I'll only buy it if they release it in anamorphic widescreen.
What are you on? All the Star Trek series were shot in academy ratio (4:3) for the TV. If you want to watch them in the wrong ratio almost any wide screen TV will oblige by either stretching the picture horizontally so Picard fatter than Kirk did or by chopping off the top half of everyone's head.
The problem with wireless is that other people in the neighborhood can free ride off your signal. One student in a dorm might subscribe to cable and rebroadcast it via 802.11 to the rest of the dorm. Or you might have your neighbors hooking into your 802.11 net without your consent and find out that you watch the porn channels or the 700 club.
The Philips proposal sounds to me to be of the form 'what do we need to do to make this pass likely regulation' rather than 'what can we do to support the RIAA and MPAA'.
While no DRM solution can ultimately be proof against a moderately determined attack it is certainly possible to produce stuff for the consumer market that does not support piracy without deliberate modification. For example you might see 'home media servers' being sold that store several hundred CDs and DVDs that can be broadcast to a number of access points in the house. These access points would initially be set top boxes but could be embedded in the TV if there was a recognized standard.
I don't fault Philips for anticipating likely regulation here. I would much rather that Philips produced something that was a reasonable compromise than waited for the RIAA and MPAA to buy votes in congress to either impose something completely derranged or try to kill the field altogether.
There are already attempts to kill off ReplayTV, the broadcast media would much rather support Tivo which has made it clear will roll over whenever asked. So we lose features like the ad-skip button.
As you seem to be in the know, can you tell us what is considered "reasonable steps?" Exactly how much money did they spend on fatter pipes and faster servers before deciding that extortion is a better option?
There is a limit to the size of pipe that is available. There are no fatter pipes available at any price. There are no routers capable of routing them.
Why do people in the DNS world seem to think that spending money on hardware is the solution to every problem? What happened to engineering and protocol efficiency? All the waitlist provides is a somewhat more efficient mechanism than polling.
To understand the nature of the problem it is necessary to understand the type of business model the attackers are involved in. A typical approach is to scan the net for church group sites, locate those that are about to expire, grab the name and put up a porn site or a casino site in its place. The original owner is then offered the site back for a substantial fee.
If you have a business model of that kind, the best way to lower your overheads is to pay to become a registrar.
This isn't limited to the field of compression of course. There are people that come up with "unbreakable" encryption, infinite gain amplifier (is that gain in V and I?), and all sorts of perpetual motion machines. The sad fact is that compression and encryption are not well understood enough for these ideas to be killed before a company is started or stacked on the claims
I don't think that the problem is a lack of understanding of the fields in question. The problem is a surfeit of gullability on the part of the con-artist's marks.
I remember there being a 'compression' company not long ago that blew $15 million on its start up party in Las Vegas and closed not long after when it transpired that the CEO was an ex-convict on the run from a parole violation.
The problem is that the press take the claim to have 'disproven' some fundamental proof as giving credibility to the claimants rather than making them suspect. The argument proceeds thus 'Black is white and therefore my perpetual motion machine works', 'Black is not white and your perpetual motion machine is almost certainly a fraud', 'You are only arguing that way because you are stuck in your ways and fail to understand that black is actually white, people like you have stopped every advance in science, they laughed at Gallileo when he said the earth was a cube...'.
I am pretty well known as a security consultant. My advice is that you immediately get someone who is a top rank security protocol designer to provide you with a cryptographic solution fast. To do the job well you should expect to pay a minimum of $100K for the design plus about the same for implementation.
To answer the questions you pose:
Do I have a problem
If you did not before, you do now. Hint, if you rely on security through obscurity to secure a $50 million piece of hardware then best not tell the favourite news site for much of the hacker community.
The threat comes from two sources, one is bored teenagers who can't get a girlfriend, the other is an attack by a well resourced adversary such as a hostile government, a major terrorist group or organised crime. The teen hacker problem is non-negligible but the well resourced adversary is more likely.
Post 9/11 concern about infrastructure attacks is much greater. As a result the insurance syndicates I advise will shortly be requiring you to secure your communications links if you want to insure the bird. There will also be increased pressure from governments, particularly in the US to secure posibly sensistive infrastructure.
Are the existing security measures sufficient
Absolutely not. In the first place by relying on security through obscurity you are putting your employees at risk. A motivated attacker would have no qualms about kidnapping an employee (or a member of their familly) and forcing them to reveal the necessary information.
A more sophisticated attacker could obtain the necessary information simply by discovering the location of your site and visiting it with a suitably sophisticated scanner. Even the best dish does not direct 100% of the signal at the satelite. There is plenty scattered arround the dish. Intercepting the signal is not a major difficulty.
Even if you have a large security perimeter arround your upload point (e.g. at a military site) the attacker could use an aircraft. Even a model plane might be sufficient to detect the carrier frequency.
If the attacker can intercept the signal they will have no difficulty decoding your command sequences. It is quite likely that there is information available to the public in any case. Much of the software used in that type of application is canabalised from one project to the next. You might think you have a one off that is unique but it might well turn out to share 80% of its code with another bird used by some obscure company (or university!).
What should I do
This is not a hard problem for an expert to solve, but I really would not go at it armed with only a copy of Applied Crypto and enthusiasm. Security protocol design is a subtle business. The 802.11b folk who tried the DIY solution failed. If you are going to get your bird insured you will probably end up having to have a recognised expert check the design.
What you really need is a means of authenticating the commands sent to the bird. The easiest and most lightweight means of doing that is to use a message authentication code such as HMAC-SHA1 or one of the AES MAC modes. You need to establish some form of shared secret between the bird and the control station, this is simply a very large random number.
You may or may not want to bother with public key infrastucture. If you want to launch your bird on a Chinese platform you might not want the shared secret to be present on the bird when you launch. So you embed the public component of some private key in the bird and do some form of key exchange (don't do this at home, contact one of the people involved in the IETF design of the IPSEC key agreement protocol).
Incidentaly the attack you are protecting yourself from there is not the Chinese stealling the key (unlikely). A more likely form of attack is some jumped up pipsqueak senator looking to make a name for himself with a grandstanding attack on your perfidy (ask the directors of Loral).
Securing the link is the easy part, securing the shared secret to secure the link is harder. Some form of PK based key splitting scheme may be needed.
In summary, go see a specialist. Someone like Paul Kocher at Cryptography.com, Eric Rescorla at RTFM.com, Derek Atkins (warlord@mit.edu) is also highly competent. Expect to pay a lot more than you expect. The best people charge from $2,500 a day to $5,000. There are some who charge more, you will have great difficulty hiring them.
The UTV upgrade is, unsurprisingly, not unlike the DishPlayer upgrade. In fact, it is pretty much the same.
I could not find a description of that on the forum. But I did here.
Basically the piece says 'take your Dish PVR apart, put in a bigger hard drive, reassemble'.
What I would really like to do is to modify the PVR so that I can use a removable drive. That might mean buying a new case.
Only thing they don't mention is putting two drives in - as has been done with Tiva (plural of Tivo). I would ideally like two 160Gb Hard Drives, or bigger.
You forget the dreaded (and actually rather expensive) international transfer fees, which are going to get eliminated within the Euro zone.
Actually the cost of inter bank settlement in the EU has nothing to do with currencies. It is the dependence on the very expensive SWIFT VAN that is the cause of high costs.
This will undoubtedly be dealt with, but the solution will be to replace SWIFT and any such network would as a matter of course go for the much more lucrative UK/US transfer market regardless of what currencies were in use.
If Britain joined the Euro, then the banks would not be able to charge 4% (or more) for changing the money used to pay for all our imports (food) and all our exports).
Ie the banks would no longer be able to tax us 8% of our GNP.
In the first place your math is off, you are double counting.
in the second, the fraction of GNP that is imported or exported at all is not 100% (try 40) and of that much is third-party trade that does not touch the UK at all (i.e. the UK port shippers Ware selling to the USA). The proportion of UK trade with the Eurozone is much smaller still
thirdly, commercial exchange rates are nowhere near 4% which is pretty high even for tourist rates
I may agree with you conclusion but I see no excuse for a deceitful argument, or are you one of the Tory moles paid by Smith sq. to write garbage in Internet chat rooms so that other plants can trump it? The name Dr spin and your inability to tell the truth suggests so.
Sadly for them, they've failed, and London is still the financial capital of the world (with the debatable exception of NY; though I think the fact that we own the Bond, Gold, FX, Swap and Euromarkets settles it).
I would agree, except that due to the timezone differences, the London markets are more complimentary to the US rather than competing. The trading day starts somewhere in Asia (once Tokyo, someday soon HK as a proxy for Bejing), transfers to London and from there to NYC. To be a major player you have to be in both London and NYC.
The argument that the UK should go in for the sake of the city is specious however. In the first place the city will use any currency they care to, the commodity markets may well switch to the Euro without parliament. But the city will always have to use the dollar and the Euro until there is world government and a true single currency.
The city will do fine with or without the UK in the Euro. If the govt. were to do anything for the city, getting rid of some of the culture of old bufferism would have greater effect. Of course we all believe in self regulation until we have a lloyds style catastrophe, then we go to HMG for a bailout.
Rupert Murdoch gave up his.au citizenship some years ago to comply with US media ownership rules when he took over FOX
Actually he acquired US citizenship and through political chicanery was able to keep his.au citizenship, thus allowing him to keep his vast.au holdings.
Re:Simple question..
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The Euro
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Initially I thought this was a good way of looking at it, but now I think you're not quite right. The Conservatives won the 1992 election simply because the Labour government of the time (Socialist, blatantly Left Wing) was unpalatable to the majority of the electorate..
Actually the election was far more finely balanced. The Tories benefitted from an unexpectedly high turnout which was largely due to the weather, it was the first fine day of spring. The margin was very narrow, less than 2000 votes in 20 seats. In fact had the 50 seats with the smallest majorities gone 50:50 to Tory/Labour then Labour would have won narrowly.
The voter perception of Labour policy was largely fuelled by the Murdoch press. What Major offered was a Conservative government minus Thatcher. The mistake the Labour party had made was that by daemonising Thatcher they allowed the Tories to get re-elected simply by putting a new face at the helm. The Labour policy changes from 1992 through 1997 were of presentaion, not substance.
The major change was not in the Labour party but in the Conservatives. Racked with open internal warfare few of the cabinet made any attempt to conceal their contempt for their party leader. The numerous corruption scandals, starting with sex and ending with peculation and perjury erased any remaining vesigest of respect for the party.
The main similarity between 1992 and 2000 is the extent to which a viciously partisan press tipped the balance in favour of the right. Bush was consistently praised despite his obvious deficiencies while every opportunity was taken to attack Gore. So Bush got a bye for lying about driving while drunk while Gore was called a liar for mistakenly saying he visited Texas with the head of FEMA when it was the deputy head, he having visited 19 other states with the head one might think it an innocent mistake. The list goes on.
The relevance to the Euro is that but for the campaign against it in the Murdoch press it is unlikely that UK opposition would be anything like as great.
We will see if the end result is the same, before 9/11 that looked very likely. The ecconomy was in recession, the administration had lost control of the Senate due to crass political judgement, the California energy crisis caused by blatant market manipulation by Bush's texas cronies at Enron. Of course the hil Bush now needs to climb is that the press loves nothing better than making history repeat. So just as the Clinton years were spent trying to repeat Watergate, the press will now be trying to tie Bush II to the script of Bush I.
Re:The real reason the Euro is BAD NEWS
on
The Euro
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· Score: 2
We've had to save your butts from the Germans two times already WWI, and WWII.
First off, we were saving our own butts, just as the Yanks were when they finally entered the war after Hitloer declared war on them and Japan attacked them.
When I discussed Europe with Ted Heath he said that the reason he took the UK into the then EEC was precisely because he lost half his school friends in WWII. The whole point as far as he was concerned was to integrate the European economies to the extent that 1) no European country would ever again fall into the level of chaos that allowed Hitler to come to power and 2) would pre-empt any Facist type argument for invading other European countries.
I've been to Belgium, I've seen the graveyards full of millions of British dead.
The last time the UK suffered casualties on anything like that scale in Belgium was at Waterloo. Even then Wellington's force was nowhere near a million men, and the casualty rate was 50%. Oh and the only reason why we won rather than lost was that Blucher's Prussian guard (also known as Germans) arrived in time.
Re:Coming from a store owner...
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The Euro
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· Score: 2
Sounds to me like you might end up being an ex-owner of a chain of stores.
The Euro costs us £0.50 to exchange for every transaction made. That's right, the banks charge us to convert our money back into pounds! They don't charge at the consumer level, just merchant to merchant, so we mandate consumers do this on their own, or pay via another means.
So that would be on what? Cards? Cheques? Cash? If the customer is paying by credit card or EuroCheque then the amount will be in pounds sterling in any case. All you need to do is to quote the price in Euro.
If you are taking cash then the bank cannot charge per transaction, unless you mean by 'transaction' banking your takings at the end of the day. Unless you are paying your staff illegally low wages 50p is irrelevant.
In any case the demand from merchants to support banking of Euros is going to be significant. The bank charges will rapidly fall as merchants tell their banks that they expect the services to be realistically priced. If the banks don't respond there will be plenty of players ready to step in to offer low cost services.
The conversion rates fluctuate constantly. What's to say that one day, we charge 500 for a gold ring, and then going to the bank to exchange it, it's then worth 90% of that?
And what if the pound suddenly devalues to 90%? You are already dealling in precious metals that have a somewhat volatile price. Margins in the mainstream Jewlery business are typically large - 50% is not uncommon so the cost of lost business has more impact than daily fluctuations in the price of precious metals.
However unless you are running real low end outfits it is unlikely that you would do much cash business in any case.
The shops that are going to have to take Euros are going to be the convenience type outfits, newsagents, cafes, restaurants, pubs, particularly in airports and train stations.
So, you congratulate the Brits for being selfish and nationalistic? The irony is, of course, that the British economy and currency are in pretty sad shape.
For most of the Thatcher years that was indeed the case. Growth was sluggish, unemplyment catastrophic.
However since exiting the ERM the UK has been doing OK and in recent years has been growing at a steady rate of 2.5 to 3% a year - pretty good compared to the rest of Europe, inflation and unemployment are both low. Pretty good compared to the rest of Europe and not bad even in comparison to the US under Clinton. Unlike the US the UK is not currently in a recession.
Economic triumphalism goes in cycles. In the 1980s Germany and Japan were trumpeted. Then in the space of 18 months Japan went from being the miracle economy to basket case. Germany is no longer talked about with awe which is probably unfair as no other ecomony could have absorbed Eastern Europe the way Germany has without major upheaval.
But for the Bush recession the pundits would have been talking about a US economic miracle. If the US recovers they may yet do so. If they do not however and the UK continues to do well it is quite likely that the UK will be the flavor of the season.
Although pay rates in the UK at the top end are lower than in the US, wages in the middle and lower end of the scale are much better. The UK has far fewer slums than the US and beggars are almost disappeared from the streets.
Joining the Euro might well help. The effect is nowhere near as it is being made out, just as the loss of sovereignty is negligible as the choice is surrender to the exchange markets or surrender to Brussels.
Re:One simple reason why it won't work:
on
The Euro
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· Score: 2
You're right that labor, legally and technically can freely more, but there are such huge cultural barriers (language) that make it very costly to move.
I have lived and worked in four European countries and I have never troubled to learn the native dialect. All foreigners speak English, particularly now that it has become the de-facto language of the EU.
Language is becoming much less of a barrier simply because the size of the EU has grown so large that everyone who wants a job in management has to know English. All the technical litterature is in English, just about the only thing not available in English is high quality porn but nobody cares much whether the lassie groans in French (ah, ah, ah, aieeee!), English (oh, oh, oh, aghhh!) or German (eine swei, fier, ugh!...)
Re:Simple question..
on
The Euro
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· Score: 5, Informative
Why did Britain (the country with the most stable currecny) opt out of using the Euro?
Because of the internal divisions in the Conservative (Tory) party.
The history is that the Major government took over from Thatcher after she had been governing the country for 11 years and had become amazingly unpopular. The economy was in a mess and headed for a recession, people were fed up with crackpot schemes such as the poll tax, unemployment was high and the public services were collapsing. In many ways the 1992 election was similar to the 2000 US election, the right won an election that on all political calculations they should have lost. But they did so on a minority of the vote and with a very small majority in the Commons.
One of the reasons Thatcher had become unpopular in the party was that she had become anti-European and had refused to countenance going into the then ERM, a currency board that predated the Euro. When Major as Chancellor finally persuaded Thatcher to let him take the country in the pound was unrealistically high. This then led in part to the economic crisis that would peak a few years later in 1993. a bunch of speculators led by Goerge Sorros realised that HMG could not sustain the pound at its then level in the ERM, it was simply unsustainable. But Major and co refused to countenance a devaluation. Finaly the markets won and the pound fell out of the ERM. This had the immediate effect of ending the recession caused by an over-valued pound. The cost however was the Major government's credibility since they had spent $20 billion trying to sustain the higher level - equivalent to the cost of running the air force at the time.
The longer term effect was that a sizable faction in the Tory party began to use anti-Europeanism as a means to snipe at Major. A hard core of about a dozen rebels lost the party whip, but they had a large number of sympathisers. More importantly they were better organized in the constituency parties which are typically racist and reactionary.
In the 1997 election the Tory party was virtually anahilated, loosing 200 seats. That is their worst performance since universal suffrage. As always in the UK the MPs to loose their seats were the ones in the most marginal constituencies. These were also by and large the ones that were industrial rather than agricultural and as a result the ones most likely to have Europhile MPs.
By 1997 there was no prospect of the UK entering the Euro in the first wave even thought the pragmatic Blair administration supported the idea. That meant that there was no prospect of entering in that parliament. By now the Tory party was virulently opposed to the Euro and had made it practically their only campaign issue. If there was a referendum and the Tory party was to win a No vote it could easily allow the Tories to recover their lost momentum, possibly winning the next election. The political cost of negotiating to enter the Euro was consequently high and the benefit negligible since it could not be completed in one parliament.
The political calculation at this point is rather different. It now makes little difference whether the UK joins in 2003 or 2008, having missed the opportunity to set the ground rules the UK might as well watch what happens. The current Euro exchange rate is absurdly low and so a more equitable exchange rate to the pound and dollar is likely to sort itself out. It is likely that HMG will choose that moment to declare some form of currency peg. Over time the peg will become more permanent leading eventually to the UK entering the Euro.
The political advantage to doing so early remains low, the cost high. This is particularly so since 60% of the UK media market is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, an Austrailian with no particular concern for the UK or its inhabitants but a considerable and justified fear of the European Union curtailing his ambitions through anti-monopoly (trust) regulation.
. However, on the Euro, you have not got the facts right...
My statement that the Tories are crucifying their party on the cross of the Euro was based on personal observation. I doubt that your opinion is based on the same degree of interaction with the participants in that particular farce.
The dispute in the Conservative party over the Euro has no connection to economic or political sense. The real conflict is between the faction wanting to leave the EU and those wanting to stay in. That in turn has its roots in the various faction fights between the no turning back group, the one nation and the rump libertarian faction. The fracas over Europe is itself an attempt to refight the Anglo Irish agreement dispute.
The dispute over the Euro is ridiculous because as an economic and political issue it has only middling significance at best. Still the Tory party managed to destroy themselves over the corn laws so their current Euro-obsession is simply being true to their origins.
As for being taxed 4% by the banks, your opinions appear to be devoid of any connection to reality. Exchange commissions are nowhere near that high. Regardless of whether the UK is in or out of the Euro it is inevitable that most major scale commercial contracts will eventually be priced in Euros if they are not in dollars.
Well, considering that the paper discussed the use of open source in government, you'd imagine they would use an open document format.
That's all he was saying, it just defeats the whole paper's purpose, ya know?
It is a pity that folk don't take the time to read the articles referenced. The paper makes it very clear that they are do not see Open source being viable on the desktop fot 2 to 3 years minimum.
Nor is the paper written to solicit the praise and adulation of the Open Source community, that is not the constituency the authors serve. The report is written for IT managers in the UK civil service and for the companies that support them.
The UK govt. does not care for the ideological aspects of Open Source. If you go after them with an RMS style rant you will get ignored, and rightly so. The Blair govt. is in power largely because it has rejected ideology in favor of pragmatism. Their political opponents on the other hand are crucifying their party on the cross of the Euro for entirely ideological and dogmatic reasons.
So far we have seen a futile debate about open source document formats. Get it into your head, these guys are not looking to go the hair shirt, I shall not use closed source software route.
The real issue is whether HMG should start adopting procurement guidelines that require the code they have written for them to be made available as open source. In some cases this would be a very bad idea, in others very good.
The issue for the UK is that they can have a much bigger influence on the development of OSS than they can on the development of Windows.
The UK government wouldn't be in this pickle if they hadn't made a monumental mistake over 160 years ago. If they had seen fit to fully fund Charles Babbage's startup concepts, the British Crown would be the dominant player in information technology today.
Twaddle. Babbage recieved tens of thousands of pounds for his research. In fact he was one of the first ever recipients of government research funding. Babbage failled to deliver because he fell into tinkering and continual upgrades rather than delivering a working product.
Disraeli and Gladstone were both major supporters of Babbage and pretty much understood the implications of what they were funding as well as Babbage.
Over the last couple of years my opinion of Lessig switched from being pretty favorable to considering him something of a blowhard. I would have had more respect for him if he had stayed out of the Microsoft case after getting bounced out by the Appeals court. Instead he goes back to support Jackson in a quasi-judicial role that should have required impartiality.
The behavior of Jackson and to a lesser extent Lessig is the reason the case ended the way it did. What Microsoft did is essentially get the line umpire so mad at them that he made an obvious foul on them so the decision was bound to be overuled by the chief umpire.
It is easy to agree with someone who appears to be arguing the same case you are. Only I start to get the feeling that we are simply seeing our own prejudices getting reflected.
Re:Yes. Microkernel technology died last millenium
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Hurd: H2 CD Images
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· Score: 2
Believe me, most academics working in the field has a pretty good idea of what's going on.
Hmm let us see, back in 1991 how many academics would have been basing their O/S research on such an unfashionable and underpowered device as the 386? It was mid 1995 before anyone outside Intel realised that they might be able to win the processor race with brute force application of cash. Back in 1991 the SPARC chip and the MIPS series were the hot devices and the smart money was betting on the just introduced Alpha. Even Microsoft was supporting 3 different architectures for NT.
The MACH kernel was designed even earlier when the first wave of RISC was just comming in with the ARM and the SPARC.
The microkernel concept was very closely bound to the then fashionable RISC idea. The academics working on microkernels would not be as old fashioned to consider the limitations of the i86 series when designing an O/S. After all the whole point of RISC is build you silicon to the demands of the compiler and adding the O/S to that list is not a big step.
As to whether the Hurd based on Mach will outdo Linux, I am skeptical. After all the whole point of a microkernel is you keep it small and tight. Let us assume for the sake of argument that the Hurd does start to show positive advantages, then what, do we all move to the Hurd? I very much think not.
The first obstacle to any move to the Hurd is the vast installed base of Linux. The second is that the increased overhead of added RMS is far greater than the reduced overhead of a microkernel.
So if Hurd starts to show major earth shattering performance advantages, someone somewhere will hack up MACH-Linux. After all the majority of the Linux code is the support, packaging, device drivers etc. The actual kernel is pretty small and actual dependencies on the kernel architecture relatively few. OK so not an insignificant undertaking, but compared to the overhead of managing RMS trivial, but then again so would be recoding the whole of Win2k using punch cards.
We don't need to wait for the Hurd to see whether the microkernel offers a real advantage. Just benchmark an Alpha running Linux against an Alpha running the Mach based Digital Unix. My guess is that there will be no real difference since the disparity between VMS and Digital Unix was never vast (except on highly UNIX specific benchmarks).
Are copy protected CDs actually CDs at all? Do they comply with red book? Are they legally entitled to carry the "Compact Disc - Digital Audio" trademark? Does anyone here know?
The owners of the CD mark appears to be a holding company owned by Philips and Sony that licenses their patents on the medium. At this point those patents must be nearing expiry. However anyone can legally use the mark if the owner does not object and I doubt that as charter members of the RIAA it is likely Philips or Sony would.
All the cactus CDs are are CDs that have deliberate coding errors that cause the standard Windows 95 and 98 CDROM drivers to fail to read the disk. The question then is whether CDROM players with bad drivers should be using the CD mark. It would be interesting to hear from people with XP since many of the driver bugs have been fixed.
I suspect that the reason the corrupted disks work in DVD players is that they have the DVD driver which is newer and was written to support reading Audio CDs rather than 'tollerate' it.
Since the catus shield is depending on bugs in the Windows drivers to work it is not likely to be a very usefull long term solution. Sooner or later the drivers will change and it is difficult to see how the cactus folk can complain that their favorite bugs have been removed. Even on XP you can still load unsigned drivers, you can even turn off the warning when you try to load unsigned drivers. The criteria for signing drivers are written to reduce the number of bugs, Microsoft is fed up with people complaining about their system crashing when the cause is crappy kernek mode drivers. Microsoft has not made support for goofy DRM schemes a driver signing requirement.
It is a fair bet that the Linux drivers will be written to implement the red book spec in a way that does not cause it to fail on corrupted non-red book CDs. While Linux boxes are a small proportion of the market there are easily enough to support the bootleg distribution networks with ripped content.
Yes the large IBM mainframes do have impressive specs for use in banks. I have never criticized their use in that context. I have criticized their purchase by IT managers in major science labs where they are exceptionally unsuited to the work performed and the reasons for the purchase have more to do with ego than technology.
However I disagree on your assement of the reliability and security of the beasts. Used in a general computing environment the series is notable for its fragility. If on the other hand you only use the machine for one task, then the simpler the better and lacking almost every feature you would reasonably expect in an O/S MVS is a great choice, but by the same measure so is MSDOS.
Comparison to UNIX merely shows how far we have sunk. UNIX has never been a secure or a reliable O/S on the measures relevant to financial services. Even today if you want to run something like a chemical plant or a nuclear power station you use VMS.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you on? All the Star Trek series were shot in academy ratio (4:3) for the TV. If you want to watch them in the wrong ratio almost any wide screen TV will oblige by either stretching the picture horizontally so Picard fatter than Kirk did or by chopping off the top half of everyone's head.
The Philips proposal sounds to me to be of the form 'what do we need to do to make this pass likely regulation' rather than 'what can we do to support the RIAA and MPAA'.
While no DRM solution can ultimately be proof against a moderately determined attack it is certainly possible to produce stuff for the consumer market that does not support piracy without deliberate modification. For example you might see 'home media servers' being sold that store several hundred CDs and DVDs that can be broadcast to a number of access points in the house. These access points would initially be set top boxes but could be embedded in the TV if there was a recognized standard.
I don't fault Philips for anticipating likely regulation here. I would much rather that Philips produced something that was a reasonable compromise than waited for the RIAA and MPAA to buy votes in congress to either impose something completely derranged or try to kill the field altogether.
There are already attempts to kill off ReplayTV, the broadcast media would much rather support Tivo which has made it clear will roll over whenever asked. So we lose features like the ad-skip button.
There is a limit to the size of pipe that is available. There are no fatter pipes available at any price. There are no routers capable of routing them.
Why do people in the DNS world seem to think that spending money on hardware is the solution to every problem? What happened to engineering and protocol efficiency? All the waitlist provides is a somewhat more efficient mechanism than polling.
To understand the nature of the problem it is necessary to understand the type of business model the attackers are involved in. A typical approach is to scan the net for church group sites, locate those that are about to expire, grab the name and put up a porn site or a casino site in its place. The original owner is then offered the site back for a substantial fee.
If you have a business model of that kind, the best way to lower your overheads is to pay to become a registrar.
I don't think that the problem is a lack of understanding of the fields in question. The problem is a surfeit of gullability on the part of the con-artist's marks.
I remember there being a 'compression' company not long ago that blew $15 million on its start up party in Las Vegas and closed not long after when it transpired that the CEO was an ex-convict on the run from a parole violation.
The problem is that the press take the claim to have 'disproven' some fundamental proof as giving credibility to the claimants rather than making them suspect. The argument proceeds thus 'Black is white and therefore my perpetual motion machine works', 'Black is not white and your perpetual motion machine is almost certainly a fraud', 'You are only arguing that way because you are stuck in your ways and fail to understand that black is actually white, people like you have stopped every advance in science, they laughed at Gallileo when he said the earth was a cube...'.
With 2.2 GHz CPUs that all changes, every machine comes with a built in microwave.
Anyone know what effect the CPU has on 802.11b? Like might be tricky with both in the same box???
To answer the questions you pose:
Do I have a problem
If you did not before, you do now. Hint, if you rely on security through obscurity to secure a $50 million piece of hardware then best not tell the favourite news site for much of the hacker community.
The threat comes from two sources, one is bored teenagers who can't get a girlfriend, the other is an attack by a well resourced adversary such as a hostile government, a major terrorist group or organised crime. The teen hacker problem is non-negligible but the well resourced adversary is more likely.
Post 9/11 concern about infrastructure attacks is much greater. As a result the insurance syndicates I advise will shortly be requiring you to secure your communications links if you want to insure the bird. There will also be increased pressure from governments, particularly in the US to secure posibly sensistive infrastructure.
Are the existing security measures sufficient
Absolutely not. In the first place by relying on security through obscurity you are putting your employees at risk. A motivated attacker would have no qualms about kidnapping an employee (or a member of their familly) and forcing them to reveal the necessary information.
A more sophisticated attacker could obtain the necessary information simply by discovering the location of your site and visiting it with a suitably sophisticated scanner. Even the best dish does not direct 100% of the signal at the satelite. There is plenty scattered arround the dish. Intercepting the signal is not a major difficulty.
Even if you have a large security perimeter arround your upload point (e.g. at a military site) the attacker could use an aircraft. Even a model plane might be sufficient to detect the carrier frequency.
If the attacker can intercept the signal they will have no difficulty decoding your command sequences. It is quite likely that there is information available to the public in any case. Much of the software used in that type of application is canabalised from one project to the next. You might think you have a one off that is unique but it might well turn out to share 80% of its code with another bird used by some obscure company (or university!).
What should I do
This is not a hard problem for an expert to solve, but I really would not go at it armed with only a copy of Applied Crypto and enthusiasm. Security protocol design is a subtle business. The 802.11b folk who tried the DIY solution failed. If you are going to get your bird insured you will probably end up having to have a recognised expert check the design.
What you really need is a means of authenticating the commands sent to the bird. The easiest and most lightweight means of doing that is to use a message authentication code such as HMAC-SHA1 or one of the AES MAC modes. You need to establish some form of shared secret between the bird and the control station, this is simply a very large random number.
You may or may not want to bother with public key infrastucture. If you want to launch your bird on a Chinese platform you might not want the shared secret to be present on the bird when you launch. So you embed the public component of some private key in the bird and do some form of key exchange (don't do this at home, contact one of the people involved in the IETF design of the IPSEC key agreement protocol).
Incidentaly the attack you are protecting yourself from there is not the Chinese stealling the key (unlikely). A more likely form of attack is some jumped up pipsqueak senator looking to make a name for himself with a grandstanding attack on your perfidy (ask the directors of Loral).
Securing the link is the easy part, securing the shared secret to secure the link is harder. Some form of PK based key splitting scheme may be needed.
In summary, go see a specialist. Someone like Paul Kocher at Cryptography.com, Eric Rescorla at RTFM.com, Derek Atkins (warlord@mit.edu) is also highly competent. Expect to pay a lot more than you expect. The best people charge from $2,500 a day to $5,000. There are some who charge more, you will have great difficulty hiring them.
I could not find a description of that on the forum. But I did here.
Basically the piece says 'take your Dish PVR apart, put in a bigger hard drive, reassemble'.
What I would really like to do is to modify the PVR so that I can use a removable drive. That might mean buying a new case.
Only thing they don't mention is putting two drives in - as has been done with Tiva (plural of Tivo). I would ideally like two 160Gb Hard Drives, or bigger.
Actually the cost of inter bank settlement in the EU has nothing to do with currencies. It is the dependence on the very expensive SWIFT VAN that is the cause of high costs.
This will undoubtedly be dealt with, but the solution will be to replace SWIFT and any such network would as a matter of course go for the much more lucrative UK/US transfer market regardless of what currencies were in use.
In the first place your math is off, you are double counting.
in the second, the fraction of GNP that is imported or exported at all is not 100% (try 40) and of that much is third-party trade that does not touch the UK at all (i.e. the UK port shippers Ware selling to the USA). The proportion of UK trade with the Eurozone is much smaller still
thirdly, commercial exchange rates are nowhere near 4% which is pretty high even for tourist rates
I may agree with you conclusion but I see no excuse for a deceitful argument, or are you one of the Tory moles paid by Smith sq. to write garbage in Internet chat rooms so that other plants can trump it? The name Dr spin and your inability to tell the truth suggests so.
I would agree, except that due to the timezone differences, the London markets are more complimentary to the US rather than competing. The trading day starts somewhere in Asia (once Tokyo, someday soon HK as a proxy for Bejing), transfers to London and from there to NYC. To be a major player you have to be in both London and NYC.
The argument that the UK should go in for the sake of the city is specious however. In the first place the city will use any currency they care to, the commodity markets may well switch to the Euro without parliament. But the city will always have to use the dollar and the Euro until there is world government and a true single currency.
The city will do fine with or without the UK in the Euro. If the govt. were to do anything for the city, getting rid of some of the culture of old bufferism would have greater effect. Of course we all believe in self regulation until we have a lloyds style catastrophe, then we go to HMG for a bailout.
Actually he acquired US citizenship and through political chicanery was able to keep his .au citizenship, thus allowing him to keep his vast .au holdings.
Actually the election was far more finely balanced. The Tories benefitted from an unexpectedly high turnout which was largely due to the weather, it was the first fine day of spring. The margin was very narrow, less than 2000 votes in 20 seats. In fact had the 50 seats with the smallest majorities gone 50:50 to Tory/Labour then Labour would have won narrowly.
The voter perception of Labour policy was largely fuelled by the Murdoch press. What Major offered was a Conservative government minus Thatcher. The mistake the Labour party had made was that by daemonising Thatcher they allowed the Tories to get re-elected simply by putting a new face at the helm. The Labour policy changes from 1992 through 1997 were of presentaion, not substance.
The major change was not in the Labour party but in the Conservatives. Racked with open internal warfare few of the cabinet made any attempt to conceal their contempt for their party leader. The numerous corruption scandals, starting with sex and ending with peculation and perjury erased any remaining vesigest of respect for the party.
The main similarity between 1992 and 2000 is the extent to which a viciously partisan press tipped the balance in favour of the right. Bush was consistently praised despite his obvious deficiencies while every opportunity was taken to attack Gore. So Bush got a bye for lying about driving while drunk while Gore was called a liar for mistakenly saying he visited Texas with the head of FEMA when it was the deputy head, he having visited 19 other states with the head one might think it an innocent mistake. The list goes on.
The relevance to the Euro is that but for the campaign against it in the Murdoch press it is unlikely that UK opposition would be anything like as great.
We will see if the end result is the same, before 9/11 that looked very likely. The ecconomy was in recession, the administration had lost control of the Senate due to crass political judgement, the California energy crisis caused by blatant market manipulation by Bush's texas cronies at Enron. Of course the hil Bush now needs to climb is that the press loves nothing better than making history repeat. So just as the Clinton years were spent trying to repeat Watergate, the press will now be trying to tie Bush II to the script of Bush I.
First off, we were saving our own butts, just as the Yanks were when they finally entered the war after Hitloer declared war on them and Japan attacked them.
When I discussed Europe with Ted Heath he said that the reason he took the UK into the then EEC was precisely because he lost half his school friends in WWII. The whole point as far as he was concerned was to integrate the European economies to the extent that 1) no European country would ever again fall into the level of chaos that allowed Hitler to come to power and 2) would pre-empt any Facist type argument for invading other European countries.
I've been to Belgium, I've seen the graveyards full of millions of British dead.
The last time the UK suffered casualties on anything like that scale in Belgium was at Waterloo. Even then Wellington's force was nowhere near a million men, and the casualty rate was 50%. Oh and the only reason why we won rather than lost was that Blucher's Prussian guard (also known as Germans) arrived in time.
The Euro costs us £0.50 to exchange for every transaction made. That's right, the banks charge us to convert our money back into pounds! They don't charge at the consumer level, just merchant to merchant, so we mandate consumers do this on their own, or pay via another means.
So that would be on what? Cards? Cheques? Cash? If the customer is paying by credit card or EuroCheque then the amount will be in pounds sterling in any case. All you need to do is to quote the price in Euro.
If you are taking cash then the bank cannot charge per transaction, unless you mean by 'transaction' banking your takings at the end of the day. Unless you are paying your staff illegally low wages 50p is irrelevant.
In any case the demand from merchants to support banking of Euros is going to be significant. The bank charges will rapidly fall as merchants tell their banks that they expect the services to be realistically priced. If the banks don't respond there will be plenty of players ready to step in to offer low cost services.
The conversion rates fluctuate constantly. What's to say that one day, we charge 500 for a gold ring, and then going to the bank to exchange it, it's then worth 90% of that?
And what if the pound suddenly devalues to 90%? You are already dealling in precious metals that have a somewhat volatile price. Margins in the mainstream Jewlery business are typically large - 50% is not uncommon so the cost of lost business has more impact than daily fluctuations in the price of precious metals.
However unless you are running real low end outfits it is unlikely that you would do much cash business in any case.
The shops that are going to have to take Euros are going to be the convenience type outfits, newsagents, cafes, restaurants, pubs, particularly in airports and train stations.
For most of the Thatcher years that was indeed the case. Growth was sluggish, unemplyment catastrophic.
However since exiting the ERM the UK has been doing OK and in recent years has been growing at a steady rate of 2.5 to 3% a year - pretty good compared to the rest of Europe, inflation and unemployment are both low. Pretty good compared to the rest of Europe and not bad even in comparison to the US under Clinton. Unlike the US the UK is not currently in a recession.
Economic triumphalism goes in cycles. In the 1980s Germany and Japan were trumpeted. Then in the space of 18 months Japan went from being the miracle economy to basket case. Germany is no longer talked about with awe which is probably unfair as no other ecomony could have absorbed Eastern Europe the way Germany has without major upheaval.
But for the Bush recession the pundits would have been talking about a US economic miracle. If the US recovers they may yet do so. If they do not however and the UK continues to do well it is quite likely that the UK will be the flavor of the season.
Although pay rates in the UK at the top end are lower than in the US, wages in the middle and lower end of the scale are much better. The UK has far fewer slums than the US and beggars are almost disappeared from the streets.
Joining the Euro might well help. The effect is nowhere near as it is being made out, just as the loss of sovereignty is negligible as the choice is surrender to the exchange markets or surrender to Brussels.
I have lived and worked in four European countries and I have never troubled to learn the native dialect. All foreigners speak English, particularly now that it has become the de-facto language of the EU.
Language is becoming much less of a barrier simply because the size of the EU has grown so large that everyone who wants a job in management has to know English. All the technical litterature is in English, just about the only thing not available in English is high quality porn but nobody cares much whether the lassie groans in French (ah, ah, ah, aieeee!), English (oh, oh, oh, aghhh!) or German (eine swei, fier, ugh! ...)
Because of the internal divisions in the Conservative (Tory) party.
The history is that the Major government took over from Thatcher after she had been governing the country for 11 years and had become amazingly unpopular. The economy was in a mess and headed for a recession, people were fed up with crackpot schemes such as the poll tax, unemployment was high and the public services were collapsing. In many ways the 1992 election was similar to the 2000 US election, the right won an election that on all political calculations they should have lost. But they did so on a minority of the vote and with a very small majority in the Commons.
One of the reasons Thatcher had become unpopular in the party was that she had become anti-European and had refused to countenance going into the then ERM, a currency board that predated the Euro. When Major as Chancellor finally persuaded Thatcher to let him take the country in the pound was unrealistically high. This then led in part to the economic crisis that would peak a few years later in 1993. a bunch of speculators led by Goerge Sorros realised that HMG could not sustain the pound at its then level in the ERM, it was simply unsustainable. But Major and co refused to countenance a devaluation. Finaly the markets won and the pound fell out of the ERM. This had the immediate effect of ending the recession caused by an over-valued pound. The cost however was the Major government's credibility since they had spent $20 billion trying to sustain the higher level - equivalent to the cost of running the air force at the time.
The longer term effect was that a sizable faction in the Tory party began to use anti-Europeanism as a means to snipe at Major. A hard core of about a dozen rebels lost the party whip, but they had a large number of sympathisers. More importantly they were better organized in the constituency parties which are typically racist and reactionary.
In the 1997 election the Tory party was virtually anahilated, loosing 200 seats. That is their worst performance since universal suffrage. As always in the UK the MPs to loose their seats were the ones in the most marginal constituencies. These were also by and large the ones that were industrial rather than agricultural and as a result the ones most likely to have Europhile MPs.
By 1997 there was no prospect of the UK entering the Euro in the first wave even thought the pragmatic Blair administration supported the idea. That meant that there was no prospect of entering in that parliament. By now the Tory party was virulently opposed to the Euro and had made it practically their only campaign issue. If there was a referendum and the Tory party was to win a No vote it could easily allow the Tories to recover their lost momentum, possibly winning the next election. The political cost of negotiating to enter the Euro was consequently high and the benefit negligible since it could not be completed in one parliament.
The political calculation at this point is rather different. It now makes little difference whether the UK joins in 2003 or 2008, having missed the opportunity to set the ground rules the UK might as well watch what happens. The current Euro exchange rate is absurdly low and so a more equitable exchange rate to the pound and dollar is likely to sort itself out. It is likely that HMG will choose that moment to declare some form of currency peg. Over time the peg will become more permanent leading eventually to the UK entering the Euro.
The political advantage to doing so early remains low, the cost high. This is particularly so since 60% of the UK media market is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, an Austrailian with no particular concern for the UK or its inhabitants but a considerable and justified fear of the European Union curtailing his ambitions through anti-monopoly (trust) regulation.
My statement that the Tories are crucifying their party on the cross of the Euro was based on personal observation. I doubt that your opinion is based on the same degree of interaction with the participants in that particular farce.
The dispute in the Conservative party over the Euro has no connection to economic or political sense. The real conflict is between the faction wanting to leave the EU and those wanting to stay in. That in turn has its roots in the various faction fights between the no turning back group, the one nation and the rump libertarian faction. The fracas over Europe is itself an attempt to refight the Anglo Irish agreement dispute.
The dispute over the Euro is ridiculous because as an economic and political issue it has only middling significance at best. Still the Tory party managed to destroy themselves over the corn laws so their current Euro-obsession is simply being true to their origins.
As for being taxed 4% by the banks, your opinions appear to be devoid of any connection to reality. Exchange commissions are nowhere near that high. Regardless of whether the UK is in or out of the Euro it is inevitable that most major scale commercial contracts will eventually be priced in Euros if they are not in dollars.
That's all he was saying, it just defeats the whole paper's purpose, ya know?
It is a pity that folk don't take the time to read the articles referenced. The paper makes it very clear that they are do not see Open source being viable on the desktop fot 2 to 3 years minimum.
Nor is the paper written to solicit the praise and adulation of the Open Source community, that is not the constituency the authors serve. The report is written for IT managers in the UK civil service and for the companies that support them.
So far we have seen a futile debate about open source document formats. Get it into your head, these guys are not looking to go the hair shirt, I shall not use closed source software route.
The real issue is whether HMG should start adopting procurement guidelines that require the code they have written for them to be made available as open source. In some cases this would be a very bad idea, in others very good.
The issue for the UK is that they can have a much bigger influence on the development of OSS than they can on the development of Windows.
Twaddle. Babbage recieved tens of thousands of pounds for his research. In fact he was one of the first ever recipients of government research funding. Babbage failled to deliver because he fell into tinkering and continual upgrades rather than delivering a working product.
Disraeli and Gladstone were both major supporters of Babbage and pretty much understood the implications of what they were funding as well as Babbage.
Over the last couple of years my opinion of Lessig switched from being pretty favorable to considering him something of a blowhard. I would have had more respect for him if he had stayed out of the Microsoft case after getting bounced out by the Appeals court. Instead he goes back to support Jackson in a quasi-judicial role that should have required impartiality. The behavior of Jackson and to a lesser extent Lessig is the reason the case ended the way it did. What Microsoft did is essentially get the line umpire so mad at them that he made an obvious foul on them so the decision was bound to be overuled by the chief umpire.
It is easy to agree with someone who appears to be arguing the same case you are. Only I start to get the feeling that we are simply seeing our own prejudices getting reflected.
Hmm let us see, back in 1991 how many academics would have been basing their O/S research on such an unfashionable and underpowered device as the 386? It was mid 1995 before anyone outside Intel realised that they might be able to win the processor race with brute force application of cash. Back in 1991 the SPARC chip and the MIPS series were the hot devices and the smart money was betting on the just introduced Alpha. Even Microsoft was supporting 3 different architectures for NT.
The MACH kernel was designed even earlier when the first wave of RISC was just comming in with the ARM and the SPARC.
The microkernel concept was very closely bound to the then fashionable RISC idea. The academics working on microkernels would not be as old fashioned to consider the limitations of the i86 series when designing an O/S. After all the whole point of RISC is build you silicon to the demands of the compiler and adding the O/S to that list is not a big step.
As to whether the Hurd based on Mach will outdo Linux, I am skeptical. After all the whole point of a microkernel is you keep it small and tight. Let us assume for the sake of argument that the Hurd does start to show positive advantages, then what, do we all move to the Hurd? I very much think not.
The first obstacle to any move to the Hurd is the vast installed base of Linux. The second is that the increased overhead of added RMS is far greater than the reduced overhead of a microkernel.
So if Hurd starts to show major earth shattering performance advantages, someone somewhere will hack up MACH-Linux. After all the majority of the Linux code is the support, packaging, device drivers etc. The actual kernel is pretty small and actual dependencies on the kernel architecture relatively few. OK so not an insignificant undertaking, but compared to the overhead of managing RMS trivial, but then again so would be recoding the whole of Win2k using punch cards.
We don't need to wait for the Hurd to see whether the microkernel offers a real advantage. Just benchmark an Alpha running Linux against an Alpha running the Mach based Digital Unix. My guess is that there will be no real difference since the disparity between VMS and Digital Unix was never vast (except on highly UNIX specific benchmarks).
The owners of the CD mark appears to be a holding company owned by Philips and Sony that licenses their patents on the medium. At this point those patents must be nearing expiry. However anyone can legally use the mark if the owner does not object and I doubt that as charter members of the RIAA it is likely Philips or Sony would.
All the cactus CDs are are CDs that have deliberate coding errors that cause the standard Windows 95 and 98 CDROM drivers to fail to read the disk. The question then is whether CDROM players with bad drivers should be using the CD mark. It would be interesting to hear from people with XP since many of the driver bugs have been fixed.
I suspect that the reason the corrupted disks work in DVD players is that they have the DVD driver which is newer and was written to support reading Audio CDs rather than 'tollerate' it.
Since the catus shield is depending on bugs in the Windows drivers to work it is not likely to be a very usefull long term solution. Sooner or later the drivers will change and it is difficult to see how the cactus folk can complain that their favorite bugs have been removed. Even on XP you can still load unsigned drivers, you can even turn off the warning when you try to load unsigned drivers. The criteria for signing drivers are written to reduce the number of bugs, Microsoft is fed up with people complaining about their system crashing when the cause is crappy kernek mode drivers. Microsoft has not made support for goofy DRM schemes a driver signing requirement.
It is a fair bet that the Linux drivers will be written to implement the red book spec in a way that does not cause it to fail on corrupted non-red book CDs. While Linux boxes are a small proportion of the market there are easily enough to support the bootleg distribution networks with ripped content.
However I disagree on your assement of the reliability and security of the beasts. Used in a general computing environment the series is notable for its fragility. If on the other hand you only use the machine for one task, then the simpler the better and lacking almost every feature you would reasonably expect in an O/S MVS is a great choice, but by the same measure so is MSDOS.
Comparison to UNIX merely shows how far we have sunk. UNIX has never been a secure or a reliable O/S on the measures relevant to financial services. Even today if you want to run something like a chemical plant or a nuclear power station you use VMS.