I can't speak to the feasability of cracking WMA itself, but you seem to be romanticizing things a bit. True, all encryption technologies can be subverted. However, there are plenty of examples in which it is mathematically unfeasable to do so, and no amount of clever hacking tricks can change it. What if the next version of WMA encryption were as secure as AES? It's certainly not likely, but I wouldn't say it's impossible either. I understand that there are fundamental differences between DRM and plain encryption, but the point is that uncrackable systems are possible.
We can't just rely on "someone" to eventually crack everything we don't like. Microsoft has a lot of smart people working for them, as does Apple. Apple will fix their encryption, and MS will improve theirs. What we have to do is get to the root of the problem with DRM; namely that fair-use rights are being blocked, and the standards are proprietary and strategically limited in availability. I don't think these problems are impossible to solve either.
I would actually encourage an open-source DRM implementation, perhaps as part of OGG media. If a free alternative were available to publishers, that fixed the fair-use problems, I can certainly see that it might be adopted.
Actually, I believe that current linguistic history theory suggests that humans developed abstract thought in parallel with language. That is, early language in apes was purely situational (Danger! Food! Sex!) and it was the evolutionary usefulness of language (teamwork, efficient teaching, etc.) that led humans to develop higher intelligence and abstract thinking capability in the first place.
Also, "mushin" more closely refers to "acting without thought" than "thinking without words".
Is there any chance it will offer a decent treatment of the issues Open Source advocates worry about today?
I heard a radio ad for this show this morning. The quote was "Ma'am, is it true that you started a relationship with this man for the purpose of downloading his personality?"
So I'd say, probably not. Sounds like more far-fetched, yet hackneyed sci-fi cliches inserted into Law&Order.
I really shouldn't get involved in this, but Gnome does and always has used a nice clean theme by default. like this. Those "muddy colors" were configured by the reviewer, including the uglyish Noia-warm icon set which is (ironically) a port of a KDE icon theme.
By comparison, KDE looks like this by default. In my opinion the Keramik theme is offensively ugly. The default 3.2 theme is quite a bit better, although the window decorations are an XP ripoff.
IANAL, but if you ask me, secretly funding another company to baselessly sue your competitors is pretty close to vexatious litigation and abuse of process. Paying another company to defame your competitors is pretty close to libel.
... but can someone explain why brain cells need DNA to begin with? I know they need the corresponding RNA to build protiens and whatnot, but isn't the DNA only used for cell reproduction, something that brain cells don't do in mature humans?
using free software to achieve the WSIS goals might get in the way of an intellectual property owner's ability to make a profit
Using proprietary software might also get in the way of an intellectual property owner's ability to make a profit, i.e. another company. That's what happens when you make a choice between one product or another. So what are they saying, that they should only buy software if there were no competing products? That they should only buy from monopolies? Please tell us, oh wise and corrupt US representatives...
What I think is starting to happen (and please correct me if I'm off target) is that companies like Epic, Valve, and Id are making more and more money from licensing their game engines. Certain companies, like Havok, are already around that focus entirely on game engines or game engine components. At some point some of these engines will become ubiquitous, and the companies that develop them will keep them constantly up to date with the latest hardware. Game developers will only have to worry about features of a particular engine, rather than specifics and generalities of the hardware. This is what I mean when I say that advances in software generality will become more important than hardware advances.
> Video cards don't need to be faster than they > already are in the midrange and top end.
That's what they said when 3Dfx built the Voodoo2 back when Quake2's graphics blew everyone away. There will ALWAYS be room at the top. I want a graphics solution that can render full-scene real-time anti-aliased anisotropically-filtered photo-quality scenes across three high-res displays. Even the best cards out there would flat-out choke.
That said, what I think better software needs to be written to take advantage of the current hardware. When I see how beautiful graphics look in many console games, I can't help but wonder why PC games don't look as good on average, even with much studlier hardware. PC games need to render at higher framerates and resolution to look good on a computer monitor, and developers need to code to non-standardized systems. I think the latter of these issues causes developers to not polish and tweak the look and feel of their games as well as on a console. Better, more generic, and more widely-available game engines for the PC will have more impact on graphics in the near-term than will graphics hardware.
Re:I though otherwise, so did my physics teacher.
on
Comic Book Physics
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· Score: 1
No, I think the movies did a good enough job of showing how all the non-cattle had different "superpowers" in the Matrix. The comparison was to computer hacking... Neo is an excellent hacker and has a large bag of powerful tricks. But this does not allow him to do just anything at will. Other beings in the Matrix have other superpowers, like different hacks into the system. Neo just doesn't know how to do them.
Neo has exteme speed and strength and fighting ability, obviously. He can do that rocket-boost flying thing, he can stop bullets (but not fists) with his mind, and some other assorted things. Smith has other tricks... he's fast and good at fighting, but not nearly as good as Neo. He can duplicate his program into other vessels, which is his own unique hack. The albino twins, whatever their names were, could become intangible at will. Neo didn't know how to do this, although it would have helped in several situations. They probably could have taught Neo how to do it if they weren't trying to kill him.
On a somewhat related note, there's a recent article on anandtech about the Asus DigiMatrix, a barebone computer aimed at people building a home-theater PC. that's one sexy box, with a volume knob and case buttons and an LCD, video capture card, radio tuner, tv tuner, gigabit ethernet, wireless ethernet, DVD/CD-RW, embedded audio-player OS, 7-in-1 card reader...
I'm seriously considering getting one of these and making a linux media station / fileserver. Obviously Asus supports only Win2k and WinXP, but it seems like a fun challenge getting all those cutting-edge hardware components to run in linux. Most of them, even the ethernet controller, are so new they aren't directly supported in the kernel yet. And getting all the various Linux media applications to start up and obey the case buttons automatically based on what is inserted sounds like a software project in itself.
It's interesting how he provides absolutely no evidence to support his claims. Obviously, nobody could take his stance and try to argue evidence, or else they would run into piles of evidence suggesting the exact opposite. This is sheer uninformed speculation. A couple choice quotes:
Because anyone can create and market--or give away--a Linux distribution, there's also a reasonably high risk that someone will create a distribution specifically intended to subvert security. And how would anyone know?
Same way people would know if someone was running a heroin production lab in the middle of Times Square. Open means open. If people create software designed to subvert security, they make closed software. Exhibit A: Gator/GAIN.
Who's Watching the Watchers?
Anyone who wants to. Clearly this person has no idea how Free/Open-Source software works at all.
Yes, this is a frightening trend on the ISP side. It started when they throttled upload bandwidth to favor downloading, and when some companies started forbidding customers from running "servers", however you're supposed to define that.
Another scary idea is that we're starting to see the unification of content-creators (Disney, Time-Warner) with the content-deliverers (Comcast, AOL). This can lead to horrible monopolistic practices, trapping people into certain content. Fortunately the internet is somewhat resistant to this kind of trapping. But just look at what the music industry did to radio with ClearChannel...
I met David Hanson two years ago at the AAAI conference in Edmonton, Canada. He hung out with our robotics team for a couple days during the conference where he was demonstrating his (really freaky) robot heads and we were competing in the robot host competition. He's a very artistic guy, and about as enthusiastic as they come. I'm glad to see he's starting to make it big.
Funny thing is, the Ray Kurzweil (who was also at the conference) quote in the article sounds like a conversation I had with David. Our robot, built to serve hors d'oeuvres in a coctail party environment, was designed to look like a table, rather than a butler (Although it had a pan/tilt/zoom camera for a "head"). The idea was to improve on people's expectations of a table rather than disappoint people expecting a real human. Kurzweil's quote sounds like something I probably said to David: "Better to build a smart piece of furniture than a stupid human."
Not that I'm an expert on this kind of thing, but it seems to me that the components of an IC would only really pose an environmental risk if they were exposed to the elements for a long time, or ended up being melted down at a chinese screwdriver-shop.
Which, incidentally, is what happens to a large percentage of so-called "recycled" computers.
It seems like the government, more and more now, is treating anyone who wishes to remain anonymous, or who does things anonymously, as a criminal. Granted there is nothing in our bill of rights or constitution that protects our right to anonymity, but there should be.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons why one would wish to remain anonymous. Not to mention the fact that the US government should have no control over the internet which in essence represents the international community. Just because anonymity can be inconvenient for law enforcement doesn't mean it must be made illegal.
Ski masks, pantyhose, and latex gloves are still available for sale in the US. All these are ideal tools for concealing your identity in real life. Wearing them in real life is not illegal either. It is, however, illegal to commit a crime while employing these tools, although no more so than if one does not employ them.
Yes, and if I gave you a demonstration example of AES encryption that you could do in your head, that would be pretty easy to brute-force too. One could set up port-knocking with 512 sequential secret knocks... out of 2^16 ports per knock or whatever... how easy is that to brute force? And that's just to scan one port!
The replay attack is a problem, but an attacker with the ability to sniff your local traffic will always be able to determine what ports are being used... there's no defense for that short of tunnelling everything through one ssh port.
It's infinitely better than using non-standard ports... those will still be discovered by passive port-scanners who scan a broad range. With port-knocking you can essentially make a machine as invisible as you want (maybe still smelly for the packet-sniffers) and still have all your services available to trusted clients.
It should be noted that this is NOT (necessarily) an example of security through obscurity. One could treat the port-knocking sequence as a "key". Long enough keys could make port-scanning impossible for anyone who doesn't know the key. Real mathematical cryptography is based on a similar principle.
Also, this is only a defense against port-scanning. Even if someone did manage to break the knocking sequence, they would still have to use some kind of exploit against the machine on the port they discovered.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't speak to the feasability of cracking WMA itself, but you seem to be romanticizing things a bit. True, all encryption technologies can be subverted. However, there are plenty of examples in which it is mathematically unfeasable to do so, and no amount of clever hacking tricks can change it. What if the next version of WMA encryption were as secure as AES? It's certainly not likely, but I wouldn't say it's impossible either. I understand that there are fundamental differences between DRM and plain encryption, but the point is that uncrackable systems are possible.
We can't just rely on "someone" to eventually crack everything we don't like. Microsoft has a lot of smart people working for them, as does Apple. Apple will fix their encryption, and MS will improve theirs. What we have to do is get to the root of the problem with DRM; namely that fair-use rights are being blocked, and the standards are proprietary and strategically limited in availability. I don't think these problems are impossible to solve either.
I would actually encourage an open-source DRM implementation, perhaps as part of OGG media. If a free alternative were available to publishers, that fixed the fair-use problems, I can certainly see that it might be adopted.
Actually, I believe that current linguistic history theory suggests that humans developed abstract thought in parallel with language. That is, early language in apes was purely situational (Danger! Food! Sex!) and it was the evolutionary usefulness of language (teamwork, efficient teaching, etc.) that led humans to develop higher intelligence and abstract thinking capability in the first place.
Also, "mushin" more closely refers to "acting without thought" than "thinking without words".
We can add Tad Williams's Otherland and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age to the list of sci-fi stories that have this technology.
So I'd say, probably not. Sounds like more far-fetched, yet hackneyed sci-fi cliches inserted into Law&Order.
I wonder if their webserver is running on an iPod...
I really shouldn't get involved in this, but Gnome does and always has used a nice clean theme by default. like this. Those "muddy colors" were configured by the reviewer, including the uglyish Noia-warm icon set which is (ironically) a port of a KDE icon theme.
By comparison, KDE looks like this by default. In my opinion the Keramik theme is offensively ugly. The default 3.2 theme is quite a bit better, although the window decorations are an XP ripoff.
Better yet, the spammer buys those cycles and uses them to send even more spam.
IANAL, but if you ask me, secretly funding another company to baselessly sue your competitors is pretty close to vexatious litigation and abuse of process. Paying another company to defame your competitors is pretty close to libel.
... but can someone explain why brain cells need DNA to begin with? I know they need the corresponding RNA to build protiens and whatnot, but isn't the DNA only used for cell reproduction, something that brain cells don't do in mature humans?
Using proprietary software might also get in the way of an intellectual property owner's ability to make a profit, i.e. another company. That's what happens when you make a choice between one product or another. So what are they saying, that they should only buy software if there were no competing products? That they should only buy from monopolies? Please tell us, oh wise and corrupt US representatives...
What I think is starting to happen (and please correct me if I'm off target) is that companies like Epic, Valve, and Id are making more and more money from licensing their game engines. Certain companies, like Havok, are already around that focus entirely on game engines or game engine components. At some point some of these engines will become ubiquitous, and the companies that develop them will keep them constantly up to date with the latest hardware. Game developers will only have to worry about features of a particular engine, rather than specifics and generalities of the hardware. This is what I mean when I say that advances in software generality will become more important than hardware advances.
> Video cards don't need to be faster than they
> already are in the midrange and top end.
That's what they said when 3Dfx built the Voodoo2 back when Quake2's graphics blew everyone away. There will ALWAYS be room at the top. I want a graphics solution that can render full-scene real-time anti-aliased anisotropically-filtered photo-quality scenes across three high-res displays. Even the best cards out there would flat-out choke.
That said, what I think better software needs to be written to take advantage of the current hardware. When I see how beautiful graphics look in many console games, I can't help but wonder why PC games don't look as good on average, even with much studlier hardware. PC games need to render at higher framerates and resolution to look good on a computer monitor, and developers need to code to non-standardized systems. I think the latter of these issues causes developers to not polish and tweak the look and feel of their games as well as on a console. Better, more generic, and more widely-available game engines for the PC will have more impact on graphics in the near-term than will graphics hardware.
No, I think the movies did a good enough job of showing how all the non-cattle had different "superpowers" in the Matrix. The comparison was to computer hacking... Neo is an excellent hacker and has a large bag of powerful tricks. But this does not allow him to do just anything at will. Other beings in the Matrix have other superpowers, like different hacks into the system. Neo just doesn't know how to do them.
Neo has exteme speed and strength and fighting ability, obviously. He can do that rocket-boost flying thing, he can stop bullets (but not fists) with his mind, and some other assorted things. Smith has other tricks... he's fast and good at fighting, but not nearly as good as Neo. He can duplicate his program into other vessels, which is his own unique hack. The albino twins, whatever their names were, could become intangible at will. Neo didn't know how to do this, although it would have helped in several situations. They probably could have taught Neo how to do it if they weren't trying to kill him.
Only the crappy ones. Half Life was released in 1998 and it's STILL being sold for >$30 in stores...
On a somewhat related note, there's a recent article on anandtech about the Asus DigiMatrix, a barebone computer aimed at people building a home-theater PC. that's one sexy box, with a volume knob and case buttons and an LCD, video capture card, radio tuner, tv tuner, gigabit ethernet, wireless ethernet, DVD/CD-RW, embedded audio-player OS, 7-in-1 card reader...
I'm seriously considering getting one of these and making a linux media station / fileserver. Obviously Asus supports only Win2k and WinXP, but it seems like a fun challenge getting all those cutting-edge hardware components to run in linux. Most of them, even the ethernet controller, are so new they aren't directly supported in the kernel yet. And getting all the various Linux media applications to start up and obey the case buttons automatically based on what is inserted sounds like a software project in itself.
It's interesting how he provides absolutely no evidence to support his claims. Obviously, nobody could take his stance and try to argue evidence, or else they would run into piles of evidence suggesting the exact opposite. This is sheer uninformed speculation. A couple choice quotes:
Same way people would know if someone was running a heroin production lab in the middle of Times Square. Open means open. If people create software designed to subvert security, they make closed software. Exhibit A: Gator/GAIN.
Anyone who wants to. Clearly this person has no idea how Free/Open-Source software works at all.
Yes, this is a frightening trend on the ISP side. It started when they throttled upload bandwidth to favor downloading, and when some companies started forbidding customers from running "servers", however you're supposed to define that.
Another scary idea is that we're starting to see the unification of content-creators (Disney, Time-Warner) with the content-deliverers (Comcast, AOL). This can lead to horrible monopolistic practices, trapping people into certain content. Fortunately the internet is somewhat resistant to this kind of trapping. But just look at what the music industry did to radio with ClearChannel...
I met David Hanson two years ago at the AAAI conference in Edmonton, Canada. He hung out with our robotics team for a couple days during the conference where he was demonstrating his (really freaky) robot heads and we were competing in the robot host competition. He's a very artistic guy, and about as enthusiastic as they come. I'm glad to see he's starting to make it big.
Funny thing is, the Ray Kurzweil (who was also at the conference) quote in the article sounds like a conversation I had with David. Our robot, built to serve hors d'oeuvres in a coctail party environment, was designed to look like a table, rather than a butler (Although it had a pan/tilt/zoom camera for a "head"). The idea was to improve on people's expectations of a table rather than disappoint people expecting a real human. Kurzweil's quote sounds like something I probably said to David: "Better to build a smart piece of furniture than a stupid human."
Not that I'm an expert on this kind of thing, but it seems to me that the components of an IC would only really pose an environmental risk if they were exposed to the elements for a long time, or ended up being melted down at a chinese screwdriver-shop.
Which, incidentally, is what happens to a large percentage of so-called "recycled" computers.
It seems like the government, more and more now, is treating anyone who wishes to remain anonymous, or who does things anonymously, as a criminal. Granted there is nothing in our bill of rights or constitution that protects our right to anonymity, but there should be.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons why one would wish to remain anonymous. Not to mention the fact that the US government should have no control over the internet which in essence represents the international community. Just because anonymity can be inconvenient for law enforcement doesn't mean it must be made illegal.
Ski masks, pantyhose, and latex gloves are still available for sale in the US. All these are ideal tools for concealing your identity in real life. Wearing them in real life is not illegal either. It is, however, illegal to commit a crime while employing these tools, although no more so than if one does not employ them.
Yes, and if I gave you a demonstration example of AES encryption that you could do in your head, that would be pretty easy to brute-force too. One could set up port-knocking with 512 sequential secret knocks... out of 2^16 ports per knock or whatever... how easy is that to brute force? And that's just to scan one port!
The replay attack is a problem, but an attacker with the ability to sniff your local traffic will always be able to determine what ports are being used... there's no defense for that short of tunnelling everything through one ssh port.
It's infinitely better than using non-standard ports... those will still be discovered by passive port-scanners who scan a broad range. With port-knocking you can essentially make a machine as invisible as you want (maybe still smelly for the packet-sniffers) and still have all your services available to trusted clients.
It should be noted that this is NOT (necessarily) an example of security through obscurity. One could treat the port-knocking sequence as a "key". Long enough keys could make port-scanning impossible for anyone who doesn't know the key. Real mathematical cryptography is based on a similar principle.
Also, this is only a defense against port-scanning. Even if someone did manage to break the knocking sequence, they would still have to use some kind of exploit against the machine on the port they discovered.
TWAJS
You should get your sarcasm detecter checked out, I think it's malfunctioning.
The best part of the article is the link in the sidebar to Fastener Hut