"For example, IBM could set up an open wireless network with the SSID 'ibm.com.' When you connect, our access point would send down a digital certificate for 'ibm.com,' and your wireless client would establish an encrypted connection with us, knowing that because the name in the certificate is the same as the SSID, the network you are connecting to must be run by IBM.
For serious? Because the SSID is ibm.com and that matches the certificate, you know its run by IBM? Isn't it more than possible to to simply name your SSID whatever the hell you want (i.e. ibm.com) and relatively easy to obtain the digital certificate to match? Simply by connecting to a real ibm.com served AP. That's prevented on the Internet because typing in www.ibm.com directs you to ibm.com, presuming your DNS can be trusted. But WiFi SSID? Absolutely nothing certifies that "ibm.com", as an SSID, directs to anything run by IBM, in any way. And unless they are using some different system of certificate management, obtaining the public digital certificate is trivially easy. All this will do is make it look like untrustworthy APs are trustworthy. And that is very bad.
Is there any way at all in which such a system gives anything but the illusion of security?
The source actually says both users and visitors. I remember G+ had 10 million registered users a few weeks ago, so it could be 25 million users, but its much more likely visitors. Yeah, the article writer is sloppy. Probably no idea what he is talking about.
Whoever it was, they put a lot of work into it. If you visit there webpage, you can see "articles", contact info (all generic email addresses. Telling, but not proof in any way) and bios for the personal working there (all faked, apparently). It would be difficult on first blush to tell that it was a fake. Even the name is well chosen (Aptitude Quantification). Maybe it was some kind of college psychology project? A masters thesis, even. Enough work went into it that I suspect there was something beyond "for teh lulz!" here.
Speaking of which, here is the "retraction's" print page. Looks pretty sad and pitiful as a "story" when viewed that way. Oh, and here is the actual original story. The BBC is pretty cool, no need for its print page IMO.
You think the movie industry wants you to actually watch their movies? No, they only want you to buy them. Watching it would only make you realize how shitty the movie is, resulting in you not buying more movies, and therefore can safely be made illegal. After all, it would hurt the industry.
Who else has the ability to put something this massive together?
Judging from Stuxnet, I'd say the US and Israel at least. The Russians, almost certainly. Or hell, considering that they stole mostly industrial information (according to TFA), just about any company. Actually, its probably an underground cracking organization that contracts out to companies to get the information. Maybe funded by China, but it's most likely government independent. Governments rarely operate on that kind of scale illegally, especially against commercial targets. Too much risk of backlash should it be traced back to them. And I would be shocked if such organizations didn't exist.
Exactly. Take food production. A few hundred years ago it took most of humanity most of their time and land to produce bare subsistence level of food. Exact figures from Wikipedia: in 1870, 70-80% of the US population was employed by agriculture. Now, its 2-3 percent (lots of ancillary jobs, or course, lets say its 7% counting tractor production etc.). Source.And we not only feed our people (overfeed in most cases, with a lot of waste) we also export food. I'm not saying such things can happen in every area, nor that that rate is going to sustain itself forever (although hydroponics is an untouched field that has potentially near infinite yield. Actually infinite if we expand into space.) Humans will expand for quite a while yet.
You can't very well switch to a stable, none-expanding economy while its still expanding, and we have no idea what the face of technology will look like when we reach that point, so even speculating is just that, speculation (Star Trek, I'm looking straight at you). Warnings are good: humanity should be aware that as a culture the issues should be discussed and speculated over. But it is most certainly not the pressing issue many of these scientists often claim that it is.
I always thought the best method of getting out of infinite loops was to not have infinite loops. Everybody loves watchdogs and timers but they would be a reactive fix rather than a proactive fix.
I always thought the best method of getting out of infinite loops was to not have infinite loops. Everybody loves watchdogs and timers but they would be a reactive fix rather than a proactive fix.
Except they don't rebroadcast to multiple customers at the same time. For each person watching the DVD at a time, Zediva has one copy and one DVD player. Its almost identical to renting the physical copy of the movie, but without actually sending them the disc itself. So its nothing like broadcasting, except it occurs at a distance.
Its a Bothan who lives in the Gulf of Bothnia. Which is where this was found. Which is why it's doubly funny. Triply since it seems to have whooshed all of/. Despite the fact that at least 3 people have made this exact joke.
Ah, wasn't actually expecting someone to take up the exercise. But since you did, I feel it necessary to point out that calculating from an inscribed square is not the most efficient packing configuration for circles. Hexagons take up more area of a circle, and can also regularly tessellate or tile a surface. (We want regular tiling since all our circles are, presumably, of the same size. In fact they won't be, but...). So, while your figure is probably more realistic, technically you could do it more efficiently. Oh, and I assume you meant "km" wherever you wrote "m"
Incidentally, the area of the hexagon is pretty easy to calculate. The edge length of the hexagon equals the radius of the circle, and the area of a hexagon = ~2.6*t^2. So the area would be 26,000km^2, or about 30% larger than the square inscribed in the same circle. Using your figures, that gives us a total of 379 routers for full coverage. Again, it'd be a lot more... but just thought I'd be a math nazi and point this out.
Of course, you can buy uranium on Amazon, though I wouldn't doubt if they had some sort of check in place if you try to buy more than a calibration amount.
Holy shit I did not know that. Thanks for pointing that out, more or less made my day. I'm a bit confused why they sell uranium on Amazon, but hey, thats still pretty awesome. Incidentally, some of the reviews for it are amusing. As are the "customers who bought this also bought".
Actually, the reason I said it was because the fuel generally used in nuclear reactors (U-238) can't explode, even if you deliberately tried designing it to. It's simply too stable. Although it can produce material that will explode (i.e. plutonium), without extracting it there isn't enough to achieve that kind of criticality. Hence, Iran spending vast amounts of money on centrifuges for enrichment. I believe that is true for most kinds of nuclear material. No idea what kind this kid had, but unless it was Plutonium or U-235 (or similar, which I'm guessing is a little unlikely), it simply won't explode.
Now, by "explode" I mean the massive, kiloton-yield, mushroom-cloud forming kind. It certainly could... get out of hand, maybe even make a nice little fireball and vaporize a large section of the surrounding area. Wouldn't even level a whole block, probably, though the fire might. Of course, you might wish it did just level a block, once the radioactive material spreads. In other words: seriously, don't try this at home.
Exactly. The message has to be freely readable by any Telex routers, so presumably it has to be a fairly well known and distributed system (you can't just communicate with one router, since you don't know exactly how it'll be routed). Ideally, you could prevent the sale of Telex routers to that country, which might slow it down a bit, and presumably using the wonders of asymmetrical crypto the user software wouldn't be enough to decode the routing message. So it could work, but only in a pretty limited way.
The basic idea seems interesting, though, as it would render the network itself a proxy, rather than routing through a single machine. Be really cool if there was a way to do this so that even knowing the exact details of the system, the host government couldn't stop the message, much as public key crypto can't* be broken even knowing the public key. Don't know if that would be possible, though.
*In the time before the end of the universe, anyways.
Senate Bill 54 is dubbed the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act, which aims to fight inappropriate contact between students and teachers, including protecting children from sexual misconduct by their educators. It is named after a Missouri public school student who was repeatedly molested by a teacher several decades ago.
Not only no friending on Facebook, BTW. It doesn't allow "social networking" contact through any means (i.e. IMing), although it does seem to have an exception for work-related websites (i.e. school-monitored), and it only seems to include networking websites (which is odd). What, exactly, is this law supposed to achieve? No teacher looking to molest a kid is going to care if they are breaking this law, and it's easy enough to avoid being caught. And teachers, who have close contact with their students every day, don't need social networks to communicate. The whole thing looks like a "look! We're doing something to protect your kids! Vote for us!" Someone should point out how most students also have small, portable, real time voice communication devices called "cell phones". Oh, and texting. Don't believe that does anything about that either. Oh! Almost forgot "email" (The language specifically mentions "website"). In fact, it looks like it only impedes students and teachers who are actually, you know, friends. Which can and does happen.
Apparently, they did, but not any more. But I don't really see this as being an issue. All of them are only collecting information about wireless devices functioning as access points. That information has been gathered through "cloudsourcing" for years. I remember seeing a site with that information listed about 2-3 years ago, although in retrospect I'm not sure if it listed MAC addresses or not. Point is, the information is absolutely and in no way or means private. You publicly broadcast your MAC address merely by having WiFi on, and the address need to be recorded for WiFi to even work. Total non-issue with MS, Google, et al. collecting it. Maybe the MAC shouldn't be public, but it isn't any more. End of story. MS and Google did what they should.
"Created a market"? No, the market existed before Apple ever touched it. Ever heard of the Blackberry? Technology improved, which is what allowed for the modern smartphone. That is what created the market. Apple just happened to be near the leading edge, and their massive PR ability allowed them to push the iPhone so that everyone and their mum wanted one. Without Apple, smartphones where going to happen anyways. Might have taken a bit longer, is all. Apple did a good job, and I admit that, as much as I hate them. And even if Apple single-handedly invented a market where none existed before, competition is how the free market works. It made smartphones better, yes, including the iPhone. Without the intense competition the iPhone would be far less advanced than it is now.
Now tablets on the other hand IMO don't have an actual market: people bought them because Apple made them. Fans though anything Apple made had to be good and worthwhile, so we should buy the iPad. And then occasionally take it out to play with it and justify its existence. Probably about 5% of people who bought a tablet of any sort can actually justify it over an actual laptop. Tablet PCs existed long before the iPad. Very few people bought them because very few people need a ~10 inch device thats not a laptop. And very few people still do, except as a toy. And I include the Galaxy Tab on this list. The EEE Transformer, OTOH, looks like it can do everything both tablets and laptops do, and therefore is actually a useful device generally.
Re:#1: They can solve that problem by copying Opera (more). In opera, I can set any search I want to a keyword of any length. So, for instance "g opera" does a Google search for "opera", while "w opera" does a Wikipedia search (not by default, but insanely easy to customize). "gs opera" does an SSL Google search, etc. You can even set up customized searches this way. For instance, you could make a Newegg search that orders by price. Inputting no keyword does default engine. Also addresses #2. Not sure why Firefox hasn't copied this yet (likely it would confuse many users, I guess), it's literally one of the most awesome features I've seen in a browser. I suppose you could code the system to deal with #3 too, although it'd be a little odd (replacing the address should alter the current tab).
Well, first off, I'm assuming that you just took the US land area (in sq miles) and divided by 12,000. Unfortunately, the areas are circles, not squares, so you need overlap in order to cover all land area. (fitting circles edge to edge leaves ~22% of the area uncovered.) I have no idea how many extra stations you would really need, and no time/ immediate desire to calculate it, but it would probably be at least 30-40% more, at a quick guess. Not counting for terrain. (the problem of the most efficient way to cover a square area with circles is left as an exercise to the reader.)
More importantly, though, the throughput on these is ~22Mbps, shared among all users of that station. So, you either have many, many more stations, or just very few users, as you said. So, it'll never replace other systems, but it could be useful for government work (search and rescue, park rangers, and of course the military) or people who live way, way outside civilization and can't get satellite systems.
Slashdot Mirror
So every time you click on a non-malware site, then.... what?
your computer gives you an orgasm.
Wait, don't porn sites generally have the most malware?
"For example, IBM could set up an open wireless network with the SSID 'ibm.com.' When you connect, our access point would send down a digital certificate for 'ibm.com,' and your wireless client would establish an encrypted connection with us, knowing that because the name in the certificate is the same as the SSID, the network you are connecting to must be run by IBM.
For serious? Because the SSID is ibm.com and that matches the certificate, you know its run by IBM? Isn't it more than possible to to simply name your SSID whatever the hell you want (i.e. ibm.com) and relatively easy to obtain the digital certificate to match? Simply by connecting to a real ibm.com served AP. That's prevented on the Internet because typing in www.ibm.com directs you to ibm.com, presuming your DNS can be trusted. But WiFi SSID? Absolutely nothing certifies that "ibm.com", as an SSID, directs to anything run by IBM, in any way. And unless they are using some different system of certificate management, obtaining the public digital certificate is trivially easy. All this will do is make it look like untrustworthy APs are trustworthy. And that is very bad.
Is there any way at all in which such a system gives anything but the illusion of security?
The source actually says both users and visitors. I remember G+ had 10 million registered users a few weeks ago, so it could be 25 million users, but its much more likely visitors. Yeah, the article writer is sloppy. Probably no idea what he is talking about.
Whoever it was, they put a lot of work into it. If you visit there webpage, you can see "articles", contact info (all generic email addresses. Telling, but not proof in any way) and bios for the personal working there (all faked, apparently). It would be difficult on first blush to tell that it was a fake. Even the name is well chosen (Aptitude Quantification). Maybe it was some kind of college psychology project? A masters thesis, even. Enough work went into it that I suspect there was something beyond "for teh lulz!" here.
Speaking of which, here is the "retraction's" print page. Looks pretty sad and pitiful as a "story" when viewed that way. Oh, and here is the actual original story. The BBC is pretty cool, no need for its print page IMO.
You think the movie industry wants you to actually watch their movies? No, they only want you to buy them. Watching it would only make you realize how shitty the movie is, resulting in you not buying more movies, and therefore can safely be made illegal. After all, it would hurt the industry.
Who else has the ability to put something this massive together?
Judging from Stuxnet, I'd say the US and Israel at least. The Russians, almost certainly. Or hell, considering that they stole mostly industrial information (according to TFA), just about any company. Actually, its probably an underground cracking organization that contracts out to companies to get the information. Maybe funded by China, but it's most likely government independent. Governments rarely operate on that kind of scale illegally, especially against commercial targets. Too much risk of backlash should it be traced back to them. And I would be shocked if such organizations didn't exist.
A vulnerability we should have to deal with no longer!
Sincerely, The Year of Linux on the residential exterior
This is /. I'm guessing most people here already don't have windows. Basements rarely do.
Exactly. Take food production. A few hundred years ago it took most of humanity most of their time and land to produce bare subsistence level of food. Exact figures from Wikipedia: in 1870, 70-80% of the US population was employed by agriculture. Now, its 2-3 percent (lots of ancillary jobs, or course, lets say its 7% counting tractor production etc.). Source.And we not only feed our people (overfeed in most cases, with a lot of waste) we also export food. I'm not saying such things can happen in every area, nor that that rate is going to sustain itself forever (although hydroponics is an untouched field that has potentially near infinite yield. Actually infinite if we expand into space.) Humans will expand for quite a while yet.
You can't very well switch to a stable, none-expanding economy while its still expanding, and we have no idea what the face of technology will look like when we reach that point, so even speculating is just that, speculation (Star Trek, I'm looking straight at you). Warnings are good: humanity should be aware that as a culture the issues should be discussed and speculated over. But it is most certainly not the pressing issue many of these scientists often claim that it is.
I always thought the best method of getting out of infinite loops was to not have infinite loops. Everybody loves watchdogs and timers but they would be a reactive fix rather than a proactive fix.
I always thought the best method of getting out of infinite loops was to not have infinite loops. Everybody loves watchdogs and timers but they would be a reactive fix rather than a proactive fix.
Except they don't rebroadcast to multiple customers at the same time. For each person watching the DVD at a time, Zediva has one copy and one DVD player. Its almost identical to renting the physical copy of the movie, but without actually sending them the disc itself. So its nothing like broadcasting, except it occurs at a distance.
Its a Bothan who lives in the Gulf of Bothnia. Which is where this was found. Which is why it's doubly funny. Triply since it seems to have whooshed all of /. Despite the fact that at least 3 people have made this exact joke.
Ah, wasn't actually expecting someone to take up the exercise. But since you did, I feel it necessary to point out that calculating from an inscribed square is not the most efficient packing configuration for circles. Hexagons take up more area of a circle, and can also regularly tessellate or tile a surface. (We want regular tiling since all our circles are, presumably, of the same size. In fact they won't be, but...). So, while your figure is probably more realistic, technically you could do it more efficiently. Oh, and I assume you meant "km" wherever you wrote "m"
Incidentally, the area of the hexagon is pretty easy to calculate. The edge length of the hexagon equals the radius of the circle, and the area of a hexagon = ~2.6*t^2. So the area would be 26,000km^2, or about 30% larger than the square inscribed in the same circle. Using your figures, that gives us a total of 379 routers for full coverage. Again, it'd be a lot more... but just thought I'd be a math nazi and point this out.
Of course, you can buy uranium on Amazon, though I wouldn't doubt if they had some sort of check in place if you try to buy more than a calibration amount.
Holy shit I did not know that. Thanks for pointing that out, more or less made my day. I'm a bit confused why they sell uranium on Amazon, but hey, thats still pretty awesome. Incidentally, some of the reviews for it are amusing. As are the "customers who bought this also bought".
Actually, the reason I said it was because the fuel generally used in nuclear reactors (U-238) can't explode, even if you deliberately tried designing it to. It's simply too stable. Although it can produce material that will explode (i.e. plutonium), without extracting it there isn't enough to achieve that kind of criticality. Hence, Iran spending vast amounts of money on centrifuges for enrichment. I believe that is true for most kinds of nuclear material. No idea what kind this kid had, but unless it was Plutonium or U-235 (or similar, which I'm guessing is a little unlikely), it simply won't explode.
Now, by "explode" I mean the massive, kiloton-yield, mushroom-cloud forming kind. It certainly could... get out of hand, maybe even make a nice little fireball and vaporize a large section of the surrounding area. Wouldn't even level a whole block, probably, though the fire might. Of course, you might wish it did just level a block, once the radioactive material spreads. In other words: seriously, don't try this at home.
Exactly. The message has to be freely readable by any Telex routers, so presumably it has to be a fairly well known and distributed system (you can't just communicate with one router, since you don't know exactly how it'll be routed). Ideally, you could prevent the sale of Telex routers to that country, which might slow it down a bit, and presumably using the wonders of asymmetrical crypto the user software wouldn't be enough to decode the routing message. So it could work, but only in a pretty limited way.
The basic idea seems interesting, though, as it would render the network itself a proxy, rather than routing through a single machine. Be really cool if there was a way to do this so that even knowing the exact details of the system, the host government couldn't stop the message, much as public key crypto can't* be broken even knowing the public key. Don't know if that would be possible, though.
*In the time before the end of the universe, anyways.
Senate Bill 54 is dubbed the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act, which aims to fight inappropriate contact between students and teachers, including protecting children from sexual misconduct by their educators. It is named after a Missouri public school student who was repeatedly molested by a teacher several decades ago.
Not only no friending on Facebook, BTW. It doesn't allow "social networking" contact through any means (i.e. IMing), although it does seem to have an exception for work-related websites (i.e. school-monitored), and it only seems to include networking websites (which is odd). What, exactly, is this law supposed to achieve? No teacher looking to molest a kid is going to care if they are breaking this law, and it's easy enough to avoid being caught. And teachers, who have close contact with their students every day, don't need social networks to communicate. The whole thing looks like a "look! We're doing something to protect your kids! Vote for us!" Someone should point out how most students also have small, portable, real time voice communication devices called "cell phones". Oh, and texting. Don't believe that does anything about that either. Oh! Almost forgot "email" (The language specifically mentions "website"). In fact, it looks like it only impedes students and teachers who are actually, you know, friends. Which can and does happen.
Apparently, they did, but not any more. But I don't really see this as being an issue. All of them are only collecting information about wireless devices functioning as access points. That information has been gathered through "cloudsourcing" for years. I remember seeing a site with that information listed about 2-3 years ago, although in retrospect I'm not sure if it listed MAC addresses or not. Point is, the information is absolutely and in no way or means private. You publicly broadcast your MAC address merely by having WiFi on, and the address need to be recorded for WiFi to even work. Total non-issue with MS, Google, et al. collecting it. Maybe the MAC shouldn't be public, but it isn't any more. End of story. MS and Google did what they should.
Well, a nuclear reactor potentially adds a whole new meaning to "there goes the neighborhood".
P.S.Namely, there it goes in a cloud of radioactivity.I know nuclear reactors generally can't explode.
"Created a market"? No, the market existed before Apple ever touched it. Ever heard of the Blackberry? Technology improved, which is what allowed for the modern smartphone. That is what created the market. Apple just happened to be near the leading edge, and their massive PR ability allowed them to push the iPhone so that everyone and their mum wanted one. Without Apple, smartphones where going to happen anyways. Might have taken a bit longer, is all. Apple did a good job, and I admit that, as much as I hate them. And even if Apple single-handedly invented a market where none existed before, competition is how the free market works. It made smartphones better, yes, including the iPhone. Without the intense competition the iPhone would be far less advanced than it is now.
Now tablets on the other hand IMO don't have an actual market: people bought them because Apple made them. Fans though anything Apple made had to be good and worthwhile, so we should buy the iPad. And then occasionally take it out to play with it and justify its existence. Probably about 5% of people who bought a tablet of any sort can actually justify it over an actual laptop. Tablet PCs existed long before the iPad. Very few people bought them because very few people need a ~10 inch device thats not a laptop. And very few people still do, except as a toy. And I include the Galaxy Tab on this list. The EEE Transformer, OTOH, looks like it can do everything both tablets and laptops do, and therefore is actually a useful device generally.
Re:#1: They can solve that problem by copying Opera (more). In opera, I can set any search I want to a keyword of any length. So, for instance "g opera" does a Google search for "opera", while "w opera" does a Wikipedia search (not by default, but insanely easy to customize). "gs opera" does an SSL Google search, etc. You can even set up customized searches this way. For instance, you could make a Newegg search that orders by price. Inputting no keyword does default engine. Also addresses #2. Not sure why Firefox hasn't copied this yet (likely it would confuse many users, I guess), it's literally one of the most awesome features I've seen in a browser. I suppose you could code the system to deal with #3 too, although it'd be a little odd (replacing the address should alter the current tab).
So, when can I download my free car from TPB?
Well, first off, I'm assuming that you just took the US land area (in sq miles) and divided by 12,000. Unfortunately, the areas are circles, not squares, so you need overlap in order to cover all land area. (fitting circles edge to edge leaves ~22% of the area uncovered.) I have no idea how many extra stations you would really need, and no time/ immediate desire to calculate it, but it would probably be at least 30-40% more, at a quick guess. Not counting for terrain. (the problem of the most efficient way to cover a square area with circles is left as an exercise to the reader.)
More importantly, though, the throughput on these is ~22Mbps, shared among all users of that station. So, you either have many, many more stations, or just very few users, as you said. So, it'll never replace other systems, but it could be useful for government work (search and rescue, park rangers, and of course the military) or people who live way, way outside civilization and can't get satellite systems.
Rosie Huntington-Whitely isn't in Transformers 3 for her acting skills.
Really? I'm pretty sure simply being alive counts as good acting for that series. And yes, I am including plants.
Its okay. I fully expect a group, such as RELOADED, to make a single-player "mod" anyways. Look for it on TPB or similar sites.