Microsoft "gives away" IE. Sounds like a taxable item to me. And they give away plenty of other pieces of software for various reasons. Salesforces everywhere are known for claiming that someone is getting thousands of dollars of freebees, if they only purchase this minute. Gads, I think proprietary software companies "give away" more software than open source groups.
It's easy to find cases where people get light sentences for crimes that, at least to me, seem much more damaging to society than a few swapped files. How do you justify asking for billions of dollars of so-called damages or years of jail time when people who shoplift some CDs receive little if any punishment?
Oh sure. THat proves there's a demand for it. If we can do it for Quake, why not for the XBox games.
Re:Would the real ruse please stand up?
on
Hacking the XBox
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· Score: 1
Well, it may not say anything about helping the handicapped, but that's the problem. If there's no exemption, then it's against the law . Have you checked the size of the penalties? Those college student who thought they were doing "nothing wrong" by swapping a few files are going to be paying off their debt for a long time. They're lucky they weren't saddled with a million dollars in penalties.
Chapter 12 of Free for All analyzes the differences between Microsoft's version of charity and the open source's version. It sort of anticipated this debate by a few years and it also asks the very interesting question about tax deductions. Just how much did M$ write off for these deductions? The full cost of the software? The list price? Or just the amortized cost of development? Or perhaps the most honorable, nothing at all. That's how much the FSF takes off their taxes.
Someone told me that they don't start charging your credit card until you hit $20 in purchases. They seemed to think you could run up 20 songs without having to pay. I think that they'll eventually get around to charging us, but it would suggest that Apple doesn't have $100k in their bank right now.
The real question is if this is a prudent thing for businesses to do online. I think it's a pain to go to the credit cards for every $.99 transaction because the credit card companies just take most of that with their fees. But if you wait , you may never get the money. What will happen if people close their account before buying that 21st song?
Gosh, I loved the first WebTV even after MS bought them. It was a great, lightweight client with a beautiful user interface, at least for the time. Now the jerk wants to save us from SPAM just so he can spam us himself. Plus, you pay him $10/year and can't avoid it. That's right, the TOS says you CAN'T opt out.
Memo to VCs: don't fund ex-M$ people. They seem to believe that they can jam any TOS down people's throats.
I wish I could be more enthusiastic about Robert Park's list, but it's never so simple. Much of good science fails some of these tests and much of the bad science passes it.
He puts too much faith in peer review. I realize it's all we've got, but it's failed again and again and again. The other scientists just don't have the time to do a good job and many times they have ulterior motives. That's why the peer review journals have printed so many faked articles recently. (Read here or here for starters. )
I would believe his claim about pitching to the media directly, if he didn't do it himself so often. Was his column peer reviewed? His weekly news summary is entertaining, but his smug sense of superiority really grates on me. How in the hell does he know that cold fusion doesn't exist? You can't prove a negative, but there he goes trashing Fleischman and Pons. I'm not saying that cold fusion does exist, but I think it's more complicated than his sound bite. Let's face it, Park is as much of a media whore as the other scientists and he's just as prejudiced.
His other list items are just as faulty. Most scientists work in some kind of isolation because they don't want others to scoop them. But let me guess, the guys who are friends of Park aren't in isolation because they're hanging out with him.
Plus, new laws of nature are what science is all about. We don't need people dropping rocks all day and then announcing, "Yup, gravity still works." We want people probing the undefined areas of knowledge where marginal results leave us confused. That's the whole point.
The deepest problem is the faith we place in the scientific method. We want those guys in white coats to ladle out pure truth. That's why we spend so much tax money on them. But it's never so simple especially when the phenomena are new or strange. He says you can always find some scientist to certify anything. So what good are scientists? I know, other scientists are the problem. If everyone would just listen to Park, everything would be alright.
Park could handle this a bit better if he wasn't so arrogant. A more enlightened stance is to say that the scientific method takes a long time to converge on an answer and even then it may not be right. But it's the best we can do.
Too many extraneous details
on
Immortal Code
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· Score: 1
The article was okay, but it was filled with all of those crazy details that writers are always including to make you feel as if you're in the room. Like who gives a flying f&*&# about whether you take a left turn or a right turn to get to the headquarters? But that's the beginning of the story!!!
I hate when writers lard up with stuff like that. They should stick with the meat.
What do you be that there's something terribly secret down there that needs $250 million to develop. These weird "scientific explorations" are often just fascades for weird political operations. The Glomar Challenger, after all, was searching for Russian subs not manganese nodules or whatever the cover story said.
Doesn't this just slow down the wardriving a bit?
on
Wireless Camouflage?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
So I get a list of hundreds of access points. My trusty computer can be programmed to check them all one by one. Only the legit one will respond. I realize this is a bit slower, but I think the number of fake APs needs to be huge to hurt the war drivers.
In fact, I think that the problem with this solution is the amount of effort expended in defense is equal to the amount of effort for the war driver. You've got to have a PC pumping out fake APs constantly. Both radio modems are putting out the same bandwidth. This isn't a good equation for most of us.
Good encryption, on the other hand, takes only a few cycles to do but a gazillion cycles to undo. That's a great ratio of defense to offense.
Plus, don't the fake APs still end up jamming the channel. If you're faking an AP, someone else can't use the channel on that micro second. Given that wardrivers come only occasionally, but the jamming goes on constantly, I think that the legitmate users will pay a big price in network access for something that would only slow war drivers down a bit.
I love gadgets too, but they're a real headache. My house is only 2500 or so square feet. I've only got one car. But it seems like I'm constantly debugging the damn things. My car stereo, for instance, has a fancy automatic security panel to disguise it from thieves. It sounded cool, but now it won't work in the rain. Humidity jams it. My cordless phone battery is starting to suck. The list goes on and on.
Hiding information in the least significant bits of images is okay if you keep the bit rate low. If it gets too high, the statistical profiles of the image changes and that can set off detectors.
First, it's Ralph Merkle. Second, the scheme he invented with Martin Hellman was broken. It looked cool at the time, but someone came up with a neat way to break it. So things come to naught even with the best prepartions and reputation.
I would love it if his editors applied the treat-cyberspace-like-meatspace and killed his column. Then we wouldn't have the WSJ churning out endless blather about the effect of the new economy. There are no columns devoted to the steel industry or the building supply industry. Yet, this guy keeps going on and on about the so-called Boom Town. (Can't someone explain to him the problem with the column's title?) If he wants to treat cyberspace like everything else, he should leave the reporting to industry rags, not flashy columns.
And the premise is all mixed up. There are tons of new regulations introduced for each new technology. There's a special category called "wire fraud" for people who use the phone system to defraud people. Transmitting gambling information across state lines is a crime and that law was introduced to stop people from phoning their bookie, not going to their bookie's website.
The main reason that cyberspace is different is the only thing moving from place to place is information and freedom of speech is protected by many constitutions. So any law regulating the Internet often runs afoul of these laws.
It would be nice if the regular laws from the world applied to cyberspace. How much did Kevin Mitnick steal? How much damage did he really cause? I would love to see concrete analysis applied. The fact is that most hacking efforts cause less damage than most grafiti. In most cases, the damage can be reversed by running some backup tapes. I realize this takes time. I realize that it's pain. Hey, some jerk broke into my car last week and it caused me more pain and suffering than any hacker.
There may come a time when book publishing starts to think seriously about used sales. They tried long ago to capture a portion of secondary sales but failed when the Supreme Court said that the purchaser actually got something for the money.
If Amazon gets more successful at this, we may have only a few copies flying around the country as people resell books. This would be great for the postal system but bad for the author.
I'm not in favor of giving the copyright czars any more power, but I do get a bit creeped out by the "buy it used" button on Amazon. If authors make less money, there will be fewer books. I would rather the authors get the money than the post office.
Eventually, Amazon and Half.com are going to really hurt the publishing industry too. We need to find some balanced, middle ground. I wish someone could suggest something.
What's missing here is a definition of snip(). It's a good idea to leave out many of the bits at each stage. SHA produces 160 bits, for instance. Let snip(b1) take the first 80 bits of b1 and ignore the rest.
Cryptographically secure hash functions like SHA or MD-5 are often used to convert shorter, shared numbers (the key) into a long bit stream that can be xor'ed with the file in much the same way as a one-time pad. This is done all of the time.
Let k be your key. Let b1, b2, b3 be blocks of bits. Take as many as you need to encrypt the file:
I've got one here in my office and it blocks my 802.11b. The wireless network goes down whenever I use the phone. Why aren't they complaining about 2.4GHz phones? Maybe because the phones aren't as big a threat to the powers that be.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft "gives away" IE. Sounds like a taxable item to me. And they give away plenty of other pieces of software for various reasons. Salesforces everywhere are known for claiming that someone is getting thousands of dollars of freebees, if they only purchase this minute. Gads, I think proprietary software companies "give away" more software than open source groups.
The book Translucent Databases describes much of the same ideas. The website is here .
Read this , or this. Arrrr, Polly want a clue?
It's easy to find cases where people get light sentences for crimes that, at least to me, seem much more damaging to society than a few swapped files. How do you justify asking for billions of dollars of so-called damages or years of jail time when people who shoplift some CDs receive little if any punishment?
Oh sure. THat proves there's a demand for it. If we can do it for Quake, why not for the XBox games.
Well, it may not say anything about helping the handicapped, but that's the problem. If there's no exemption, then it's against the law . Have you checked the size of the penalties? Those college student who thought they were doing "nothing wrong" by swapping a few files are going to be paying off their debt for a long time. They're lucky they weren't saddled with a million dollars in penalties.
Chapter 12 of Free for All analyzes the differences between Microsoft's version of charity and the open source's version. It sort of anticipated this debate by a few years and it also asks the very interesting question about tax deductions. Just how much did M$ write off for these deductions? The full cost of the software? The list price? Or just the amortized cost of development? Or perhaps the most honorable, nothing at all. That's how much the FSF takes off their taxes.
They self-organize and pass the packets to the one machine with a wormhole into the real Internet. Most are just fancy, router/repeaters.
Of course the wormhole into the Internet is important if you want to actually download important things like blog rambles or pr0n.
Someone told me that they don't start charging your credit card until you hit $20 in purchases. They seemed to think you could run up 20 songs without having to pay. I think that they'll eventually get around to charging us, but it would suggest that Apple doesn't have $100k in their bank right now.
The real question is if this is a prudent thing for businesses to do online. I think it's a pain to go to the credit cards for every $.99 transaction because the credit card companies just take most of that with their fees. But if you wait , you may never get the money. What will happen if people close their account before buying that 21st song?
I'm not trying to be sarcastic. I'm just curious. Are there any out there? Can you run them with a 1.4.1 plugin?
Gosh, I loved the first WebTV even after MS bought them. It was a great, lightweight client with a beautiful user interface, at least for the time. Now the jerk wants to save us from SPAM just so he can spam us himself. Plus, you pay him $10/year and can't avoid it. That's right, the TOS says you CAN'T opt out.
Memo to VCs: don't fund ex-M$ people. They seem to believe that they can jam any TOS down people's throats.
I wish I could be more enthusiastic about Robert Park's list, but it's never so simple. Much of good science fails some of these tests and much of the bad science passes it.
He puts too much faith in peer review. I realize it's all we've got, but it's failed again and again and again. The other scientists just don't have the time to do a good job and many times they have ulterior motives. That's why the peer review journals have printed so many faked articles recently. (Read here or here for starters. )
I would believe his claim about pitching to the media directly, if he didn't do it himself so often. Was his column peer reviewed? His weekly news summary is entertaining, but his smug sense of superiority really grates on me. How in the hell does he know that cold fusion doesn't exist? You can't prove a negative, but there he goes trashing Fleischman and Pons. I'm not saying that cold fusion does exist, but I think it's more complicated than his sound bite. Let's face it, Park is as much of a media whore as the other scientists and he's just as prejudiced.
His other list items are just as faulty. Most scientists work in some kind of isolation because they don't want others to scoop them. But let me guess, the guys who are friends of Park aren't in isolation because they're hanging out with him.
Plus, new laws of nature are what science is all about. We don't need people dropping rocks all day and then announcing, "Yup, gravity still works." We want people probing the undefined areas of knowledge where marginal results leave us confused. That's the whole point.
The deepest problem is the faith we place in the scientific method. We want those guys in white coats to ladle out pure truth. That's why we spend
so much tax money on them. But it's never so simple especially when the phenomena are new or strange. He says you can always find some scientist to certify anything. So what good are scientists? I know, other scientists are the problem. If everyone would just listen to Park,
everything would be alright.
Park could handle this a bit better if he wasn't so arrogant. A more enlightened stance is to say that the scientific method takes a long time to converge on an answer and even then it may not be right. But it's the best we can do.
The article was okay, but it was filled with all of those crazy details that writers are always including to make you feel as if you're in the room. Like who gives a flying f&*&# about whether you take a left turn or a right turn to get to the headquarters? But that's the beginning of the story!!!
I hate when writers lard up with stuff like that. They should stick with the meat.
both are now involved in deep-sea oil exploration..
Wink...
What do you be that there's something terribly secret down there that needs $250 million to develop. These weird "scientific explorations" are often just fascades for weird political operations. The Glomar Challenger, after all, was searching for Russian subs not manganese nodules or whatever the cover story said.
So I get a list of hundreds of access points. My trusty computer can be programmed to check them all one by one. Only the legit one will respond. I realize this is a bit slower, but I think the number of fake APs needs to be huge to hurt the war drivers.
In fact, I think that the problem with this solution is the amount of effort expended in defense is equal to the amount of effort for the war driver. You've got to have a PC pumping out fake APs constantly. Both radio modems are putting out the same bandwidth. This isn't a good equation for most of us.
Good encryption, on the other hand, takes only a few cycles to do but a gazillion cycles to undo. That's a great ratio of defense to offense.
Plus, don't the fake APs still end up jamming the channel. If you're faking an AP, someone else can't use the channel on that micro second. Given that wardrivers come only occasionally, but the jamming goes on constantly, I think that the legitmate users will pay a big price in network access for something that would only slow war drivers down a bit.
But I may be wrong.
I love gadgets too, but they're a real headache. My house is only 2500 or so square feet. I've only got one car. But it seems like I'm constantly debugging the damn things. My car stereo, for instance, has a fancy automatic security panel to disguise it from thieves. It sounded cool, but now it won't work in the rain. Humidity jams it. My cordless phone battery is starting to suck. The list goes on and on.
Hiding information in the least significant bits of images is okay if you keep the bit rate low. If it gets too high, the statistical profiles of the image changes and that can set off detectors.
I currently like the list of disco songs tool because it doens't have the same statistical problems.
Diffies, Hellmans, and Merckles...
First, it's Ralph Merkle. Second, the scheme he invented with Martin Hellman was broken. It looked cool at the time, but someone came up with a neat way to break it. So things come to naught even with the best prepartions and reputation.
Where's this guy living? Hypespace?
I would love it if his editors applied the treat-cyberspace-like-meatspace and killed his column. Then we wouldn't have the WSJ churning out endless blather about the effect of the new economy. There are no columns devoted to the steel industry or the building supply industry. Yet, this guy keeps going on and on about the so-called Boom Town. (Can't someone explain to him the problem with the column's title?) If he wants to treat cyberspace like everything else, he should leave the reporting to industry rags, not flashy columns.
And the premise is all mixed up.
There are tons of new regulations introduced for each new technology. There's a special category called "wire fraud" for people who use the phone system to defraud people. Transmitting gambling information across state lines is a crime and that law was introduced to stop people from phoning their bookie, not going to their bookie's website.
The main reason that cyberspace is different is the only thing moving from place to place is information and freedom of speech is protected by many constitutions. So any law regulating the Internet often runs afoul of these laws.
It would be nice if the regular laws from the world applied to cyberspace. How much did Kevin Mitnick steal? How much damage did he really cause? I would love to see concrete analysis applied. The fact is that most hacking efforts cause less damage than most grafiti. In most cases, the damage can be reversed by running some backup tapes. I realize this takes time. I realize that it's pain. Hey, some jerk broke into my car last week and it caused me more pain and suffering than any hacker.
but if someone were to use Enigma to protect content, then the movie could arguably become contraband under the DMCA
The author explicitly uses the Enigma system to protect a sentence! So it's happened.
There may come a time when book publishing starts to think seriously about used sales. They tried long ago to capture a portion of secondary sales but failed when the Supreme Court said that the purchaser actually got something for the money.
If Amazon gets more successful at this, we may have only a few copies flying around the country as people resell books. This would be great for the postal system but bad for the author.
I'm not in favor of giving the copyright czars any more power, but I do get a bit creeped out by the "buy it used" button on Amazon. If authors make less money, there will be fewer books. I would rather the authors get the money than the post office.
Eventually, Amazon and Half.com are going to really hurt the publishing industry too. We need to find some balanced, middle ground. I wish someone could suggest something.
What's missing here is a definition of snip(). It's a good idea to leave out many of the bits at each stage. SHA produces 160 bits, for instance. Let snip(b1) take the first 80 bits of b1 and ignore the rest.
Let + stand for concatenation.
Cryptographically secure hash functions like SHA or MD-5 are often used to convert shorter, shared numbers (the key) into a long bit stream that can be xor'ed with the file in much the same way as a one-time pad. This is done all of the time.
Let k be your key. Let b1, b2, b3 be blocks of bits. Take as many as you need to encrypt the file:
b1=SHA(key)
b2=SHA(snip(b1)+key)
b3=SHA(snip(
etc....
In fact, you can use any encryption function instead of SHA with a few tweaks.
I've got one here in my office and it blocks my 802.11b. The wireless network goes down whenever I use the phone. Why aren't they complaining about 2.4GHz phones? Maybe because the phones aren't as big a threat to the powers that be.