We the authors' guild have found another disturbing trend in literary circles: in certain cities and suburban communities in America, so-called "libraries" actually make books that we worked hard to write available for free to anyone who wants to read them!
If a "library" is allowed to purchase one copy of a book and share it with many people, they will undermine book sales because these people will never buy the book -- depriving hard-working authors of their money.
If you read books from libraries, you support communism.
Re:rebooting will not die, yet. .... Not really
on
No More Rebooting?
·
· Score: 1
Blockquoth the poster:
Also, computers are now 1000 times faster than 10 years ago and they take much more time to boot (DOS did it in seconds on 286).
Back in 1988, I had an 80286 with 640 KB of RAM (Back when it was enough for everybody.:), and I refute that line pointedly. The machine took 30 seconds to POST, for one thing. (It just sat there forever reading "Checking stuck NMI.")
After it actually did start to "load DOS" it took a good 30-60 more seconds. By contrast, the 700 MHz PIII I have today loads win98 in *well* under a minute, from POST to actual keyboard/mouse responsiveness (That is, after its finished loading all 8 or so things that appear in the systray, etc, and is ready to launch more programs).
So, sorry, but with the increase in speed over the last 14 years as I've experienced it, boot times have lessened as well.
90% of crime is intent. Killing somebody isn't always a crime. It can be excused -- accidental vehicular manslaughter, for example. It can be government sanctioned -- in executions, or in times of war.
Killing somebody because they're ugly, now that's a crime.
A DoS attack is "bad" because it is a deliberate assault on a system with the intent of bringing a server down. You send 5,000,000 HTTP requests with absolutely no intention of reading even one of them. Bad dog.
If you had a web monitoring bot or somesuch that went berzerk and pounded a webpage with a million requests, they'd call you an irresponsible idiot, but you wouldn't incur the same wrath as if you had intended to do it.
Likewise, the "Slashdot Effect" is the complete opposite of a DoS attack in intent: A DoS'er tries to force people to not view a website. Slashdot posts links in an effort to promote the viewing of a specific website.
Any (reasonable) court of law (hah!) will see that based on intent, there's a fundamental difference between a DoS attack and a slashdotting.
Unfortunately for your scheme, your friend who would be receiving this encrypted data isn't too good at raw binary data analysis either, I'm guessing. For that matter, neither are you.
If you have a function F(k,m) that takes a key and a message, and returns 'c', a cipher, then you always know c = F(k,m), and m = F'(k,c).
All you have to do is write down 'k' and keep it safe someplace.
However, if you do your algorithm trick, then you're simply applying F(), G(), and/or H() to your message. So now you've done F(k,G(k,H(k,G(k,m)))). Better write down "FGHG" and keep that secret too, or else have fun recovering your data!
Essentially, you've just made the algorithm the key. Keeping this a secret is just as important as keeping your key a secret.
If you're transmitting data to a friend, you originally had to send c and k in order to recover m. (The danger is that someone may intercept k.) Now you need to send c, k, and the algorithm. If someone intercepts the algorithm, you're equally as screwed: they'll just use their attacks on that series of algorithms, which may have known exploitable weaknesses -- especially if you 'modify' the algorithms at each level: such modifications can definitely weaken your algorithm (as shown by the simple choice of the SBoxes in DES).
In Intuit's case, they're trying to be helpful with targetted ads ("If you need a tax program, maybe you need a bank -- try this one") and they're obviously being open about it. Shortcuts on the desktop do not bug me. Highlight - click - drag - delete. (And ideally, this should be lowering the price of the software... fine by me.)
What does bug me is when a program silently installs something named 'cdload.exe' or some other important driver-sounding thing in the background which randomly pops up IE windows every 30 minutes or so, and really confuses the heck out of me (especially when I didn't have IE running in the first place!).
To me, "monkeying around with the computer" really means surreptitiously installing boot-time-start daemons which consume resources and spy/spam/etc actively, not just throw a few links around....
That's the difference between scumware and just selling "sponsored links".
I don't have a degree in physics or anything, so #include<std/disclaimer.h>...
But as I understand it, it isn't particularly useful until the energy created by fusion is greater than the power required to drive the reaction (e.g., its self-sustaining). Do they give any statistics on its self-perpetuability? (Or, for that matter, how much energy was required to set up the fusion reaction?)
Would still be a pretty cool first step to stable fusion though.
(Note: Yes, I know according to thermodynamics you never get more energy out than you put in. However, the fuel itself counts as energy. I'm saying to be useful, the fuel should provide enough energy to fuse up more fuel.)
I'm told that if you'd really like to stick it to The Man, filling the envelope with an ounce or so of sand in a plastic bag works quite well. (Messes up the machines that slice the things open.)
If you ignore the instructions for copying the system from magtape to disk (!), everything else looks very similar to the install notes for most modern unices today....
They tell you to 'cat' files to the printer, 'tar' together items for backup storage, 'sync' before you turn the machine off, and remember to check 'df' regularly to make sure your users don't fill up the disk, and clean out the/tmp directory periodically.
Reading documentation written 30 years ago which almost hasn't changed at all is really a beautiful thing. (Well, some things have changed. During bootup, the 'mem' line reports user-available memory in bytes.:)
Hats off to the developers of a system which is so flexible that hasn't really needed interface changing at all to adapt to 30 years of great changes in computer design and usage!
Sometime between the first and second impacts, when the Magi are programmed by Ritsuko's mother. Then we'll have the three forces of Mother, Woman, and Scientist to rule our entire nation. (If you haven't watched enough Neon Genesis: Evangelion [animefu.com]):)
Did anybody read the debate between Tannenbaum and Torvalds regarding monolithic vs. microkernels?
Two direct quotes from AT:
"5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."
"I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design:-)"
Besides the fact that both AT and LT assumed Hurd would be the GNU kernel, and would eventually subsume both of their OSes, who would get the higher grade nowadays?:)
Look. The data is stored on your computer. On your HARD DRIVE. Even if they encrypt the drive, your memory is zeroed on powerdown. So the keys are either on your harddrive, or readily transferrable to your computer via a network connection, etc.
I don't care how much software or hardware protection is on that system, it can't tell me from "the system" if I feed it the correct bits.
If the keys must be downloaded, you just write a dummy app for linux, plug in an old computer, and download the keys that way.
The you pull out your DRM harddrive, and plug the cable in the back into an old computer. "Obsolete hardware dissapears" you say? I still have an 8088 in the basement. Slow. Inefficient. But it can still read 40-pin IDE cable. Enough to get the job done. And then I'll just read the whole drive in, flip whatever bits I want, and flush the drive back, DRM disabled.
Then I will just plug the drive back in, and the computer won't be able to tell that I disabled it's security.
Remember: You are able to view the material on the harddrive, through some "Trusted" app. (Otherwise, why would it be on your harddrive?) Therefore, at some point, it MUST be decryptable. And no algorithm can't be reproduced, given enough time, on a system not "intended" to run it (DeCSS? SDMI hack? Now DRM-ripping? Why not?)
Sure the old car still "works", you just can't find any gas to run it on!
The thing is though, computers are changing too.
My Pentium-90, which I bought 2 weeks after Win95 debuted, still runs, but I can't buy any new software for it.
Honestly, I think your analysis fails because the computers Win95 was designed for - No USB, limited 3d capabilities, very minor focus on internet, etc - are largely gone. When they stop selling Win95, its not as though your old Win95-based computer will magically stop working, you just can't buy any new software for it. And frankly, I can't buy any new software for that machine anyway.
We all complain when stupid hacks are introduced into to software to support legacy hardware / legacy code / legacy whatever (ISA anyone?),
but when Microsoft cuts out its old hacks to support obsolete hardware, we all cry "monopoly!"
This was win16. Excel is great now, but do you remember how much it sucked before office 95?
Win95 wasn't built in a day, you know.
Win95 development started around, oh, 1993 or so? Meaning he was in charge of the versions of VB and Excel/Office95 and whatnot that debuted concurrently with Win95 -- the same versions you praise.
Re:What the hell is wrong with the Judiciary
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 1
District judges, I believe are appointed. State circuit, appeals, etc judges are elected by the citizens of the municipality. (Terms range from 3 to 10 years I believe.)
So all you new jersey/.'ers out there, please do your part next november:)
This book was genius. Before the internet existed, he conceptualized a version strikingly similar to what we have today. "Newsnets" are exactly like USENET is. Email. Instant Messaging. Anonymous monikers divorced from your real name.
The tablet-computer "desks" in the book had a great deal of functionality we take for granted today, and given that the book was written FAR before these technologies became popular, I think Orson Scott Card was really a visionary.
MIT License "free". As in, that's what MIT software generally is released as. And that's, (imnsho) real freedom, not gpl freedom, as in "free as in speech so long as your opinion agrees with mine."
Uhm, my erector set includes exploded diagrams
which show very nicely which screw goes thru which holes, etc....
Quite easy to follow.
I like legos better, though, because after
you tighten all the bolts and fire up the erector
model whatever, the 6v engine vibrated it to pieces within moments. Legos, on the other hand, could withstand fantastic impacts...
Slashdot Mirror
We the authors' guild have found another disturbing trend in literary circles: in certain cities and suburban communities in America, so-called "libraries" actually make books that we worked hard to write available for free to anyone who wants to read them!
If a "library" is allowed to purchase one copy of a book and share it with many people, they will undermine book sales because these people will never buy the book -- depriving hard-working authors of their money.
If you read books from libraries, you support communism.
Back in 1988, I had an 80286 with 640 KB of RAM (Back when it was enough for everybody.
refute that line pointedly. The machine took 30 seconds to POST, for one thing. (It just sat there forever reading "Checking stuck NMI.")
After it actually did start to "load DOS" it took a good 30-60 more seconds. By contrast, the 700 MHz PIII I have today loads win98 in *well* under a minute, from POST to actual keyboard/mouse responsiveness (That is, after its finished loading all 8 or so things that appear in the systray, etc, and is ready to launch more programs).
So, sorry, but with the increase in speed over the last 14 years as I've experienced it, boot times have lessened as well.
IANAL, #include
90% of crime is intent.
Killing somebody isn't always a crime.
It can be excused -- accidental vehicular manslaughter, for example.
It can be government sanctioned -- in executions, or in times of war.
Killing somebody because they're ugly, now that's a crime.
A DoS attack is "bad" because it is a deliberate assault on a system with the intent of bringing a server down. You send 5,000,000 HTTP requests with absolutely no intention of reading even one of them. Bad dog.
If you had a web monitoring bot or somesuch that went berzerk and pounded a webpage with a million requests, they'd call you an irresponsible idiot, but you wouldn't incur the same wrath as if you had intended to do it.
Likewise, the "Slashdot Effect" is the complete opposite of a DoS attack in intent: A DoS'er tries to force people to not view a website. Slashdot posts links in an effort to promote the viewing of a specific website.
Any (reasonable) court of law (hah!) will see that based on intent, there's a fundamental difference between a DoS attack and a slashdotting.
telnet pop3.concentric.net:110
Anything else, it's feature creep.
I have absolutely no need to plan for a kernel panic
Such famous last words.
Unfortunately for your scheme, your friend who would be receiving this encrypted data isn't too good at raw binary data analysis either, I'm guessing. For that matter, neither are you.
If you have a function F(k,m) that takes a key and a message, and returns 'c', a cipher, then you always know c = F(k,m), and m = F'(k,c).
All you have to do is write down 'k' and keep it safe someplace.
However, if you do your algorithm trick, then you're simply applying F(), G(), and/or H() to your message. So now you've done F(k,G(k,H(k,G(k,m)))). Better write down "FGHG" and keep that secret too, or else have fun recovering your data!
Essentially, you've just made the algorithm the key. Keeping this a secret is just as important as keeping your key a secret.
If you're transmitting data to a friend,
you originally had to send c and k in order to recover m. (The danger is that someone may intercept k.) Now you need to send c, k, and the algorithm. If someone intercepts the algorithm, you're equally as screwed: they'll just use their attacks on that series of algorithms, which may have known exploitable weaknesses -- especially if you 'modify' the algorithms at each level: such modifications can definitely weaken your algorithm (as shown by the simple choice of the SBoxes in DES).
There's a difference, though.
In Intuit's case, they're trying to be helpful with targetted ads ("If you need a tax program, maybe you need a bank -- try this one") and they're obviously being open about it. Shortcuts on the desktop do not bug me. Highlight - click - drag - delete. (And ideally, this should be lowering the price of the software... fine by me.)
What does bug me is when a program silently installs something named 'cdload.exe' or some other important driver-sounding thing in the background which randomly pops up IE windows every 30 minutes or so, and really confuses the heck out of me (especially when I didn't have IE running in the first place!).
To me, "monkeying around with the computer" really means surreptitiously installing boot-time-start daemons which consume resources and spy/spam/etc actively, not just throw a few links around....
That's the difference between scumware and just selling "sponsored links".
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.
are named after stuff from Tolkien lore.
Frodo, Gandolf, Bilbo, etc...
I figure when I run out of names (hah!), I can start using other stuff such as Lothlorien, Moria, etc.
Gotta love J.R.R.
I don't have a degree in physics or anything, so
#include<std/disclaimer.h>...
But as I understand it, it isn't particularly useful until the energy created by fusion is greater than the power required to drive the reaction (e.g., its self-sustaining). Do they give any statistics on its self-perpetuability? (Or, for that matter, how much energy was required to set up the fusion reaction?)
Would still be a pretty cool first step to stable fusion though.
(Note: Yes, I know according to thermodynamics you never get more energy out than you put in. However, the fuel itself counts as energy. I'm saying to be useful, the fuel should provide enough energy to fuse up more fuel.)
I'm told that if you'd really like to stick it to The Man, filling the envelope with an ounce or so of sand in a plastic bag works quite well. (Messes up the machines that slice the things open.)
*Cough*napster*cough....
This case was dismissed because the defendant A) wasn't in california and B) didn't talk to californians, as far as I can see.
Did the kid who wrote DeCSS in another country have any contact with California? (Which is where I thought the DeCSS case was litigated...)
Is there a way that they can use this ruling?
is really amazing.
/tmp directory periodically.
:)
If you ignore the instructions for copying the system from magtape to disk (!), everything else looks very similar to the install notes for most modern unices today....
They tell you to 'cat' files to the printer, 'tar' together items for backup storage, 'sync' before you turn the machine off, and remember to check 'df' regularly to make sure your users don't fill up the disk, and clean out the
Reading documentation written 30 years ago which almost hasn't changed at all is really a beautiful thing. (Well, some things have changed. During bootup, the 'mem' line reports user-available memory in bytes.
Hats off to the developers of a system which is so flexible that hasn't really needed interface changing at all to adapt to 30 years of great changes in computer design and usage!
Sometime between the first and second impacts, when the Magi are programmed by Ritsuko's mother. Then we'll have the three forces of Mother, Woman, and Scientist to rule our entire nation. (If you haven't watched enough Neon Genesis: Evangelion [animefu.com]) :)
With all those peripherals, do you think they could easily co-brand a purple TiVo-branded rack to mount all that equipment in? :)
Blockquoth the Chief Software Architect,
Wouldn't 100% of the things you buy be commercially supported? Or is it just me...?
Did anybody read the debate between Tannenbaum and Torvalds regarding monolithic vs. microkernels?
:-)"
:)
Two direct quotes from AT:
"5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."
"I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
Besides the fact that both AT and LT assumed Hurd would be the GNU kernel, and would eventually subsume both of their OSes, who would get the higher grade nowadays?
I don't see this as a big issue.
Look. The data is stored on your computer. On your HARD DRIVE. Even if they encrypt the drive, your memory is zeroed on powerdown. So the keys are either on your harddrive, or readily transferrable to your computer via a network connection, etc.
I don't care how much software or hardware protection is on that system, it can't tell me from "the system" if I feed it the correct bits.
If the keys must be downloaded, you just write a dummy app for linux, plug in an old computer, and download the keys that way.
The you pull out your DRM harddrive, and plug the cable in the back into an old computer. "Obsolete hardware dissapears" you say? I still have an 8088 in the basement. Slow. Inefficient. But it can still read 40-pin IDE cable. Enough to get the job done. And then I'll just read the whole drive in, flip whatever bits I want, and flush the drive back, DRM disabled.
Then I will just plug the drive back in, and the computer won't be able to tell that I disabled it's security.
Remember: You are able to view the material on the harddrive, through some "Trusted" app. (Otherwise, why would it be on your harddrive?) Therefore, at some point, it MUST be decryptable. And no algorithm can't be reproduced, given enough time, on a system not "intended" to run it (DeCSS? SDMI hack? Now DRM-ripping? Why not?)
Sure the old car still "works", you just can't find any gas to run it on!
The thing is though, computers are changing too.
My Pentium-90, which I bought 2 weeks after Win95 debuted, still runs, but I can't buy any new software for it.
Honestly, I think your analysis fails because the computers Win95 was designed for - No USB, limited 3d capabilities, very minor focus on internet, etc - are largely gone. When they stop selling Win95, its not as though your old Win95-based computer will magically stop working, you just can't buy any new software for it. And frankly, I can't buy any new software for that machine anyway.
We all complain when stupid hacks are introduced into to software to support legacy hardware / legacy code / legacy whatever (ISA anyone?),
but when Microsoft cuts out its old hacks to support obsolete hardware, we all cry "monopoly!"
Seriously....
Win95 wasn't built in a day, you know.
Win95 development started around, oh, 1993 or so? Meaning he was in charge of the versions of VB and Excel/Office95 and whatnot that debuted concurrently with Win95 -- the same versions you praise.
District judges, I believe are appointed. State circuit, appeals, etc judges are elected by the citizens of the municipality. (Terms range from 3 to 10 years I believe.)
/.'ers out there, please do your part next november :)
So all you new jersey
This book was genius. Before the internet existed, he conceptualized a version strikingly similar to what we have today. "Newsnets" are exactly like USENET is. Email. Instant Messaging. Anonymous monikers divorced from your real name.
The tablet-computer "desks" in the book had a great deal of functionality we take for granted today, and given that the book was written FAR before these technologies became popular, I think Orson Scott Card was really a visionary.
MIT License "free". As in, that's what MIT software generally is released as. And that's, (imnsho) real freedom, not gpl freedom, as in "free as in speech so long as your opinion agrees with mine."
Uhm, my erector set includes exploded diagrams
which show very nicely which screw goes thru which holes, etc....
Quite easy to follow.
I like legos better, though, because after
you tighten all the bolts and fire up the erector
model whatever, the 6v engine vibrated it to pieces within moments. Legos, on the other hand, could withstand fantastic impacts...