Without the full data (results, directions & time windows) you cannot establish that the state you are measuring is the proper entangled state. The rejections of invalid pairs in these types of measurements is based not only on the selected directions (this doesn't even come up in lab experiments since the directions are predefined) but also on the outcomes. The "wrong" outcomes within the same window (and the same direction) indicate "accidental concidences," and these get thrown away as well.
Without having a guarantee of the entangled state, someone with intercepts on A & B branches can feed non-entangled states (a deterministic sequence of their choice) and knowing the sequence of the measurement directions and the time windows of A and B (passed via unprotected link to the common location) extract the key much easier.
The detail the "quantum-crypto-oil" salesmen usually omit is that processing of the entangled photon data requires a post-processing step where the two sides get all their data in one place and perform coincidence filtering, which makes the whole "secrecy" hopla of the 100km fiber slightly redundant.
Check for example the quantum cryptography setup description on a resarch page:
Post-Experiment Key Generation
Only after a measurement run is completed, Alice and Bob compare their lists of detections to extract the coincidences and generate the quantum keys. Taking into account the time uncertainties of all measurement electronics in our system, we can implement a coincidence window of 5 ns. All the communication for generating the quantum keys and testing the security of the quantum channel is done by Alice's and Bob's personal computers via the standard computer network.
Well, no, expect to put you on the list of those who have something to hide.
From Allegory to Madness - Matrix vs Terminator
on
The Science of the Matrix
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The allegory is only the first step of the Neo's adventure. Once he realized that the 'real world' is a model playing out in his brain (which is correct), he flips out (following white rabbit, like Alice in Wonderland) and descends into a paranoid schizophrenia. This is similar to Terminator story (or Alices' story), except that in the Terminator, the madness of the female hero (also inhereted by her son) is more explicit.
The tip-off that it is a madness are the difficulties in maintaining plausibility and logical coherence of the 'reality' the hero believes in. His limited knowledge of sciences, history and almost everything else, limits his psychotic model to the domain he is most familiar with -- a model by programmer has the computer as the basis of his scheme of the world. The rest, which he doesn't understand, is incoherently patched up (like humans as the energy source). His upbringing in the college PeeCee brainwash shows through the role of the ecology and the predictable multicultural racial and gender stereotyping in his model (which is the two parameter function, where one axis is skin/hair pigment, the other axis is testosterone -- increasing levels of skin/hair pigment and/or lower testosterone imply greater intelligence, wisdom, goodness,... lower pigment and/or larger testosterone imply dumber, more machine-like and more evil).
If garabage collecters can be "sanitation engineers" and housewives can be "domestic engineers"..
For these, being called 'engineer' is a promotion, for many programmers it would be a demotion.
Programming is a unique discipline on the intersection between engineering, art, science and mathematics. It requires much greater deal of creativity and mental dexterity in entirely novel situations than mere engineering.
McDonalds used to have the best fries around. When my wife decided to learn how to make fries, these fries were the benchmark. When her skill eventually plateaued, our conclusion was -- wow, they are almost like McDonalds fries.
Now all their stuff is like styrofoam bits cut into food shapes, with textures painted in, then warmed up and dipped into rancid tallow. Don't even let my kids go there any more.
Whether it is disadvantage depends on where you are looking from. Increase in state control over individuals is an advantage for the state (recall the Poindexter's "scientia est potentia"). This is probably why it is being pushed by the bureaucrats.
The same way the internet filters in libraries got rammed through dressed up in 'protecting the children' rationale. Or the never ending 'war on drugs' which has done more damage to privacy and freedom than any other single 'noble cause' (to say nothing of damage to the pocketbooks of public which finances both sides in the war, as victims of increased taxes and other property crimes).
if Microsoft was as pure a monopoly as everyone says they are, then they'd have no interest in offering discount deals
They'are monoply for the OS. But they can (and do) use that as a foot in the door to establish or expand their presence in all other areas. For example they may wish to displace Java with C# in CS courses. Or they may wish to get the first byte at hiring the best of the best, before other companies snatch them.
The only reason Microsoft doesn't want the taxpayer to see what their money is buying is that on the whole, the flashy wrappers plus the secret warts, the taxpayer wouldn't like what he is getting.
Why does our government, and our lawyers, and courts lack so much common sense??
Considering that with each such law we end up with less freedom while they end up with more power, while we keep re-electing them, one has to wonder who is the one that really lacks common sense. Or any sense at all.
Say you're in a shopping mall and some teen keeps tripping on escalators and bumping at your feet. With each 'accident' the partner of the 'inept' teen takes something out of your pockets. Would you call the falling teen an uncoordinated fool, knowing that after each fall you end up with less money?
Now, this would be the same as calling the big swindlers in Washington and New York inept fools, just because their outward rationales for their decisions don't make much sense -- their actions and means chosen seem always out of sync with the stated noble goals.
But when you observe the seemingly unintended side effects of those decisions, you realize that these rationales and noble goals are mere distractions, just like the fall of the 'inept' teen, so the truly intended purposes can unnoticably unfold while we tangle in their verbal smokescreen.
The piracy is a merely another decoy, the same as child pornography, indecency, violence, recipes for explosives, spying, selling drugs, doubting certain parts of the official history,... etc. The underlying objective behind all those moves is to regain the control over the information that the 'masses' may receive. They had it tied up so nicely with TV, movie and major print media all in the few hands. Then internet came and ruined it all. They've been itching to clamp it down by any excuse they can sell. Each pretext du jour they're pushing slices the opposition differently. Eventually, these fragments of the opposition will become so small and misaligned in their particular purposes, that they can be brought again under control.
Although the chess is a finite game, the number of distinct positions is about 10^46, so your lookup table is not practical for the current millenium.
But for the chess endgames (with up to 5 pieces, including 2 kings) such tables are available (files go into hundreds of MB) and are used by most commercial and amateur programs.
A very active computer chess discussion group (where many top chess programmers participate) is at:
Remember: big companies aren't working for you, they're working to get your money.
As if you work for a company instead of working to get their money. It is same however you turn it. The pursuit of self-interest by all players makes the game work better.
After all, each of your cells cares only that it gets nutrients from other cells around it and that its metabolic waste gets removed. It just happens that the side-effects of its pursuit of personal happines benefit other cells and you as a meta-entity/god of their society.
You don't really need a Faraday cage. Namely to Change EM field vector A to a desired EM field vector B you simply add a single EM field vector C=B-A to A. The superposition will produce resulting vector B. A computer driven emitter with GPS sensors could probably do all this by inputing the desired coordinates into it.
This is similar to computerized noise suppressors which work by continuously measuring the acoustic waves and emitting the waves of exactly the same amplitude and opposite phase. With GPS the situation is much easier since the waves to cancel are not random noise but a perfectly predictable source (after the initial measurement).
The/. title is wrong. The experiment had merely observed the quantization of neutron momentum in the external gravitation field. The gravitation in that model (the external field approximation) is a purely classical (non-quantum) potential, i.e. it afects the quantum particle (neutron) but it is not affected by the particle. To detect quantum gravity one would need an experiment that detects quantization of that field (e.g. particle-like aspect of the gravitational field, the same way that photons are manifestation of the quantization of the EM field).
> You're probably right that he's talking about > that, but that is not technically function
> of DNS
In my company's product that (www.hotComm.com), which also provides user with HTTP server (among other serving capabilities) this is actually a function of DNS in conjuction with http. Here is how it works:
When hotcomm loads, it checks (using other peers) whether its port 80 is connectable from outside. If it is not (e.g. due to ISP's or some other firewall blocking), the hotcomm sets up its http port to 8080 (or some other, in case there are multiple users behind the nat sharing the same external IP). When hotcomm client logs to a VNS server (these are p2p virtual network servers/brokers), the client's www domain name, e.g. www.john-doe.ezpeer.net is associated with his current IP and the DNS server also records the current http port of the client. When a DNS request comes for www.john-doe.ezpeer.net, the DNS code checks the clients http port and if it is 80, it returns the client's IP. If it is not 80, it returns the IP of an available http redirector server.
When the http redirector receives http request for host www.john-doe.ezpeer.net it consults the same database used by DNS server (both servers are in the same program and work off the same memory & disk files), it finds John Doe's entry at port 8080, and then it redirects the http caller to w8080.john-doe.ezpeer.net:8080.
The caller then goes to our DNS servers again, to find out what IP does this w8080... domain have. The VNS checks w8080 prefix, checks John Doe's current http port and if it is 8080, it returns the John Doe's actual IP (otherwise, e.g. if this request comes from a bookmarked hyperlink, it send caller to the http redirector). Similar sequence occurs if user's http port is now 80, but someone has bookmarked users site as w8080.john-doe.ezpeer.net:8080 and makes a dns request for w8080.john-doe.ezpeer.net (in this case our http redirector has to also listen to port 8080, as well as on all other alternate http ports).
This combination of the two tightly coupled servers, DNS and HTTP (implementing essentially a single stateful protocol made up of several steps of two stateless protocolos) make hotcomm clients immune to any port 80 blocking or IP sharing among multiple p2p based http servers behind the NAT. They all can use hyperlinks of the fixed type, such as www.john-doe.ezpeer.net/default.html, even though their IP may change from login to login and their http ports may be nonstandard or may change from login to login. And whatever variation of the domain name form gets bookmarked by the visitors to these p2p http servers, they get to the right IP.
Re:Help me out on this one...
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 1
in this case, default.ida takes everthing after that number of letters and runs it like it were a program.
What kind of server buffer handler would execute the content of the buffer? You have to go out of your way doing stupid things to make it happen. Who are these morons at Microsoft who write that kind of code?
"So, could you explain, where is the gain for the user (not Microsoft or government bureaucrats) in keeping personal info on Microsoft servers, and how does that same reasoning fail to apply to your bookmarks or email address books."
The idea behind passport and a centralized approach is so that yourinformation is available
EVERYWHERE.
That is what I was asking above -- why does not that same rationale (which is commonly being peddled by Passport advocates) make users keep their email address books or bookmark lists on Microsofts or AOL servers, instead of keeping them on their local machines (and copying these lists if needed to their laptops or other machines)?
The answer is that the heavy and numerous downsides of a centralized third party database of your personal data far outweigh any minor convenience of being able, say, to email friends from a cruse ship, without that so "terribly hard" job of having to copy address book to your laptop.
While you can argue theoretically using some contrived low-probability scenarios or by tweaking your weighing of one convenience (usable "everywhere" and without needing to copy data to other computers) vs all the problems, to conclude that Passport-like schemes will take off, the only weighing that counts at the end (the hundreds of millions of email address books & browser bookmark users) has already been done and the result is: No Thanks. I would rather copy my email address book and bookmark files to my laptop than have Microsoft or government keep them for "my" convenience on their servers. The same goes for my "usernames" and my "passwords."
The Passport will take off the same way the so-called "push technology" and other such scams, disguised as the great "conveniences" for the users, took off. They are much too cheap and transparent, even for the TV zombie generations lobotomized by the PeeCee "education."
Probably not, but a secure single sign on would be nice, if the proper privacy and security issues can be addressed.
It might "be nice," but for whom?
Why does this info need to be on an external machine at all (other than helping Microsoft or government bureaucrats)? A browser (or an add-on) could do all that with a locally encrypted database (which can be copied or synchronized with, say, your laptop) and you don't have to expose your personal info and browsing habits to some central agency to collect, track and correlate. It need not essentially be any different than the list of bookmarks bookmarks or email addresses we already use. If you have multiple machines, you copy your bookmarks or email address book to other machines.
The commonly parroted "Passport rationale" could be equally applied to browser bookmarks or email address book and, if it had any merit, we would already have our bookmark lists and email address books on the Microsoft servers to use as they wish. We don't keep them there. And the same will apply to the Passport scam.
So, could you explain, where is the gain for the user (not Microsoft or government bureaucrats) in keeping personal info on Microsoft servers, and how does that same reasoning fail to apply to your bookmarks or email address books.
Seems Adobe gets upset when you demonstrate that their approach is ineffective.
In the case of ebooks, the scenario is not that of encryption, where you can have virtually perfect software protection. The e-reader has to get the "protected" data on that machine and make them unprotected, which means the encypted text and the key are available (to anyone with a debugger to trace through). So you don't have the encryption scenario (where the hostile party lacks a key), but merely scrambling and unscrambling of data, no different in principle from the ROT-13.
I don't think they tested it on Windows emulators (other then some Windows remote control packages, which is not exactly an emulator on both ends) since unless Cyber Sentry could find standard Win 9x VxD or NT 4 kernel driver entry points for intercepts it wouldn't decode protected content at all (it bails out at load time with error messages). The emulator would have to emulate Windows operation down to ring 0 level (at least those undocumented aspects that some other MS apps use, since that kind of assured me MS won't change these items lightly) to have the program run at all. For example, even though there were no win98 or 98SE at the time when the original code was written (mid 1997), the Win95 version of the program ran without a change when those Windows versions came out. The same went for the various NT4 servica packs. As long as you stick only to the undocumented APIs you see MS Office or IE are importing, they're fairly safe to use.
Yep, it worked with anything short of having your own kernel/vxd level display driver to capture the screen (even then the file i/o intercepts might block you from saving it to disk in an unencrypted form). To avoid overhead of having to analyze every bitblt coming to the driver, all the intercepts were correlated from the win16/win32 api level (user, gdi, kernel) down to the driver level, so that the routine internal windows housekeeping of the screen would not trigger the low level intercepts. If one could disassemble the code in action, one could bypass the protection, of course, but the dynamic debugging was silently detected (we had a network connections with tight UDP heartbeats to help detect this) and the protected content would come through scrambled or, if already decoded, the browser's calls to Enter/LeaveCriticalSection would be quietly brought out of sync causing (many instructions later) unexpected and mysterious looking lockups in the ring 0 code.
Having had a bit of a hobby of cracking protections for fun way back since old dBase III days, I knew which kinds of things take lots of time and frustration the get around, so I put all the meanest stuff in. The product was sold later by MSI (to TLC, then to Mattel, then JSB) few times and it came out under different brand names. I haven't looked whether this latest one might be some of the descendents of the original Cyber Sentry. Functionally it sound similar.
Slashdot Mirror
Without the full data (results, directions & time windows) you cannot establish that the state you are measuring is the proper entangled state. The rejections of invalid pairs in these types of measurements is based not only on the selected directions (this doesn't even come up in lab experiments since the directions are predefined) but also on the outcomes. The "wrong" outcomes within the same window (and the same direction) indicate "accidental concidences," and these get thrown away as well.
Without having a guarantee of the entangled state, someone with intercepts on A & B branches can feed non-entangled states (a deterministic sequence of their choice) and knowing the sequence of the measurement directions and the time windows of A and B (passed via unprotected link to the common location) extract the key much easier.
Check for example the quantum cryptography setup description on a resarch page:
Only after a measurement run is completed, Alice and Bob compare their lists of detections to extract the coincidences and generate the quantum keys. Taking into account the time uncertainties of all measurement electronics in our system, we can implement a coincidence window of 5 ns. All the communication for generating the quantum keys and testing the security of the quantum channel is done by Alice's and Bob's personal computers via the standard computer network.
there's even a chance that a hacker could file a lawsuit against a honeypot operator
The honeypot law is clearly mimicking the idea of a honeypot -- the honeypot owner becomes the honeypot for a lawsuit.
I think 99.4% is pretty damn close, for a moderate number of randomly choosen genes.
:)
Especially when you consider that you share only 50% of your genes with your father
Well, no, expect to put you on the list of those who have something to hide.
The allegory is only the first step of the Neo's adventure. Once he realized that the 'real world' is a model playing out in his brain (which is correct), he flips out (following white rabbit, like Alice in Wonderland) and descends into a paranoid schizophrenia. This is similar to Terminator story (or Alices' story), except that in the Terminator, the madness of the female hero (also inhereted by her son) is more explicit.
The tip-off that it is a madness are the difficulties in maintaining plausibility and logical coherence of the 'reality' the hero believes in. His limited knowledge of sciences, history and almost everything else, limits his psychotic model to the domain he is most familiar with -- a model by programmer has the computer as the basis of his scheme of the world. The rest, which he doesn't understand, is incoherently patched up (like humans as the energy source). His upbringing in the college PeeCee brainwash shows through the role of the ecology and the predictable multicultural racial and gender stereotyping in his model (which is the two parameter function, where one axis is skin/hair pigment, the other axis is testosterone -- increasing levels of skin/hair pigment and/or lower testosterone imply greater intelligence, wisdom, goodness,... lower pigment and/or larger testosterone imply dumber, more machine-like and more evil).
If garabage collecters can be "sanitation engineers" and housewives can be "domestic engineers"..
For these, being called 'engineer' is a promotion, for many programmers it would be a demotion.
Programming is a unique discipline on the intersection between engineering, art, science and mathematics. It requires much greater deal of creativity and mental dexterity in entirely novel situations than mere engineering.
In mid 1980s the McDonalds fries were very good.
McDonalds used to have the best fries around. When my wife decided to learn how to make fries, these fries were the benchmark. When her skill eventually plateaued, our conclusion was -- wow, they are almost like McDonalds fries.
Now all their stuff is like styrofoam bits cut into food shapes, with textures painted in, then warmed up and dipped into rancid tallow. Don't even let my kids go there any more.
Whether it is disadvantage depends on where you are looking from. Increase in state control over individuals is an advantage for the state (recall the Poindexter's "scientia est potentia"). This is probably why it is being pushed by the bureaucrats.
The same way the internet filters in libraries got rammed through dressed up in 'protecting the children' rationale. Or the never ending 'war on drugs' which has done more damage to privacy and freedom than any other single 'noble cause' (to say nothing of damage to the pocketbooks of public which finances both sides in the war, as victims of increased taxes and other property crimes).
They'are monoply for the OS. But they can (and do) use that as a foot in the door to establish or expand their presence in all other areas. For example they may wish to displace Java with C# in CS courses. Or they may wish to get the first byte at hiring the best of the best, before other companies snatch them.
The only reason Microsoft doesn't want the taxpayer to see what their money is buying is that on the whole, the flashy wrappers plus the secret warts, the taxpayer wouldn't like what he is getting.
Why does our government, and our lawyers, and courts lack so much common sense??
Considering that with each such law we end up with less freedom while they end up with more power, while we keep re-electing them, one has to wonder who is the one that really lacks common sense. Or any sense at all.
Say you're in a shopping mall and some teen keeps tripping on escalators and bumping at your feet. With each 'accident' the partner of the 'inept' teen takes something out of your pockets. Would you call the falling teen an uncoordinated fool, knowing that after each fall you end up with less money?
Now, this would be the same as calling the big swindlers in Washington and New York inept fools, just because their outward rationales for their decisions don't make much sense -- their actions and means chosen seem always out of sync with the stated noble goals.
But when you observe the seemingly unintended side effects of those decisions, you realize that these rationales and noble goals are mere distractions, just like the fall of the 'inept' teen, so the truly intended purposes can unnoticably unfold while we tangle in their verbal smokescreen.
The piracy is a merely another decoy, the same as child pornography, indecency, violence, recipes for explosives, spying, selling drugs, doubting certain parts of the official history,... etc. The underlying objective behind all those moves is to regain the control over the information that the 'masses' may receive. They had it tied up so nicely with TV, movie and major print media all in the few hands. Then internet came and ruined it all. They've been itching to clamp it down by any excuse they can sell. Each pretext du jour they're pushing slices the opposition differently. Eventually, these fragments of the opposition will become so small and misaligned in their particular purposes, that they can be brought again under control.
Although the chess is a finite game, the number of distinct positions is about 10^46, so your lookup table is not practical for the current millenium.
But for the chess endgames (with up to 5 pieces, including 2 kings) such tables are available (files go into hundreds of MB) and are used by most commercial and amateur programs.
A very active computer chess discussion group (where many top chess programmers participate) is at:
Computer-Chess Club
See also:
The computer chess links page
As if you work for a company instead of working to get their money. It is same however you turn it. The pursuit of self-interest by all players makes the game work better.
After all, each of your cells cares only that it gets nutrients from other cells around it and that its metabolic waste gets removed. It just happens that the side-effects of its pursuit of personal happines benefit other cells and you as a meta-entity/god of their society.
This is similar to computerized noise suppressors which work by continuously measuring the acoustic waves and emitting the waves of exactly the same amplitude and opposite phase. With GPS the situation is much easier since the waves to cancel are not random noise but a perfectly predictable source (after the initial measurement).
The /. title is wrong. The experiment had merely observed the quantization of neutron momentum in the external gravitation field. The gravitation in that model (the external field approximation) is a purely classical (non-quantum) potential, i.e. it afects the quantum particle (neutron) but it is not affected by the particle. To detect quantum gravity one would need an experiment that detects quantization of that field (e.g. particle-like aspect of the gravitational field, the same way that photons are manifestation of the quantization of the EM field).
He can do it if he can prove that he came up with his design before your idea was published.
> of DNS
In my company's product that (www.hotComm.com), which also provides user with HTTP server (among other serving capabilities) this is actually a function of DNS in conjuction with http. Here is how it works:
When hotcomm loads, it checks (using other peers) whether its port 80 is connectable from outside. If it is not (e.g. due to ISP's or some other firewall blocking), the hotcomm sets up its http port to 8080 (or some other, in case there are multiple users behind the nat sharing the same external IP). When hotcomm client logs to a VNS server (these are p2p virtual network servers/brokers), the client's www domain name, e.g. www.john-doe.ezpeer.net is associated with his current IP and the DNS server also records the current http port of the client. When a DNS request comes for www.john-doe.ezpeer.net, the DNS code checks the clients http port and if it is 80, it returns the client's IP. If it is not 80, it returns the IP of an available http redirector server.
When the http redirector receives http request for host www.john-doe.ezpeer.net it consults the same database used by DNS server (both servers are in the same program and work off the same memory & disk files), it finds John Doe's entry at port 8080, and then it redirects the http caller to w8080.john-doe.ezpeer.net:8080.
The caller then goes to our DNS servers again, to find out what IP does this w8080... domain have. The VNS checks w8080 prefix, checks John Doe's current http port and if it is 8080, it returns the John Doe's actual IP (otherwise, e.g. if this request comes from a bookmarked hyperlink, it send caller to the http redirector). Similar sequence occurs if user's http port is now 80, but someone has bookmarked users site as w8080.john-doe.ezpeer.net:8080 and makes a dns request for w8080.john-doe.ezpeer.net (in this case our http redirector has to also listen to port 8080, as well as on all other alternate http ports).
This combination of the two tightly coupled servers, DNS and HTTP (implementing essentially a single stateful protocol made up of several steps of two stateless protocolos) make hotcomm clients immune to any port 80 blocking or IP sharing among multiple p2p based http servers behind the NAT. They all can use hyperlinks of the fixed type, such as www.john-doe.ezpeer.net/default.html, even though their IP may change from login to login and their http ports may be nonstandard or may change from login to login. And whatever variation of the domain name form gets bookmarked by the visitors to these p2p http servers, they get to the right IP.
What kind of server buffer handler would execute the content of the buffer? You have to go out of your way doing stupid things to make it happen. Who are these morons at Microsoft who write that kind of code?
The idea behind passport and a centralized approach is so that yourinformation is available EVERYWHERE.
That is what I was asking above -- why does not that same rationale (which is commonly being peddled by Passport advocates) make users keep their email address books or bookmark lists on Microsofts or AOL servers, instead of keeping them on their local machines (and copying these lists if needed to their laptops or other machines)?
The answer is that the heavy and numerous downsides of a centralized third party database of your personal data far outweigh any minor convenience of being able, say, to email friends from a cruse ship, without that so "terribly hard" job of having to copy address book to your laptop.
While you can argue theoretically using some contrived low-probability scenarios or by tweaking your weighing of one convenience (usable "everywhere" and without needing to copy data to other computers) vs all the problems, to conclude that Passport-like schemes will take off, the only weighing that counts at the end (the hundreds of millions of email address books & browser bookmark users) has already been done and the result is: No Thanks. I would rather copy my email address book and bookmark files to my laptop than have Microsoft or government keep them for "my" convenience on their servers. The same goes for my "usernames" and my "passwords."
The Passport will take off the same way the so-called "push technology" and other such scams, disguised as the great "conveniences" for the users, took off. They are much too cheap and transparent, even for the TV zombie generations lobotomized by the PeeCee "education."
It might "be nice," but for whom?
Why does this info need to be on an external machine at all (other than helping Microsoft or government bureaucrats)? A browser (or an add-on) could do all that with a locally encrypted database (which can be copied or synchronized with, say, your laptop) and you don't have to expose your personal info and browsing habits to some central agency to collect, track and correlate. It need not essentially be any different than the list of bookmarks bookmarks or email addresses we already use. If you have multiple machines, you copy your bookmarks or email address book to other machines.
The commonly parroted "Passport rationale" could be equally applied to browser bookmarks or email address book and, if it had any merit, we would already have our bookmark lists and email address books on the Microsoft servers to use as they wish. We don't keep them there. And the same will apply to the Passport scam.
So, could you explain, where is the gain for the user (not Microsoft or government bureaucrats) in keeping personal info on Microsoft servers, and how does that same reasoning fail to apply to your bookmarks or email address books.
In the case of ebooks, the scenario is not that of encryption, where you can have virtually perfect software protection. The e-reader has to get the "protected" data on that machine and make them unprotected, which means the encypted text and the key are available (to anyone with a debugger to trace through). So you don't have the encryption scenario (where the hostile party lacks a key), but merely scrambling and unscrambling of data, no different in principle from the ROT-13.
I don't think they tested it on Windows emulators (other then some Windows remote control packages, which is not exactly an emulator on both ends) since unless Cyber Sentry could find standard Win 9x VxD or NT 4 kernel driver entry points for intercepts it wouldn't decode protected content at all (it bails out at load time with error messages). The emulator would have to emulate Windows operation down to ring 0 level (at least those undocumented aspects that some other MS apps use, since that kind of assured me MS won't change these items lightly) to have the program run at all. For example, even though there were no win98 or 98SE at the time when the original code was written (mid 1997), the Win95 version of the program ran without a change when those Windows versions came out. The same went for the various NT4 servica packs. As long as you stick only to the undocumented APIs you see MS Office or IE are importing, they're fairly safe to use.
Having had a bit of a hobby of cracking protections for fun way back since old dBase III days, I knew which kinds of things take lots of time and frustration the get around, so I put all the meanest stuff in. The product was sold later by MSI (to TLC, then to Mattel, then JSB) few times and it came out under different brand names. I haven't looked whether this latest one might be some of the descendents of the original Cyber Sentry. Functionally it sound similar.