Since only you should have access to your data, you wouldn't need assymetrical encryption for this (i.e. not RSA, PGP, etc). You could just stuff your files through some traditional encryption scheme, and you'd have tonnes of security. A 1024 bit key, for instance, would stop anything short of a quantum computer for the next few decades, at the very least.
Actually, IIRC, originally Freenet wasn't encrypted at all. The main point is that it's decentralised; there's no real way of tracking who put what on the network as it all gets copied around. A bit like trying to find who originally ripped an mp3 found on Kazaa. Encryption was put on afterwards, which is probably a darn good idea, because then people can rightly claim they have absolutely no idea what's on their node, which makes putting forward any legal case against an individual near impossible. They (i.e. the RIAA, MPAA, etc) would have to make the technology itself illegal.
I got into Nethack via Falcon's Eye, and had many hours fun hacking through dungeon aplenty. Then I tried the QT interface, which is hardly as pretty but certainly a step up from ANSI graphics. And yet, it was better that way; you could see the whole dungeon at once, you could see which monster was which more easily, and keyboard commands were faster and more exact than any mouse-driven interface.
So then I upgraded and the QT libraries broke for Nethack, so I was temporarily forced to use the text-based interface to the game instead. I've never gone back to graphical Nethack since. Because it uses standard ANSI characters, it's far more easy to see what the dungeon represents. Instead of interpreting some small icons or raytraced models, you can instantly see what's about. A little picture of a kobold is hard to recognise, but a 'k' is easy to see. Once you've connected monsters with letters, then there's really only one way to play.
The University of Warwick here in England runs mainly Windows NT, with some Unix workareas dotted about, but the Computer Science building runs only Linux (Redhat) and Solaris. There's quite a lot of work done in the Computer Science course here that needs a fairly good working knowledge of Linux. Which is a pretty good thing, IMHO:)
But with 25 and 26 the whole point is missed, like stopping before you get in too deep. 25 was probably my favourite episode, if only for the Rem/Meryl bit. 26 was a bit anti-climactic, I agree, but I'd rather have that then have it end at 24, which would just make it all predictably sad and sorrowful.
I'm rambling, but I really liked the ending, if only that it was happily optimistic and nicely profound:)
Re:Not Mozilla compliant?
on
HotBot Returns
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· Score: 2
Somehow I'm hesitant to take the advice of someone who doesn't seem to know how to use capital letters to denote the beginning of a sentence.
And why use IE anyway? I can't really think of any advantage it offers of Mozilla. Well, perhaps the ability to see badly designed websites, but that isn't really something that is that important. Any website with good content worth seeing is usually designed well enough to conform to most web standards.
If there's something I've missed, perhaps someone could enlighten me on the advantages of IE?
It didn't say they were being repaired, just that it was resetting the system. Maybe it was figuring out a way of using the remaining emitters to compensate for the rest. Or maybe a fuse was blown inside, and it had to figure a way round it, like an immobot. But since it gave an exact time to when it could restart, I'm guessing it was Windows based and just crashed:)
Come to think of it, Windows does have a spookily accurate way of crashing in the most inopportune of moments. So it would kind of make sense for the invisibility to fault in the heat of battle. Perhaps Bill Gates is actually a member of SPECTRE?
I think it's more that most people generally have things they deem to be more important. And why not? We can't all specialise in computing, and for those who don't the information crunching and calculating power shouldn't be denied to them. You don't need to know everything about a computer to use it. For instance, do you use a web browser or do you telnet in on port 80 and translate the HTTP headers and HTML all in your mind?
Computers are there to make life easier. Well, at least that's the theory. They shouldn't be difficult or tricky just because it generates a feeling of elite amongst the computer-literate. Besides, there may be an "an obvious qualitative difference", but that's assuming you understand pop-ups for what they are. If you see a strange dialog pop up, then you're likely to become alarmed, even if it does look different. Only if you can tell the difference is because of it being in a opened browser window generated by javascript would you know that it isn't worth bothering with. The point is people don't know that the difference is important. Like the difference between a poisonous Coral Snake and a relatively harmless Milk Snake (black on yellow is the former and red on black the latter, if I recall correctly. An obvious difference, but not if you don't know what to look for).
Ah, so this is the self-centred geek sense of superiority I've heard so much about. And I was just beginning to think that most techs were nice and would help people if they got into trouble. I know quite a few people who fall for these things, one of whom is currently signing up for her second degree course, so she's not, by any means, an imbecile.
I put forward the suggestion, that you are the imbecile for possessing such an aloof (probably false) sense of superiority over those less knowlegable about computers. Either that or a troll, whom I should probably not be feeding.
To put it another way, would you like a professor of computer science calling you an imbecile for not, say, being able to create a Turing Machine to convert some logic expression to its native CNF and thus, given the values of the predicates, solve the equation? Or to draw up a basic circuit diagram of a microcomputer capable of solving polynomial equations? After all, if you don't understand computers you shouldn't be using them, right?
His writing is very dark and not very uplifting, which is why I don't really enjoy his work (Ok, I admit it; I'm an optimist:). The one book I read of his where the main character didn't die, it turned out that the protagonist murdered someone in a quite gruesome way.
This was a pretty major(ish) bug (though not security related, like the majority of IE's) that they found in a major release. In short, the Mozilla crew, programming gurus though they may be, screwed up.
They don't make excuses. They've pulled the browser and are working on an update. Please don't make excuses for them.
When I was younger, we used to have a Dragon 32 microcomputer, which loaded up external data through cassette tapes. If I remember correctly, the tape recorder's line out was plugged into a port onto the computer. So to load up a game, you played the tape, which made a whole host of squeakings and gratings. But you could tell, with some practise, when the loading was going well, and when it was going to fail. Kinda like with this article, though in this case, it's with a network.
Attack of the Jar Jars! You'd get them overrunning planets, swarming over defenses with nigh indestructability. *Shudder* The horror!
(Btw, there was a similar problem with wolves in UO, wasn't there? Though I quit playing UO almost as soon as I got it. My connection was too laggy, and it wasn't worth the monthly costs for me.)
Unfortunately I don't know much about P2P protocols, but wouldn't this tend to slow them down a bit? How many connections does Gnutella (for instance) throw out per second?
Once nanotechnology is in full force, how long do you think any encryption is going to stand up once we have the ability to make millions of specialized computers in a matter of weeks/days/hours/minutes?
Um. Encrypting something is easier than decrypting something by force. Therefore, no matter how much processing power is availiable to the world at large, encryption will still hold (discounting quantum computers or a solution to the NP complete set of problems).
Once the technology exists to create a computer for each possible combination in a 128-bit key, how long do you think your encryption is really going to hold up? Long enough for six million more computers to be built?
A 128 bit key has 3.4e38 possibilities. That's a lot of computers. Now, 6.022e23 hydrogen atoms make up one gram of mass (1 mole). Therefore there are at most 6.022e26 atoms in a kilogram. The Earth weights 5.972e24 kg. Therefore there is at most 3.6e51 atoms that make up the Earth.
Therefore perhaps the poster could explain to me how you could have the technology to "create a computer for each possible combination"? It might work for a 128-bit key, in theory. But a 256-bit key has 1.15e77 possibilities, which outnumbers the number of atoms in the Earth by billions to one. Even solving 128-bit encryption by having a computer per combination would require a minimum of weight of 565 million tonnes.
This reminds me of the story of the grains of rice and the chessboard, where one grain was put on the first square, two grains on the second, four on the third, and so forth. It quickly gets out of control, and you find that there isn't enough rice in the world to complete the sequence.
I don't want to think of the poster as an idiot, but he does seem like he's trying quite hard to be.
Why is the parent post modded up as insightful?! I would insult the moderator stupid enough to mod the parent, but he's probably wearing a black ski mask and on his way to sabotage the Lucasarts Star Wars servers by now.
Andrew S Tanenbaum's book on Computer Networks points out a similar trend; that bandwidth is increasing faster than processor speed. In the future, it'll veyr likely be faster to transfer information about than to process it locally. And that means that distributed computing might become intrisic to most software.
The internet in itself might become a resource for idle CPUs. With a few billion or more individual systems networked up, playing that game of Quake 10 might rely on the processor time borrowed from others.
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Since only you should have access to your data, you wouldn't need assymetrical encryption for this (i.e. not RSA, PGP, etc). You could just stuff your files through some traditional encryption scheme, and you'd have tonnes of security. A 1024 bit key, for instance, would stop anything short of a quantum computer for the next few decades, at the very least.
Actually, IIRC, originally Freenet wasn't encrypted at all. The main point is that it's decentralised; there's no real way of tracking who put what on the network as it all gets copied around. A bit like trying to find who originally ripped an mp3 found on Kazaa. Encryption was put on afterwards, which is probably a darn good idea, because then people can rightly claim they have absolutely no idea what's on their node, which makes putting forward any legal case against an individual near impossible. They (i.e. the RIAA, MPAA, etc) would have to make the technology itself illegal.
Seriously, the question wasn't limited to C/C++, which brings lots of other baggage besides teh GUI.
And Java doesn't bring lots of baggage?!
As far as I know this law only applies to Denmark.
I got into Nethack via Falcon's Eye, and had many hours fun hacking through dungeon aplenty. Then I tried the QT interface, which is hardly as pretty but certainly a step up from ANSI graphics. And yet, it was better that way; you could see the whole dungeon at once, you could see which monster was which more easily, and keyboard commands were faster and more exact than any mouse-driven interface.
So then I upgraded and the QT libraries broke for Nethack, so I was temporarily forced to use the text-based interface to the game instead. I've never gone back to graphical Nethack since. Because it uses standard ANSI characters, it's far more easy to see what the dungeon represents. Instead of interpreting some small icons or raytraced models, you can instantly see what's about. A little picture of a kobold is hard to recognise, but a 'k' is easy to see. Once you've connected monsters with letters, then there's really only one way to play.
The University of Warwick here in England runs mainly Windows NT, with some Unix workareas dotted about, but the Computer Science building runs only Linux (Redhat) and Solaris. There's quite a lot of work done in the Computer Science course here that needs a fairly good working knowledge of Linux. Which is a pretty good thing, IMHO :)
But with 25 and 26 the whole point is missed, like stopping before you get in too deep. 25 was probably my favourite episode, if only for the Rem/Meryl bit. 26 was a bit anti-climactic, I agree, but I'd rather have that then have it end at 24, which would just make it all predictably sad and sorrowful.
:)
I'm rambling, but I really liked the ending, if only that it was happily optimistic and nicely profound
Somehow I'm hesitant to take the advice of someone who doesn't seem to know how to use capital letters to denote the beginning of a sentence.
And why use IE anyway? I can't really think of any advantage it offers of Mozilla. Well, perhaps the ability to see badly designed websites, but that isn't really something that is that important. Any website with good content worth seeing is usually designed well enough to conform to most web standards.
If there's something I've missed, perhaps someone could enlighten me on the advantages of IE?
It didn't say they were being repaired, just that it was resetting the system. Maybe it was figuring out a way of using the remaining emitters to compensate for the rest. Or maybe a fuse was blown inside, and it had to figure a way round it, like an immobot. But since it gave an exact time to when it could restart, I'm guessing it was Windows based and just crashed :)
Come to think of it, Windows does have a spookily accurate way of crashing in the most inopportune of moments. So it would kind of make sense for the invisibility to fault in the heat of battle. Perhaps Bill Gates is actually a member of SPECTRE?
Everyone wants it a bit too easy, huh?
I think it's more that most people generally have things they deem to be more important. And why not? We can't all specialise in computing, and for those who don't the information crunching and calculating power shouldn't be denied to them. You don't need to know everything about a computer to use it. For instance, do you use a web browser or do you telnet in on port 80 and translate the HTTP headers and HTML all in your mind?
Computers are there to make life easier. Well, at least that's the theory. They shouldn't be difficult or tricky just because it generates a feeling of elite amongst the computer-literate. Besides, there may be an "an obvious qualitative difference", but that's assuming you understand pop-ups for what they are. If you see a strange dialog pop up, then you're likely to become alarmed, even if it does look different. Only if you can tell the difference is because of it being in a opened browser window generated by javascript would you know that it isn't worth bothering with. The point is people don't know that the difference is important. Like the difference between a poisonous Coral Snake and a relatively harmless Milk Snake (black on yellow is the former and red on black the latter, if I recall correctly. An obvious difference, but not if you don't know what to look for).
Heh. That's quite clever :)
Ah, so this is the self-centred geek sense of superiority I've heard so much about. And I was just beginning to think that most techs were nice and would help people if they got into trouble. I know quite a few people who fall for these things, one of whom is currently signing up for her second degree course, so she's not, by any means, an imbecile.
I put forward the suggestion, that you are the imbecile for possessing such an aloof (probably false) sense of superiority over those less knowlegable about computers. Either that or a troll, whom I should probably not be feeding.
To put it another way, would you like a professor of computer science calling you an imbecile for not, say, being able to create a Turing Machine to convert some logic expression to its native CNF and thus, given the values of the predicates, solve the equation? Or to draw up a basic circuit diagram of a microcomputer capable of solving polynomial equations? After all, if you don't understand computers you shouldn't be using them, right?
His writing is very dark and not very uplifting, which is why I don't really enjoy his work (Ok, I admit it; I'm an optimist :). The one book I read of his where the main character didn't die, it turned out that the protagonist murdered someone in a quite gruesome way.
This was a pretty major(ish) bug (though not security related, like the majority of IE's) that they found in a major release. In short, the Mozilla crew, programming gurus though they may be, screwed up.
They don't make excuses. They've pulled the browser and are working on an update. Please don't make excuses for them.
When I was younger, we used to have a Dragon 32 microcomputer, which loaded up external data through cassette tapes. If I remember correctly, the tape recorder's line out was plugged into a port onto the computer. So to load up a game, you played the tape, which made a whole host of squeakings and gratings. But you could tell, with some practise, when the loading was going well, and when it was going to fail. Kinda like with this article, though in this case, it's with a network.
...Should reveal a few moon landing conspirisists to make fun of... :)
It's a conspiracy!
Ok, you got me. It's a lie. Nothing gets past your razor-sharp intellect, does it?
Attack of the Jar Jars! You'd get them overrunning planets, swarming over defenses with nigh indestructability. *Shudder* The horror!
(Btw, there was a similar problem with wolves in UO, wasn't there? Though I quit playing UO almost as soon as I got it. My connection was too laggy, and it wasn't worth the monthly costs for me.)
Unfortunately I don't know much about P2P protocols, but wouldn't this tend to slow them down a bit? How many connections does Gnutella (for instance) throw out per second?
Once nanotechnology is in full force, how long do you think any encryption is going to stand up once we have the ability to make millions of specialized computers in a matter of weeks/days/hours/minutes?
Um. Encrypting something is easier than decrypting something by force. Therefore, no matter how much processing power is availiable to the world at large, encryption will still hold (discounting quantum computers or a solution to the NP complete set of problems).
Once the technology exists to create a computer for each possible combination in a 128-bit key, how long do you think your encryption is really going to hold up? Long enough for six million more computers to be built?
A 128 bit key has 3.4e38 possibilities. That's a lot of computers. Now, 6.022e23 hydrogen atoms make up one gram of mass (1 mole). Therefore there are at most 6.022e26 atoms in a kilogram. The Earth weights 5.972e24 kg. Therefore there is at most 3.6e51 atoms that make up the Earth.
Therefore perhaps the poster could explain to me how you could have the technology to "create a computer for each possible combination"? It might work for a 128-bit key, in theory. But a 256-bit key has 1.15e77 possibilities, which outnumbers the number of atoms in the Earth by billions to one. Even solving 128-bit encryption by having a computer per combination would require a minimum of weight of 565 million tonnes.
This reminds me of the story of the grains of rice and the chessboard, where one grain was put on the first square, two grains on the second, four on the third, and so forth. It quickly gets out of control, and you find that there isn't enough rice in the world to complete the sequence.
I don't want to think of the poster as an idiot, but he does seem like he's trying quite hard to be.
Frankly, I doubt people will care.
...
"Meesa Jar-Jar Bin-"
*Jedi jumps out of the trees, yelling "Die Jar-jar scum!*
-Respawn-
"Meesa Ja-"
*BOOM!*
-Respawn-
"Mee-"
*Head blown off by a well aimed blaster*
-Respawn-
I'd be surprised if they could get Jar-Jar to last for more than a few seconds without some player lopping his head off with a lightsaber.
Why is the parent post modded up as insightful?! I would insult the moderator stupid enough to mod the parent, but he's probably wearing a black ski mask and on his way to sabotage the Lucasarts Star Wars servers by now.
That when I loaded up the page there was an IBM advert that showed a load of empty cubicles?
Andrew S Tanenbaum's book on Computer Networks points out a similar trend; that bandwidth is increasing faster than processor speed. In the future, it'll veyr likely be faster to transfer information about than to process it locally. And that means that distributed computing might become intrisic to most software.
The internet in itself might become a resource for idle CPUs. With a few billion or more individual systems networked up, playing that game of Quake 10 might rely on the processor time borrowed from others.