So why isn't Slashdot participating? Everything that gets posted suggests they support the position; why not participate? Do the editors really only support it enough to get readers and comments? I know your readers are generally informed, but that's true of a lot of the sites that are participating. Come on Slashdot, you can do better than this.
OK, not a bad question. not hard to answer, either;)
Once you have it up, open the browser proxy page. there are some default bookmarks there. Go to The Freedom Engine.
When that loads (it'll take a while... it's big...) go looking for porn links. There's lots of non-porn stuff, but just do Find in Page 'porn' or some such and you should find a few. ALternately, YoYo and some of the other default bookmarks have categorised stuff (including porn) but they might be harder to get to load / more out of date. YMMV.
Does anyone else find it annoying that slashdot just rips off the first paragraph of the article as their summary? Is there a reason the submitter / editor can't write their own summary, but has to plagiarize it instead? (In my book it's plaigarized because they don't give credit). Come on people, it takes 30 seconds and a bare minimum of creative thought... it really isn't that hard to do it right.
OK, let's see. 16 glue guns at 900 meters per minutes, with 0.5 millimeter accuracy. 16 micro (not mili) second timings on 16 different devices is hard, especially if you're computing on the fly where you want them. Sounds impressive to me. Granted, it's only an incremental improvement over 16 different boxes, each somewhat larger, and computing the paths in advance, but those incremental improvements are important, and some of them pose nasty technical challenges.
Oh, no offense taken... just meant to say that Transmeta produces good chips. Not for every purpose, but for some. And I'm always in favor of a bit more competition, especially when the competitor has some really interesting innovations.
That's interesting; I rather like my transmeta-powered laptop. Especially the way it uses a whole 7 watts of power for the entire thing (that's a mostly idle state... editors and web browsers open, but not doing ahuge amount). It's lightweight and fast enough, but more speed is always welcome. As is lower power, which I think the new chip is...
Seems to me the Transmeta chips work fine.
For reference, I'm using a Toshiba Libretto L1, purchased from Dynamism.com.
You know it's already been done. But if *you* had a plugin that meant you could load slashdotted pages when no one else could easily, and you knew it would only work as long as you didn't give it to other people, would you *really* give to everyone? Then no one would benefit, and the servers would stay hosed even longer...
will happily sell you a Toshiba Libretto without windows on it, for $100 less than their published list price. They'll also put ISOs on the hard disk for you. I have an L1 I'm very happy with. Be warned, though, they are somewhat overpriced. They also sell other things small, light, and Japanese.
This really can be implemented with a guarantee of anonymity. I hope this makes things a little more clear:
First, the entire transaction is encrypted to ensure privacy, with keys completely unrelated to any of the other keys I will describe.
The bank has a private key and a public key (call them BPr and BPu). These keys are only used for signing digital cash. Also, there is only one such pair per bank, and it is connected to the bank and not in any way to the person making the withdrawl. You have a key pair that is only used for proving you are actually the owner of your account. This pair is not used in connection with the digital cash in any way other than letting the bank know it's ok to take the money from your account.
When you go to get digital cash from the bank, you create another set of keys, only used for this withdrawl from your account (call them WPr and WPu). These keys can obviously be connected to you, but that's ok. You're getting rid of them after this transaction anyway.
You now create your 10 pieces of cash. Each of them has the denomination and a unique ID (assigned by you at random). For each of these, you also generate a unique blinding factor (B1-B10; ten separate ones, all independent). You encrypt each piece of cash with WPu, so that it can only be read using WPr. You then blind each piece of cash. Now it can only be read with WPr and Bi together. You send all ten to the bank. The bank picks one of these to sign, tells you which one, and asks for the blinding factors on the other nine.
You send the bank the other nine blinding factors, along with WPr (the private key). The bank can now decrypt the nine pieces of cash, but not the tenth. The bank can now verify that you are creating cash of the value you say you are, with unique ids. The bank cannot read the selected piece of cash because it lacks the corresponding Bi.
The bank signs this selected piece of cash with BPr, so that anyone can verify the bank's signature. The bank now sends you this one piece of cash. You now have a piece of cash, with several numbers connected to it. These are WPu (the banks public key), Bi (the blinding factor you chose), and Wpr (the private component of the key pair you used to encrypt it). When you decrypt the cash using WPr, and deblind it using Bi, you are left with a piece of cash which has only the bank's signature on it, plus the unique id. Remeber, however, that the bank cannot know the id, because they never had the blinding factor.
Now, this file (it's just a collection of bits; nowhere has it been tied to a card, computer, or anything else) is worth money, because it has a denomination and is signed by the bank, which means the bank has promised to pay. It can be copied anywhere, put on a computer, or smartcard, on anything.
When you go to spend your piece of cash, you go to a merchant (or other person, or whatever). You give the merchant your piece of cash, which has only the unique id and the bank's signature connected to it. The merchant sends the cash to the bank, along with the merchant's account number. The bank checks in its database that that unique id has not been used before, and deposits the money. You never give the merchant your identification if you're worried about privacy, just like with physical cash.
Now, the bank can observe who deposited the piece of cash when. However, they do not know who created the cash, and they do not know who gave it to the merchant. This is equivalent to a merchant instantly depositing every piece of physical cash they recieve, and the bank noting the serial numbers. That is the only privacy concern, unless the merchant starts requiring an id. But then, there are privacy concerns if the merchant requires id for physical cash purchases, and they are the exact same concerns.
OK, I hope that made things clearer without being too complicated... if you have other concerns / questions, let me know and I'll do my best. If you're interested in the details of the math, I strongly recommend finding an introductory cryptography book that explains RSA, or getting a copy of Applied Cryptography.
Also, let me reiterate that I have serious doubts a system like this would be implemented, because of the complexity, but also because I think our governments and banks want to be able to track us easily.
And of course, it's all done electronically so you don't have the faintest clue whether they really anonymized it.
That's the easy part... a standard, open format, open source software on the cards, third party card manufacturers, third party card readers. The protocol is such that the bank doesn't have to trust you and you don't have to trust the bank (beyond believing they'll pay, that is). Again, I'm not saying they'd *do* this... just that proving you've implemented what you say you have is straightforward.
Re:Claimed anonimity is bogus
on
Cashless Society
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Not neccessarily true...
Though I imagine you're right for this implementation, it is possible to build a digital cash cryptosystem that is as anonymous as cash. I believe Bruce Schneier covers the basics in Applied Cryptography; we went over it in an intro cryptography course I took, and I think that was the source.
The basic system is that the bank signs individual units of value (think individual bills). You then insert your card, and it transfers several of them over, gets change if needed, etc.
For the more detailed explanation (somewhat):
You, the party desiring cash from the bank, begin a transaction to create a bill. You tell the bank the account number to take the money from, and prove you're you through whatever standard techniques. Then, you create a handful (say 10) "bills"; they're real bills, minus the bank's signature. You give them each a randomly chosen 128 bit id (128 bits is enough to avoid collisions, globaly -- but you need a good source of randomness). Then, you blind each bill with a new random number. Then, you encrypt all the bills, using a different key created only for this purpose. This extra key will be thrown away when the transaction is complete. The blinding and encryption work such that you can only recover the original text with both the key and the blinding number. The bank then chooses one bill, signs it, asks to see the blinding numbers on the other 9 and also asks for the decryption key. The bank verifies that the other bills are valid, and can assume the tenth is too. They sign it and return it to you. You decrypt it and deblind it. The math works such that the banks signature is still intact. Basically, using RSA, encryption and decryption are exponentiation, and blinding is multiplication (all done modulo the key).
The bank has now signed your bill as being worth money, without knowing the id number on the bill.
This system is rather complicated, and it is unlikely something equivalent has been implemented in this case. But it is possible to do it right (just hard). I've simpleified a little, but the major pieces are there.
Actually, that number is more like 10k these days. Gnu Go version 3.3.15 (current development version) is rated at 10k* on nngs. You might find playing it to be an interesting experience. It is currently one of, if not the, strongest go programs available. It is available for Linux, Windows, etc, at http://www.gnu.org/software/gnugo/index.html.
Having said all that, it is far far away from dan level play. I believe the feeling among the developers is that it will get a few stones stronger simply through correcting mistakes and continued tuning, but that more than that will take some major changes and improvements.
I am an occasional contributor to Gnu Go, and play at the 8k* level on nngs. I can give Gnu Go 4 stones, but that is in large part by playing to its weaknesses. It is a worthy opponent, but its games tend to have the same feel to them. The tactics and life and death are remarkably strong, in the 1-3k range, but its global planning and other aspects are weak.
I mean, you pour a six pack on a computer, it just won't go as fast. OK, so you might need some work to beat the fault tolerance, but I'm sure you can find six parts that'll bring it down together.
As somebody using a Toshiba Libretto L1, with a 600MHz crusoe chip in it, I think I can offer some insight.. basically, the 600MHz crusoe is similar to 450MHz PII. So... yeah, it's slow. But the speed is fine. I'm currently running Debian with Mozilla + KDE as my main apps. But then, I only really do basic web browsing, etc on it.
Also, you can't compile for the Crusoe. it spends a lot of memory on code morphing caches (16MB of main memory), and looks to all the world like an x86 chip. And it's very much an emulation mode... only thing is, you can't get out of it. Which Transmeta sees as a good thing, 'cause they can change the underlying chip without anyone noticing from one rev to the next... the 5800 could have a different ISA from the 5600, if they wanted. They haven't said, so I assume it doesn't, but still...
I used to wonder about that too. Then I asked a particle physicist. Turns out the answer is you have to conserve boson count, among other things. also charge. The basic result of which is, you can only create anitparticles in pairs with their corresponding particle. So, efficiency caps at 50%, which kills the scheme. This is because half your usable energy goes into creating not useful regular matter.
And I know it's not easy. First off, Dead Tree is good. sometimes just a break for the eyes, sometimes just the security of knowing it won't go down.
What I want is the Linux Application Guide. Basically, a book that says "Here are the major Word Processors. These are the key features of each. We suggest you decide based on whether you need to do this, that or the other." Ditto browsers, Desktops, mail clients, DVD players, Instant Messaging, p2p.
Basically, I use Linux. I use KDE because I tried it and I like it. pine because I tried it and liked it. Ditto Konq, Kword, mplayer, and others. They may or may not be the best there is. They're just the first I tried that was good enough. So... help me pick my applications.
I know you don't write the books... but I've been waiting for that book, and haven't heard anything about it. I know there are problems -- time frame, distro, etc. Just try to make it distro-independent, maybe list easy distros for each app. Also, it would need a brief bit about configuration. I'm thinking two to three pages per app plus a couple screen shots. Order of five to ten apps in less than a dozen categories.
Slashdot Mirror
So why isn't Slashdot participating? Everything that gets posted suggests they support the position; why not participate? Do the editors really only support it enough to get readers and comments? I know your readers are generally informed, but that's true of a lot of the sites that are participating. Come on Slashdot, you can do better than this.
OK, not a bad question. not hard to answer, either ;)
Once you have it up, open the browser proxy page. there are some default bookmarks there. Go to The Freedom Engine.
When that loads (it'll take a while... it's big...) go looking for porn links. There's lots of non-porn stuff, but just do Find in Page 'porn' or some such and you should find a few. ALternately, YoYo and some of the other default bookmarks have categorised stuff (including porn) but they might be harder to get to load / more out of date. YMMV.
Does anyone else find it annoying that slashdot just rips off the first paragraph of the article as their summary? Is there a reason the submitter / editor can't write their own summary, but has to plagiarize it instead? (In my book it's plaigarized because they don't give credit). Come on people, it takes 30 seconds and a bare minimum of creative thought... it really isn't that hard to do it right.
Give it time.
OK, let's see. 16 glue guns at 900 meters per minutes, with 0.5 millimeter accuracy. 16 micro (not mili) second timings on 16 different devices is hard, especially if you're computing on the fly where you want them. Sounds impressive to me. Granted, it's only an incremental improvement over 16 different boxes, each somewhat larger, and computing the paths in advance, but those incremental improvements are important, and some of them pose nasty technical challenges.
Economists have successfully predicted 8 of the past 5 recessions.
Oh, it's quite official; it's just that it only happens when some of the editors get beat by the slashdot effect, and they want a BT stream...
http://www.barbieslapp.com/others/fatburn.htm
"The City you provided could not be found. The map is centered on the State or Province."
"Steam to Heat High Speed Internet"?
Oh, no offense taken... just meant to say that Transmeta produces good chips. Not for every purpose, but for some. And I'm always in favor of a bit more competition, especially when the competitor has some really interesting innovations.
Seems to me the Transmeta chips work fine.
For reference, I'm using a Toshiba Libretto L1, purchased from Dynamism.com.
Is the mirror there in case EE Times gets slashdotted? Like it has every other time they get linked to?
You know it's already been done. But if *you* had a plugin that meant you could load slashdotted pages when no one else could easily, and you knew it would only work as long as you didn't give it to other people, would you *really* give to everyone? Then no one would benefit, and the servers would stay hosed even longer...
will happily sell you a Toshiba Libretto without windows on it, for $100 less than their published list price. They'll also put ISOs on the hard disk for you. I have an L1 I'm very happy with. Be warned, though, they are somewhat overpriced. They also sell other things small, light, and Japanese.
First, the entire transaction is encrypted to ensure privacy, with keys completely unrelated to any of the other keys I will describe.
The bank has a private key and a public key (call them BPr and BPu). These keys are only used for signing digital cash. Also, there is only one such pair per bank, and it is connected to the bank and not in any way to the person making the withdrawl. You have a key pair that is only used for proving you are actually the owner of your account. This pair is not used in connection with the digital cash in any way other than letting the bank know it's ok to take the money from your account.
When you go to get digital cash from the bank, you create another set of keys, only used for this withdrawl from your account (call them WPr and WPu). These keys can obviously be connected to you, but that's ok. You're getting rid of them after this transaction anyway.
You now create your 10 pieces of cash. Each of them has the denomination and a unique ID (assigned by you at random). For each of these, you also generate a unique blinding factor (B1-B10; ten separate ones, all independent). You encrypt each piece of cash with WPu, so that it can only be read using WPr. You then blind each piece of cash. Now it can only be read with WPr and Bi together. You send all ten to the bank. The bank picks one of these to sign, tells you which one, and asks for the blinding factors on the other nine.
You send the bank the other nine blinding factors, along with WPr (the private key). The bank can now decrypt the nine pieces of cash, but not the tenth. The bank can now verify that you are creating cash of the value you say you are, with unique ids. The bank cannot read the selected piece of cash because it lacks the corresponding Bi.
The bank signs this selected piece of cash with BPr, so that anyone can verify the bank's signature. The bank now sends you this one piece of cash. You now have a piece of cash, with several numbers connected to it. These are WPu (the banks public key), Bi (the blinding factor you chose), and Wpr (the private component of the key pair you used to encrypt it). When you decrypt the cash using WPr, and deblind it using Bi, you are left with a piece of cash which has only the bank's signature on it, plus the unique id. Remeber, however, that the bank cannot know the id, because they never had the blinding factor.
Now, this file (it's just a collection of bits; nowhere has it been tied to a card, computer, or anything else) is worth money, because it has a denomination and is signed by the bank, which means the bank has promised to pay. It can be copied anywhere, put on a computer, or smartcard, on anything.
When you go to spend your piece of cash, you go to a merchant (or other person, or whatever). You give the merchant your piece of cash, which has only the unique id and the bank's signature connected to it. The merchant sends the cash to the bank, along with the merchant's account number. The bank checks in its database that that unique id has not been used before, and deposits the money. You never give the merchant your identification if you're worried about privacy, just like with physical cash.
Now, the bank can observe who deposited the piece of cash when. However, they do not know who created the cash, and they do not know who gave it to the merchant. This is equivalent to a merchant instantly depositing every piece of physical cash they recieve, and the bank noting the serial numbers. That is the only privacy concern, unless the merchant starts requiring an id. But then, there are privacy concerns if the merchant requires id for physical cash purchases, and they are the exact same concerns.
OK, I hope that made things clearer without being too complicated... if you have other concerns / questions, let me know and I'll do my best. If you're interested in the details of the math, I strongly recommend finding an introductory cryptography book that explains RSA, or getting a copy of Applied Cryptography.
Also, let me reiterate that I have serious doubts a system like this would be implemented, because of the complexity, but also because I think our governments and banks want to be able to track us easily.
That's the easy part... a standard, open format, open source software on the cards, third party card manufacturers, third party card readers. The protocol is such that the bank doesn't have to trust you and you don't have to trust the bank (beyond believing they'll pay, that is). Again, I'm not saying they'd *do* this... just that proving you've implemented what you say you have is straightforward.
Though I imagine you're right for this implementation, it is possible to build a digital cash cryptosystem that is as anonymous as cash. I believe Bruce Schneier covers the basics in Applied Cryptography; we went over it in an intro cryptography course I took, and I think that was the source.
The basic system is that the bank signs individual units of value (think individual bills). You then insert your card, and it transfers several of them over, gets change if needed, etc.
For the more detailed explanation (somewhat):
You, the party desiring cash from the bank, begin a transaction to create a bill. You tell the bank the account number to take the money from, and prove you're you through whatever standard techniques. Then, you create a handful (say 10) "bills"; they're real bills, minus the bank's signature. You give them each a randomly chosen 128 bit id (128 bits is enough to avoid collisions, globaly -- but you need a good source of randomness). Then, you blind each bill with a new random number. Then, you encrypt all the bills, using a different key created only for this purpose. This extra key will be thrown away when the transaction is complete. The blinding and encryption work such that you can only recover the original text with both the key and the blinding number. The bank then chooses one bill, signs it, asks to see the blinding numbers on the other 9 and also asks for the decryption key. The bank verifies that the other bills are valid, and can assume the tenth is too. They sign it and return it to you. You decrypt it and deblind it. The math works such that the banks signature is still intact. Basically, using RSA, encryption and decryption are exponentiation, and blinding is multiplication (all done modulo the key).
The bank has now signed your bill as being worth money, without knowing the id number on the bill.
This system is rather complicated, and it is unlikely something equivalent has been implemented in this case. But it is possible to do it right (just hard). I've simpleified a little, but the major pieces are there.
Having said all that, it is far far away from dan level play. I believe the feeling among the developers is that it will get a few stones stronger simply through correcting mistakes and continued tuning, but that more than that will take some major changes and improvements.
I am an occasional contributor to Gnu Go, and play at the 8k* level on nngs. I can give Gnu Go 4 stones, but that is in large part by playing to its weaknesses. It is a worthy opponent, but its games tend to have the same feel to them. The tactics and life and death are remarkably strong, in the 1-3k range, but its global planning and other aspects are weak.
I mean, you pour a six pack on a computer, it just won't go as fast. OK, so you might need some work to beat the fault tolerance, but I'm sure you can find six parts that'll bring it down together.
Crusoe comments...
As somebody using a Toshiba Libretto L1, with a 600MHz crusoe chip in it, I think I can offer some insight.. basically, the 600MHz crusoe is similar to 450MHz PII. So... yeah, it's slow. But the speed is fine. I'm currently running Debian with Mozilla + KDE as my main apps. But then, I only really do basic web browsing, etc on it.
Also, you can't compile for the Crusoe. it spends a lot of memory on code morphing caches (16MB of main memory), and looks to all the world like an x86 chip. And it's very much an emulation mode... only thing is, you can't get out of it. Which Transmeta sees as a good thing, 'cause they can change the underlying chip without anyone noticing from one rev to the next... the 5800 could have a different ISA from the 5600, if they wanted. They haven't said, so I assume it doesn't, but still...
I used to wonder about that too. Then I asked a particle physicist. Turns out the answer is you have to conserve boson count, among other things. also charge. The basic result of which is, you can only create anitparticles in pairs with their corresponding particle. So, efficiency caps at 50%, which kills the scheme. This is because half your usable energy goes into creating not useful regular matter.
My uncle's got a DivX player that's near-useless
I didn't realize they sold any...
And I know it's not easy. First off, Dead Tree is good. sometimes just a break for the eyes, sometimes just the security of knowing it won't go down.
What I want is the Linux Application Guide. Basically, a book that says "Here are the major Word Processors. These are the key features of each. We suggest you decide based on whether you need to do this, that or the other." Ditto browsers, Desktops, mail clients, DVD players, Instant Messaging, p2p.
Basically, I use Linux. I use KDE because I tried it and I like it. pine because I tried it and liked it. Ditto Konq, Kword, mplayer, and others. They may or may not be the best there is. They're just the first I tried that was good enough. So... help me pick my applications.
I know you don't write the books... but I've been waiting for that book, and haven't heard anything about it. I know there are problems -- time frame, distro, etc. Just try to make it distro-independent, maybe list easy distros for each app. Also, it would need a brief bit about configuration. I'm thinking two to three pages per app plus a couple screen shots. Order of five to ten apps in less than a dozen categories.