the notes that you used? If not, did you really create that song, or did you just re-use notes that other songs have already used before you?
I'm sorry, but saying that function calls are "cheating" is missing the point entirely. The true creative exercise in programming is deciding what your program is going to do, and then finding/writing/using the appropriate functions to do it. When you think about it, I didn't invent any of the words I've used in this post, someone else did, I merely arranged them in a way that gets my point across. As did you.
Neither retinal patterns nor fingerprints are provably unique.
Yes, of course, nothing is 100% effective, I wasn't trying to imply that it was. However, the likelihood of two people having identical iris/retina patterns is somewhere around 0.000005% or less, so they are, as you put it, "unique enough". Besides, it's a hell of a lot more reliable than signatures, which are easily forged yet legally binding.
The problem with this is that they are suspect to all the usual forces that affect humans in normal society. In a company, programmers have to follow the dictacts of those above, and 'those above' have to follow the dictacts of the shareholder and the consumer. This forces them to do be innovative.
How does that force them to be any more or less innovative than open source developers? If anything, one could argue that being free to develop whatever you want, without having to follow the rules set out for you by upper management, could result in more innovation, not less. It's exactly because open source projects don't have anyone to answer to (i.e. management, shareholders, etc) that they can innovate, by trying new things. Traditional management structures in closed-source companies don't like trying new things, they like to stick to older, proven, tried-and-true methods, hence, less innovation.
Turn it around. Microsoft is saying that no software can be free, otherwise innovation is stifled and the incentive to do R&D goes away. So who's the fascist?
can you have laser surgery and make your eyes look like someone else's?
No. Retinal scanners work by examining the pattern of blood vessels in the back of your eye. Like a fingerprint, everyone has a unique retinal pattern, even identical twins have unique retinal patterns. Iris scanners use visible and infrared light to examine the characteristics of the human iris.
Neither of these technologies can be fooled or tricked by things like laser eye surgery, contact lenses, or even dilation of the pupil during changing lighting conditions.
Anybody see the movie "Charlie's Angels" last year? There's a scene where Drew Barrymore defeats a retinal scanner by wearing special contact lenses. I was the only one in the theater who groaned out loud, I guess these technologies are not yet widely understood (which is somewhat surprising, considering that the concept of retinal scanners has been around since the 1930's).
If my name were also Bruce Springsteen, and I had a personal web site at www.brucespringsteen.com, would "the" Bruce Springsteen be able to take it away from me?
Probably. It's not about who got there first, it's about who has the most money, and can afford the best lawyers. Just wait, soon enough Springsteen might decide to go after other "infringing" web sites like bornintheusa.com.
What the hell is that thing in the lower left corner of this picture? "Cousin it" from the Addam's family? Or is it the back of somebody's head, and if so, how in the world did his head get so pointy? I knew that old-school hackers are traditionally hairy, but, damn.
If a court rules that Alan Emtage was the first to develop the methods described in CMGI's patents and CMGI's patents are canceled (or whatever the legal term for canceling a patent is), can Alan Emtage then get patents on the same methods and sue CMGI?
Two wrongs don't make a right. You can't beat these slimeballs by sinking to their level, it would be better instead to work towards patent reform (or abolishment, whichever comes first).
Check these out:
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work for a company that created an email app that worked exactly as you describe here (except with a proprietary encryption alg instead of PGP). It worked as a proxy instead of a client so that you could plug it in to pretty much any mail client you wanted (Netscape messenger, Pegasus, Eudora, Outlook, etc). It was a pretty neat product, and extremely easy to use, but it did have a couple of major disadvantages:
- Central server. If the certificate server was down, no one could send encrypted mail.
- Related to the above, having one central server wouldn't scale very well. If millions of people had started using our product, our poor little key server would have been overloaded.
In the end, the product failed miserably. The crypto community (rightly) scorned us for using a proprietary, closed source algorithm. However, the idea itself was pretty cool, and certainly much easier to use than any existing email encryption system.- There is no significant use of steganography on the Internet.
- Nobody uses steganographic systems that we can find.
- All users of steganographic systems carefully choose passwords that are not susceptible to dictionary attacks. (emphasis mine)
In response to number 3, I'd like to say, "well, duh". Anyone clever enough to transmit messages via steganography is not going to be stupid enough to potentially compromise themselves by choosing a simple password.But beyond that, this search is limited to one small part (Ebay) of the entire Internet. There are certainly many other places where images can be transmitted inconspicuously (certain usenet groups come to mind).
To me, this seems like a "feel good" story designed to put people at ease. It has little actual merit.
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That doesn't make it any less stupid or frivolous. Just because it's an "entire system" that uses old, well-known technology doesn't mean it's patentable (or should be). This is just another stupid corporation trying to make profit with their legal department instead of their R&D department.
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What about adding force feedback to the pilot's controls, to try and simulate what the pilot would feel if the computer wasn't there? I believe that something like that was done with the CF-105 here in Canada (a long time ago).
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I also (usually) prefer to code alone, but in my last job, I had an opportunity to try pair programming, and I must say it was surprisingly good. One programmer sits at the keyboard and makes code changes while the other programmer sits beside him, hands off the keyboard, and just sits, watches, and comments. You'd be amazed how well this can work at times, the programmer who isn't at the keyboard will have a slightly more objective view, and will be quick to spot any errors that the other makes. Personally, I think it works so well because you've got one guy concentrating on the small picture (the guy at the keyboard) and the other thinking about the big picture.
However, having said that, I found that pair programming can be tiring at times (having someone watch over your shoulder can be taxing), and it can also be boring if you're the one away from the keyboard. Like all things, I think it's best when used in moderation.
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Another reason, which I'll mention here even though it's already been mentioned several times on this topic, is that this kind of car really doesn't offer any environmental benefit. Sure, the car spits out air instead of exhaust, but you need a generator to power the air compressor that refills it, so where does that electricity come from?
The only "alternative" fuel powered cars that produce zero total emissions are solar powered cars, which are pretty useless in most parts of the world, and even then are very weather dependant. Batteries, compressed air, fuel cells, all of these solutions produce secondary emissions, and so can't really be considered environmentally friendly.
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Sorry, wrong answer. I have a 14.4 dialup connection at home (I know, I know) and I can tell you from experience that it's a lot quicker to load one big page than to load several small pages. I do think you may be on to something with the advertising banner thing, though.
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Attitudes like this irritate me. Why focus on the hardware when, really, all the interesting stuff is in the software? Contrast to the computer industry in the 1980's: IBM figured they could make billions by making better hardware (i.e. PS2) when all the money turned out to be in the software (i.e. Micro$oft). It seems to me that hardware is becoming less and less relevant, it's the software that will really drive innovation in the games industry, especially if cross-platform console games start to get developed en masse. Nintendo's attitude of "if you want to play a Nintendo game, you must buy a Nintendo system!" seems really backwards.
[Off Topic]: on an unrelated note, what the hell is with the page layout in this article? Why display only two or three questions and answers on a page, and then provide a link to the next page? Why not just put the entire interview on one page? I hate when web sites do that!
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"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible."
[Lord Kelvin, 1895]
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
[Commissioner, US Patent Office, 1899]
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
[Yale Economics professor, 1929]
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
[IBM Chairman, 1943]
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
[Bill Gates, 1981]
128 bits is a very very large key space (to put it mildly), but the phrase "AES may *never* be replaced" seems destined to end up on someone's "stupid predictions made by historical figures" list sooner or later. (I'm not trying to insult Ross Anderson here, in fact I have a great deal of respect for the work he's done in the field of cryptography, it's just that whenever I hear the word "never" an alarm is triggered in the back of my head).
--
About a year ago I worked for a company (which shall remain nameless) that tasked me with writing a secure disk wiping algorithm. I did a little homework, and found that the US Department of Defense had a recommended 7-pass algorithm. A little more homework, and I discovered a crypto guru named Peter Gutmann who had a 35-pass algorithm. I implemented both of those, and then took it a step further and allowed the user to create a custom wiping algorithm, up to 99 passes (I figured any more than that would probably be overkill). We had a professional cryptographer on staff who assured me that even after 99 passes of overwriting the data on disk with different patterns, the NSA or some other such agency could still recover the data if they wanted to badly enough. I had my doubts, but then I've never ventured into the field of electron microscopy.
Anyway, the project was killed due to management/marketing cluelessness, so we never actually shipped it, but it sure was educational to implement. I had been under the impression that simply overwriting a file even once with 0's and 1's would be enough to render it unrecoverable, how naive I was.
--
Copyright was intended to foster innovation in science and the arts, by granting the artist control over his/her/their works for a limited time, after which, the works enter the public domain for all to enjoy. "Permanent copyright" would pretty much guarantee that innumerable works, both scientific and literary, would be lost to future generations.
--
And that, in a nutshell, is the thrust of the argument against software patents. No one should be able to patent something that is obvious. Period. If this means that we see a dramatic drop in the number of patent applications that get approved, great.
--
When you build a house, did you create all the building materials yourself? If not, did you really build that house, or are you just rearranging things (lumber, concrete, etc) that were already there?
When you write a song, did you invent all the notes that you used? If not, did you really create that song, or did you just re-use notes that other songs have already used before you?
I'm sorry, but saying that function calls are "cheating" is missing the point entirely. The true creative exercise in programming is deciding what your program is going to do, and then finding/writing/using the appropriate functions to do it. When you think about it, I didn't invent any of the words I've used in this post, someone else did, I merely arranged them in a way that gets my point across. As did you.
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Yes, of course, nothing is 100% effective, I wasn't trying to imply that it was. However, the likelihood of two people having identical iris/retina patterns is somewhere around 0.000005% or less, so they are, as you put it, "unique enough". Besides, it's a hell of a lot more reliable than signatures, which are easily forged yet legally binding.
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How does that force them to be any more or less innovative than open source developers? If anything, one could argue that being free to develop whatever you want, without having to follow the rules set out for you by upper management, could result in more innovation, not less. It's exactly because open source projects don't have anyone to answer to (i.e. management, shareholders, etc) that they can innovate, by trying new things. Traditional management structures in closed-source companies don't like trying new things, they like to stick to older, proven, tried-and-true methods, hence, less innovation.
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No. Retinal scanners work by examining the pattern of blood vessels in the back of your eye. Like a fingerprint, everyone has a unique retinal pattern, even identical twins have unique retinal patterns. Iris scanners use visible and infrared light to examine the characteristics of the human iris.
Neither of these technologies can be fooled or tricked by things like laser eye surgery, contact lenses, or even dilation of the pupil during changing lighting conditions.
Anybody see the movie "Charlie's Angels" last year? There's a scene where Drew Barrymore defeats a retinal scanner by wearing special contact lenses. I was the only one in the theater who groaned out loud, I guess these technologies are not yet widely understood (which is somewhat surprising, considering that the concept of retinal scanners has been around since the 1930's).
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Probably. It's not about who got there first, it's about who has the most money, and can afford the best lawyers. Just wait, soon enough Springsteen might decide to go after other "infringing" web sites like bornintheusa.com.
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(Okay, okay, so you've heard that one, what can I say, I'm a sucker for the classics).
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Two wrongs don't make a right. You can't beat these slimeballs by sinking to their level, it would be better instead to work towards patent reform (or abolishment, whichever comes first). Check these out:
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