firstly the MPAA's hold (or lack thereof) on the UK government is totally irrelevant, as over here in the UK we have an independant judiciary.
Although the Lord Chancellor appoints senior judges and sits in the cabinet (for the Americans out there: think of him as a presidential advisor + senator rolled into one), these are NOT political appointments.
Judges are expected to have no political affiliations (famously a judge who was an Amnesty International member was removed from a case about Pinochet's extradition) and certainly not to allow their opinions to influence their decisions.
This is completely unlike for example in the US where Bush can freely appoint Republican anti-abortionists to the Supreme Court.
Another difference is that the government does not interfere in judicial decisions. There is a huge outcry at the moment after the Home Office Minister told criminal judges to give higher sentences... even that was considered unwarranted interference.
As easyCinema's case against companies concerned: not supplying top films to a distributor could be considered anti-competitive and could well be in breach of both EU and UK competition law. I am not an expert in this area but it certainly looks to me like a good case could be made.
Especially as Warner run one of the biggest chains of cinemas in the UK...
I think a better analogy is those "profesional thieves" paid (lots) by banks to show how their bank could be broken into.
Security, whether real-life or online, is all about knowledge. If you dont know the weaknesses in your system you simply cannot protect it.
As such crackers as well as hackers should be encouraged and protected by law if and when they are acting ethically.
For example it is not illegal to break into a computer system you have been authorised to break into. Remember the crime isnt "hacking" it is "unauthorised access to a computer system."
As such an individual, corporation or government body could offer money to a person (known or unknown) to attempt to break into their system in exchange for knowledge of that systems weaknesses. White-hat hacking.
Under current law it would be illegal for that same person to break in and then offer the information, or even to break in and give the information freely.
The same goes for computer software. For all we know the latest version of Windows could have a bug so destructive that Osama et al. wouldnt need a bomb to bring America to its knees. It would, however, be illegal to try to find such a bug whatever your intentions, without the authorisation of Microsoft (which you wont get).
As such, we have a lack of knowledge about the weaknesses of the software, and only those who are willing to commit illegal acts, or who live in countries where the law isnt enforced in quite the same way, are able to obtain such knowledge.
This is a big argument in favour of free software such as the Linux operating system. As we can, legally, check or search for bugs and weaknesses, the software is made stronger and stronger. Hence the interest of many governments around the world in the open source movement.
sometimes people want to do something just because they can, just to see if they can.
why do I go rock climbing? to see if I can, to stretch my body to its limits, to conquer the rockface.
why might I want to change the IEMI number on my mobile phone? to see if I can, to stretch my mind to its limits, to conquer the interface.
reprogramming a mobile phone is a good exercise for computer science / electrical engineering students. people should be allowed to do such things for educational/recreational purposes.
as has already been stated there are laws against misappropriating telephone serices.
modifying a phones IEMI number for an illegal purpose is already illegal, so illegalising the act of modifying an IEMI number only restricts those who have no illegal intention.
the problem is that there are very few people in this world who will actually wish to modify their IEMI number for a legal purpose. democracy will "win out" and their freedom will be restricted in the name of the masses who cannot see a reason to allow IEMI modification.
I don't know about the US law, but in the UK that would come under the Criminal Attempts Act 1981. Anything that is 'more than merely preparatory' to the commission of a crime is potentially caught.
The mere buying of a shotgun with the requisite intention would probably be enough, but walking to the house would make all doubt disappear. Not that any good lawyer couldn't get you off the hook if it ever came to court.
If the documents are already shredded, eg: the court asks for them on day 92 and you can prove the shredding was done on schedule and in accordance with an open policy, then you will almost certainly get away with it.
If the court asks for the documents before the shredding date, even if they ask the day before (and it will generally be fairly obvious they are about to ask), then you will be in contempt of court if they are shredded nonetheless. It would be negligent to *allow* them to be shredded.
Finally we have to remember that documents are kept for good reasons. They are often needed long after they are produced and ongoing relationships with another company (eg: Andersen with Enron) is a clear case where this will be the case (you never really know when you will need to see last years accounts to check a detail in todays).
It is also in companies like Andersen and in their employees and directors' interests to keep many document to save their backs in potential litigation. You need to be able to prove exactly who gave what authority for what decision when. If you can't then you can get screwed over at any stage.
Accountability works both ways. The documents can be your best friends or your worst enemies, and you will rarely know which until something blows up in your face. This is why last minute shredding occured at Andersen (although as Enron's auditors they ought to have known it was about to go into meltdown...).
A company is generally held responsible for the acts of its employees done in the course of their employment. Whether the acts are negiligent, illegal or immoral the employer is considered responsible.
How far the courts will be willing to take it in this case I do not know (I mean do they really want to take Andersen down in the flames of Enron?).
expensive to do, but think of the profit you could make:
1) getting museums/restaurants/clubs/schools to PAY you to send their logo covered 'souvenirs' into space;
2) selling your own products when they come back down "Authentic meatball lapel pin has spent >24h in actual, real, genuine space"....
NASA may make some weird decisions about which projects to fund and which to ditch overboard, but sometimes they have good business sense (either that or they are learning from the nouveau riche capitalists in Russia who are pumping their space program for all it is worth...
Wake up! You should be *happy* they are doing these searches. They are protecting you
I'm sorry but there is a limit where reasonable protection of your right to the free enjoyment of life encroaches on your other liberties.
Efforts to prevent terrorism are quite certainly valid as a form of protection of your liberties: you can't enjoy freedom of speech when you are dead, but any encroachment of your liberties must be justified, it must be reasonable, and must be the minimum encroachment on your rights that is required to achieve the objective or protecting said rights.
That is the OFFICIAL legal situation in the United Kingdom under the Human Rights Act 1998. It is also why Jack Straw's talk of derogating from the Human Rights Act in order to pass anti-terror legislation is idiotic: there is no need to do so as limits to rights are allowed by the act.
Although I do not know the legal situation in America, I feel that this is well thought out theoretical standpoint. I am willing to accept that certain rights, for eg: right to privacy, are infringed, if and only if this is necessary, and the minimum necessary infringement, to protect my life and liberties more generally.
Again however, I am not and would not be willing to submit to random searches that will have no effect on protecting my freedom and my life but merely encroach thereon in an unnecessary manner.
IANAL yet, but am studying law and will be in 2 years.
Actual if it isn't in the terms of your contract that you will submit to such a breach of your personal liberties they would NOT have a right to fire you.
how about:
100000=100^2
my compressed data reads: 100
the decompressor original=data^2
with larger numbers you probably make larger savings, especially if you can use squares.
Change my original post to read any number can be defined as n=a^2 + b. It is still true and for small (yet still huge) files ie: 100KB-1MB, you make massive savings.
Again though it works as a one off compression for a given data set. And again, I'm no mathematician and not exceptionally talented computer-wise: I could be completely wrong.
the contest was not to be able to compress random data, but to compress a specific file of random data: original.dat
take the binary expression of original.dat, preferably choosing a small value, convert it into decimal, find the values a, b, and c. Save them as seperate files, or as different lines in a single file. Decompress. Collect $5000
It is not elegant, does not work for large files (I'd hate to try to find a, b, and c for a 5MB+ file), but given the time to look at and analyse the data file, it would work.
I'm not an expert on compression algorithms or anything related to computer science for that matter but you can easily 'compress' any arbitrary set of data.
Any data file can be expressed in binary form as a number. This number can be defined as n=a*b+c. Where c is 1 in the case of prime numbers and 0 otherwise.
The challenge could be won by choosing a relatively small data file (say 1MB), and finding a, b, and c. A lengthy process, but not a difficult one.
All the decompresser has to do is multiply files a and b, and add c.
This might be slightly pedantic but the article wondered whether 3G would ever hit Europe, now I'm not all that good at geography but I thought the Isle of Man, as part of the British Isles was actually in Europe.
As any economist could tell you the market doesn't always do the rational thing, which in this case would seem to be to switch to Ogg Vorbis encoding of audio data. The term mp3 is so well known, largely as a result of the publicity surrounding the Napster v. RIAA case, that everyone understands that it means "illegally copied music spread by evil hackers across the internet" and everybody wants some. Putting MP3 on the box makes everyone pick up on it and think "Hey I can get free music!" You could probably sell a processor by pointing out it was MP3 compatible, heck you might even get away with it on the box of a graphics card.
Ogg Vorbis doesn't have this affect. Whilst it could easily be cheaper (for commercial entreprises) and even, perhaps, a superior encoding format, it will probably not succeed in breaking the market so dominated by mp3. Newbies who have just figured out they can use their PCs to play music will run searches for "Limp Bizkit MP3", not "Beethoven Ogg Vorbis". Just because that is what they have heard of.
Its funny, they put a couple of his email addresses in that article. I wonder how much fanmail and spam he picks up from jail??
Surely its illegal to publish other people's addresses in this way, especially those of soon-be-convicted-but-none-the-less-innocent-until -proven-guilty spies... I mean he's practically a celebrity
Isn't it ironic that one of the crimes of this Hanssen guy is to have betrayed double agents in Russia.
I just wonder how the Feds found out about him? Did a Russian double agent reveal the double-crossing American double agent? And what will happen when another US double agent reveals the name of the Russian double agent?
People are willing to believe it, despite any logic and the complete lack of evidence of what badastronomy call Hoax Believers for two simple reasons: firstly they find it hard enough to picture a working space mission to the moon now, let alone in the late 60s early 70s. Admit it, there is something 'unreal' about the moon. The laws of physics that we are so used to on Earth, only apply in weird ways. Gravity isn't 'right' and all that. People find it hard to get their heads around.
The second reason is the US government had good reasons to want to fake a moon landing, and we've been lied to often enough before. The basic premise of the Hoax Believers, is that the US was 'losing' the 'space race' and needed a victory over the Soviets to bolster capitalism and the American Way. If they stopped there rather than present phony evidence, I might be tempted to have my doubts: it does sound possible. And governments have lied to us so many times in the past. I would say especially the US government but I think that the Russian, British, Israeli, and many others are equally bad. Face it, when they feel the need to individual politicians and governments in general, democratic or otherwise are quite happy to lie through their teeth.
Fair enough I say, but it does give credence to conspiracy theories as whacky as this one.
The question is: will the preference for a good service win out. I would prefer an ISP that gave excellent service, sending a man out to fix my email troubles if I couldn't and they couldn't explain it over the phone. Such services just aren't available through large corporations who lay off tech-support personnel to save money, and only hire under-trained techs anyway.
A well run small business could service a small community far more efficiently, though to make a living from it would be very hard. At $20 a month, how many customers do you need per employee? It would almost certainly have to be combined with some other form of employment: software development for example, and unfortunately that would almost certainly have to be closed source....
If indie ISPs just aren't profitable anymore, they will die out. Very quickly. Either through selling out to make ends meet, through out and out bankruptcy, or through slowly lagging more and more behind in the the hardware stakes.
The only possibility I see for life after death is for individuals with very powerful computers and quick connections (being used for some other activity or job), allowing a small number of accounts on the machine to supplement their income. I would love a T1 to myself, but even if I could afford one, I wouldn't use up its capacity and could easily pass some on by allowing cheap or even free dial up accounts to friends and family.
Also what about co-operative style ISPs. A bunch of geeks getting together to purchase a shared T1? Possible or not?
The wasps started out as a single species, but the infected ones can only reproduce with other infected wasps. Slowly a split will emerge, hence speciation.
With humans this would work in a similar way. Given the hypothetical that say coloured people everywhere became infected with a Wolbachia variant, they would no longer be able to reproduce outside the group of infected persons (their genetic code needing decrypting in the article's somewhat ridiculous analogy).
The race!=species relationship is of no importance here, the infected group could just as easily be 'French people' or 'people with blonde hair' or 'micro$oft coders', any hypthetical infection would prevent "breeding" outside of the group and slowly, over a period of possibly hundreds of generations, the French would emerge as a distinct race their genetic code having evolved in a fork from the path followed by the rest of humanity.
Perhaps this could be a way for them to save their precious culture from Americanization....
Slashdot Mirror
As a UK lawyer I have a few points to make:
firstly the MPAA's hold (or lack thereof) on the UK government is totally irrelevant, as over here in the UK we have an independant judiciary.
Although the Lord Chancellor appoints senior judges and sits in the cabinet (for the Americans out there: think of him as a presidential advisor + senator rolled into one), these are NOT political appointments.
Judges are expected to have no political affiliations (famously a judge who was an Amnesty International member was removed from a case about Pinochet's extradition) and certainly not to allow their opinions to influence their decisions.
This is completely unlike for example in the US where Bush can freely appoint Republican anti-abortionists to the Supreme Court.
Another difference is that the government does not interfere in judicial decisions. There is a huge outcry at the moment after the Home Office Minister told criminal judges to give higher sentences... even that was considered unwarranted interference.
As easyCinema's case against companies concerned: not supplying top films to a distributor could be considered anti-competitive and could well be in breach of both EU and UK competition law. I am not an expert in this area but it certainly looks to me like a good case could be made.
Especially as Warner run one of the biggest chains of cinemas in the UK...
Security, whether real-life or online, is all about knowledge. If you dont know the weaknesses in your system you simply cannot protect it.
As such crackers as well as hackers should be encouraged and protected by law if and when they are acting ethically.
For example it is not illegal to break into a computer system you have been authorised to break into. Remember the crime isnt "hacking" it is "unauthorised access to a computer system."
As such an individual, corporation or government body could offer money to a person (known or unknown) to attempt to break into their system in exchange for knowledge of that systems weaknesses. White-hat hacking.
Under current law it would be illegal for that same person to break in and then offer the information, or even to break in and give the information freely.
The same goes for computer software. For all we know the latest version of Windows could have a bug so destructive that Osama et al. wouldnt need a bomb to bring America to its knees. It would, however, be illegal to try to find such a bug whatever your intentions, without the authorisation of Microsoft (which you wont get).
As such, we have a lack of knowledge about the weaknesses of the software, and only those who are willing to commit illegal acts, or who live in countries where the law isnt enforced in quite the same way, are able to obtain such knowledge.
This is a big argument in favour of free software such as the Linux operating system. As we can, legally, check or search for bugs and weaknesses, the software is made stronger and stronger. Hence the interest of many governments around the world in the open source movement.
why do I go rock climbing? to see if I can, to stretch my body to its limits, to conquer the rockface.
why might I want to change the IEMI number on my mobile phone? to see if I can, to stretch my mind to its limits, to conquer the interface.
reprogramming a mobile phone is a good exercise for computer science / electrical engineering students. people should be allowed to do such things for educational/recreational purposes.
as has already been stated there are laws against misappropriating telephone serices.
modifying a phones IEMI number for an illegal purpose is already illegal, so illegalising the act of modifying an IEMI number only restricts those who have no illegal intention.
the problem is that there are very few people in this world who will actually wish to modify their IEMI number for a legal purpose. democracy will "win out" and their freedom will be restricted in the name of the masses who cannot see a reason to allow IEMI modification.
I don't know about the US law, but in the UK that would come under the Criminal Attempts Act 1981. Anything that is 'more than merely preparatory' to the commission of a crime is potentially caught.
The mere buying of a shotgun with the requisite intention would probably be enough, but walking to the house would make all doubt disappear. Not that any good lawyer couldn't get you off the hook if it ever came to court.
If the documents are already shredded, eg: the court asks for them on day 92 and you can prove the shredding was done on schedule and in accordance with an open policy, then you will almost certainly get away with it.
If the court asks for the documents before the shredding date, even if they ask the day before (and it will generally be fairly obvious they are about to ask), then you will be in contempt of court if they are shredded nonetheless. It would be negligent to *allow* them to be shredded.
Finally we have to remember that documents are kept for good reasons. They are often needed long after they are produced and ongoing relationships with another company (eg: Andersen with Enron) is a clear case where this will be the case (you never really know when you will need to see last years accounts to check a detail in todays).
It is also in companies like Andersen and in their employees and directors' interests to keep many document to save their backs in potential litigation. You need to be able to prove exactly who gave what authority for what decision when. If you can't then you can get screwed over at any stage.
Accountability works both ways. The documents can be your best friends or your worst enemies, and you will rarely know which until something blows up in your face. This is why last minute shredding occured at Andersen (although as Enron's auditors they ought to have known it was about to go into meltdown...).
Vicarious Liability.
A company is generally held responsible for the acts of its employees done in the course of their employment. Whether the acts are negiligent, illegal or immoral the employer is considered responsible.
How far the courts will be willing to take it in this case I do not know (I mean do they really want to take Andersen down in the flames of Enron?).
1) getting museums/restaurants/clubs/schools to PAY you to send their logo covered 'souvenirs' into space;
2) selling your own products when they come back down "Authentic meatball lapel pin has spent >24h in actual, real, genuine space"....
NASA may make some weird decisions about which projects to fund and which to ditch overboard, but sometimes they have good business sense (either that or they are learning from the nouveau riche capitalists in Russia who are pumping their space program for all it is worth...
I care about quiet.
I am in a small student room, and need to be able to keep my PC running over night: its on a broadband connection and is serving web pages.
Sleeping with 40-50 dB of background noise is really not that easy, and I've been looking at ways on cutting down the noise for a while.
The major problem is the heat reduction vs. noise trade-off. The minor problem is my practically non-existant student budget...
:)~
I'm sorry but there is a limit where reasonable protection of your right to the free enjoyment of life encroaches on your other liberties.
Efforts to prevent terrorism are quite certainly valid as a form of protection of your liberties: you can't enjoy freedom of speech when you are dead, but any encroachment of your liberties must be justified, it must be reasonable, and must be the minimum encroachment on your rights that is required to achieve the objective or protecting said rights.
That is the OFFICIAL legal situation in the United Kingdom under the Human Rights Act 1998. It is also why Jack Straw's talk of derogating from the Human Rights Act in order to pass anti-terror legislation is idiotic: there is no need to do so as limits to rights are allowed by the act.
Although I do not know the legal situation in America, I feel that this is well thought out theoretical standpoint. I am willing to accept that certain rights, for eg: right to privacy, are infringed, if and only if this is necessary, and the minimum necessary infringement, to protect my life and liberties more generally.
Again however, I am not and would not be willing to submit to random searches that will have no effect on protecting my freedom and my life but merely encroach thereon in an unnecessary manner.
Again IANAL-yet, but will be soon.
IANAL yet, but am studying law and will be in 2 years.
Actual if it isn't in the terms of your contract that you will submit to such a breach of your personal liberties they would NOT have a right to fire you.
... and everyone sees it 5 hours before it happens with satellite dishes the size of a small house...
To a historian [me] it just looked like the common sense solution...
Should have thought about it more, but it was a nice distraction from my history thesis anyway...
69 hours and counting
how about:
100000=100^2
my compressed data reads: 100
the decompressor original=data^2
with larger numbers you probably make larger savings, especially if you can use squares.
Change my original post to read any number can be defined as n=a^2 + b. It is still true and for small (yet still huge) files ie: 100KB-1MB, you make massive savings.
Again though it works as a one off compression for a given data set. And again, I'm no mathematician and not exceptionally talented computer-wise: I could be completely wrong.
the contest was not to be able to compress random data, but to compress a specific file of random data: original.dat
take the binary expression of original.dat, preferably choosing a small value, convert it into decimal, find the values a, b, and c. Save them as seperate files, or as different lines in a single file. Decompress. Collect $5000
It is not elegant, does not work for large files (I'd hate to try to find a, b, and c for a 5MB+ file), but given the time to look at and analyse the data file, it would work.
Any data file can be expressed in binary form as a number. This number can be defined as n=a*b+c. Where c is 1 in the case of prime numbers and 0 otherwise.
The challenge could be won by choosing a relatively small data file (say 1MB), and finding a, b, and c. A lengthy process, but not a difficult one.
All the decompresser has to do is multiply files a and b, and add c.
newsonline@bbc.co.uk
Ogg Vorbis doesn't have this affect. Whilst it could easily be cheaper (for commercial entreprises) and even, perhaps, a superior encoding format, it will probably not succeed in breaking the market so dominated by mp3. Newbies who have just figured out they can use their PCs to play music will run searches for "Limp Bizkit MP3", not "Beethoven Ogg Vorbis". Just because that is what they have heard of.
Surely its illegal to publish other people's addresses in this way, especially those of soon-be-convicted-but-none-the-less-innocent-until -proven-guilty spies... I mean he's practically a celebrity
I just wonder how the Feds found out about him?
Did a Russian double agent reveal the double-crossing American double agent?
And what will happen when another US double agent reveals the name of the Russian double agent?
People are willing to believe it, despite any logic and the complete lack of evidence of what badastronomy call Hoax Believers for two simple reasons: firstly they find it hard enough to picture a working space mission to the moon now, let alone in the late 60s early 70s. Admit it, there is something 'unreal' about the moon. The laws of physics that we are so used to on Earth, only apply in weird ways. Gravity isn't 'right' and all that. People find it hard to get their heads around.
The second reason is the US government had good reasons to want to fake a moon landing, and we've been lied to often enough before. The basic premise of the Hoax Believers, is that the US was 'losing' the 'space race' and needed a victory over the Soviets to bolster capitalism and the American Way. If they stopped there rather than present phony evidence, I might be tempted to have my doubts: it does sound possible. And governments have lied to us so many times in the past. I would say especially the US government but I think that the Russian, British, Israeli, and many others are equally bad. Face it, when they feel the need to individual politicians and governments in general, democratic or otherwise are quite happy to lie through their teeth.
Fair enough I say, but it does give credence to conspiracy theories as whacky as this one.
A well run small business could service a small community far more efficiently, though to make a living from it would be very hard. At $20 a month, how many customers do you need per employee? It would almost certainly have to be combined with some other form of employment: software development for example, and unfortunately that would almost certainly have to be closed source....
The only possibility I see for life after death is for individuals with very powerful computers and quick connections (being used for some other activity or job), allowing a small number of accounts on the machine to supplement their income. I would love a T1 to myself, but even if I could afford one, I wouldn't use up its capacity and could easily pass some on by allowing cheap or even free dial up accounts to friends and family.
Also what about co-operative style ISPs. A bunch of geeks getting together to purchase a shared T1? Possible or not?
The wasps started out as a single species, but the infected ones can only reproduce with other infected wasps. Slowly a split will emerge, hence speciation.
With humans this would work in a similar way. Given the hypothetical that say coloured people everywhere became infected with a Wolbachia variant, they would no longer be able to reproduce outside the group of infected persons (their genetic code needing decrypting in the article's somewhat ridiculous analogy).
The race!=species relationship is of no importance here, the infected group could just as easily be 'French people' or 'people with blonde hair' or 'micro$oft coders', any hypthetical infection would prevent "breeding" outside of the group and slowly, over a period of possibly hundreds of generations, the French would emerge as a distinct race their genetic code having evolved in a fork from the path followed by the rest of humanity.
Perhaps this could be a way for them to save their precious culture from Americanization....