Unfortunately, the "Outstanding Technology of the Year" award you mention was not given by the prestigious International Academy of Science. It was given by a sketchy Missouri-based organization that capitalizes on the same name to offer non-accredited technical degrees. Let's avoid increasing their page rank any further...
Misleading article title!
on
No Ice on the Moon
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This study does *not* indicate that there is no ice in permanently shadowed areas of the Moon. Before this study came out, there were two widely cited lines of evidence for ice:
1) Lunar Prospector found elevated hydrogen near the poles using a neutron spectrometer 2) Clementine bi-static radar (and later ground-based measurements) found backscatter effects that looked like ice
Most planetary geologists weighted (1) more heavily. There was always a lot of argument about interpretation of (2).
Now this study comes along and fairly definitively throws out (2) by showing the data has another explanation. Fine. From (1) we still have solid evidence of hydrogen near the poles, and most geologists would agree that the likeliest explanation of that hydrogen is water ice deposits in permanently dark crater interiors (the only places cold enough for ice to be stable in a vacuum).
So the main impact of this study is to suggest (but not prove) that ice, if present, is not found in clumps of centimeter scale or larger. And the 1% concentration figure they cite is a *lower* bound, not an upper bound. That is, ice could be more concentrated than 1% in some regions below neutron spectrometer resolution (e.g. kilometer scale) and we would have no way to know.
Regardless of whether you're worried about a Big Brother scenario in which the FBI arrests you for conspiring to violate the DMCA or some such, there are some obvious adverse consequences for requiring encryption back doors
Problems with international porting. Do you need to publish a different version of the software for each country, with a back door usable by only that nation's law enforcement community?
If there's a back door for the encryption that's embedded in the software, it's necessarily
a public key scheme, and we've seen that with massive resources, these schemes can be cracked. The key embedded in software used for a large proportion of US e-mail would be a very attractive target for cracking.
Open source encryption software can be trivially modified to remove back doors. For that matter, with a little work, binary distributions probably can be also. But that might not stop regulations that prohibit open source encryption. Or they might require expensive registration with a government agency, which practically speaking rules out underfunded open source development.
There's no need to invoke a nightmare scenario to see the potential problems.
I wrote a similar system as a college freshman.
From the
UMBC Agent Web:
A new and improved diffAgent
server has been released which includes additional mediators. "A
diffAgent watches information sources available via the web and
e-mails you when it detects changes. In particular, it can:
Watch your FedEx package for you and e-mail you when it sees the words
"Package has been Delivered!" (make a package watcher agent)
Monitor a list of query results at a search service like Altavista to
see when new pages on your topic appear (make a web topic watcher
agent)
Keep track of news articles on a topic and mail you when it finds new
ones (make a news topic watcher agent)
Mail you when your name appears in a list of papers at an electronic
archive (make a web page watcher agent)
Tell you when the word "snow" appears on the Pittsburgh weather page
(make a web page watcher agent)
8/15/96
diffAgent had two modes. In the first mode,
it stored a CRC checksum of the page, periodically
compared checksums, and notified
you of changes.
In the second mode, it stored the whole page,
ran diff --context=3 over it to detect changed lines, and then grep'd for
user-specified words of interest.
I believe The NetMind web page was already
up at that time, but they may not have had all
of the features important to the patent.
IMO, the NetMind technology is not worth a
patent, but it is a bit beyond the diffAgent,
and not entirely trivial to implement even if it is
trivial to think of.
Jim Tomayko
has taught an undergraduate course as an elective in the CS curriculum at Carnegie Mellon University (which I didn't take, but I've heard good things about). My quick web search for more info about the course came up empty, but you might
be able to contact him directly for advice.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the "Outstanding Technology of the Year" award you mention was not given by the prestigious International Academy of Science. It was given by a sketchy Missouri-based organization that capitalizes on the same name to offer non-accredited technical degrees. Let's avoid increasing their page rank any further...
This study does *not* indicate that there is no ice in permanently shadowed areas of the Moon. Before this study came out, there were two widely cited lines of evidence for ice:
1) Lunar Prospector found elevated hydrogen near the poles using a neutron spectrometer
2) Clementine bi-static radar (and later ground-based measurements) found backscatter effects that looked like ice
Most planetary geologists weighted (1) more heavily. There was always a lot of argument about interpretation of (2).
Now this study comes along and fairly definitively throws out (2) by showing the data has another explanation. Fine. From (1) we still have solid evidence of hydrogen near the poles, and most geologists would agree that the likeliest explanation of that hydrogen is water ice deposits in permanently dark crater interiors (the only places cold enough for ice to be stable in a vacuum).
So the main impact of this study is to suggest (but not prove) that ice, if present, is not found in clumps of centimeter scale or larger. And the 1% concentration figure they cite is a *lower* bound, not an upper bound. That is, ice could be more concentrated than 1% in some regions below neutron spectrometer resolution (e.g. kilometer scale) and we would have no way to know.
- Problems with international porting. Do you need to publish a different version of the software for each country, with a back door usable by only that nation's law enforcement community?
- If there's a back door for the encryption that's embedded in the software, it's necessarily
a public key scheme, and we've seen that with massive resources, these schemes can be cracked. The key embedded in software used for a large proportion of US e-mail would be a very attractive target for cracking.
- Open source encryption software can be trivially modified to remove back doors. For that matter, with a little work, binary distributions probably can be also. But that might not stop regulations that prohibit open source encryption. Or they might require expensive registration with a government agency, which practically speaking rules out underfunded open source development.
There's no need to invoke a nightmare scenario to see the potential problems.A new and improved diffAgent server has been released which includes additional mediators. "A diffAgent watches information sources available via the web and e-mails you when it detects changes. In particular, it can:
- Watch your FedEx package for you and e-mail you when it sees the words
"Package has been Delivered!" (make a package watcher agent)
- Monitor a list of query results at a search service like Altavista to
see when new pages on your topic appear (make a web topic watcher
agent)
- Keep track of news articles on a topic and mail you when it finds new
ones (make a news topic watcher agent)
- Mail you when your name appears in a list of papers at an electronic
archive (make a web page watcher agent)
- Tell you when the word "snow" appears on the Pittsburgh weather page
(make a web page watcher agent)
8/15/96diffAgent had two modes. In the first mode, it stored a CRC checksum of the page, periodically compared checksums, and notified you of changes.
In the second mode, it stored the whole page, ran diff --context=3 over it to detect changed lines, and then grep'd for user-specified words of interest.
I believe The NetMind web page was already up at that time, but they may not have had all of the features important to the patent. IMO, the NetMind technology is not worth a patent, but it is a bit beyond the diffAgent, and not entirely trivial to implement even if it is trivial to think of.
Jim Tomayko has taught an undergraduate course as an elective in the CS curriculum at Carnegie Mellon University (which I didn't take, but I've heard good things about). My quick web search for more info about the course came up empty, but you might be able to contact him directly for advice.