What strikes me as remarkable is that anyone thinks so-called "lawsuits" of this nature will in any way stem the Niagra-like flow of files being shared on computer networks.
Wow. I'm not actually sure whether you meant Niagara or Viagra. Congratulations.:)
There's a difference between information being possible to track if you know about it at the time it is transmitted and are waiting to intercept it (which is the case with most Internet transfers) and a service provider keeping a log of what you access without telling you. The latter is far more serious, and possibly a violation of data retention laws in many countries, whereas the former is just an abstract capability that you pretty much have to live with. Or use freenet, although even that isn't perfect.
No, you eliminate some redundancy, thus *increasing* the randomness
Actually, randomness is orthogonal to redundancy. The message "fish babble warg" is no more or less random if I compress it with an adaptive huffman coder or send it in ASCII art letters fifteen rows high.
If chunks of known ciphertext in something like AES-256 can't be broken in times measured in universe ages, then I can't foresee much success in wholesale scanning of all information, searching for embedded secret strings which, if properly encrypted, should be indistinguishable from random noise.
The problem is that most of the places where steg is currently used (at least in techniques widely known to those of us who only follow the field with amateur interest) the 'apparently entirely random' encrypted data replaces data that is frequently systematic noise -- that is, each bit is _not_ independent of other bits within it.
Sure, if you know what you're doing you could analyse the data you're embedding in and come up with an algorithm that makes your hidden data fit whatever analysis you've applied, but then when somebody analyses it in a different way you're still in trouble...
And if your system's security is ever compromised, then the *attacker* will know about it, too.
It might be possible to store the information about your habits in a hashed form, which wouldn't permit the attacker to discover your armadillo porn fetish. However, after noting the huge number of armadillos in the jpeg collection on your desktop with amusing names like 'look at the plates on that', he might be able to guess.
Your specific example is probably the toughest one I can think of offhand... you'd have to have a copy of the HD controller cached somewhere to be able to restart it. (since, obviously, you can't load it from HD:)).
Note that you have to be able to load it from _somewhere_ in order to be able to bootstrap the system. I don't know how L4 solves this problem, but the toy microkernel I've been playing with for the last few years solves it by having a simple rom filesystem driver built into the kernel, and loading the drivers needed to bootstrap the rest of the system (i.e., the hard disk driver, the primary filesystem driver and the vfs layer driver) from that. If that crashes, you'd have a kernel panic, but it's highly unlikely as the code is _very_ simple -- it would probably indicate a serious hardware failure, in fact.
My system doesn't support restarting drivers at the moment, but in theory it could restart the hard disk driver if it crashed.
I think it's more like the stage Linux was at in 1991. But it promises to progress faster, 'cause a lot of bits are already there that had to be written for Linux from scratch.
Check your firewall settings. If you don't have (IIRC) 6880-6899 or so open, you'll get awfully slow speeds on bittorrent. It'll still work, but be very slow.
Huh? I don't, and have no trouble saturating my 576/128kbit ADSL line in both directions after ten minutes or so of downloading any big popular file.
pdflatex sounds like it's probably good. Can I install it without the rest of teTeX, or discard the rest of teTeX?
I'm not sure. I installed from an RPM source that doesn't give you a lot of choices. OTOH, my/usr/share/texmf directory is only 143Mb, so it's hardly a huge installation even if you don't bother optimising it.
Completely off topic I know, but a couple of years ago my 11 year old son was banned for a week from the school computer lab after being found using DOS.
The irony is that I used to have to hack my school's computers in order to get a DOS prompt, and nobody said a thing about it...
For a company that can't explain what its own SMTP server is doing, I can't say that this surprises me.
Nobody can explain BT's outgoing SMTP server system. Mail goes in at one end and (usually) comes out at the other, but between these events there is a mysterious lag during which rumour has it it is forwarded several hundred times by non-RFC-compliant store & forward agents until it arrives at its eventual and non-deterministic egress point, from where it is forwarded to a randomly chosen MX for the destination domain.
Unless it's going to hotmail, at which point it just disappears without a trace about 50% of the time.
I left as soon as my 12 month ADSL contract expired. Can you tell?
I just found this post through meta-moderation. It occurred to me that I was moderating a moderation of a post about the moderation of a post about the moderation of another post. This makes it meta-meta-meta-meta-moderation.
The MSRP of Microsoft Word 2003 is $229. Your number is off by more than 20%. It is trivial to find the standalone application available for a cost drastically lower than MSRP.
In this case, what is the relevance of the MSRP? Market price is what counts. Office XP Small Business Edition sells for approximately the same price as you quote for Word 2003. $280 plus tax gets you Office 2003 SBE. This is new, retail packaged software from a reputable supplier local to me (at today's exchange rates according to xe.com). Why is anyone even interested that the manufacturer is suggesting stores should sell it for $400, when it is available at that price?
I don't't think so. The case in question was in Australia. This case is in the US.
I don't know about the US, but I believe the UK has a system where if a question comes up in court that has been settled in other countries but never in the UK, the judge will consider the verdicts of those other countries' courts and whether or not any of the reasoning that was applied in them is suitable for application to the case he is hearing. If the US has such a system, then it is a precedent, albeit not a very good one. The case would be substantially altered by the US constitutional right to free speech, which AFAIK has no equivalent in Australian law (?).
Actually, I've seen some of the data on this. There is evidence that this is actually what happened. The world was in a warm period anyway, and just a little extra CO2 (relatively speaking) may have been enough to tip the balance by causing the release of dissolved methane in the oceans.
The cooling from a volcano's dust is substantially outlived by the warming from its gasses.
Didn't some guy say that we should all stop eating meat so we cull most of the cows so their methane gasses would no longer contribute to greenhouse gasses?
I've not heard that one, although I believe New Zealand briefly considered introducing a sheep tax as one of the few ways they could think of to meet their Kyoto targets.
It's certainly not the first time Vulcanism* has been implicated in a mass extinction - the Deccan Traps, for instance, have been implicated in the KT event that is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 Million Years ago.
I've heard the theory before, although never about the KT event. ISTR Horizon (BBC science documentary series) running an episode about this very theory and the same mass extinction this article is talking about roughly 2-3 years ago.
Hmmm. Interesting, I didn't realise that. It seems a little unfair if this guy wouldn't be able to claim it were he in the UK, as he would need the funding as much as somebody who, for instance, was getting divorced (who would be eligible for assistance).
On investigation, it certainly seems you may be correct. The following is from the Legal Aid Funding Code Guidance document, available from here.
Paragraph 1 of the Schedule lists areas of law in relation to which no services may be funded beyond the provision of general information about the law, the legal system and the availability of legal services. [...] other areas of law excluded by paragraph 1 are: [...] defamation or malicious falsehood; [...] These are excluded because they are not considered to have sufficient priority to justify public funding. [...] In particular, it is not thought justified to spend public money helping businessmen who fail to insure against the risk of facing legal costs."
There is a list of exclusions to these exclusions, but the only one that might apply is "proceedings which have a significant wider public interest". It seems unlikely though.
However, it is worth noting that he really doesn't need representation in the UK. Filing an application for summary judgement on the grounds that there is no case to answer is easy enough that anybody with the competence to complain about spam to their ISP could manage it.
Hmm. Implication from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/ssdataset.as p?vlnk=6339 suggests the generally reported statistic does have factual basis.
Whether "air weapon" includes "Air pistol converted to fire live cartridges" or whether there really are that many crimes committed with pellet guns would be useful information.
I believe these crimes are almost all actually committed with pellet guns. An acquaintance who works for an air gun manufacturer insists that it is almost impossible to make a conversion between the two, and I believe he knows what he is talking about.
Yes, it is ridiculous that air guns are considered 'firearms' by UK law, but they are.
Are you using IBM "Deathstars" or Seagates by chance? I've been using a Western Digital and Maxtor, have had 0 problems. The WD is a 10,000 RPM SATA, and despite the heat it throws off it still works perfectly.
I've had 2 Maxtor 40GBs less than 1 year old fail on me recently, within a week of each other. A third that's in a different machine has recently been throwing the occasional bad sector message into the system log. There's no cooling problems in these machines (oversized case with two case fans and a power supply with a huge through fan stuck under it, I've never seen anything else like it, the cooling system was designed for 8 disc server setups), and power supply seems fine. The third Seagate drive from the machine with the 2 failures has been in there twice as long and is showing no signs of trouble.
Make sure the drives have different manufacturers. I had two Maxtor drives fail on me almost simultaneously last month, which was an unpleasant experience, to say the least. Any manufacturer could have problems, remember the shit everyone had with IBM drives a couple of years ago?
"but you can never fully rely on them to never fail"
I'd rather say you can fully rely on them to eventually fail. Which is why you need so much space for backups.
I used to be a proponent of disc to disc backups. It's easy and quick and there's no fuss changing discs around all the time. You can even do it over a remote network link if you need a backup in case of fire damage/theft.
Then I had two discs fail almost simultaneously. I'm sure its a manufacturing defect, they were the same model of drive (although purchased from different retailers several months apart from each other), and a third of the same model I have is also starting to fail.
So, if you're doing disc to disc backup, please make sure you're at least using discs from different manufacturers...!
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, there will:
1. Sell cars at a loss
2. ???
3. Profit!
You see, it works just about as well as any of those 3-step plans do.
What strikes me as remarkable is that anyone thinks so-called "lawsuits" of this nature will in any way stem the Niagra-like flow of files being shared on computer networks.
:)
Wow. I'm not actually sure whether you meant Niagara or Viagra. Congratulations.
There's a difference between information being possible to track if you know about it at the time it is transmitted and are waiting to intercept it (which is the case with most Internet transfers) and a service provider keeping a log of what you access without telling you. The latter is far more serious, and possibly a violation of data retention laws in many countries, whereas the former is just an abstract capability that you pretty much have to live with. Or use freenet, although even that isn't perfect.
No, you eliminate some redundancy, thus *increasing* the randomness
Actually, randomness is orthogonal to redundancy. The message "fish babble warg" is no more or less random if I compress it with an adaptive huffman coder or send it in ASCII art letters fifteen rows high.
If chunks of known ciphertext in something like AES-256 can't be broken in times measured in universe ages, then I can't foresee much success in wholesale scanning of all information, searching for embedded secret strings which, if properly encrypted, should be indistinguishable from random noise.
The problem is that most of the places where steg is currently used (at least in techniques widely known to those of us who only follow the field with amateur interest) the 'apparently entirely random' encrypted data replaces data that is frequently systematic noise -- that is, each bit is _not_ independent of other bits within it.
Sure, if you know what you're doing you could analyse the data you're embedding in and come up with an algorithm that makes your hidden data fit whatever analysis you've applied, but then when somebody analyses it in a different way you're still in trouble...
And if your system's security is ever compromised, then the *attacker* will know about it, too.
It might be possible to store the information about your habits in a hashed form, which wouldn't permit the attacker to discover your armadillo porn fetish. However, after noting the huge number of armadillos in the jpeg collection on your desktop with amusing names like 'look at the plates on that', he might be able to guess.
Your specific example is probably the toughest one I can think of offhand... you'd have to have a copy of the HD controller cached somewhere to be able to restart it. (since, obviously, you can't load it from HD :)).
Note that you have to be able to load it from _somewhere_ in order to be able to bootstrap the system. I don't know how L4 solves this problem, but the toy microkernel I've been playing with for the last few years solves it by having a simple rom filesystem driver built into the kernel, and loading the drivers needed to bootstrap the rest of the system (i.e., the hard disk driver, the primary filesystem driver and the vfs layer driver) from that. If that crashes, you'd have a kernel panic, but it's highly unlikely as the code is _very_ simple -- it would probably indicate a serious hardware failure, in fact.
My system doesn't support restarting drivers at the moment, but in theory it could restart the hard disk driver if it crashed.
It's at the same stage as Linux was in 1994?
:)
I think it's more like the stage Linux was at in 1991. But it promises to progress faster, 'cause a lot of bits are already there that had to be written for Linux from scratch.
By 2006, it'll be 1995 all over again.
Ah, Slackware 3, whatever happened to you?
Check your firewall settings. If you don't have (IIRC) 6880-6899 or so open, you'll get awfully slow speeds on bittorrent. It'll still work, but be very slow.
Huh? I don't, and have no trouble saturating my 576/128kbit ADSL line in both directions after ten minutes or so of downloading any big popular file.
pdflatex sounds like it's probably good. Can I install it without the rest of teTeX, or discard the rest of teTeX?
/usr/share/texmf directory is only 143Mb, so it's hardly a huge installation even if you don't bother optimising it.
I'm not sure. I installed from an RPM source that doesn't give you a lot of choices. OTOH, my
Completely off topic I know, but a couple of years ago my 11 year old son was banned for a week from the school computer lab after being found using DOS.
The irony is that I used to have to hack my school's computers in order to get a DOS prompt, and nobody said a thing about it...
For a company that can't explain what its own SMTP server is doing, I can't say that this surprises me.
Nobody can explain BT's outgoing SMTP server system. Mail goes in at one end and (usually) comes out at the other, but between these events there is a mysterious lag during which rumour has it it is forwarded several hundred times by non-RFC-compliant store & forward agents until it arrives at its eventual and non-deterministic egress point, from where it is forwarded to a randomly chosen MX for the destination domain.
Unless it's going to hotmail, at which point it just disappears without a trace about 50% of the time.
I left as soon as my 12 month ADSL contract expired. Can you tell?
I just found this post through meta-moderation. It occurred to me that I was moderating a moderation of a post about the moderation of a post about the moderation of another post. This makes it meta-meta-meta-meta-moderation.
But whose GNOME/Linux SW can read every Adobe Acrobat doc as accurately as Adobe's reader, with text searching/copy/paste?
Have you tried using Adobe's reader? I'm sure it will work.
And can create PDF? Without grinding a PIII/800 to its knees?
I use pdflatex (part of the standard teTeX distribution), which runs adequately quickly on a Pentium 133 MMX with 32Mb RAM.
The MSRP of Microsoft Word 2003 is $229. Your number is off by more than 20%. It is trivial to find the standalone application available for a cost drastically lower than MSRP.
In this case, what is the relevance of the MSRP? Market price is what counts. Office XP Small Business Edition sells for approximately the same price as you quote for Word 2003. $280 plus tax gets you Office 2003 SBE. This is new, retail packaged software from a reputable supplier local to me (at today's exchange rates according to xe.com). Why is anyone even interested that the manufacturer is suggesting stores should sell it for $400, when it is available at that price?
IANAL
I don't't think so. The case in question was in Australia. This case is in the US.
I don't know about the US, but I believe the UK has a system where if a question comes up in court that has been settled in other countries but never in the UK, the judge will consider the verdicts of those other countries' courts and whether or not any of the reasoning that was applied in them is suitable for application to the case he is hearing. If the US has such a system, then it is a precedent, albeit not a very good one. The case would be substantially altered by the US constitutional right to free speech, which AFAIK has no equivalent in Australian law (?).
Actually, I've seen some of the data on this. There is evidence that this is actually what happened. The world was in a warm period anyway, and just a little extra CO2 (relatively speaking) may have been enough to tip the balance by causing the release of dissolved methane in the oceans.
The cooling from a volcano's dust is substantially outlived by the warming from its gasses.
Didn't some guy say that we should all stop eating meat so we cull most of the cows so their methane gasses would no longer contribute to greenhouse gasses?
I've not heard that one, although I believe New Zealand briefly considered introducing a sheep tax as one of the few ways they could think of to meet their Kyoto targets.
It's certainly not the first time Vulcanism* has been implicated in a mass extinction - the Deccan Traps, for instance, have been implicated in the KT event that is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 Million Years ago.
I've heard the theory before, although never about the KT event. ISTR Horizon (BBC science documentary series) running an episode about this very theory and the same mass extinction this article is talking about roughly 2-3 years ago.
The URLs always show up in everyone's posts to start with, but they disappear when somebody mods the post up.
UK legal aid doesn't apply to defamation cases
Hmmm. Interesting, I didn't realise that. It seems a little unfair if this guy wouldn't be able to claim it were he in the UK, as he would need the funding as much as somebody who, for instance, was getting divorced (who would be eligible for assistance).
On investigation, it certainly seems you may be correct. The following is from the Legal Aid Funding Code Guidance document, available from here.
Paragraph 1 of the Schedule lists areas of law in relation to which no services
may be funded beyond the provision of general information about the law, the
legal system and the availability of legal services.
[...]
other areas of law excluded by paragraph 1 are: [...] defamation or malicious
falsehood; [...] These are excluded because they are not considered to have sufficient priority to justify public funding. [...] In particular, it is not thought justified to spend public
money helping businessmen who fail to insure against the risk of facing legal
costs."
There is a list of exclusions to these exclusions, but the only one that might apply is "proceedings which have a significant wider public interest". It seems unlikely though.
However, it is worth noting that he really doesn't need representation in the UK. Filing an application for summary judgement on the grounds that there is no case to answer is easy enough that anybody with the competence to complain about spam to their ISP could manage it.
Hmm. Implication from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/ssdataset.as p?vlnk=6339 suggests the generally reported statistic does have factual basis.
Whether "air weapon" includes "Air pistol converted to fire live cartridges" or whether there really are that many crimes committed with pellet guns would be useful information.
I believe these crimes are almost all actually committed with pellet guns. An acquaintance who works for an air gun manufacturer insists that it is almost impossible to make a conversion between the two, and I believe he knows what he is talking about.
Yes, it is ridiculous that air guns are considered 'firearms' by UK law, but they are.
Funny, I have the opposite problem. I'm buying DVDs so that I can delete the videos that are taking up so much space on my HD
DVD-R is a much cheaper solution to that particular problem.
Are you using IBM "Deathstars" or Seagates by chance? I've been using a Western Digital and Maxtor, have had 0 problems. The WD is a 10,000 RPM SATA, and despite the heat it throws off it still works perfectly.
I've had 2 Maxtor 40GBs less than 1 year old fail on me recently, within a week of each other. A third that's in a different machine has recently been throwing the occasional bad sector message into the system log. There's no cooling problems in these machines (oversized case with two case fans and a power supply with a huge through fan stuck under it, I've never seen anything else like it, the cooling system was designed for 8 disc server setups), and power supply seems fine. The third Seagate drive from the machine with the 2 failures has been in there twice as long and is showing no signs of trouble.
I will get 2x 200GB drives for RAID-1
Make sure the drives have different manufacturers. I had two Maxtor drives fail on me almost simultaneously last month, which was an unpleasant experience, to say the least. Any manufacturer could have problems, remember the shit everyone had with IBM drives a couple of years ago?
"but you can never fully rely on them to never fail"
I'd rather say you can fully rely on them to eventually fail. Which is why you need so much space for backups.
I used to be a proponent of disc to disc backups. It's easy and quick and there's no fuss changing discs around all the time. You can even do it over a remote network link if you need a backup in case of fire damage/theft.
Then I had two discs fail almost simultaneously. I'm sure its a manufacturing defect, they were the same model of drive (although purchased from different retailers several months apart from each other), and a third of the same model I have is also starting to fail.
So, if you're doing disc to disc backup, please make sure you're at least using discs from different manufacturers...!