I'm willing to bet that if this stupid idea ever gets off the ground, its going to have one-lane-wide exits and traffic jams for miles as all the traffic tries to fit into the exit. See exit ramp from 59 coming into town to 610 going North on the southwest side for a real live example...
People keep thinking making the roads wider will fix all the traffic problems, but none of them go out to look at what the hell the traffic problem IS, and 95% of the time here, its the entrace/exit ramps (the other 5% its some drooling idiot who managed to run into another car while they're all going the same direction).
would be *great* for say, theaters. No more annoying cell phones going off
I've heard cellphones that beep repeatedly to let you know you're out of service range.
Of course, in a theatre situation, maybe that would remind the person to shut it off, or at least provide a homing beacon for those that want to shut it off for him before the movie starts.
Normal life of TV: at least 5 years. More typically 7 years.
Hooray technological progress!
We have a ~20 year old TV that worked perfectly fine until about 2 months ago when it blew one of the capacitors in the color system. Still works fine, but any green on the screen "glows" now.
We bought a new TV and fully expect this piece of junk to work for 5 years. You can't even pay for the kind of quality you got 2 decades ago, it seems.
Well, no, now you're arguing that murderers play GTA. In order to say that GTA turns normal law-abiding people into murderers, you must consider the population of normal law-abiding people.
The statement you have is "Of murderers, 1/3 were murderers because of GTA". Its certainly a big number and I'm sure there are lawyers who would love to flaunt numbers like that around, but its not as interesting or useful as "Of people who played GTA, X were murderers because of GTA".
GTA: San Andreas sold roughly 2.1 million copies in the first 4 days. Lets say in all there were 10 million copies sold in the US (probably a conservative estimate. I can't seem to find solid numbers, even in take2's financial statements)
Now, if 1% of the copies caused people to shoot another person, that would be 100,000 murderers created by the game since its release at the end of October. A crime spree like that would be front page headlines across the country!
So lets say 0.1% of them became murderers. (We're already below the margin of error for most polls and quite a few research studies) That would be 10,000 people out of ~291million (in July 03). New York City had a population of 8,085,742. Assuming an even distribution, that would be 270 murderers in New York city alone, half of the murders for the year of 2004 (which was the lowest rate for the city since the 60's).
Below 0.1% you're no longer arguing statistical correlation vs. causal relation, you're talking about coincidence. Or in this case, the kids blaming their bad behavior on anything but themselves.
What if I came by and spotted your family heirloom dinner table, told you I recognized it as a very fancy piece of furniture and that I'd pay you $40,000? (Lets assume that you have no job, and therefore need the money more than you need the table.) Then it turns out it was actually the table George Washington ate from, and that I knew it at the time, and that its actually worth several million dollars?
You'd think you had been had too.
How is that different from a company looking for a person with particular ideas and offering that person a pittance (remember, this was pre-dot-com days, he probably drew $45-$60k/yr, and his pension would be a fraction of that) for ideas they clearly knew would be worth millions?
When Texas started its concealed gun law, I assumed that this was what was going to happen. After all, rather than risking a gunfight, what smart thief wouldn't shoot first and loot later?
It apparently turns out that thieves are pretty much stupid fuckwits as well;)
I've put some thought to this kind of stuff going on in games. Here's some of my ideas contrasted with what games actually do:
1) Religious alignment system (think DandD style with gods/goddesses representing alignments). "Good" players received the protection of their appropriate gods, say protection from corpse looting. "Evil" players received other rewards and protections, but not protection from looting (thus their reign of terror ends when a dozen good characters stand up to them). Changing alignment leads to temporary penalties where nobody wants to protect you. Then, players who play "good" characters can go about their lives with the occasional evil character attack (the rewards for being evil should be good enough to justify it). Evil characters (the pkillers) can spend their time killing each other for the loot. By splitting hairs farther, perhaps Lawful Good characters (who had never attacked another player) would be completely immune to pkilling, which other good players would have to hold their own or hope that they were close enough to town for the town guards to come running.
Won't fly though, people would flip out at the suggestion of religion;) You could get around it if you're Star Wars, and implement a version following the Light/Dark side concept of Knights of the Old Republic.
2) If the world was heavily magical (ie, everyone was a magician and justified this), everyone could be issed a mostly harmless pet familiar. Who would then be capable of growing into a dragon and hosing down any unwanted invitations to a duel with fire. It could be made so that pk could still be possible, but would widen the xp gap needed for griefing considerably to take on a n00b and their dragon at the same time.
A) Preventing PvP entirely outside of arenas. Easy to implement when everyone is a good guy, but what do you do if you've got a situation where players play on opposing countries/sides/whatever and fighting is expected as part of the story? This path seems to be getting taken a lot by current games.
B) Doing nothing and letting it happen. This seems to be what the other games do. I wonder if I was the only one who was annoyed by the article's advice of "Ignore them and they will go away"? When I was in elementary school, I was bullied regularly for a year while I tried to "ignore it" until I finally snapped and bloodied the bully's nose. That led to a week of peace followed by the bully's friends holding me down while he taught me not to bother fighting back, followed by more of the usual. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
In the end, I think MMO companies will need to come up with creative, true-to-plot solutions to the problem, whether its as simple as a "murderer" flag, or tied to more complex socioeconomic penalties (say, shopkeepers charging you more and more the more bloodthirsty you become, until eventually the same players that you kill are making money off of you by reselling items to you at a hefty markup).
You still need a real tracker. And anyone smart enough to find the torrent file on freenet is going to connect to that tracker and see everyone who's sharing that file, and if they're MPAA, they're still going to sue them all.
Then do you think the "post-apocalyptic" story where debuggers are only available for use by licensed individuals and are heavily regulated is "asinine and incorrect"?
create any free DVD I want
Oh sure, you can create a DVD for free, but there is still no widely available legal way to play them on Linux (Intervideo is holding out on LinDVD for whatever reason, and after making waves with a working product years ago and having a page announcing that they would be selling it as an OEM linux product with a standalone product in the works, now appears to have completely expunged it from their site. Insert DVD-CCA brand tinfoil here). If you want to make your movie available to the masses without any kind of expenditure required (legally) on their part, you're looking in the wrong place. Stick to ogg (while mp3 is patent encumbered) for your music, and mpeg1 (which I'm assuming isn't encumbered) for your video.
The DMCA does not force creators to encrypt their works.
It may not right this second, but we'll see what happens when the ??AA has their lawyers move to finally close the analog gap (this is inevitable, and if Palladium/TCPA appears, technologically feasible). Then, EVERY recording will be DRM-encumbered, because it might be a recording of one of the RIAA's member's albums, or a shakeycam rip of an MPAA movie. The DRM will be permissive enough to allow mommy to send grandma babys_first_steps.wmv, but tough luck if grandma wants to show it to all her bridge partners, or if mommy has more than 5 relatives she wants to show the movie to.
Then, if the only legal way to make a recording is to record to a DRM encumbered format, does the DMCA allow the creator to break that format?
As for your "nomenclature": "Article 1, Section 8. The Congress shall have power [...] [t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". Copyright was about granting the creator exclusive rights to their output when it was first created. As soon as courts began to find that publishing contracts operate as "Work for Hire" situations even if the contract doesn't explicitly state so and the real authors no longer had any rights to their work, thats when your "owner" nomenclature showed up.
which are laws that allow the author to choose how his work is distributed
They haven't been about the author for years now. Show me the part in the DMCA that says an author can override access controls in a medium if they want their users to not face access controls. Or where an author can authorize a customer to break the encryption on his/her book so that they can distribute it for free if the author chooses to.
No, copyright has since been perverted to protect the publisher. This is why the ??AA have been working so hard to both protect their own interests and to snuff out any individualism in their markets. If enough content creators discovered they could self-publish, copyright laws would return to providing control to the creator, and the publishers don't want that to happen.
Did the CEO publish porn on the site? Or was it the person who offered the porn for sale on the site? Was porn really published on the site at all (since it was just being sold. I'd suspect that no pornographic images were shown on the site, though maybe whoever listed it took screenshots of the best moments.)?
I'd say that the law needs to go a few rounds in some kind of supreme court situation (does India implement a higher court that is responsible for removal or interpretation of laws?) to interpret what exactly should be meant by publish in this law, and who exactly is doing the publishing.
Check of integritiy of an installed piece of software
During the desktop's formative years, the raw drive space needed to actually implement these kinds of things just wasn't available. This is why things like file versioning (popular on large systems like VMS, where the universities/companies running it had the money for the storage requirements) and permanent storage of "unwanted" files just didn't appear.
The third problem is a bit tougher without some extra metadata and hardcore discussions on exactly what should be monitored/done/etc (personally, I don't think this is a kernel-level operation). Something must be stored somewhere so that the system can identify a modified binary. At some time (before change, in which case the operation is stopped? After change? Monthly?) someone (root? file owner? script kiddie currently logged in as root?) has to be notified (syslog? message to terminal? email?) that something (virus? script kiddie? make install? dpkg? rpm?) has altered the (executable? configuration? library? manpage?). As you can see, its one thing to say "oh yeah the OS should do this" and another entirely to define what this is.
The second problem is tough as well, but there are patches to libc's unlink() function (either as a patch or as an LD_PRELOAD library to override libc's function) that move the files to a pre-defined trashcan, and that every dynamically linked application will use.
The first problem is mostly just a lack of demand. Nobody cares, so nobody made a filesystem that can do it. Both ext*fs and reiserfs are extendable (with optional options. Reiserfs moreso than ext), so if you care, do it yourself, but again there's questions you'll have to be prepared to answer (and since you insist on doing this at the kernel level, you have to have THE answer): If a program writes 1MB to a file 1 byte at a time, is that one million revisions? If you're writing a document and you hit save after every paragraph, is that a revision? How are you going to tell this apart at the kernel level?
Passwords are too insecure, or if you choose a secure one, too hard to remember. I choose entire passphrases from movies, music, whatever, complete with punctuation.
My home root passphrase: "Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
My home user passphrase: "Think bule count one two"
Workstation passphrase at work: "Soylent Green is people."
CC Website passphrase: "Another day older and deeper in debt"
Bank account passphrase: "Blew it all on the suit."
Home Windows computer passphrase: "MAIN SCREEN TURN ON"
no one has dared to make a COMPLETE TEST of PHP running with Apache2, explaining which PHP modules fail and why.
This is what I want to know. Which modules use libraries that are threadsafe (or have threadsafe versions)? Which modules are known to crash the thread?
I build php here with postgresql as the only additional library over whatever the default modules are (and I have found threadsafe patches for libpq). Is having threadsafe libraries enough?
Wow gee, how did you think these got found? By the Hardened PHP project bashing their head against the table until ideas popped out? Try "it was found because their eyes were on the code". Something the PHP developers missed that someone else found. Gotta wonder how much stuff Microsoft missed in their code.
I did't see a provision for refreshing session keys, but I only glanced thru the code and docs and didn't read it in depth.
Its not explicitly mentioned, but "forward secrecy" implies that the session keys change at some point, though it may not change within a single communication. (If Key A and Key B always created the same SessionKey S, then compromising Key A or B would allow an attacker to reveal S (for all past sessions as well) when they talked to each other again.)
As an aside, the steganography idea mentioned by another poster above is probably the one I'd use.
With this thing on your computer, you could give them the fake key, and in a couple of days they'd figure out that you've got the phonebook userspace tools on there and realize they've been had.
Not a lot of other posts even mentioned this story.
I figured I'd chime in to point out that The Lathe of Heaven was also converted to a Made-for-TV movie, and I thought the transition was quite well done. Even if not a literal copy of the book, it was still effective at conveying the core concepts and displaying the changes in the world and its people through the shifts in architecture, costumes, technology, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
So you type the username and password into a program
At no point -- except perhaps inside the card itself
Except when you type it into the keyboard. There are already keyboard sniffer worms out there to handle that.
I'm willing to bet that if this stupid idea ever gets off the ground, its going to have one-lane-wide exits and traffic jams for miles as all the traffic tries to fit into the exit. See exit ramp from 59 coming into town to 610 going North on the southwest side for a real live example...
People keep thinking making the roads wider will fix all the traffic problems, but none of them go out to look at what the hell the traffic problem IS, and 95% of the time here, its the entrace/exit ramps (the other 5% its some drooling idiot who managed to run into another car while they're all going the same direction).
Have a key stored on that card and encrypt the login information on the card itself, don't store any information on the computer itself.
This would have worked for about 30 minutes before someone would have modified a worm to spy on the smartcard-reading-process.
would be *great* for say, theaters. No more annoying cell phones going off
I've heard cellphones that beep repeatedly to let you know you're out of service range.
Of course, in a theatre situation, maybe that would remind the person to shut it off, or at least provide a homing beacon for those that want to shut it off for him before the movie starts.
should you get a karma bonus?
(I'm not the bearer of that sig.)
Thats a good question. Should karma reward only insightful posts or should it reward people who start insightful discussions as well?
Honestly, 50% of the trolls never get a response, and probably 50% of the responses are likewise trollish and don't get modded up.
Normal life of TV: at least 5 years. More typically 7 years.
Hooray technological progress!
We have a ~20 year old TV that worked perfectly fine until about 2 months ago when it blew one of the capacitors in the color system. Still works fine, but any green on the screen "glows" now.
We bought a new TV and fully expect this piece of junk to work for 5 years. You can't even pay for the kind of quality you got 2 decades ago, it seems.
Well, no, now you're arguing that murderers play GTA. In order to say that GTA turns normal law-abiding people into murderers, you must consider the population of normal law-abiding people.
The statement you have is "Of murderers, 1/3 were murderers because of GTA". Its certainly a big number and I'm sure there are lawyers who would love to flaunt numbers like that around, but its not as interesting or useful as "Of people who played GTA, X were murderers because of GTA".
GTA: San Andreas sold roughly 2.1 million copies in the first 4 days. Lets say in all there were 10 million copies sold in the US (probably a conservative estimate. I can't seem to find solid numbers, even in take2's financial statements)
Now, if 1% of the copies caused people to shoot another person, that would be 100,000 murderers created by the game since its release at the end of October. A crime spree like that would be front page headlines across the country!
So lets say 0.1% of them became murderers. (We're already below the margin of error for most polls and quite a few research studies) That would be 10,000 people out of ~291million (in July 03). New York City had a population of 8,085,742. Assuming an even distribution, that would be 270 murderers in New York city alone, half of the murders for the year of 2004 (which was the lowest rate for the city since the 60's).
Below 0.1% you're no longer arguing statistical correlation vs. causal relation, you're talking about coincidence. Or in this case, the kids blaming their bad behavior on anything but themselves.
Sorry, the guy did get paid
Did he? Sounds more like the guy got had.
What if I came by and spotted your family heirloom dinner table, told you I recognized it as a very fancy piece of furniture and that I'd pay you $40,000? (Lets assume that you have no job, and therefore need the money more than you need the table.) Then it turns out it was actually the table George Washington ate from, and that I knew it at the time, and that its actually worth several million dollars?
You'd think you had been had too.
How is that different from a company looking for a person with particular ideas and offering that person a pittance (remember, this was pre-dot-com days, he probably drew $45-$60k/yr, and his pension would be a fraction of that) for ideas they clearly knew would be worth millions?
When Texas started its concealed gun law, I assumed that this was what was going to happen. After all, rather than risking a gunfight, what smart thief wouldn't shoot first and loot later?
;)
It apparently turns out that thieves are pretty much stupid fuckwits as well
I've put some thought to this kind of stuff going on in games. Here's some of my ideas contrasted with what games actually do:
;) You could get around it if you're Star Wars, and implement a version following the Light/Dark side concept of Knights of the Old Republic.
1) Religious alignment system (think DandD style with gods/goddesses representing alignments). "Good" players received the protection of their appropriate gods, say protection from corpse looting. "Evil" players received other rewards and protections, but not protection from looting (thus their reign of terror ends when a dozen good characters stand up to them). Changing alignment leads to temporary penalties where nobody wants to protect you. Then, players who play "good" characters can go about their lives with the occasional evil character attack (the rewards for being evil should be good enough to justify it). Evil characters (the pkillers) can spend their time killing each other for the loot. By splitting hairs farther, perhaps Lawful Good characters (who had never attacked another player) would be completely immune to pkilling, which other good players would have to hold their own or hope that they were close enough to town for the town guards to come running.
Won't fly though, people would flip out at the suggestion of religion
2) If the world was heavily magical (ie, everyone was a magician and justified this), everyone could be issed a mostly harmless pet familiar. Who would then be capable of growing into a dragon and hosing down any unwanted invitations to a duel with fire. It could be made so that pk could still be possible, but would widen the xp gap needed for griefing considerably to take on a n00b and their dragon at the same time.
A) Preventing PvP entirely outside of arenas. Easy to implement when everyone is a good guy, but what do you do if you've got a situation where players play on opposing countries/sides/whatever and fighting is expected as part of the story? This path seems to be getting taken a lot by current games.
B) Doing nothing and letting it happen. This seems to be what the other games do. I wonder if I was the only one who was annoyed by the article's advice of "Ignore them and they will go away"? When I was in elementary school, I was bullied regularly for a year while I tried to "ignore it" until I finally snapped and bloodied the bully's nose. That led to a week of peace followed by the bully's friends holding me down while he taught me not to bother fighting back, followed by more of the usual. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
In the end, I think MMO companies will need to come up with creative, true-to-plot solutions to the problem, whether its as simple as a "murderer" flag, or tied to more complex socioeconomic penalties (say, shopkeepers charging you more and more the more bloodthirsty you become, until eventually the same players that you kill are making money off of you by reselling items to you at a hefty markup).
I know where. Please contact me at Methodist Hospital, room 233.
You still need a real tracker. And anyone smart enough to find the torrent file on freenet is going to connect to that tracker and see everyone who's sharing that file, and if they're MPAA, they're still going to sue them all.
That is entirely asinine, and incorrect.
Then do you think the "post-apocalyptic" story where debuggers are only available for use by licensed individuals and are heavily regulated is "asinine and incorrect"?
create any free DVD I want
Oh sure, you can create a DVD for free, but there is still no widely available legal way to play them on Linux (Intervideo is holding out on LinDVD for whatever reason, and after making waves with a working product years ago and having a page announcing that they would be selling it as an OEM linux product with a standalone product in the works, now appears to have completely expunged it from their site. Insert DVD-CCA brand tinfoil here). If you want to make your movie available to the masses without any kind of expenditure required (legally) on their part, you're looking in the wrong place. Stick to ogg (while mp3 is patent encumbered) for your music, and mpeg1 (which I'm assuming isn't encumbered) for your video.
The DMCA does not force creators to encrypt their works.
It may not right this second, but we'll see what happens when the ??AA has their lawyers move to finally close the analog gap (this is inevitable, and if Palladium/TCPA appears, technologically feasible). Then, EVERY recording will be DRM-encumbered, because it might be a recording of one of the RIAA's member's albums, or a shakeycam rip of an MPAA movie. The DRM will be permissive enough to allow mommy to send grandma babys_first_steps.wmv, but tough luck if grandma wants to show it to all her bridge partners, or if mommy has more than 5 relatives she wants to show the movie to.
Then, if the only legal way to make a recording is to record to a DRM encumbered format, does the DMCA allow the creator to break that format?
As for your "nomenclature": "Article 1, Section 8. The Congress shall have power [...] [t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". Copyright was about granting the creator exclusive rights to their output when it was first created. As soon as courts began to find that publishing contracts operate as "Work for Hire" situations even if the contract doesn't explicitly state so and the real authors no longer had any rights to their work, thats when your "owner" nomenclature showed up.
A much better approach is to buy non-restrictive DVDs
Let me know when they write off across the cover in type at least the same size as "FULLSCREEN VERSION" "RESTRICTED VERSION".
I'll take the widescreen unrestricted version please.
which are laws that allow the author to choose how his work is distributed
They haven't been about the author for years now. Show me the part in the DMCA that says an author can override access controls in a medium if they want their users to not face access controls. Or where an author can authorize a customer to break the encryption on his/her book so that they can distribute it for free if the author chooses to.
No, copyright has since been perverted to protect the publisher. This is why the ??AA have been working so hard to both protect their own interests and to snuff out any individualism in their markets. If enough content creators discovered they could self-publish, copyright laws would return to providing control to the creator, and the publishers don't want that to happen.
Whoever publishes
The question becomes "who published this"?
Did the CEO publish porn on the site? Or was it the person who offered the porn for sale on the site? Was porn really published on the site at all (since it was just being sold. I'd suspect that no pornographic images were shown on the site, though maybe whoever listed it took screenshots of the best moments.)?
I'd say that the law needs to go a few rounds in some kind of supreme court situation (does India implement a higher court that is responsible for removal or interpretation of laws?) to interpret what exactly should be meant by publish in this law, and who exactly is doing the publishing.
Files arn't versioned
Undelete?
Check of integritiy of an installed piece of software
During the desktop's formative years, the raw drive space needed to actually implement these kinds of things just wasn't available. This is why things like file versioning (popular on large systems like VMS, where the universities/companies running it had the money for the storage requirements) and permanent storage of "unwanted" files just didn't appear.
The third problem is a bit tougher without some extra metadata and hardcore discussions on exactly what should be monitored/done/etc (personally, I don't think this is a kernel-level operation). Something must be stored somewhere so that the system can identify a modified binary. At some time (before change, in which case the operation is stopped? After change? Monthly?) someone (root? file owner? script kiddie currently logged in as root?) has to be notified (syslog? message to terminal? email?) that something (virus? script kiddie? make install? dpkg? rpm?) has altered the (executable? configuration? library? manpage?). As you can see, its one thing to say "oh yeah the OS should do this" and another entirely to define what this is.
The second problem is tough as well, but there are patches to libc's unlink() function (either as a patch or as an LD_PRELOAD library to override libc's function) that move the files to a pre-defined trashcan, and that every dynamically linked application will use.
The first problem is mostly just a lack of demand. Nobody cares, so nobody made a filesystem that can do it. Both ext*fs and reiserfs are extendable (with optional options. Reiserfs moreso than ext), so if you care, do it yourself, but again there's questions you'll have to be prepared to answer (and since you insist on doing this at the kernel level, you have to have THE answer): If a program writes 1MB to a file 1 byte at a time, is that one million revisions? If you're writing a document and you hit save after every paragraph, is that a revision? How are you going to tell this apart at the kernel level?
Passwords are too insecure, or if you choose a secure one, too hard to remember. I choose entire passphrases from movies, music, whatever, complete with punctuation.
My home root passphrase: "Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
My home user passphrase: "Think bule count one two"
Workstation passphrase at work: "Soylent Green is people."
CC Website passphrase: "Another day older and deeper in debt"
Bank account passphrase: "Blew it all on the suit."
Home Windows computer passphrase: "MAIN SCREEN TURN ON"
no one has dared to make a COMPLETE TEST of PHP running with Apache2, explaining which PHP modules fail and why.
This is what I want to know. Which modules use libraries that are threadsafe (or have threadsafe versions)? Which modules are known to crash the thread?
I build php here with postgresql as the only additional library over whatever the default modules are (and I have found threadsafe patches for libpq). Is having threadsafe libraries enough?
Wow gee, how did you think these got found? By the Hardened PHP project bashing their head against the table until ideas popped out? Try "it was found because their eyes were on the code". Something the PHP developers missed that someone else found. Gotta wonder how much stuff Microsoft missed in their code.
I did't see a provision for refreshing session keys, but I only glanced thru the code and docs and didn't read it in depth.
Its not explicitly mentioned, but "forward secrecy" implies that the session keys change at some point, though it may not change within a single communication. (If Key A and Key B always created the same SessionKey S, then compromising Key A or B would allow an attacker to reveal S (for all past sessions as well) when they talked to each other again.)
As an aside, the steganography idea mentioned by another poster above is probably the one I'd use.
With this thing on your computer, you could give them the fake key, and in a couple of days they'd figure out that you've got the phonebook userspace tools on there and realize they've been had.
Yes, its called "Phonebook Encryption". Not sure why. It's written by familiar faces though.
The Lathe of Heaven
Not a lot of other posts even mentioned this story.
I figured I'd chime in to point out that The Lathe of Heaven was also converted to a Made-for-TV movie, and I thought the transition was quite well done. Even if not a literal copy of the book, it was still effective at conveying the core concepts and displaying the changes in the world and its people through the shifts in architecture, costumes, technology, etc.