I totally and unwaveringly believe that we domesticated primates will use
any and every tool or concept we can get our hands on to fuck one another
over.
Some of us play nice because we've found that takes less work, on
average, than killing, raping, and robbing our "fellow" man; but we still
have the same goal - win the pack dominance game by having the biggest pile
of green slips of paper.
So does that mean that any work I do would violate this law,
if I lived in the UK?
And I don't mean this as hyperbole. We made it to the top of the food-chain
by proving ourselves the most evil bastards on the planet.
It's neither "open source" nor "free software"
The Stallmans (and apparently Nicholas Negropontes) of the world aside,
it STILL, and always has, counted as free-as-in-beer.
Jeezus, people, get over this self-righteous trip about source
code. As an SE, I appreciate having source code available, but
will in general just run what works.
And that best describes 99.999% of the planet - They don't care
about your BS philosophies. They just want a cool app to edit
their digital pictures. A solitaire clone. An MP3 and DVD player
(and they don't care if the second of those breaks a law they don't
understand, either). An office productivity suite, whatever
you call it and whatever (open or not) file formats it uses.
I seriously don't mean this as a troll - I do understand the
importance of FOSS. But the zealots pushing so hard for its ubiquity
will only end up killing it without at least a little compromise.
Keep in mind that "we" count as an extremely small minority.
The vast majority don't even know the issue exists! And of those
who do, the vast majority just want free software and don't
even have the ability to compile their own, much less make
modifications to the source code.
FTA: Symantec's DeepSight team said the exploit successfully
executes shellcode when it is processed by Microsoft Word
2003. The malicious file caused Microsoft Word 2000 to
crash, but shellcode execution did not occur.
Wonderful! So it only affects the latest-and-greatest
versions of Office. Considering that MS hasn't added anything
since Office 95 (I still run '97, myself), I expect only
business users on SA should ever get hit by this exploit.
Then again, I suppose this means that Microsoft has
added something, at least since Office 2000... Namely,
more security flaws. Woot! Way to go Billy G! "Focus more
on security" indeed.
"...so please, please remember - when you make "open" movies,
you don't just take profits away from some Hollywood fat-cats;
You hurt the gaffers and set designers and makeup artists and
fluffers and all the rest of the "little guys". Without all
of them, the movies you love just couldn't exist!"
If you had a desktop with the kind of gaming power
these little boxes such as the 360 and the PS3, they'd
cost well over $1,000.
And if I had a desktop that could run as fast as a horse,
it too would cost well over $1,000.
Just because both have CPUs and can play games doesn't make
them comparable. My car has no fewer than 7 CPUs,
and I play games in it all the time. So should I
justify the price of a high-end gaming PC by saying that
my car costs more and can't even push as many gigaflops?
The PS3 (and any gaming console, except possible the original
XBox) represents a very crippled subset of the capabilities
of a PC. So it doesn't really matter if they need
to include 99% of a PC in there, as long as they don't
let me use it as a PC when not gaming, with my OS
of choice and an off-the-shelf USB keyboard and mouse. But
that will happen right around the same time Apple
releases OS-X for commodity PC hardware and Billy G puts
Vista under the GPL.
For those who (like me) had no idea why "re-shipping" would
break the law (except possibly as some cheesy customs
violation), particularly to the extent that someone would
count as a member of the top-four international cybercriminals...
The actual crime lies somewhere between (inclusive) credit
card fraud and identity theft. The "shipping" part of that
just helps launder the profits.
Apparently those particular sub-strains that are resistant
to one antibiotic are not to one of the other two. It didn't
matter which of the two you chose, just that you used any two
in combination.
Yup, that works in some situations. But also explains why
we now have poly-drug-resistant strains (such as M/V/ORSA,
with "O" referring to ofloxacin rather than oxacillin, though
the "M" tends to include the latter anyway).
Unfortunately, bacteria have a SERIOUS evolutionary advantage
over humans, and this topic has counted as a personal peeve
for quite a while. We need to STOP giving antibiotics in
animal feed, STOP giving whiny mothers placebo antibiotics
for kids with minor ear infections, STOP giving any unknown
infection a blind multi-drug mix without first doing an
antibiotic sensitivity culture. But of course, all of those
require more effort than "take two and call me in the morning".
And as a result, we've almost gone back to the situation
we had before 1928, when a diagnosis of pneumonia meant a
death sentence, and people die from minor cuts while shaving.
We've already returned to the days of TB or malaria
as fatal if you can't afford two years of intensive multi-drug
IV treatment.
Pathetic. We as a species don't deserve antibiotics.
If we ever actually had something as useful as a babel fish
on this planet, I have little doubt they've gone extinct
because they taste good.
As computers advance it only makes sense to use
the power that is becoming available.
You miss the point... Yes, we want to make full use of
the power of our PCs... But we want that use to go to
the programs we run, whether that means games or
multimedia editing or whatever. If the OS itself
requires those specs, that doesn't speak well for how
well other things will run under that OS.
"Sure I used to run Cool3dShooter2005 at 115fps and
under Vista I only get 20fps... But look at that cool
transparent window title with multiple internal
reflections! And it means a lot to me that Microsoft
has thoughtfully reserved 400MB of RAM to make sure I
get my once-or-twice-a-month local file searches back
ASAP."
Hell with the attitude you have why would we have
ever wanted more than text based graphics?
I'll admit I've gotten used to the convenience of using
a GUI for managing a filesystem... Drag-and-drop takes
soooo much less effort than manually typing out
paths. But beyond that, I don't care what the OS looks
like - Win95 already had every significant feature
of the Windows GUI I find valuable. But the OS merely
serves a purpose, it acts as a tool. Would you go out
and buy a new house just so you can use a spiffy new
chrome-plated swiss-army hammer with racing fins and
a limited edition bottle-opener, but doesn't work on
"legacy" nails?
You'd need two "keys" to whatever it was you were
encrypting, and you'd have to spend some time to create
a second plaintext of the exact same length that was
plausable but harmless.
A way around the first requirement exists, by having the
one-time pad not random.
You write two messages, the harmless one and the real one.
XOR them together. You now have one key and one cyphertext
that looks like innocuous plaintext.
Of course, this leaves the problem of what to do with the
key, since it has the same size as the message, looks
encrypted, and you can't pre-share it. But boy
could you have a good laugh in your cell when they put
you away for not providing the "key" to the key itself
(though in practice, even a rank amateur could figure
out what to do with the key if they had it, so here the
problem reduces to one of steganography rather than
crypto).
Time for steganographic file systems where your private
data can be hidden inside innocent looking files.
Yes and no...
That works well for hiding a small amount of data that
would potentially impact a lot of people, such as your
contacts list. It requires a HUGE amount of data compared
to what you want to hide, though, like 1:10 at best. If
you wanted to hide your downloaded MP3 collection... Good
luck. Better start taking a LOT of digital family photos,
and buy stock in Maxtor for the number of drives you'll
need to hide any sizeable collection.
It doesn't help so much in actual communication. Yes,
you could send such a "family photo" via email, but
as brain-damaged as laws like this sound, the actual
guys in the field watching your traffic would rather
quickly figure out that the network of 27 people you
frequenly email have little interest in yet another
picture of your dog sleeping on the couch.
the bigger problem here, though, involves exactly what
they mean by "your" encryption keys... Several times a
day, I check my email over an SSH tunnel. Even if I
don't check my email, just leaving sshd running
generates a new server key once per hour. If I just
connect and immediately disconnect, that means I've
created (at least) one disposeable session key. If
I stay connected for any length of time, it makes a
new keypair every... what, one minute? Five minutes?
And even if I wanted to comply... I never know
any of those keys! All of the above happens
transparently in the background of the tunnel, entirely
with telling me the details.
So how, exactly, does the UK government plan to require
those keys, without which the user's password or personal
private key won't suffice to decrypt a captured
session?
So people are going to give up being able to recharge
their cell phone batteries for free for the ultra-convienence
of having to go to the store to buy new fuel cells for their
phones
Yeah, I too kinda wonder about the logic behind such a
product.
I also have to wonder just how much more eco-friendly
this would prove over the life of a phone - For a ballpark
calculation, people replace their phones every two years and
current phones need charging every two to three days. If
this cell lasts twice as long that means it will eat between
120 and 180 cells over the life of the phone. Does one
Li-ion battery really cause that much damage to the
environment that 180 PEMs+tank represents an
improvement???
For bigger things, like laptops, I can see the use of
fuel cells as an auxilliary power source (though
not replacing batteries outright). But for a cell phone,
they last three days, not three hours, per charge. Even
then, though, I have to wonder just how popular they would
prove themselves.
Mostly, I see fuel cells as useful in places where we
already use fluids (ie, gasoline) as a source of power,
such as cars and generators. I also see a possible
secondary market in places we currently use mostly
non-rechargeable batteries, such as flashlights and
radios. But targetting cell-phones, laptops, or any
other device that already uses rechargeables seems
like a sure way to make sure fuel cells never become
popular.
AT&T has lost its '11th hour bid' to force closed
hearings on unsealing critical documents
First, why the hell didn't the EFF go public
with their evidence first? Depending on the
outcome of the case, we might never know whether they
stumbled onto something "real", or just something
trivial that the NSA could hypothetically abuse
under a combination of unlikely circumstances.
But aside from that...
How exactly does the evidence remain under seal in an
open court? Do all parties involved use vague
allusions and a lot of wink-wink-nudge-nudge to
refer to the evidence without revealing anything
about it to the public? Do spectators swear not to
reveal anything they see or hear (yeah, that
would work - until about 30 seconds after the end
of the first session)? Do the MiB use their magic
flashing memory eraser any time someone mentions a
detail under seal?
So goddamned sick of all the secrets and lies. Who wants
to join me in pushing for a constitutional amendment banning
the use of secrecy or any form of "classified" designation
(perhaps with a nonrenewable two-week-maximum exception for
situations where revealing such information would directly
threaten American lives)? Time to let these arrogant
twats know who they work for!
Anyone can pick apart someones comment out of context.
Care to explain how that counted as "out of context"?
Yes, anyone can use selective quoting to rip appart someone's
words. And I would consider doing so "cheating" at the game
of rhetoric.
But a clause-by-clause response hardly counts as "out of context."
Now, if you want to claim that I didn't limit my discourse to a
strictly factual rebuttal, I would agree with you - I did indeed
"stoop to his level". But unfairly attacking out-of-context? No.
Because it'll take some time to review "anything that
comes through".
True, and for that reason, this won't help much to prevent
any short-term activity.
After-the-fact, however, it would tend to allow a near 100%
detection rate - Assuming the subject used any form of electronic
communication (which, interestingly enough, tends to make this
all the less useful for detecting terrorists, who strongly
favor ultra-low-tech methods). Case in point, the recent
Slashdot article on using phone records to track down
Whitehouse whistle-blowers. The leaks still happened, but
if this alleged data collection really has occurred, it
would only take a minimum effort for a human agent to
manually go through a few dozen pre-heuristically-filtered
hours of data to pinpoint exactly who leaked what, when,
where, possibly why, and to whom.
Also, don't underestimate the NSA's ability to weed out
the vast majority of uninteresting traffic, as well as to
detect (some of) the most interesting traffic. They don't
need to follow up on every use of the word "bomb";
but if it occurs with certain other not-commonly-known details
(operation code-names, classified locations, names of
people under cover, etc), they have a pretty good chance of
finding something juicy.
And just for the record - I do not believe
a near-perfect post hoc detection rate justifies
the nearly total loss of privacy rights this system
(if real) would necessarily entail.
What's the basis for saying the PS3 will likely
drop to half its cost?
Fair question!
1) I honestly don't think it will sell well at
$600, passing above a critical mental threshold of "more
than $500". Perhaps Sony will prove me totally wrong on
that, but above $500, people start thinking in terms of
"half a thousand" rather than "five hundred".
2) The cost of producing the PS3 will drop as they
get into the swing of it... Even if they need
to sell the first million units so high to try to
recoup R&D and hardware costs, that situation will
(as history has shown) rapidly improve.
3) Competition. Although you could argue that the
Wii has a different demographic than the PS3, the 360
targets the same group and costs considerably less.
And even if Sony doesn't wise-up first, I think the
game devs will eventually force (by lawsuits,
if necessary) Sony to suck it up and maximize the
customer base to which they can hope to sell their
games.
BLAH BLAH BLAH Im tired of reading about everyone's
lame ass opinion
One might well ask why, then, you bother not only reading
said "lame ass opinion"s, but actually wasting your time
responding to them.
Are you the CEO of Sony? No?
No. Not the CEO, someone much more important
(in the aggregate) - A potential customer. And a potential
customer who makes quite a lot more than the average
member of the PS3's target market, at that (not bragging
here, just stating the obvious fact that most people with
the free time to justify buying a $600 way to waste time,
generally have not yet entered the "real" working-world).
And I still won't pay $600 for a gaming machine.
The point is, this competition calls for desperate
measures
Oh, yeah, I can feel their pain at the competition forcing
them to sell the most expensive of this generation's machines.
Boo-frickin-hoo. Can I get Sony and you a couple of tissues?
thus creating wonderful things for us consumers.
Ah, and here I see our failure to communicate. You consider
yourself a "consumer" like a well-trained good little sheep.
Baa-aaa-aaa. Run from the sun, little sheep. Drink the
party kool-aid, little sheep. Defend Sony's rape of you,
little sheep. Buy the new black, little sheep.
That is all we should care about.
Wow. I hope for your sake you meant that as a
troll.
Im tired of listening to wailing fangirls in heat
over prices
How much it costs at launch really makes almost no
difference. If you want a better idea of its "real" price,
we need to ask how much will it cost 13 months after
launch.
I expect we'll have the exact opposite opinions then...
Because, while the Wii will probably only come down by 20-30%
(a drop of around $50), the PS3 will most likely plummet to
half its original cost.
$600 for a game console... Sony apparently learned
nothing from NeoGeo's lesson.
However, Sony's mistake does have one positive side... I'll
probably finally get around to buying a PS2 in the near
future, as the price of both the console and its games
plummets (and start appearing in used CD stores for a
pittance).
A lot of noise has been made lately regarding
TiVo's transformation from an ad zapper to Madison
Avenue's new darling.
The day Madison Avenue considers TiVo as anything but
a mortal enemy, I will switch to using a Myth box.
Currently, TiVo has a slight edge, at least
for those of us fortunate enough to have free lifetime
basic service (Yeah, suuuuuure I'll upgrade...
Just as soon as they offer that free for life).
But if they make it progressively more difficult to
avoid ads, I'll just avoid TiVo.
In their first podcast ever, TiVo explains how they hope
to redefine advertising in the age of the DVR through a
customer centered approach.
They already have redefined advertising, or at
least the sub-category of the 30-second spot - As
"An obsolete means of giving viewers a bathroom break,
once necessary only because viewers lacked the ability
to pause live TV". Unless their new definition includes
a way to get rid of even more advertisements,
they'd do well to quit while ahead.
how will their new initiatives change your TV
viewing experience?
Well, it might make it TiVo-less in the near future, but
aside from that - They just can't make people start watching
commercials again. Sheep might never discover on their own
that the clover in the shady spot by the tree tastes better,
but once forced to try it, they'll never go back to
plain ol' grass.
Why bother to be diplomatic? I mean, there have to be
some empty seats on those CIA black-bag extradition flights;
when you're taking terrorists to Russia to have their
toenails ripped out, pay the right people and I'm sure
you could get a few spammers to fill the seats on the
return leg.
Do you recall how the CIA funded its black-ops from the 1960s
to the 1980s? And how the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan?
The CIA acted as the world's drug-dealer. They stocked up
on Afghan heroin, shipped it to the rest of the world, put
on the occasional dog-and-pony of busting "smugglers"
(aka "competition") to drive up the sales price, and did
pretty much whatever the hell they wanted with the profits.
Now... Acting as a successful spammer requires fat pipes
spread across the globe ("real" law enforcement has a
hell of a time tracking activity across national borders).
It requires some pretty powerful people to look the other
way. And what have we seen lately? A nice little
dog-and-pony where a few minor spammers get busted and
put away for pitifully short prison terms, with the
effect of driving up the price for those seeking
"mass-email marketing" services.
If you think the CIA will take out spammers for you,
you clearly haven't paid attention for the past 50 years.
IF they suddenly seem interested in spam, it will
just mean they see a new way to fund their political
games in Central America and the former Soviet Satellites,
and need to weed out the competition before they can take
over the market.
I never really understood the term "fight fire with
fire." A more effective way to fight fire is with water
or foam.
Water and foam both put out fire by lowering the temperature
and depriving the combustible material of oxygen. This
requires enough foam or water to completely saturate the
area already burning, with a bit extra on the edges to prevent
fresh fuel from igniting. That works well on a small scale
(a single house), but very poorly on widespread forest
or brush fires.
"Fighting fire with fire" means a controlled burn going
inward toward the source of the fire. Done correctly,
by the time the controlled burn meets the core of the fire,
it has left in its wake a wide swath of already-consumed and
partially-cooled fuel. Thus, the fire can't contine spreading
outward along that same path. Completely surround the fire
with such already-burned zones, and the fire can't do anything
but burn itself out in-place.
Rather than needing to saturate the existing fire and
its edges, this only requires defending a single line against
spreading in the wrong direction - And preparation for that
can start before igniting the controlled burn (such as by
pre-saturating the area and/or clear-cutting a narrow strip
bordering the target burn).
Extending the metaphor to to anti-spam techniques, think of
the above description as DOS'ing the core of the fire. If
we saturate the spammers' network connections, they have
no more bandwidth to consume in spreading their crapfloods
outward to the world. Continue until bandwidth costs "consume"
the bank-accounts of the spammers (or more realistically,
they cut their losses and run), and the spammer goes under
(at least temporarily).
Now personally, I'd rather mix metaphors and literally
fight spam with fire - Track these less-than-worthless
bastards down and surround their offices or houses with
a ring of fire moving in toward the core. Then roast
marshmallows over their charred corpses as we sing
"We Shall Overcome".
But, the law frowns on that, so I'll have to settle for
simply helping to put them out of business.
Jonathan Schwartz at JavaOne this morning said that he
will release the source code for Java. The company is asking
developers to provide feedback on how to best get there and
prevent forking and fragmentation.
Well, as a developer, I will tell you THE one
and only way to prevent forking and fragmentation...
even entertainment system components are going to need
to be powered.
Which raises the question, why not just superimpose an
onboard data network over the power system, the same way
BPL or those older home 2Mbit network-through-your-outlets
systems worked? Then you only need a single wire running
to every onboard device (assuming a frame ground).
Fly-by-wireless indeed. Neither necessary nor
desireable - A solution in need of a problem, nothing
more.
Slashdot Mirror
(b) believing that it is likely to be so used.
I totally and unwaveringly believe that we domesticated primates will use any and every tool or concept we can get our hands on to fuck one another over.
Some of us play nice because we've found that takes less work, on average, than killing, raping, and robbing our "fellow" man; but we still have the same goal - win the pack dominance game by having the biggest pile of green slips of paper.
So does that mean that any work I do would violate this law, if I lived in the UK?
And I don't mean this as hyperbole. We made it to the top of the food-chain by proving ourselves the most evil bastards on the planet.
It's neither "open source" nor "free software"
The Stallmans (and apparently Nicholas Negropontes) of the world aside, it STILL, and always has, counted as free-as-in-beer.
Jeezus, people, get over this self-righteous trip about source code. As an SE, I appreciate having source code available, but will in general just run what works.
And that best describes 99.999% of the planet - They don't care about your BS philosophies. They just want a cool app to edit their digital pictures. A solitaire clone. An MP3 and DVD player (and they don't care if the second of those breaks a law they don't understand, either). An office productivity suite, whatever you call it and whatever (open or not) file formats it uses.
I seriously don't mean this as a troll - I do understand the importance of FOSS. But the zealots pushing so hard for its ubiquity will only end up killing it without at least a little compromise. Keep in mind that "we" count as an extremely small minority. The vast majority don't even know the issue exists! And of those who do, the vast majority just want free software and don't even have the ability to compile their own, much less make modifications to the source code.
FTA: Symantec's DeepSight team said the exploit successfully executes shellcode when it is processed by Microsoft Word 2003. The malicious file caused Microsoft Word 2000 to crash, but shellcode execution did not occur.
Wonderful! So it only affects the latest-and-greatest versions of Office. Considering that MS hasn't added anything since Office 95 (I still run '97, myself), I expect only business users on SA should ever get hit by this exploit.
Then again, I suppose this means that Microsoft has added something, at least since Office 2000... Namely, more security flaws. Woot! Way to go Billy G! "Focus more on security" indeed.
"...so please, please remember - when you make "open" movies, you don't just take profits away from some Hollywood fat-cats; You hurt the gaffers and set designers and makeup artists and fluffers and all the rest of the "little guys". Without all of them, the movies you love just couldn't exist!"
If you had a desktop with the kind of gaming power these little boxes such as the 360 and the PS3, they'd cost well over $1,000.
And if I had a desktop that could run as fast as a horse, it too would cost well over $1,000.
Just because both have CPUs and can play games doesn't make them comparable. My car has no fewer than 7 CPUs, and I play games in it all the time. So should I justify the price of a high-end gaming PC by saying that my car costs more and can't even push as many gigaflops?
The PS3 (and any gaming console, except possible the original XBox) represents a very crippled subset of the capabilities of a PC. So it doesn't really matter if they need to include 99% of a PC in there, as long as they don't let me use it as a PC when not gaming, with my OS of choice and an off-the-shelf USB keyboard and mouse. But that will happen right around the same time Apple releases OS-X for commodity PC hardware and Billy G puts Vista under the GPL.
Actually I'd like to know where they are going to get these PC's that are not made in China.
From small-scale builders?
I build all my own, and would gladly do so for a the government (for about 3x the price of the components, of course).
Hmm... I wonder if Taiwan counts. Don't all motherboards now come from there?
For those who (like me) had no idea why "re-shipping" would break the law (except possibly as some cheesy customs violation), particularly to the extent that someone would count as a member of the top-four international cybercriminals...
The actual crime lies somewhere between (inclusive) credit card fraud and identity theft. The "shipping" part of that just helps launder the profits.
Just an FYI.
Apparently those particular sub-strains that are resistant to one antibiotic are not to one of the other two. It didn't matter which of the two you chose, just that you used any two in combination.
Yup, that works in some situations. But also explains why we now have poly-drug-resistant strains (such as M/V/ORSA, with "O" referring to ofloxacin rather than oxacillin, though the "M" tends to include the latter anyway).
Unfortunately, bacteria have a SERIOUS evolutionary advantage over humans, and this topic has counted as a personal peeve for quite a while. We need to STOP giving antibiotics in animal feed, STOP giving whiny mothers placebo antibiotics for kids with minor ear infections, STOP giving any unknown infection a blind multi-drug mix without first doing an antibiotic sensitivity culture. But of course, all of those require more effort than "take two and call me in the morning". And as a result, we've almost gone back to the situation we had before 1928, when a diagnosis of pneumonia meant a death sentence, and people die from minor cuts while shaving. We've already returned to the days of TB or malaria as fatal if you can't afford two years of intensive multi-drug IV treatment.
Pathetic. We as a species don't deserve antibiotics. If we ever actually had something as useful as a babel fish on this planet, I have little doubt they've gone extinct because they taste good.
I don't want to mod this down; can somebody translate?
Ummm...
Okay...
1) Free recharges vs pay-per-charge - Who wins?
2) 180 fuel cells vs one rechargeable battery - Which damages Mother Nature more?
3) "New" or "Improved" - Which do you actually want?
(Cheat-sheet: 1B; 2A?; 3B)
As computers advance it only makes sense to use the power that is becoming available.
You miss the point... Yes, we want to make full use of the power of our PCs... But we want that use to go to the programs we run, whether that means games or multimedia editing or whatever. If the OS itself requires those specs, that doesn't speak well for how well other things will run under that OS.
"Sure I used to run Cool3dShooter2005 at 115fps and under Vista I only get 20fps... But look at that cool transparent window title with multiple internal reflections! And it means a lot to me that Microsoft has thoughtfully reserved 400MB of RAM to make sure I get my once-or-twice-a-month local file searches back ASAP."
Hell with the attitude you have why would we have ever wanted more than text based graphics?
I'll admit I've gotten used to the convenience of using a GUI for managing a filesystem... Drag-and-drop takes soooo much less effort than manually typing out paths. But beyond that, I don't care what the OS looks like - Win95 already had every significant feature of the Windows GUI I find valuable. But the OS merely serves a purpose, it acts as a tool. Would you go out and buy a new house just so you can use a spiffy new chrome-plated swiss-army hammer with racing fins and a limited edition bottle-opener, but doesn't work on "legacy" nails?
You'd need two "keys" to whatever it was you were encrypting, and you'd have to spend some time to create a second plaintext of the exact same length that was plausable but harmless.
A way around the first requirement exists, by having the one-time pad not random.
You write two messages, the harmless one and the real one. XOR them together. You now have one key and one cyphertext that looks like innocuous plaintext.
Of course, this leaves the problem of what to do with the key, since it has the same size as the message, looks encrypted, and you can't pre-share it. But boy could you have a good laugh in your cell when they put you away for not providing the "key" to the key itself (though in practice, even a rank amateur could figure out what to do with the key if they had it, so here the problem reduces to one of steganography rather than crypto).
Time for steganographic file systems where your private data can be hidden inside innocent looking files.
Yes and no...
That works well for hiding a small amount of data that would potentially impact a lot of people, such as your contacts list. It requires a HUGE amount of data compared to what you want to hide, though, like 1:10 at best. If you wanted to hide your downloaded MP3 collection... Good luck. Better start taking a LOT of digital family photos, and buy stock in Maxtor for the number of drives you'll need to hide any sizeable collection.
It doesn't help so much in actual communication. Yes, you could send such a "family photo" via email, but as brain-damaged as laws like this sound, the actual guys in the field watching your traffic would rather quickly figure out that the network of 27 people you frequenly email have little interest in yet another picture of your dog sleeping on the couch.
the bigger problem here, though, involves exactly what they mean by "your" encryption keys... Several times a day, I check my email over an SSH tunnel. Even if I don't check my email, just leaving sshd running generates a new server key once per hour. If I just connect and immediately disconnect, that means I've created (at least) one disposeable session key. If I stay connected for any length of time, it makes a new keypair every... what, one minute? Five minutes?
And even if I wanted to comply... I never know any of those keys! All of the above happens transparently in the background of the tunnel, entirely with telling me the details.
So how, exactly, does the UK government plan to require those keys, without which the user's password or personal private key won't suffice to decrypt a captured session?
Who the hell modded this informative?
Check the destination of that link before you click it... It goes to Bottle Guy - Just another site similar to Goatse or TubGirl.
So people are going to give up being able to recharge their cell phone batteries for free for the ultra-convienence of having to go to the store to buy new fuel cells for their phones
Yeah, I too kinda wonder about the logic behind such a product.
I also have to wonder just how much more eco-friendly this would prove over the life of a phone - For a ballpark calculation, people replace their phones every two years and current phones need charging every two to three days. If this cell lasts twice as long that means it will eat between 120 and 180 cells over the life of the phone. Does one Li-ion battery really cause that much damage to the environment that 180 PEMs+tank represents an improvement???
For bigger things, like laptops, I can see the use of fuel cells as an auxilliary power source (though not replacing batteries outright). But for a cell phone, they last three days, not three hours, per charge. Even then, though, I have to wonder just how popular they would prove themselves.
Mostly, I see fuel cells as useful in places where we already use fluids (ie, gasoline) as a source of power, such as cars and generators. I also see a possible secondary market in places we currently use mostly non-rechargeable batteries, such as flashlights and radios. But targetting cell-phones, laptops, or any other device that already uses rechargeables seems like a sure way to make sure fuel cells never become popular.
AT&T has lost its '11th hour bid' to force closed hearings on unsealing critical documents
First, why the hell didn't the EFF go public with their evidence first? Depending on the outcome of the case, we might never know whether they stumbled onto something "real", or just something trivial that the NSA could hypothetically abuse under a combination of unlikely circumstances.
But aside from that...
How exactly does the evidence remain under seal in an open court? Do all parties involved use vague allusions and a lot of wink-wink-nudge-nudge to refer to the evidence without revealing anything about it to the public? Do spectators swear not to reveal anything they see or hear (yeah, that would work - until about 30 seconds after the end of the first session)? Do the MiB use their magic flashing memory eraser any time someone mentions a detail under seal?
So goddamned sick of all the secrets and lies. Who wants to join me in pushing for a constitutional amendment banning the use of secrecy or any form of "classified" designation (perhaps with a nonrenewable two-week-maximum exception for situations where revealing such information would directly threaten American lives)? Time to let these arrogant twats know who they work for!
Anyone can pick apart someones comment out of context.
Care to explain how that counted as "out of context"?
Yes, anyone can use selective quoting to rip appart someone's words. And I would consider doing so "cheating" at the game of rhetoric.
But a clause-by-clause response hardly counts as "out of context."
Now, if you want to claim that I didn't limit my discourse to a strictly factual rebuttal, I would agree with you - I did indeed "stoop to his level". But unfairly attacking out-of-context? No.
Because it'll take some time to review "anything that comes through".
True, and for that reason, this won't help much to prevent any short-term activity.
After-the-fact, however, it would tend to allow a near 100% detection rate - Assuming the subject used any form of electronic communication (which, interestingly enough, tends to make this all the less useful for detecting terrorists, who strongly favor ultra-low-tech methods). Case in point, the recent Slashdot article on using phone records to track down Whitehouse whistle-blowers. The leaks still happened, but if this alleged data collection really has occurred, it would only take a minimum effort for a human agent to manually go through a few dozen pre-heuristically-filtered hours of data to pinpoint exactly who leaked what, when, where, possibly why, and to whom.
Also, don't underestimate the NSA's ability to weed out the vast majority of uninteresting traffic, as well as to detect (some of) the most interesting traffic. They don't need to follow up on every use of the word "bomb"; but if it occurs with certain other not-commonly-known details (operation code-names, classified locations, names of people under cover, etc), they have a pretty good chance of finding something juicy.
And just for the record - I do not believe a near-perfect post hoc detection rate justifies the nearly total loss of privacy rights this system (if real) would necessarily entail.
What's the basis for saying the PS3 will likely drop to half its cost?
Fair question!
1) I honestly don't think it will sell well at $600, passing above a critical mental threshold of "more than $500". Perhaps Sony will prove me totally wrong on that, but above $500, people start thinking in terms of "half a thousand" rather than "five hundred".
2) The cost of producing the PS3 will drop as they get into the swing of it... Even if they need to sell the first million units so high to try to recoup R&D and hardware costs, that situation will (as history has shown) rapidly improve.
3) Competition. Although you could argue that the Wii has a different demographic than the PS3, the 360 targets the same group and costs considerably less. And even if Sony doesn't wise-up first, I think the game devs will eventually force (by lawsuits, if necessary) Sony to suck it up and maximize the customer base to which they can hope to sell their games.
BLAH BLAH BLAH Im tired of reading about everyone's lame ass opinion
One might well ask why, then, you bother not only reading said "lame ass opinion"s, but actually wasting your time responding to them.
Are you the CEO of Sony? No?
No. Not the CEO, someone much more important (in the aggregate) - A potential customer. And a potential customer who makes quite a lot more than the average member of the PS3's target market, at that (not bragging here, just stating the obvious fact that most people with the free time to justify buying a $600 way to waste time, generally have not yet entered the "real" working-world). And I still won't pay $600 for a gaming machine.
The point is, this competition calls for desperate measures
Oh, yeah, I can feel their pain at the competition forcing them to sell the most expensive of this generation's machines. Boo-frickin-hoo. Can I get Sony and you a couple of tissues?
thus creating wonderful things for us consumers.
Ah, and here I see our failure to communicate. You consider yourself a "consumer" like a well-trained good little sheep. Baa-aaa-aaa. Run from the sun, little sheep. Drink the party kool-aid, little sheep. Defend Sony's rape of you, little sheep. Buy the new black, little sheep.
That is all we should care about.
Wow. I hope for your sake you meant that as a troll.
Im tired of listening to wailing fangirls in heat over prices
See my first sentence above.
How much it costs at launch really makes almost no difference. If you want a better idea of its "real" price, we need to ask how much will it cost 13 months after launch.
I expect we'll have the exact opposite opinions then... Because, while the Wii will probably only come down by 20-30% (a drop of around $50), the PS3 will most likely plummet to half its original cost.
$600 for a game console... Sony apparently learned nothing from NeoGeo's lesson.
However, Sony's mistake does have one positive side... I'll probably finally get around to buying a PS2 in the near future, as the price of both the console and its games plummets (and start appearing in used CD stores for a pittance).
A lot of noise has been made lately regarding TiVo's transformation from an ad zapper to Madison Avenue's new darling.
The day Madison Avenue considers TiVo as anything but a mortal enemy, I will switch to using a Myth box.
Currently, TiVo has a slight edge, at least for those of us fortunate enough to have free lifetime basic service (Yeah, suuuuuure I'll upgrade... Just as soon as they offer that free for life). But if they make it progressively more difficult to avoid ads, I'll just avoid TiVo.
In their first podcast ever, TiVo explains how they hope to redefine advertising in the age of the DVR through a customer centered approach.
They already have redefined advertising, or at least the sub-category of the 30-second spot - As "An obsolete means of giving viewers a bathroom break, once necessary only because viewers lacked the ability to pause live TV". Unless their new definition includes a way to get rid of even more advertisements, they'd do well to quit while ahead.
how will their new initiatives change your TV viewing experience?
Well, it might make it TiVo-less in the near future, but aside from that - They just can't make people start watching commercials again. Sheep might never discover on their own that the clover in the shady spot by the tree tastes better, but once forced to try it, they'll never go back to plain ol' grass.
Why bother to be diplomatic? I mean, there have to be some empty seats on those CIA black-bag extradition flights; when you're taking terrorists to Russia to have their toenails ripped out, pay the right people and I'm sure you could get a few spammers to fill the seats on the return leg.
Do you recall how the CIA funded its black-ops from the 1960s to the 1980s? And how the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan?
The CIA acted as the world's drug-dealer. They stocked up on Afghan heroin, shipped it to the rest of the world, put on the occasional dog-and-pony of busting "smugglers" (aka "competition") to drive up the sales price, and did pretty much whatever the hell they wanted with the profits.
Now... Acting as a successful spammer requires fat pipes spread across the globe ("real" law enforcement has a hell of a time tracking activity across national borders). It requires some pretty powerful people to look the other way. And what have we seen lately? A nice little dog-and-pony where a few minor spammers get busted and put away for pitifully short prison terms, with the effect of driving up the price for those seeking "mass-email marketing" services.
If you think the CIA will take out spammers for you, you clearly haven't paid attention for the past 50 years. IF they suddenly seem interested in spam, it will just mean they see a new way to fund their political games in Central America and the former Soviet Satellites, and need to weed out the competition before they can take over the market.
I never really understood the term "fight fire with fire." A more effective way to fight fire is with water or foam.
Water and foam both put out fire by lowering the temperature and depriving the combustible material of oxygen. This requires enough foam or water to completely saturate the area already burning, with a bit extra on the edges to prevent fresh fuel from igniting. That works well on a small scale (a single house), but very poorly on widespread forest or brush fires.
"Fighting fire with fire" means a controlled burn going inward toward the source of the fire. Done correctly, by the time the controlled burn meets the core of the fire, it has left in its wake a wide swath of already-consumed and partially-cooled fuel. Thus, the fire can't contine spreading outward along that same path. Completely surround the fire with such already-burned zones, and the fire can't do anything but burn itself out in-place.
Rather than needing to saturate the existing fire and its edges, this only requires defending a single line against spreading in the wrong direction - And preparation for that can start before igniting the controlled burn (such as by pre-saturating the area and/or clear-cutting a narrow strip bordering the target burn).
Extending the metaphor to to anti-spam techniques, think of the above description as DOS'ing the core of the fire. If we saturate the spammers' network connections, they have no more bandwidth to consume in spreading their crapfloods outward to the world. Continue until bandwidth costs "consume" the bank-accounts of the spammers (or more realistically, they cut their losses and run), and the spammer goes under (at least temporarily).
Now personally, I'd rather mix metaphors and literally fight spam with fire - Track these less-than-worthless bastards down and surround their offices or houses with a ring of fire moving in toward the core. Then roast marshmallows over their charred corpses as we sing "We Shall Overcome".
But, the law frowns on that, so I'll have to settle for simply helping to put them out of business.
Jonathan Schwartz at JavaOne this morning said that he will release the source code for Java. The company is asking developers to provide feedback on how to best get there and prevent forking and fragmentation.
Well, as a developer, I will tell you THE one and only way to prevent forking and fragmentation...
Don't release the source code.
Oops.
even entertainment system components are going to need to be powered.
Which raises the question, why not just superimpose an onboard data network over the power system, the same way BPL or those older home 2Mbit network-through-your-outlets systems worked? Then you only need a single wire running to every onboard device (assuming a frame ground).
Fly-by-wireless indeed. Neither necessary nor desireable - A solution in need of a problem, nothing more.