Somebody please moderate the post I'm responding to upwards. I think its a very insightful twist on the line of thought most of us have been following.
DNA and genes are way beyond my area of expertise, but to me the genes themselves already exist and so aren't patentable. The techniques involved in the gene therapy may very well be patentable though. Again, I know nothing about what is involved. I imagine some molecular machine counting down the rungs of the DNA, doing a snip and inserting a benign segment of DNA. The molecular machine should be patentable for that application.
I can understand not donating your research to for-profit organizations. If I had invested as much time and money in the results as I'm sure was invested I'd feel the same way. However patenting it seems counterintuitive to me and thats what I have issues with. Patent all the techniques involved with extracting the data, patent any special tools, but the data itself shouldn't be patentable. That doesn't mean that Venter's data should be public domain, but if other researchers extract the data without violating the patents on the tools and technology then the data should be theirs to do with as they wish. Essentially the raw data is their for anybody to access... if they've got the ingenuity, or you can purchase the data from Venter.
This is all postulating of course, there's no information on what was really patented.
You stated, and I quote: "Why should they be allowed to make extra revenue off us when every other news site in the world doesn't?" referring to the New York Times. I didn't refute that the New York Times made people fill out personal information (in fact I reinforced this notion by stating it was possible to lie about the information) nor did I insist that the mentioned sites required you to provide personal information. What I refuted was your stance that the other sites don't make money off of us. As I illustrated by the use of banner ads on the other sites, this is plainly untrue.
In simpler words: You were wrong.
I applaud that privacy advocates try to educate people on privacy concerns. What I don't believe in is sensationalism. There needs to be some indication that while this is new to the internet its business as usual in many other forms of commerce. Don't fuel the luddites or conspiracy theorists.
Actually, those were facts. I don't see how your posting is even relevant to the original article which started this thread. The article was referring to banner adds and the use of cookies to collect statistics, not sites like the New York Times where you are required to divulge personal information in order to read their stories.
As an aside the New York Times has every right to ask this information, you have every right to refuse or falsify it. You've got every right to go elsewhere for news as well. I'd much prefer being educated on the impacts of the internet on personal privacy than having a privacy gestapo like you seem to prefer regulating what can and can not be done.
As for the New York Times being the only news site which collects information on its users you are pretty close to 100% inaccurate. ABC News, CNN, CBS news and NBC News all make use of banner adds. The issue the article was dealing with. I can't connect to the BBC News and it looks like it may be the one news site that doesn't use banner adds.
Whether or not the Dreamcast was actually connected to the internet or not was not the issue. It turns out that it isn't. The issue was that the owner of an allegedly popular Dreamcast news site felt it was his perogative to run nmap against his users which indicated just how much privacy you really have.
Something can be patented and freely available. Actually patenting something does make it freely available, just not necessarily freely usable. A patent disclosure has to include all the details necessary for a person competent in the field to reproduce the work. You could still patent something and make it freely useable however, though the likelyhood that Dr Venter is doing this is vanishingly small.
I don't understand how you can patent decoding something? Sure, the decoded data may be very valuable but it isn't your invention. It may be appropriate to patent the tools and techniques involved in the decoding process, but I don't understand how decoded data can be patented.
Suppose I decode the file format for Microsoft Office 2000? Can I then patent it? I'd love to have Microsoft have to pay me for reverse engineering their work but it doesn't seem realistic.
In the future I can see patenting DNA as a creation: specialized DNA which is the result of some large and expensive research and design process but even then as only a delta to some established DNA. You'd get a patent on the incremental improvement, not on the whole DNA structure.
The patent officers should ask themselves whether it would be appropriate to patent the image of man which would be roughly analogous to patenting its DNA.
You're almost constantly divulging information to a third party in real life. Let me try and explain. Suppose you use a credit card, this is a bank backed service. You released some personal information for this privledge, quite understandibly. Each time you use this line of credit the transactions can build up a profile of your buying habits.
Suppose you don't use credit though. A profile is still built up. Consider bathroom tissue at your local grocery store. The grocery store sells a certain amount of single-ply and a certain amount of two-ply. The sell through on the two-ply is probably a lot quicker than the sell through on single-ply. This information is then fed back to the manufacturer (through the distributor) which tells them to make less single-ply tissue. They also make two-ply quilted tissue however. The sell through on this is less than plain two-ply tissue but the manufacturer knows that the profit margin is a lot higher. As a result two actions are initiated: They pay for more eye level shelf space at the grocery store to display two-ply quilted tissue and they launch an advertising campaign.
Cookies is a potentially more directed advertising research but there is still a layer of anonimity between you and the entity being tracked. They can only correlate the click through characteristics with some cookie stored in your browser, they can't correlate it with an individual person (which can be done with a credit card or grocery store discount card). Actually, it can only be resolved on a per cookie per machine basis and there is no way to tie together the accounts you have on various machines (home account, work account, school account etc)
I'm willing to give up this bit of data (though I've probably only clicked through 4 whole banner adds in my life) if it means that a site like slashdot can exist. I consider it a necessary evil and a pretty benign evil at that. If I had to pay for slashdot via donations or fees I would have to decide based on the same criteria I donate to public television and you could probably expect the same level of support: 1/10 people who watch public TV ever make a donation.
discard all your ISP accounts shred your credit cards always pay cash (not even cheques) avoid a drivers license avoid owning a home or conventional renting don't register to vote don't file taxes ...
Even surfing anonymously on slashdot is betting your privacy on the scruples of Rob and co. Check out the article (just over a month ago) about maybe being able to telnet into a Dreamcast. sTp81 runs nmap on systems that use his Dreamcast coverage site. That to me is a pretty blatant invasion of privacy.
Every time you use credit some information is being collected about you, not as a class of users but individually, its called your credit report.
Just about everything you do can be used to track you or track down information about you (do you rent in an upscale community or do you have the upper unit in somebodies home?) and this has been true for a long time. Privacy has been dead about as long as commerce has existed.
New technologies may mean new ways to track (such as banner adds) but the concept isn't new. It's also the price each of us has to pay due to our expectaction on getting most services, such as slashdot, for free. Somebody has to foot the bill and unless CmdrTaco, Hemos and Nate have a rich uncle its going to be us through banner ads.
Bruce, what is your view of what many have said is the governments relaxation of export controls on commercial cryptography? In particular are there any actual dangers to the requirement that the algorithms and code be submitted for review? My personal feeling is that rather than protecting the consumer the review process is more likely to be to ensure that any cryptography is sufficiently weak to please the government. So maybe crypto for credit card transactions is somewhat safe since the businesses involved can be subpoenaed, but crypto for obsfucating personal communications is less secure since there may be more chance of evidence being withheld.
The world of tomorrow and enabling technologies
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Rise of the Nanobots
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· Score: 1
The CNN piece wasn't any different than any other popular press article that shows up every century or half century. The clock is quickly ticking through the last few moments of what a rather large cross section of the planet refers to as the twentieth century. Journalists who also consider themselves futurists or have a passing interest in technology (maybe they picked up a pulp science fiction novel at some point) make all kind of predictions. Most of these predictions won't pan out.
These types of predictions are futile and I'll try and explain why. Consider the first computers, big bulky monstrosities that used large amounts of energy to do some small number of calculations and as a side effect produced huge amounts of heat. There were a number of differing views on what the impact of these devices would have on society. Some people felt that the US would need maybe 5 in total mostly for military or industrial use with no major impact on the general public. Other people felt that each community would have one as a shared resource and it would enable mankind to produce their own utopia. I don't recall reading any early prognosticators stating that every person in the industrialized nations would have one or more computer like devices in their posession (remember that from the point of view of the early machine designers a pocket calculator would be a pretty wonderous computer, not to mention all the hidden computers in microwaves, VCRs, TVs and automobiles!). They couldn't foresee microelectronics, it really wasn't even a blip on their radar screen. The actual reality turned out to be that everybody has access to computing resources but everybody still works. Nobody predicted the enabling technology of microelectronics and at the same time forgot that people still need food, clothes and like to be entertained. All of this means that somebody, somewhere needs to work.
Next consider electrical power and the enabling technology predicted for it: nuclear fusion. In the fifties everybody was sure that nuclear fusion would supply us with cheap, clean and limitless electrical power. Just the thing to power our personal aircraft and homes of tomorrow. For close to fifty years economically feasible nuclear fusion has been just around the corner but so far as of October 21, 1999 12:55 pm central standard time its not happened. The truth is that it may never happen but if it does there will be some enabling technology that enables nuclear fusion that will have been invented. Enabling technologies to enable enabling technologies. Even well respected experts in the field (real experts, not the guy who does the weekly science column for the hometown paper) can't predict this technology with any certainty.
This is the current situation with nanotechnology as well. It may well be 'just around the corner' for our lifetime, and our childrens lifetime and... Or it may happen in 25 years, or in 10 years. Lots of discoveries and inventions with respect to nanotechnology are made. In order for nanotechnology to happen in a meaningful way we need DISCOVERIES and INVENTIONS though. When these fundamental enabling technologies happen (if they happen) nanotechnology will take off and the impact on society will be vastly different than the utopia the experts (this time it is the guy who writes the weekly science column for your local newspaper) predict.
The world of tomorrow and enabling technologies
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Rise of the Nanobots
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· Score: 1
The CNN piece wasn't any different than any other popular press article that shows up every century or half century. The clock is quickly ticking through the last few moments of what a rather large cross section of the planet refers to as the twentieth century. Journalists who also consider themselves futurists or have a passing interest in technology (maybe they picked up a pulp science fiction novel at some point) make all kind of predictions. Most of these predictions won't pan out.
These types of predictions are futile and I'll try and explain why. Consider the first computers, big bulky monstrosities that used large amounts of energy to do some small number of calculations and as a side effect produced huge amounts of heat. There were a number of differing views on what the impact of these devices would have on society. Some people felt that the US would need maybe 5 in total mostly for military or industrial use with no major impact on the general public. Other people felt that each community would have one as a shared resource and it would enable mankind to produce their own utopia. I don't recall reading any early prognosticators stating that every person in the industrialized nations would have one or more computer like devices in their posession (remember that from the point of view of the early machine designers a pocket calculator would be a pretty wonderous computer, not to mention all the hidden computers in microwaves, VCRs, TVs and automobiles!). They couldn't foresee microelectronics, it really wasn't even a blip on their radar screen. The actual reality turned out to be that everybody has access to computing resources but everybody still works. Nobody predicted the enabling technology of microelectronics and at the same time forgot that people still need food, clothes and like to be entertained. All of this means that somebody, somewhere needs to work.
Next consider electrical power and the enabling technology predicted for it: nuclear fusion. In the fifties everybody was sure that nuclear fusion would supply us with cheap, clean and limitless electrical power. Just the thing to power our personal aircraft and homes of tomorrow. For close to fifty years economically feasible nuclear fusion has been just around the corner but so far as of October 21, 1999 12:55 pm central standard time its not happened. The truth is that it may never happen but if it does there will be some enabling technology that enables nuclear fusion that will have been invented. Enabling technologies to enable enabling technologies. Even well respected experts in the field (real experts, not the guy who does the weekly science column for the hometown paper) can't predict this technology with any certainty.
This is the current situation with nanotechnology as well. It may well be 'just around the corner' for our lifetime, and our childrens lifetime and... Or it may happen in 25 years, or in 10 years. Lots of discoveries and inventions with respect to nanotechnology are made. In order for nanotechnology to happen in a meaningful way we need DISCOVERIES and INVENTIONS though. When these fundamental enabling technologies happen (if they happen) nanotechnology will take off and the impact on society will be vastly different than the utopia the experts (this time it is the guy who writes the weekly science column for your local newspaper) predict.
Re:Interview with id CEO Todd Hollenshead up at..
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John Carmack Answers
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· Score: 1
Why was this moderated as flamebait? I could see not moderating it up, but moderating it down?
Try checking out Macintouch, they need 24 to 48 hours to finalize everything, you'll get an email. Ric Ford verified it with Apple, it is happening.
The phone peon probably hasn't even heard of the reversal yet, Steve Job's may have a Reality Distortion Field but he's never been known to have telepathy. Communication takes time.
I'm glad Apple did this, I want a G4 running MacOS X alongside my PIII 450 runing Linux. Once MacOS X rolls out I'll buy a midrange G4 nicely equipped, whatever midrange means at the time.
It doesn't naturally lead to it. My feeling is that they wanted to keep up with their three tier G4 scheme of good, better and best. The 500 MHz part won't be available for some time so rather than temporarily discontinuing the 500 MHz PowerMac G4 they made the 450 MHz G4 best, the 400 MHz G4 better and neutered the low end model (which used an older motherboard) to 350 MHz.
Very dumb.
To make things worse they cancelled all orders for the 400 MHz and 450 MHz G4 along with the 500 MHz G4 meaning that customers who were in the pipe so to speak either can't get their original configuration (in the case of the 400 MHz Yikes or 500 MHz Yosemite models) and have to pay more for that honour.
Incredibly stupid.
Once the 500 MHz parts start to fill up the supply train they'll probably drop the 350 MHz model and add on the 500 MHz model. (The low end model was always a stop-gap so that some G4's were immediately available) The 400 MHz G4 will then go up in price (it'll be with the new motherboard, not the old motherboard, the parts on it or more expensive such as RAM etc.) the 450 MHz model will drop in price and the 500 MHz model will take the 450 MHz models price point.
I just gave my old 9500/150 to my sister leaving me with only a Pentium III box running Linux to use. Once MacOS X came out I was going to purchase a mid ranged G4 for my day to day use. I'm not so sure anymore though, this has annoyed me more than any of the other alleged slings and arrows out of 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino CA.
If they want me back on board they'll at least have to uncancel the 400 MHz and 450 MHz orders or offer them a rebate to match the old price points. The speed reduction of the Yikes configuration was just marketing stupidity which I can deal with.
When designing consumer electronics such as this the goal has to be to target the majority of consumers at the minimum cost with features they'd find useful. This is a moving target: a few years ago multiplayer games meant that there were 4 joystick ports in a Nintendo 64; Now this means a modem port and possibly an optional ethernet connectivity; In a few years it will probably be at least 10 base T, more likely 100 base T.
The vast majority of consumers only need a modem and all consumers can 'make do' with a modem. If they'd chosen to only have ethernet then the vast majority of consumers would've been unable to make use of the networked multiplayer aspect of the system. If they'd have bundled both then the price would've increased somewhat and they'd sell less units which in turn would effect the availability of games.
I would sincerely hope that they come out with a 10 base T module and that their API was designed to be fabric agnostic. That is its just as happy to speak with another DreamCast over ethernet as it is over an analog modem connection.
Personally I say you are entitled to your point of views, I'm entitled to agree or disagree with them as the case may be. Feel free to shout out your views where ever its appropriate.
However, a big part of the reason white Christian males (or Christians in general) are being ostracized now is that while they feel they are entitled to speak their mind, no opposing views are entitled. This isn't necessarily about you, I don't know you personally, but the Christian society as a whole.
Any media which presents an opposing view with any more realism or tact than Jerry Springer is boycotted and thus silenced. In my community the screaming hordes of Christians have banded together to ban books from the school libraries. Do they advocate genocide, popularize Hitler or are they hard core porn? No, they're books that try to help students understand that gay persons have a right to live and a right to happiness. Whether or not those people agree with the philosophy or not, if they expect the freedom to express their views they should tolerate the same freedoms in others. Rather than voicing opinions they've got a mob mentality and the numbers to allow them to supress opposing views. That's not exercising free speech, thats NAZIism.
Linux won't have comparable framerates to Windows even though the underlying architecture is more stable and faster. Windows provides ways for the programmer to pipe data directly into the graphics hardware at the cost of robustness. Linux could do something along these lines but it would be a compromise. I'd see something like that as a package that would need to be optionally installed. I don't want any program to be able to get around the robustness on a server for instance.
This is part of why Mesa3D is dog slow compared to OpenGL under Windows. (you're also talking through the X server, there are plans to streamline that portion of the operation)
Re:One Time Pads and cypher technology
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The Code Book
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· Score: 1
One time pads aren't used for everything. One time pads are theoretically completely unbreakable but in practice they suffer from a few problems mostly relating to the delivery system.
One time pads work by adding a number modulo 26 (or however many characters are in the alphabet used) and transmitting the result. For each character in the message (or bit etc.) you need one truly random character (or bit etc.). On the receive side the same set of random information and same process is used to decrypt the message.
Somehow two sites must be able to agree on a set of random information for the encryption/decryption process. The random information has to be truly random with no biases (i.e. flip a coin, heads are 1, tails are 0, not use some complex mathematical function. The flipper has to be honest, he has to faithfully report the stream of heads and tails. If he notices that a lot of heads have happened he can't influence the bit stream to be more evenly distributed) The transmit and receive side both have to destroy the pads as used. The mechanics of it make one time pads unwieldly for a lot of classes of information. You could theoretically for instance distribute N copies of the one time pad to N sites but then you increase the chance of intercepting the pads proportionally. As a result its better for point to point broadcasting as opposed to a multi-point broadcast.
As a result there is a lot of information still encrypted and transmitted by governments that isn't one time pad encrypted, much of which is useful to the NSA. The NSA doesn't just deal in encrypted material either, sometimes regional news or the lack thereof broadcasted is important information.
I haven't programmed in JAVA in ages (and I only did it once to say I did it) so I don't remember the various file handles, so forgive me if I get this wrong (but point it out).
JAVA is almost it, but I don't think there's exactly a 1 to 1 correspondence between each line of source code and each line in the object file. An old BASIC like on the Commodore 64 is a lot closer. The programs ran exactly as you input them, the interpreter didn't try to exploit any techniques for efficiency.
If JAVA fits the bill then we're already there. If the.class files are the actual source code and some other extension contains the object code and strips out all identifiers and optimizes code then JAVA isn't it.
Problem: paper copy is only a workaround until the folks that be decide that a book IS a machine-readable form (courtesy of OCR), at which point we're really screwed, yeah? Let's hope they get round to changing the somewhat broken law in the first place, before they realise that much...
Well, if they ban textual publishing this would render the US as a source of cryptography useless. Not that the government would have the foresight to see this of course.
There is a workaround even at this point, but it requires a bit of effort. Create a virtual machine. The characteristics of this virtual machine are that it runs an interpreted tokenized format (which probably isn't human readable) but performs no optimizations. Information on subroutine names and so on must be stored in the tokenized version (even if they aren't directly readable by humans)
The virtual machine doesn't have to run the code efficiently. In fact because of the constraints I've mentioned it wouldn't. But the goal of the virtual machine isn't running cryptographic algorithms anyway. It's job is to enable a program to be transferred 'without source code' across international boundaries. The tokens distributed aren't source code, they're kind of an intermediate machine code, but because of the design of the machine each token can be translated back into a function call or construct such as a for loop or multiplication or a named user defined subroutine.
This would probably be fairly difficult for the government to legislate away without totally disallowing the export of encryption. I wouldn't want to be in the court that tried to define the distinction between source code, object code and compiled code.
It's always hard to determine the official verbage from mainstream media, reporters often get things wrong. I'll give The New York Times the benefit of the doubt though.
If what the NYT says is true then Open Source software wasn't specifically excluded from the recent relaxed stance on crypto software. No source code may be exported whether its Open Source or a commercial entity. Please don't embellish stories with information that isn't factual.
A bigger point is that constraints on the export of source code has been rendered ineffective anyway. I can still publish a book (such as Bruce Schneir's Applied Cryptography) that contains source code though technically I can't publish it in a machine readable format. Just about anybody can get access to a decent OCR program however (is there one available for Linux incidently?) and can scan in the source code and generate a machine copy.
A paper book isn't the most efficient way of publishing source code but it is a work around. If uploading the source to Blowfish to a server in Jakarta, Indonesia is illegal than it is possible for a person located their to purchase the book, OCR it and set up an overseas mirror there.
I feel so dirty, this is the first Cringley column I've read since the last time he was mentioned in slashdot. This guy is the Rush Limbaugh of the technology circuit, thats the persona he's trying to generate.
So, does he have a point? Yup, he does, he says: "You have to do it the best that you can then take the heat,", unfortunately he then continues on that "censorship of the nerdarati is still censorship" without going into why offering an enlightened opinion is censorship.
The community on slashdot was no different than any other source. Jane's enlistment of slashdot was just an unusual means of getting technical expertise. Jane won't be posting the entire thread complete with the usual slew of "First post", "Malda sucks", "Cyberterrorism is [cool|bad|yellow]", they'll be carefully selecting pertinent opinions and statements. That's journalism.
Cringley's point of view seems to be: Blurt out your opinion, apologize later. Wonderful, except that Jane's tries to keep a good reputation. If they do this then they're spending reputation. It's no different than if their books on military hardware maintained that Canada had orbiting launch platforms capable of launching creme pies at any government official.
Polling slashdot was only one way that they could've gotten the expertise. They could've talked to security consultants which would've been a more mainstream way to go.
I think the more honest thing would have been to leave the posts up. I've posted responses to many things here on slashdot over the last couple of years, I wouldn't remove any of them. In some instances I've posted things that were wrong. In other instances I've posted views that don't hold with my current views. Some of these views have been modified by especially eloquent posts by others on slashdot. That's personal growth, its nothing to be ashamed of. I'm semi-anonymous in that I don't post under my real name and I've removed my email address not too long ago (thanks to a rather hostile email bombing response to one of my postings) but the persona is still me. A couple of friends have figured out that this is the persona I post under. I don't worry about this, it just means that I'm honest about my opinions and don't let the facade or moderation modify my views.
The best response to anybody dredging up old posts would be to say hey, that was posted N years ago, at the time its how I felt. When I was a kid I wrote letters to Santa too. If you'd like I can probably get some samples from my parents.
The admission would speak better of the person than a futile attempt to remove all traces of their net existance.
You've touched on one of my sore spots here, a total lack of understanding of the scientific method. At best scientists look at theory as a model that fits currently known phenomena. Usually they look at a theory as a model that fits currently known phenomena within certain physical constraints: Newtonian physics is a theory taught in elementary and high school, its fine as long as things don't move too very fast. Relativity is fine as long as objects aren't too small. Quantum physics is fine as long as objects aren't too big. Eventually maybe string theory will tie together quantum and relativistic theories but scientists will always be actively looking for phenomena that refute the theory.
Science doesn't 'guess', anybody who feels that science consists of guesses is a luddite. Science tries to fit theories and formulae to a constantly changing body of observations that describes the universe. Science also tries to break those same theories.
Many teachers try and teach disproven scientific theories as fact such as Newtonian physics. This isn't a failing of science its a failing of the educational system. There's nothing wrong with teaching Newtonian physics. It works for a wide range of problems, but at least mention that its a model.
Religion is the most dishonest way of explaining the universe that there is. Much of the explanations or models of reality in the bible have been disproven. Some of the people who have done the disproving have been inhumanely treated or excommunicated by the church. Sure, eventually (hundreds of years later) the church decided to repeal the excommunication, at least in well known cases, but if you believe in the teachings of the church then the excommunication was a sentence to Hell. The universe described in the bible is static and contrary to modern physical observation and has been for hundreds of years. This doesn't mean there is or isn't a God. It does mean that religious leaders want people who are even remotely proficient at critical thinking to believe in their religion it'd better start preaching the message of the religion (which is the IMPORTANT part anyway), not the model of the universe developed thousands of years ago.
The scientific view of the nature of the universe is much less wrong than the bibles and constantly improving. Religions view of the universe is wrong and static. I've picked on the Bible and Christianity here mostly because I'm somewhat familiar with it (8 years of a Catholic school education) whereas what little I know of other religions is from speaking with friends or charicatures portrayed on TV.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody please moderate the post I'm responding to upwards. I think its a very insightful twist on the line of thought most of us have been following.
DNA and genes are way beyond my area of expertise, but to me the genes themselves already exist and so aren't patentable. The techniques involved in the gene therapy may very well be patentable though. Again, I know nothing about what is involved. I imagine some molecular machine counting down the rungs of the DNA, doing a snip and inserting a benign segment of DNA. The molecular machine should be patentable for that application.
I can understand not donating your research to for-profit organizations. If I had invested as much time and money in the results as I'm sure was invested I'd feel the same way. However patenting it seems counterintuitive to me and thats what I have issues with. Patent all the techniques involved with extracting the data, patent any special tools, but the data itself shouldn't be patentable. That doesn't mean that Venter's data should be public domain, but if other researchers extract the data without violating the patents on the tools and technology then the data should be theirs to do with as they wish. Essentially the raw data is their for anybody to access... if they've got the ingenuity, or you can purchase the data from Venter.
This is all postulating of course, there's no information on what was really patented.
You stated, and I quote: "Why should they be allowed to make extra revenue off us when every other news site in the world doesn't?" referring to the New York Times. I didn't refute that the New York Times made people fill out personal information (in fact I reinforced this notion by stating it was possible to lie about the information) nor did I insist that the mentioned sites required you to provide personal information. What I refuted was your stance that the other sites don't make money off of us. As I illustrated by the use of banner ads on the other sites, this is plainly untrue.
In simpler words: You were wrong.
I applaud that privacy advocates try to educate people on privacy concerns. What I don't believe in is sensationalism. There needs to be some indication that while this is new to the internet its business as usual in many other forms of commerce. Don't fuel the luddites or conspiracy theorists.
Actually, those were facts. I don't see how your posting is even relevant to the original article which started this thread. The article was referring to banner adds and the use of cookies to collect statistics, not sites like the New York Times where you are required to divulge personal information in order to read their stories.
As an aside the New York Times has every right to ask this information, you have every right to refuse or falsify it. You've got every right to go elsewhere for news as well. I'd much prefer being educated on the impacts of the internet on personal privacy than having a privacy gestapo like you seem to prefer regulating what can and can not be done.
As for the New York Times being the only news site which collects information on its users you are pretty close to 100% inaccurate. ABC News, CNN, CBS news and NBC News all make use of banner adds. The issue the article was dealing with. I can't connect to the BBC News and it looks like it may be the one news site that doesn't use banner adds.
Whether or not the Dreamcast was actually connected to the internet or not was not the issue. It turns out that it isn't. The issue was that the owner of an allegedly popular Dreamcast news site felt it was his perogative to run nmap against his users which indicated just how much privacy you really have.
Something can be patented and freely available. Actually patenting something does make it freely available, just not necessarily freely usable. A patent disclosure has to include all the details necessary for a person competent in the field to reproduce the work. You could still patent something and make it freely useable however, though the likelyhood that Dr Venter is doing this is vanishingly small.
I don't understand how you can patent decoding something? Sure, the decoded data may be very valuable but it isn't your invention. It may be appropriate to patent the tools and techniques involved in the decoding process, but I don't understand how decoded data can be patented.
Suppose I decode the file format for Microsoft Office 2000? Can I then patent it? I'd love to have Microsoft have to pay me for reverse engineering their work but it doesn't seem realistic.
In the future I can see patenting DNA as a creation: specialized DNA which is the result of some large and expensive research and design process but even then as only a delta to some established DNA. You'd get a patent on the incremental improvement, not on the whole DNA structure.
The patent officers should ask themselves whether it would be appropriate to patent the image of man which would be roughly analogous to patenting its DNA.
You're almost constantly divulging information to a third party in real life. Let me try and explain. Suppose you use a credit card, this is a bank backed service. You released some personal information for this privledge, quite understandibly. Each time you use this line of credit the transactions can build up a profile of your buying habits.
Suppose you don't use credit though. A profile is still built up. Consider bathroom tissue at your local grocery store. The grocery store sells a certain amount of single-ply and a certain amount of two-ply. The sell through on the two-ply is probably a lot quicker than the sell through on single-ply. This information is then fed back to the manufacturer (through the distributor) which tells them to make less single-ply tissue. They also make two-ply quilted tissue however. The sell through on this is less than plain two-ply tissue but the manufacturer knows that the profit margin is a lot higher. As a result two actions are initiated: They pay for more eye level shelf space at the grocery store to display two-ply quilted tissue and they launch an advertising campaign.
Cookies is a potentially more directed advertising research but there is still a layer of anonimity between you and the entity being tracked. They can only correlate the click through characteristics with some cookie stored in your browser, they can't correlate it with an individual person (which can be done with a credit card or grocery store discount card). Actually, it can only be resolved on a per cookie per machine basis and there is no way to tie together the accounts you have on various machines (home account, work account, school account etc)
I'm willing to give up this bit of data (though I've probably only clicked through 4 whole banner adds in my life) if it means that a site like slashdot can exist. I consider it a necessary evil and a pretty benign evil at that. If I had to pay for slashdot via donations or fees I would have to decide based on the same criteria I donate to public television and you could probably expect the same level of support: 1/10 people who watch public TV ever make a donation.
If you want real anonimity then:
...
discard all your ISP accounts
shred your credit cards
always pay cash (not even cheques)
avoid a drivers license
avoid owning a home or conventional renting
don't register to vote
don't file taxes
Even surfing anonymously on slashdot is betting your privacy on the scruples of Rob and co. Check out the article (just over a month ago) about maybe being able to telnet into a Dreamcast. sTp81 runs nmap on systems that use his Dreamcast coverage site. That to me is a pretty blatant invasion of privacy.
Every time you use credit some information is being collected about you, not as a class of users but individually, its called your credit report.
Just about everything you do can be used to track you or track down information about you (do you rent in an upscale community or do you have the upper unit in somebodies home?) and this has been true for a long time. Privacy has been dead about as long as commerce has existed.
New technologies may mean new ways to track (such as banner adds) but the concept isn't new. It's also the price each of us has to pay due to our expectaction on getting most services, such as slashdot, for free. Somebody has to foot the bill and unless CmdrTaco, Hemos and Nate have a rich uncle its going to be us through banner ads.
Bruce, what is your view of what many have said is the governments relaxation of export controls on commercial cryptography? In particular are there any actual dangers to the requirement that the algorithms and code be submitted for review? My personal feeling is that rather than protecting the consumer the review process is more likely to be to ensure that any cryptography is sufficiently weak to please the government. So maybe crypto for credit card transactions is somewhat safe since the businesses involved can be subpoenaed, but crypto for obsfucating personal communications is less secure since there may be more chance of evidence being withheld.
The CNN piece wasn't any different than any other popular press article that shows up every century or half century. The clock is quickly ticking through the last few moments of what a rather large cross section of the planet refers to as the twentieth century. Journalists who also consider themselves futurists or have a passing interest in technology (maybe they picked up a pulp science fiction novel at some point) make all kind of predictions. Most of these predictions won't pan out.
These types of predictions are futile and I'll try and explain why. Consider the first computers, big bulky monstrosities that used large amounts of energy to do some small number of calculations and as a side effect produced huge amounts of heat. There were a number of differing views on what the impact of these devices would have on society. Some people felt that the US would need maybe 5 in total mostly for military or industrial use with no major impact on the general public. Other people felt that each community would have one as a shared resource and it would enable mankind to produce their own utopia. I don't recall reading any early prognosticators stating that every person in the industrialized nations would have one or more computer like devices in their posession (remember that from the point of view of the early machine designers a pocket calculator would be a pretty wonderous computer, not to mention all the hidden computers in microwaves, VCRs, TVs and automobiles!). They couldn't foresee microelectronics, it really wasn't even a blip on their radar screen. The actual reality turned out to be that everybody has access to computing resources but everybody still works. Nobody predicted the enabling technology of microelectronics and at the same time forgot that people still need food, clothes and like to be entertained. All of this means that somebody, somewhere needs to work.
Next consider electrical power and the enabling technology predicted for it: nuclear fusion. In the fifties everybody was sure that nuclear fusion would supply us with cheap, clean and limitless electrical power. Just the thing to power our personal aircraft and homes of tomorrow. For close to fifty years economically feasible nuclear fusion has been just around the corner but so far as of October 21, 1999 12:55 pm central standard time its not happened. The truth is that it may never happen but if it does there will be some enabling technology that enables nuclear fusion that will have been invented. Enabling technologies to enable enabling technologies. Even well respected experts in the field (real experts, not the guy who does the weekly science column for the hometown paper) can't predict this technology with any certainty.
This is the current situation with nanotechnology as well. It may well be 'just around the corner' for our lifetime, and our childrens lifetime and... Or it may happen in 25 years, or in 10 years. Lots of discoveries and inventions with respect to nanotechnology are made. In order for nanotechnology to happen in a meaningful way we need DISCOVERIES and INVENTIONS though. When these fundamental enabling technologies happen (if they happen) nanotechnology will take off and the impact on society will be vastly different than the utopia the experts (this time it is the guy who writes the weekly science column for your local newspaper) predict.
The CNN piece wasn't any different than any other popular press article that shows up every century or half century. The clock is quickly ticking through the last few moments of what a rather large cross section of the planet refers to as the twentieth century. Journalists who also consider themselves futurists or have a passing interest in technology (maybe they picked up a pulp science fiction novel at some point) make all kind of predictions. Most of these predictions won't pan out.
These types of predictions are futile and I'll try and explain why. Consider the first computers, big bulky monstrosities that used large amounts of energy to do some small number of calculations and as a side effect produced huge amounts of heat. There were a number of differing views on what the impact of these devices would have on society. Some people felt that the US would need maybe 5 in total mostly for military or industrial use with no major impact on the general public. Other people felt that each community would have one as a shared resource and it would enable mankind to produce their own utopia. I don't recall reading any early prognosticators stating that every person in the industrialized nations would have one or more computer like devices in their posession (remember that from the point of view of the early machine designers a pocket calculator would be a pretty wonderous computer, not to mention all the hidden computers in microwaves, VCRs, TVs and automobiles!). They couldn't foresee microelectronics, it really wasn't even a blip on their radar screen. The actual reality turned out to be that everybody has access to computing resources but everybody still works. Nobody predicted the enabling technology of microelectronics and at the same time forgot that people still need food, clothes and like to be entertained. All of this means that somebody, somewhere needs to work.
Next consider electrical power and the enabling technology predicted for it: nuclear fusion. In the fifties everybody was sure that nuclear fusion would supply us with cheap, clean and limitless electrical power. Just the thing to power our personal aircraft and homes of tomorrow. For close to fifty years economically feasible nuclear fusion has been just around the corner but so far as of October 21, 1999 12:55 pm central standard time its not happened. The truth is that it may never happen but if it does there will be some enabling technology that enables nuclear fusion that will have been invented. Enabling technologies to enable enabling technologies. Even well respected experts in the field (real experts, not the guy who does the weekly science column for the hometown paper) can't predict this technology with any certainty.
This is the current situation with nanotechnology as well. It may well be 'just around the corner' for our lifetime, and our childrens lifetime and... Or it may happen in 25 years, or in 10 years. Lots of discoveries and inventions with respect to nanotechnology are made. In order for nanotechnology to happen in a meaningful way we need DISCOVERIES and INVENTIONS though. When these fundamental enabling technologies happen (if they happen) nanotechnology will take off and the impact on society will be vastly different than the utopia the experts (this time it is the guy who writes the weekly science column for your local newspaper) predict.
Why was this moderated as flamebait? I could see not moderating it up, but moderating it down?
Try checking out Macintouch, they need 24 to 48 hours to finalize everything, you'll get an email. Ric Ford verified it with Apple, it is happening.
The phone peon probably hasn't even heard of the reversal yet, Steve Job's may have a Reality Distortion Field but he's never been known to have telepathy. Communication takes time.
I'm glad Apple did this, I want a G4 running MacOS X alongside my PIII 450 runing Linux. Once MacOS X rolls out I'll buy a midrange G4 nicely equipped, whatever midrange means at the time.
It doesn't naturally lead to it. My feeling is that they wanted to keep up with their three tier G4 scheme of good, better and best. The 500 MHz part won't be available for some time so rather than temporarily discontinuing the 500 MHz PowerMac G4 they made the 450 MHz G4 best, the 400 MHz G4 better and neutered the low end model (which used an older motherboard) to 350 MHz.
Very dumb.
To make things worse they cancelled all orders for the 400 MHz and 450 MHz G4 along with the 500 MHz G4 meaning that customers who were in the pipe so to speak either can't get their original configuration (in the case of the 400 MHz Yikes or 500 MHz Yosemite models) and have to pay more for that honour.
Incredibly stupid.
Once the 500 MHz parts start to fill up the supply train they'll probably drop the 350 MHz model and add on the 500 MHz model. (The low end model was always a stop-gap so that some G4's were immediately available) The 400 MHz G4 will then go up in price (it'll be with the new motherboard, not the old motherboard, the parts on it or more expensive such as RAM etc.) the 450 MHz model will drop in price and the 500 MHz model will take the 450 MHz models price point.
I just gave my old 9500/150 to my sister leaving me with only a Pentium III box running Linux to use. Once MacOS X came out I was going to purchase a mid ranged G4 for my day to day use. I'm not so sure anymore though, this has annoyed me more than any of the other alleged slings and arrows out of 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino CA.
If they want me back on board they'll at least have to uncancel the 400 MHz and 450 MHz orders or offer them a rebate to match the old price points. The speed reduction of the Yikes configuration was just marketing stupidity which I can deal with.
When designing consumer electronics such as this the goal has to be to target the majority of consumers at the minimum cost with features they'd find useful. This is a moving target: a few years ago multiplayer games meant that there were 4 joystick ports in a Nintendo 64; Now this means a modem port and possibly an optional ethernet connectivity; In a few years it will probably be at least 10 base T, more likely 100 base T.
The vast majority of consumers only need a modem and all consumers can 'make do' with a modem. If they'd chosen to only have ethernet then the vast majority of consumers would've been unable to make use of the networked multiplayer aspect of the system. If they'd have bundled both then the price would've increased somewhat and they'd sell less units which in turn would effect the availability of games.
I would sincerely hope that they come out with a 10 base T module and that their API was designed to be fabric agnostic. That is its just as happy to speak with another DreamCast over ethernet as it is over an analog modem connection.
Personally I say you are entitled to your point of views, I'm entitled to agree or disagree with them as the case may be. Feel free to shout out your views where ever its appropriate.
However, a big part of the reason white Christian males (or Christians in general) are being ostracized now is that while they feel they are entitled to speak their mind, no opposing views are entitled. This isn't necessarily about you, I don't know you personally, but the Christian society as a whole.
Any media which presents an opposing view with any more realism or tact than Jerry Springer is boycotted and thus silenced. In my community the screaming hordes of Christians have banded together to ban books from the school libraries. Do they advocate genocide, popularize Hitler or are they hard core porn? No, they're books that try to help students understand that gay persons have a right to live and a right to happiness. Whether or not those people agree with the philosophy or not, if they expect the freedom to express their views they should tolerate the same freedoms in others. Rather than voicing opinions they've got a mob mentality and the numbers to allow them to supress opposing views. That's not exercising free speech, thats NAZIism.
Linux won't have comparable framerates to Windows even though the underlying architecture is more stable and faster. Windows provides ways for the programmer to pipe data directly into the graphics hardware at the cost of robustness. Linux could do something along these lines but it would be a compromise. I'd see something like that as a package that would need to be optionally installed. I don't want any program to be able to get around the robustness on a server for instance.
This is part of why Mesa3D is dog slow compared to OpenGL under Windows. (you're also talking through the X server, there are plans to streamline that portion of the operation)
One time pads aren't used for everything. One time pads are theoretically completely unbreakable but in practice they suffer from a few problems mostly relating to the delivery system.
One time pads work by adding a number modulo 26 (or however many characters are in the alphabet used) and transmitting the result. For each character in the message (or bit etc.) you need one truly random character (or bit etc.). On the receive side the same set of random information and same process is used to decrypt the message.
Somehow two sites must be able to agree on a set of random information for the encryption/decryption process. The random information has to be truly random with no biases (i.e. flip a coin, heads are 1, tails are 0, not use some complex mathematical function. The flipper has to be honest, he has to faithfully report the stream of heads and tails. If he notices that a lot of heads have happened he can't influence the bit stream to be more evenly distributed) The transmit and receive side both have to destroy the pads as used. The mechanics of it make one time pads unwieldly for a lot of classes of information. You could theoretically for instance distribute N copies of the one time pad to N sites but then you increase the chance of intercepting the pads proportionally. As a result its better for point to point broadcasting as opposed to a multi-point broadcast.
As a result there is a lot of information still encrypted and transmitted by governments that isn't one time pad encrypted, much of which is useful to the NSA. The NSA doesn't just deal in encrypted material either, sometimes regional news or the lack thereof broadcasted is important information.
I haven't programmed in JAVA in ages (and I only did it once to say I did it) so I don't remember the various file handles, so forgive me if I get this wrong (but point it out).
.class files are the actual source code and some other extension contains the object code and strips out all identifiers and optimizes code then JAVA isn't it.
JAVA is almost it, but I don't think there's exactly a 1 to 1 correspondence between each line of source code and each line in the object file. An old BASIC like on the Commodore 64 is a lot closer. The programs ran exactly as you input them, the interpreter didn't try to exploit any techniques for efficiency.
If JAVA fits the bill then we're already there. If the
Well, if they ban textual publishing this would render the US as a source of cryptography useless. Not that the government would have the foresight to see this of course.
There is a workaround even at this point, but it requires a bit of effort. Create a virtual machine. The characteristics of this virtual machine are that it runs an interpreted tokenized format (which probably isn't human readable) but performs no optimizations. Information on subroutine names and so on must be stored in the tokenized version (even if they aren't directly readable by humans)
The virtual machine doesn't have to run the code efficiently. In fact because of the constraints I've mentioned it wouldn't. But the goal of the virtual machine isn't running cryptographic algorithms anyway. It's job is to enable a program to be transferred 'without source code' across international boundaries. The tokens distributed aren't source code, they're kind of an intermediate machine code, but because of the design of the machine each token can be translated back into a function call or construct such as a for loop or multiplication or a named user defined subroutine.
This would probably be fairly difficult for the government to legislate away without totally disallowing the export of encryption. I wouldn't want to be in the court that tried to define the distinction between source code, object code and compiled code.
It's always hard to determine the official verbage from mainstream media, reporters often get things wrong. I'll give The New York Times the benefit of the doubt though.
If what the NYT says is true then Open Source software wasn't specifically excluded from the recent relaxed stance on crypto software. No source code may be exported whether its Open Source or a commercial entity. Please don't embellish stories with information that isn't factual.
A bigger point is that constraints on the export of source code has been rendered ineffective anyway. I can still publish a book (such as Bruce Schneir's Applied Cryptography) that contains source code though technically I can't publish it in a machine readable format. Just about anybody can get access to a decent OCR program however (is there one available for Linux incidently?) and can scan in the source code and generate a machine copy.
A paper book isn't the most efficient way of publishing source code but it is a work around. If uploading the source to Blowfish to a server in Jakarta, Indonesia is illegal than it is possible for a person located their to purchase the book, OCR it and set up an overseas mirror there.
I feel so dirty, this is the first Cringley column I've read since the last time he was mentioned in slashdot. This guy is the Rush Limbaugh of the technology circuit, thats the persona he's trying to generate.
So, does he have a point? Yup, he does, he says: "You have to do it the best that you can then take the heat,", unfortunately he then continues on that "censorship of the nerdarati is still censorship" without going into why offering an enlightened opinion is censorship.
The community on slashdot was no different than any other source. Jane's enlistment of slashdot was just an unusual means of getting technical expertise. Jane won't be posting the entire thread complete with the usual slew of "First post", "Malda sucks", "Cyberterrorism is [cool|bad|yellow]", they'll be carefully selecting pertinent opinions and statements. That's journalism.
Cringley's point of view seems to be: Blurt out your opinion, apologize later. Wonderful, except that Jane's tries to keep a good reputation. If they do this then they're spending reputation. It's no different than if their books on military hardware maintained that Canada had orbiting launch platforms capable of launching creme pies at any government official.
Polling slashdot was only one way that they could've gotten the expertise. They could've talked to security consultants which would've been a more mainstream way to go.
I think the more honest thing would have been to leave the posts up. I've posted responses to many things here on slashdot over the last couple of years, I wouldn't remove any of them. In some instances I've posted things that were wrong. In other instances I've posted views that don't hold with my current views. Some of these views have been modified by especially eloquent posts by others on slashdot. That's personal growth, its nothing to be ashamed of. I'm semi-anonymous in that I don't post under my real name and I've removed my email address not too long ago (thanks to a rather hostile email bombing response to one of my postings) but the persona is still me. A couple of friends have figured out that this is the persona I post under. I don't worry about this, it just means that I'm honest about my opinions and don't let the facade or moderation modify my views.
The best response to anybody dredging up old posts would be to say hey, that was posted N years ago, at the time its how I felt. When I was a kid I wrote letters to Santa too. If you'd like I can probably get some samples from my parents.
The admission would speak better of the person than a futile attempt to remove all traces of their net existance.
You've touched on one of my sore spots here, a total lack of understanding of the scientific method. At best scientists look at theory as a model that fits currently known phenomena. Usually they look at a theory as a model that fits currently known phenomena within certain physical constraints: Newtonian physics is a theory taught in elementary and high school, its fine as long as things don't move too very fast. Relativity is fine as long as objects aren't too small. Quantum physics is fine as long as objects aren't too big. Eventually maybe string theory will tie together quantum and relativistic theories but scientists will always be actively looking for phenomena that refute the theory.
Science doesn't 'guess', anybody who feels that science consists of guesses is a luddite. Science tries to fit theories and formulae to a constantly changing body of observations that describes the universe. Science also tries to break those same theories.
Many teachers try and teach disproven scientific theories as fact such as Newtonian physics. This isn't a failing of science its a failing of the educational system. There's nothing wrong with teaching Newtonian physics. It works for a wide range of problems, but at least mention that its a model.
Religion is the most dishonest way of explaining the universe that there is. Much of the explanations or models of reality in the bible have been disproven. Some of the people who have done the disproving have been inhumanely treated or excommunicated by the church. Sure, eventually (hundreds of years later) the church decided to repeal the excommunication, at least in well known cases, but if you believe in the teachings of the church then the excommunication was a sentence to Hell. The universe described in the bible is static and contrary to modern physical observation and has been for hundreds of years. This doesn't mean there is or isn't a God. It does mean that religious leaders want people who are even remotely proficient at critical thinking to believe in their religion it'd better start preaching the message of the religion (which is the IMPORTANT part anyway), not the model of the universe developed thousands of years ago.
The scientific view of the nature of the universe is much less wrong than the bibles and constantly improving. Religions view of the universe is wrong and static. I've picked on the Bible and Christianity here mostly because I'm somewhat familiar with it (8 years of a Catholic school education) whereas what little I know of other religions is from speaking with friends or charicatures portrayed on TV.