Won't the RIAA get even MORE pissed, because OTHER people are making money directly off their stuff? Personally, I think as soon as it becomes commercialized, the RIAA wins the copyright battle (for this piece of software). In fact, I am even sorta inclined to think they should... Besides, doesn't this have all the same problems Napster did -- no RIAA affiliation, central body that can be sued?
The one page stay order said that questions about the ruling were raised, and Napster had until aug 18 to file a detailed brief explaining why the order should be stayed. So you now have 3 weeks to download. A little more detail is available in the ZDNN article.
Everyone seems interested in cryptography, but cryptography is only part of the problem. What can you tell us about the challenges involved in intercepting (and preventing from being intercepted) messages? Since much of the modern technology for this is presumably classified, perhaps a historical approach to answering this would work best, ie what went on in WWII and the cold war?
It seems to me that a better response to all this would have been for Napster to just start offering liscensing deals for whatever distribution mechanism someone wants to offer their stuff through. Yet another way to show up the RIAA -- instead of just suing left and right, they take advantage of any new developments.
Me: Yes, I'm very interested, but I'm quite busy. Hang on one sec, I'll be RIGHT back.
I sit back down to dinner, phone off hook.
Several minutes later, that noise that tells me to hang up the phone starts, so I get up and hang up the phone.
The best part is, the most valuable thing they have is an interested customer, second is time. I make them waste time by pretending to be interested, until they decide I must not be... and eventually they hang up. Try it some time.
Here's my thinking. Suppose for the sake of argument that 1) I am honest and pay up. 2) Enough other people are that the novel gets written. OK, now, the novel comes out in what, ten installments? So I pay $10, which is MORE than I would pay for a paperback (at $8 or so these days. Unless King's sell for more? I don't read his stuff anyway.) So now lets look at things: If this succeeds, I pay $10 for the next Stephen King novel. If it fails, I pay $8 for the next (different) novel (it is two months late cuz he wasted time, but still.) So, what benefit do I get aside from being able to read this particular novel? As best I can tell, I pay extra for no gain... Thats my quasi-game theoretic analysis. I would, as a reader, prefer that King continue in current form. Of course, that assumes I don't think King should be given lots of money just because, or the fact that I prefer my books in bound form anyway. My answer: write a script to download it 100K times and make it fail!
If your paranoid about having encryption, and don't need very long messages (a handful of words), just use the solitaire cipher from Cryptonomicon (originally in Bruce Schneier's book Applied Cryptography). All it needs is a deck of cards, and it is approximately 96bit strength (if I remember correctly), which makes it _really_ hard to crack without the key (of course, barring some unpublished attack on the algorithm...) It works for encoding a handful of words at a time. How to get the encrypted messages there is another question. Steganography (SP?) is one solution, but for the truly paranoid, try a variant on it: you're not sending that many words anyway, so try encoding it as something like each bit of each character (5 bit characters!) is encoded as whether each line of an email has an even or odd number of letters. Its common enough for people to hand-wrap email text, yours has a pattern to how its wrapped... Be prepared to write long emails about your tourism, though!
While I do not currently overclock my CPU (PII350), I plan to soon buy a Thunderbird and overclock it to some degree. Here's why I think its ok:
1)I will enjoy aving the higher MHz for games. while I know it won't matter that much, I'll enjoy it.
2)I do do video encoding (I'm not kidding! its REALLY SLOW right now!). Haveing those extra MHz matters.
3)It doesn't really affect stability. Here's why: AMD realizes that they make the most profit by making two different CPUs, Thunderbird and Duron. The Thunderbirds are all THE SAME, but by selling some as "faster" they can make a lot more money. Now, some really aren't quite as well made, so mine might not work at 900MHz, but I think it will. Also, if I don't increase the voltage, thenn I can overclock all I want without permanent damage, provided I keep the chip cool. At some point, it just stops working right though. Its unstable, so I bring it back down a bit.
4)I really would rather spend the extra money I save by buying a 700MHz over a 900MHz on a new graphics card, more RAM, a better disk, whatever. While I don't NEED the extra speed, and hence won't pay for it, I would use, and hence will try to get it.
Despite everythjing AMD has done, I still (so far) prefer their tactics to chipzilla...I am looking to upgrade soon, and will probably get an Athlon Thunderbird. But not till I can see a way to overclock it;)
While it is perhaps not the best journalism practice to accept donations from th manufacturers, it can be the only way to cover expenses and/or the only way to get the card early. So, sites of all sizes do this, from Tom's Hardware to much smaller sites. The result is that nVidia can use these tactics to manipulate sites. It seems to me that the answer is for us, as concerned consumers, to write to nvidia and tell them we don't like their tactics. Even if you think these tactics are inevitable, I don't think anyone would say they are good. So, write to them here to tell them exactly what you think. My letter will go something like: As a technically savvy consumer who reads web sites for reviews of products, I am deeply disappointed with your tactics in dealing with these sites [yadda yadda talk about specifics some]. As a result, my next graphics card purchase will be heavily influenced [yadda yadda]. Not only will my purchase be affected, but, because of the fact that I pay attention to these things and reccomend hardware to friends, theirs will be too. I hope that you decide to change your PR tactics so as to promote good, sound journalism where your cards can shine solely on their merits and not on paid reviews. I know you are capable of producing great cards, lets see your ethics meet the same standards. [signature, etc].
Go and Chess and the like don't benefit from crypto. They were examples of games where all the informatin sent is used, and no hiding is needed. We can (maybe) apply the poker thing to quake by ensuring that people send the info of where they are, but not in a form where the other person can use it. So, the other person doesn't know where you are, but you gave him the info that can later be decrypted to prove you played fairly. Thus, at the end of the game, all checks are made and we can observe that the players didn't cheat, and at the time we didn't have the data on where they were, yet they can't modify it later. And yes, these are very difficult to implement. I saw a comment, it might have been in Schneiers book, that said there are maybe a dozen people world-wide qualified to design and implement a new secure protocol. Once its built, copying the code is easier but still hard.
Thats not the point. with the proper crypto, you can have the server hand off encrypted info, which is then checked when the game is over. This way, the clients can keep the server (or each other) honest, without having info they shouldn't when they shouldn't. You can see how this is needed in poker. I drew a flush...no really, I swear I did on my deck right here! Nonono, I REALLY DID. GODDAMN IT BELIEVE ME. It would take a bit more work for a FPS, but basically for cards I encrypt each card, send you the deck, you pick your cards, encrypt those, I decrypt them (so now they only have YOUR encryption on them) you decrypt them and have your hand. When its all done we exchange keys and independently decrypt everything to verify it was all honest.
New games use it. Specifically, its that new feature nVidia is talking about: Transform and Lighting. Transform refers to taking the 3D scene and camera location and converting that to a 3D scene in the form the triangles will be in (IE relative to the monitor, not some 3D world). Therefor, any game that makes use of T&L can have this happpen. I don't think Q3A or UT do though. So, only in the new games.
OK, so maybe only the server could do the cheat; perhaps thats nothing new, but I'd like to think there is some basic verification of continuity in the current system.
This would allow a new cheat without a LOT of work going to fix it. I think I'll call this cheat "teleport." I can teleport from anywhere you can't see to any other such location; So long as your computer doesn't know where I am, you can't do anything. It would of course require a bit of hacking on my side. Time for a mod pack!
It all depends on how willing you are to sacrifice CPU time. In a short crypto class we took, we examined how to play a secure game of poker (completely randomized deck, no one knows what order the deck was in until after the hand). Its among the coolest stuff in modern crypto. Bruce Schneirs book Applied Cryptography goes into this, I believe. Also, go, chess, tictactoe, battleship, and more can be done. I think you could do a FPS through crypto by "hiding" where one player is throughout the game unless the other can see them. However, it takes VERY high bandwidth, VERY low latency and LOTS of CPU time (I think the rendering would have to ALL be software...). At the end of the game, you could check that it was all played fair by examining paths if you chose to. Not doable on current systems. We need about 2-3 more orders of magnitude to play TODAY's games, let alone whats out by then...
The info says it runs at 5400RPM for "fast performance" so that it can support ATA100. Is it me, or is 5400 now considered somewhat old and slow, with 7200 asthe new standard for good performance (in IDE). BTW, SCSI is up to 15000RPM on 160MB/s -- the Seagate Cheetah X15.
Either I'm missing some plugins (although I didn't get any popups...) or the Apple site just experienced the Slashdot Effect...Half the pictures didn't load, the rest loaded slowly, and some links were broken. OK, so maybe there were a few Mac users helping out Slashdot, but still!
Better SPAM filtering methods?
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
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· Score: 1
Myabe I'm looking at it the wrong way, but isn't there a better way to do this? What if we put togeher (all open-source of course) a set of client side scripts that did all the basic stuff, and included a "blacklist" that could be used optionally. Then users could add to the blacklist via a web page, the scripts would update occasionally, and the reallly bad spammers would get marked as such on the page and get dropped out at a lower setting. It doesn't seem SO complicated that the OSS community couldn't pull it off. Also, we seem to be the most vocal ones anyway...
The Register has a story
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
·
· Score: 4
I dont know about YOUR state, but here in North Carolina, it is ILLEGAL to see R rated movies under 18. Which is funny because you can see NC17 movies at 17. At least, thats the way I understand it; IANAL.
That's easy. All of the above. Plus 8 more. Excuse me, 7, plus an episode to explain this new time-warp effect. Or perhaps that would better fit Star Trek.
But what if I never kept the information? I could run a server-side script every time, or just use an applet. I guess I see why the judge didn't go with the trademark thing- don't I have to be using a trademark to violate it? And lastly, what reason does the judge have to find ebay an argument? Isn't that their job? he should have just thrown it out and seen whether they came back with a decent one. I think tresspass is an OK argument except that ebay gave me as an user permission to use the search engine!
Slashdot Mirror
Won't the RIAA get even MORE pissed, because OTHER people are making money directly off their stuff? Personally, I think as soon as it becomes commercialized, the RIAA wins the copyright battle (for this piece of software). In fact, I am even sorta inclined to think they should... Besides, doesn't this have all the same problems Napster did -- no RIAA affiliation, central body that can be sued?
---
The one page stay order said that questions about the ruling were raised, and Napster had until aug 18 to file a detailed brief explaining why the order should be stayed. So you now have 3 weeks to download. A little more detail is available in the ZDNN article.
---
Everyone seems interested in cryptography, but cryptography is only part of the problem. What can you tell us about the challenges involved in intercepting (and preventing from being intercepted) messages? Since much of the modern technology for this is presumably classified, perhaps a historical approach to answering this would work best, ie what went on in WWII and the cold war?
---
It seems to me that a better response to all this would have been for Napster to just start offering liscensing deals for whatever distribution mechanism someone wants to offer their stuff through. Yet another way to show up the RIAA -- instead of just suing left and right, they take advantage of any new developments.
---
[Phone Rings] Me: Hello? Hello?
[Telemarketer answers] TM: Blah blah buy product blah blah.
Me: Yes, I'm very interested, but I'm quite busy. Hang on one sec, I'll be RIGHT back.
I sit back down to dinner, phone off hook.
Several minutes later, that noise that tells me to hang up the phone starts, so I get up and hang up the phone.
The best part is, the most valuable thing they have is an interested customer, second is time. I make them waste time by pretending to be interested, until they decide I must not be... and eventually they hang up. Try it some time.
Here's my thinking. Suppose for the sake of argument that 1) I am honest and pay up. 2) Enough other people are that the novel gets written.
OK, now, the novel comes out in what, ten installments? So I pay $10, which is MORE than I would pay for a paperback (at $8 or so these days. Unless King's sell for more? I don't read his stuff anyway.) So now lets look at things: If this succeeds, I pay $10 for the next Stephen King novel. If it fails, I pay $8 for the next (different) novel (it is two months late cuz he wasted time, but still.) So, what benefit do I get aside from being able to read this particular novel? As best I can tell, I pay extra for no gain... Thats my quasi-game theoretic analysis. I would, as a reader, prefer that King continue in current form. Of course, that assumes I don't think King should be given lots of money just because, or the fact that I prefer my books in bound form anyway. My answer: write a script to download it 100K times and make it fail!
Speed of sound in water. Thats 1.5 kilometers per second.
If your paranoid about having encryption, and don't need very long messages (a handful of words), just use the solitaire cipher from Cryptonomicon (originally in Bruce Schneier's book Applied Cryptography). All it needs is a deck of cards, and it is approximately 96bit strength (if I remember correctly), which makes it _really_ hard to crack without the key (of course, barring some unpublished attack on the algorithm...) It works for encoding a handful of words at a time. How to get the encrypted messages there is another question. Steganography (SP?) is one solution, but for the truly paranoid, try a variant on it: you're not sending that many words anyway, so try encoding it as something like each bit of each character (5 bit characters!) is encoded as whether each line of an email has an even or odd number of letters. Its common enough for people to hand-wrap email text, yours has a pattern to how its wrapped... Be prepared to write long emails about your tourism, though!
1)I will enjoy aving the higher MHz for games. while I know it won't matter that much, I'll enjoy it.
2)I do do video encoding (I'm not kidding! its REALLY SLOW right now!). Haveing those extra MHz matters.
3)It doesn't really affect stability. Here's why: AMD realizes that they make the most profit by making two different CPUs, Thunderbird and Duron. The Thunderbirds are all THE SAME, but by selling some as "faster" they can make a lot more money. Now, some really aren't quite as well made, so mine might not work at 900MHz, but I think it will. Also, if I don't increase the voltage, thenn I can overclock all I want without permanent damage, provided I keep the chip cool. At some point, it just stops working right though. Its unstable, so I bring it back down a bit.
4)I really would rather spend the extra money I save by buying a 700MHz over a 900MHz on a new graphics card, more RAM, a better disk, whatever. While I don't NEED the extra speed, and hence won't pay for it, I would use, and hence will try to get it.
Despite everythjing AMD has done, I still (so far) prefer their tactics to chipzilla...I am looking to upgrade soon, and will probably get an Athlon Thunderbird. But not till I can see a way to overclock it ;)
While it is perhaps not the best journalism practice to accept donations from th manufacturers, it can be the only way to cover expenses and/or the only way to get the card early. So, sites of all sizes do this, from Tom's Hardware to much smaller sites. The result is that nVidia can use these tactics to manipulate sites. It seems to me that the answer is for us, as concerned consumers, to write to nvidia and tell them we don't like their tactics. Even if you think these tactics are inevitable, I don't think anyone would say they are good. So, write to them here to tell them exactly what you think. My letter will go something like: As a technically savvy consumer who reads web sites for reviews of products, I am deeply disappointed with your tactics in dealing with these sites [yadda yadda talk about specifics some]. As a result, my next graphics card purchase will be heavily influenced [yadda yadda]. Not only will my purchase be affected, but, because of the fact that I pay attention to these things and reccomend hardware to friends, theirs will be too. I hope that you decide to change your PR tactics so as to promote good, sound journalism where your cards can shine solely on their merits and not on paid reviews. I know you are capable of producing great cards, lets see your ethics meet the same standards. [signature, etc].
Go and Chess and the like don't benefit from crypto. They were examples of games where all the informatin sent is used, and no hiding is needed. We can (maybe) apply the poker thing to quake by ensuring that people send the info of where they are, but not in a form where the other person can use it. So, the other person doesn't know where you are, but you gave him the info that can later be decrypted to prove you played fairly. Thus, at the end of the game, all checks are made and we can observe that the players didn't cheat, and at the time we didn't have the data on where they were, yet they can't modify it later. And yes, these are very difficult to implement. I saw a comment, it might have been in Schneiers book, that said there are maybe a dozen people world-wide qualified to design and implement a new secure protocol. Once its built, copying the code is easier but still hard.
Thats not the point. with the proper crypto, you can have the server hand off encrypted info, which is then checked when the game is over. This way, the clients can keep the server (or each other) honest, without having info they shouldn't when they shouldn't. You can see how this is needed in poker. I drew a flush...no really, I swear I did on my deck right here! Nonono, I REALLY DID. GODDAMN IT BELIEVE ME. It would take a bit more work for a FPS, but basically for cards I encrypt each card, send you the deck, you pick your cards, encrypt those, I decrypt them (so now they only have YOUR encryption on them) you decrypt them and have your hand. When its all done we exchange keys and independently decrypt everything to verify it was all honest.
New games use it. Specifically, its that new feature nVidia is talking about: Transform and Lighting. Transform refers to taking the 3D scene and camera location and converting that to a 3D scene in the form the triangles will be in (IE relative to the monitor, not some 3D world). Therefor, any game that makes use of T&L can have this happpen. I don't think Q3A or UT do though. So, only in the new games.
OK, so maybe only the server could do the cheat; perhaps thats nothing new, but I'd like to think there is some basic verification of continuity in the current system.
This would allow a new cheat without a LOT of work going to fix it. I think I'll call this cheat "teleport." I can teleport from anywhere you can't see to any other such location; So long as your computer doesn't know where I am, you can't do anything. It would of course require a bit of hacking on my side. Time for a mod pack!
It all depends on how willing you are to sacrifice CPU time. In a short crypto class we took, we examined how to play a secure game of poker (completely randomized deck, no one knows what order the deck was in until after the hand). Its among the coolest stuff in modern crypto. Bruce Schneirs book Applied Cryptography goes into this, I believe. Also, go, chess, tictactoe, battleship, and more can be done. I think you could do a FPS through crypto by "hiding" where one player is throughout the game unless the other can see them. However, it takes VERY high bandwidth, VERY low latency and LOTS of CPU time (I think the rendering would have to ALL be software...). At the end of the game, you could check that it was all played fair by examining paths if you chose to. Not doable on current systems. We need about 2-3 more orders of magnitude to play TODAY's games, let alone whats out by then...
The info says it runs at 5400RPM for "fast performance" so that it can support ATA100. Is it me, or is 5400 now considered somewhat old and slow, with 7200 asthe new standard for good performance (in IDE). BTW, SCSI is up to 15000RPM on 160MB/s -- the Seagate Cheetah X15.
Either I'm missing some plugins (although I didn't get any popups...) or the Apple site just experienced the Slashdot Effect...Half the pictures didn't load, the rest loaded slowly, and some links were broken. OK, so maybe there were a few Mac users helping out Slashdot, but still!
Myabe I'm looking at it the wrong way, but isn't there a better way to do this? What if we put togeher (all open-source of course) a set of client side scripts that did all the basic stuff, and included a "blacklist" that could be used optionally. Then users could add to the blacklist via a web page, the scripts would update occasionally, and the reallly bad spammers would get marked as such on the page and get dropped out at a lower setting. It doesn't seem SO complicated that the OSS community couldn't pull it off. Also, we seem to be the most vocal ones anyway...
More detailts in this article at The Register.
I dont know about YOUR state, but here in North Carolina, it is ILLEGAL to see R rated movies under 18. Which is funny because you can see NC17 movies at 17. At least, thats the way I understand it; IANAL.
Interesting. I'd always thought that was mainly fill rate limitations. Where are these benchmarks?
That's easy. All of the above. Plus 8 more. Excuse me, 7, plus an episode to explain this new time-warp effect. Or perhaps that would better fit Star Trek.
But what if I never kept the information? I could run a server-side script every time, or just use an applet. I guess I see why the judge didn't go with the trademark thing- don't I have to be using a trademark to violate it? And lastly, what reason does the judge have to find ebay an argument? Isn't that their job? he should have just thrown it out and seen whether they came back with a decent one. I think tresspass is an OK argument except that ebay gave me as an user permission to use the search engine!