Here's the trick. If it is NOT like Wallet, and your CC info is NOT stored within Passport, then what they're effectively doing is adding a password check to your credit card for online transactions.
So where is the trick, I can't see it? The basic concept of credit card use under mail order/phone order rules is this: The cardholder posesses some data record consisting of CC number, name on card, expiration date, et cetera. In order to make a payment, the cardholder hands over the whole record to the merchant, who in turn uses the data to acquire the money. Which makes the data record a public data record because hiding it is not part of the concept (though it may make life easier if you don't tell everyone).
This, by the way, is not a weakness of the credit card, its a strength. The obvious insecurity in the technology is balanced by a rather fair and sensible distribution of liability. This non-technical factor makes credit cards a payment system one actually wants to use.
So what does adding a password to the public data record change? Sure, they can have password and other data checked by distinct entities, but still, what does it change to the concept? You have a data record, and it's public because you give it away whenever you pay.
Uh oh, and what does totally useless for the purpose of online transactions mean? Can't you shop in online stores that do not support this scheme? Does telephone count as "online", i.e. will it really block all uses of the card without physical presence of the card? Will you be required to type your passport password on a ticket vending machine's touchscreen? And will you still be able to dispute "verified" transactions?
Online shops cannot afford to require anything from their customers. The point in running a shop is selling; selling means to make buying as easy as possible. This is especially true on the Net where the customer can even remain sitting in her chair while leaving the shop and entering the competitor's. So how is this going to work? Successful online shops already know the rules and won't even try to require anything from the customers. Those who try will notice soon.
After all, digital signatures (as a legal concept) and all those esoteric digital payment schemes didn't take off; online shops just don't need them. They are even willing to take some risk if this helps them to gain new customers.
Waiting for their next smart idea...
Re:Pure Laziness
on
Version Fatigue
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This is pure intellectual laziness. What is wrong with being in a "learning mode?" We do it our entire lives! Why should someone want to actually stop learning?
Nothing. Nothing is wrong with a learning mode as such. What really makes a problem is being put back into a learning mode for the same task over and over, which is peculiar to computer software. This makes you less efficient in accomplishing that task than you were befor, for no apparent reason. Making you more efficient is generally notg your goal when using a computer; your goal is to be more efficient than you would be without. Or with the previous model. Or with a typewriter.
Also don't forget that not all learning is learning of explicit knowledge, rules and sentences one could quote in an exam. There is tacit knowledge, there are habits formed in everyday use of a thing, and there are strategies helping to find knowledge in the world when it can't be found in the head. What isn't there is an unlearn button. Learning a new way of doing something after having learned another way very well might be more difficult than learning a totally new thing.
Besides the question what sort of software is more secure, what about the terrorists? It has often been stated that they might try to attack the Internet or computers in general or certain computers in particular. But are the Internet and computers really an attractive target for terrorists? What are terrorist trying to achieve, actually, how do they think about it, why do they still prefer suicide bombing over high-tech attacks? I don't have answers, but those constructing a connection between terrorism and the open/closed source issue do not have them either. They don't even ask the right question.
The truth might turn out to be that terrorist just aren't interested in attacks nobody except a few geeks would notice or understand.
The numbers don't matter. To understand why the important information is really only the #2 position, you'll have to understand what they call charts. There are many misconceptions about it. Some think the charts statistically show what music is currently most liked by the people. Others think they show how well a song or an album sells. Teenagers may believe the charts are a service of MTV. They are all terribly wrong. The so-called charts are just a prioritized list of items the music industry would like to sell to you.
It's basically been proven that the average person drives better drunk than while trying to operate a cell phone, and that's a pretty simple interface. Now BMW is coming along and giving people more reasons to take their eyes off the road? WTF are they thinking?
There are more cellphone in the world than there are BMW cars. Let's try to change this by giving our cars a cellphone UI.
What they,(the content industries in question), need to do is present an easier option for most people at a price which,(initialy cheap,later expensive),they,(most people),will be willing to pay and which incorperates the drm of choice.
Why incorporate a DRM system if people are willing to pay?:^).
The point of drm is not to stop Every one copying a file illegaly, but to stop the majority of people and this is something which could be achieved.
That's what they tell us every time we tell them it's not going to work. The problem here is how those DRM systems fail. They are not broken instance by instance. Once a single instance is broken, all instances are broken because the newly discovered way of circumventing can be encoded in a piece of software and thus be used by everyone. The argument of keeping the honest people honest is therefore kind of invalid. Once someone has broken a system, everyone has broken it.
That's why they need another legal hammer, a DMCA-like one that makes it illegal to talk about circumvention, not to tell implementing it. It's the only protection against honest people who happen to download some software from the Internet -- it ensures that software they don't like is verboten, as is all information that could lead to implementation of such software.
Re:A small but good example of personalisation
on
Making It Personal
·
· Score: 2
But to keep getting their money they have to keep their customers happy.
Well, I prefer to choose myself who's going to make me happy, and there aren't many whom I allow to do so. People I have a business relationship with might well be among them -- as long as they are people. My local bakery could make me happy by remembering my preferences. British Airways can't, and if they try, it will be used against them.
Re:A small but good example of personalisation
on
Making It Personal
·
· Score: 2
But its a good one. Personalisation and its bigger brother CRM(Customer Relationship Management) means that people feel that they have a personal relationship with a company and are not just some number in a database.
At least until you read how they think about it. Until you understand that those companies are the same that calculate the customer lifetime value -- your customer lifetime value. Do you understand that they might consider you worthless some day? They aren't interested in you. They are interested in your money.
From a scientific point of view, is there any evidence that technologies could be invented which enable producers of digital content to control how this digital content is used, and by whom? Should there be a difference between theory and real life, I'd be interested in an answer under real-world assumptions, that is, there is an Internet and people connect to it using devices fully under their own control.
We have read similar rants about {open source|free} software licences before. The usual answer was: If you don't like this licence, use that licence, or this alternative one, or..., or roll your own. This is what {open source|free} software people have done for years. No one is forced to use a paricular licence. There are plenty of them, and there is freedom of choice.
The most important thing about EFF's OAL is not its particular content, but its existence. It just shows that open licences for music are possible, and it may serve as a prototype. A development similar to that of {open source|free} software licences seems to have begun -- people start to think about what they expect from an {open|free} music licence, write it down, and use their licences. Look here to see another example.
In response to the title of this post: Games do have the secret to the UI because they are single task programs.
And there's a second, related property specific to games: They are creating their own tasks. The sole purpose of a serious application is to help its user with an external task. The same is not true for computer games, which create their own tasks out of nothing. This is a rather fundamental difference. Application programs help you to accomplish tasks, games create tasks for you so you can spend time on them without getting bored. The user interface may even be part of this.
Computer games aren't easy to use, they just keep the initial treshold low. It is easy to learn how to move around your character in a 3D shooter, how to shoot, and how to pick up things. But there is more in the game, and in its user interface. It takes considerable effort to learn all the things that make you a skillfull player, e.g. of Quake. Find weapons and ammo and other stuff, identify enemies and shoot them quickly, without wasting too much ammo and health, remember secret rooms and buttons, find your way through the map -- all these things are not easy. The player has to learn them the hard way, and this learning is part of the fun of gaming.
Credit cards are generally the best way to pay because you have legal rights to dispute the charges if the product or service is misrepresented or never delivered.
Will payment by credit card still be the safest way if there is a computer on the card? After all, computers don't err, and if the technology makes it harder to use the card unauthorized, it may also become harder to dispute transactions, just because the technology is believed to be secure.
The traditional credit card system may be smarter than the smart card, because it accepts the possibility of failure and distributes the risk over all customers of the card issuer.
Checksums do not change gracefully given different inputs.
It depends. If we think of cryptographic hash functions, you are right. They are designed that way in order to avoid collisions and forging of messages that are mapped to a given value by a particular function.
But if we think of error correcting codes, the situation is different. They are designed with the opposite goal in mind -- changing gracefully when certain errors (i.e., small changes for some definition of "small") occur, to allow for reconstruction of the original data.
Ususally both the checksum and the corrupted data (or the corrupted data + checksum string, to be precise) is needed in the case of error correcting codes. But perhaps concepts from both -- closely related -- fields could be combined to create something usable for spam detection under hostile spammer conditions?
Then there's infomercials. (Do people outside the U.S. have these oddities on their TVs?)
They do. And this can be really funny if U.S. infomercials are equipped with overlaid (but in no case synchronised) voices in the respective native language.
If advertising could be _really_ targeted - so that the adverts you see are those for products or services you'd really be likely to buy - then aren't you directly benefiting by watching the ad and getting more information about what to buy?
Certainly not. Even if perfectly targeted to my needs and preferences, advertising remains advertising. What is the goal of a company advertising their products or services? Now that's simple: selling more of them than they would without advertising. The hope is to earn more in return from increased sales than spent for advertising.
As a customer, or a potential customer, I have no interest in any kind of advertising beyond pure, easy-to-compare lists of products and prices, and perhaps some additional, context-depenent information. The selection of products I am interested in can change very quickly. If, for instance, my car is running out of fuel during a trip, my interest in anything but gas stations will immediately drop to zero. In this situation there are also additional constraints -- I need a gas station I can reach with the remaining amount of fuel and will probably not care about price or service. As a customer I am driven by needs, be they rational like in the example above or irrational like the "need" for entertainment.
A company advertising something is not in a position to really care about my needs. (Free coffee in the morning, anywhere?) Remember, the company tries to sell as much as possible with as little effort as possible, in order to increase profit. So there is a principal conflict of interests between the customer and the company. They want to make as much profit as possible out their customers. Me as a customer wants to satisfy my needs at the lowest price possible, since saving money means I can satisfy even more needs.
How does targeted advertising resolve this conflict? It does not. Targeted advertising does not mean a company suddenly starts to adopt satisfaction of my needs as their primary goal. After all that's not their job; their job is to make profit. So to a company doing advertising, targeting means targeting to my wallet. It means to make me pay to them whatever the can get out of me. If they have to satisfy my needs in order to get my money, they will do so. But if there is any way for them to make me perceive more needs, or to overestimate existing ones, or to ignore all the other companies, they will try that.
Targeted advertising means to find the personal winning strategy against every single customer, while making him not recognise his role as a money delivery servant.
You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows.
Turning configuration into a game just makes obvious that Linux no longer needs elaborate configuration. Fiddling around with configuration has become pure fun and entertainment in many cases cases, and this new style is nothing but a consequence of it.
My company, a research agency, has an inhouse library. We buy books and let everyone read it. As a further service, the library staff even borrows books from other libraries, again for everyone in the company.
What do you think, who is going to ruin whom? And who do you think will design your next copy protection scheme if R&D has died because of every single bit of thought being licensed material without any option to share it with others?
Oh, BTW, every buck counts for us, too. To us scientists, pay per view would mean we had to fill in a form for every access to any publication, calculate the number of readings needed in a project in advance, and being unable to work if the planned amount had been spent.
Now research is much older than your business, as are old-style publishing companies, who survived it. Did you ever consider the possibility of your business model being seriously flawed in that it relies on people who paid you to enforce your rather arbitrary do-not-look-over-my-shoulders rules?
Anti-competitiveness is an inherent characteristics of the whole IP industry. Competition requires that, at least in principle, a competitor could produce a similar or better product. That's what competition is all about.
Producing a competing product is something that works fine for hadware of all kinds. If company X sells cars, company Y could build better, cheaper, or just different cars; the same for computers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and so on.
To a certain degree, such plain competition may work for software as well. If company M sells operating systems, company L could sell their own operating system. Compatibility is however an issue here and can make competition really hard to achieve. But, as the open source movement shows, it is still possible to compete. It works because such software still has a connection to hardware. One will need software when and only when using a computer. One can chose which software to use on any given computer, but on cannot use software without a computer, i.e. without hardware.
Now consider movies, music, and books. These are completely virtual by nature. Usually they are distributed on carriers of various kinds, like DVD, paper, or the Internet. But in principle they are independent from specific carriers or types of carriers. That's BTW why the IP industry has a problem with copying of such products -- it's an inherent feature of them, as we all know. What the industry actually does is to charge for distribution, not for the work itself. They won't sell you music, they will sell you CDs.
How could a competitor compete here? Of course by distributing the same product in a somehow different way, e.g. cheaper, in different colors, or more convenient. But the product is protected by copyright, it cannot be distributed by competitors. (There is also little room for improvements exept for the price; having still one single owner of the artwork limits the freedom to make better prices.) Making a similar product to a piece of music, a book, or a movie, of course would be possible, but change nothing -- nobody would by this instead of the original one, since it would be considered just a different thing. There is only one Star Trek XXVI. movie -- who could compete and how could this reduce DVD prices?
Slashdot Mirror
So where is the trick, I can't see it? The basic concept of credit card use under mail order/phone order rules is this: The cardholder posesses some data record consisting of CC number, name on card, expiration date, et cetera. In order to make a payment, the cardholder hands over the whole record to the merchant, who in turn uses the data to acquire the money. Which makes the data record a public data record because hiding it is not part of the concept (though it may make life easier if you don't tell everyone).
This, by the way, is not a weakness of the credit card, its a strength. The obvious insecurity in the technology is balanced by a rather fair and sensible distribution of liability. This non-technical factor makes credit cards a payment system one actually wants to use.
So what does adding a password to the public data record change? Sure, they can have password and other data checked by distinct entities, but still, what does it change to the concept? You have a data record, and it's public because you give it away whenever you pay.
Uh oh, and what does totally useless for the purpose of online transactions mean? Can't you shop in online stores that do not support this scheme? Does telephone count as "online", i.e. will it really block all uses of the card without physical presence of the card? Will you be required to type your passport password on a ticket vending machine's touchscreen? And will you still be able to dispute "verified" transactions?
Online shops cannot afford to require anything from their customers. The point in running a shop is selling; selling means to make buying as easy as possible. This is especially true on the Net where the customer can even remain sitting in her chair while leaving the shop and entering the competitor's. So how is this going to work? Successful online shops already know the rules and won't even try to require anything from the customers. Those who try will notice soon.
After all, digital signatures (as a legal concept) and all those esoteric digital payment schemes didn't take off; online shops just don't need them. They are even willing to take some risk if this helps them to gain new customers.
Waiting for their next smart idea ...
Nothing. Nothing is wrong with a learning mode as such. What really makes a problem is being put back into a learning mode for the same task over and over, which is peculiar to computer software. This makes you less efficient in accomplishing that task than you were befor, for no apparent reason. Making you more efficient is generally notg your goal when using a computer; your goal is to be more efficient than you would be without. Or with the previous model. Or with a typewriter.
Also don't forget that not all learning is learning of explicit knowledge, rules and sentences one could quote in an exam. There is tacit knowledge, there are habits formed in everyday use of a thing, and there are strategies helping to find knowledge in the world when it can't be found in the head. What isn't there is an unlearn button. Learning a new way of doing something after having learned another way very well might be more difficult than learning a totally new thing.
Besides the question what sort of software is more secure, what about the terrorists? It has often been stated that they might try to attack the Internet or computers in general or certain computers in particular. But are the Internet and computers really an attractive target for terrorists? What are terrorist trying to achieve, actually, how do they think about it, why do they still prefer suicide bombing over high-tech attacks? I don't have answers, but those constructing a connection between terrorism and the open/closed source issue do not have them either. They don't even ask the right question.
The truth might turn out to be that terrorist just aren't interested in attacks nobody except a few geeks would notice or understand.
The numbers don't matter. To understand why the important information is really only the #2 position, you'll have to understand what they call charts. There are many misconceptions about it. Some think the charts statistically show what music is currently most liked by the people. Others think they show how well a song or an album sells. Teenagers may believe the charts are a service of MTV. They are all terribly wrong. The so-called charts are just a prioritized list of items the music industry would like to sell to you.
There are more cellphone in the world than there are BMW cars. Let's try to change this by giving our cars a cellphone UI.
HTH
Why incorporate a DRM system if people are willing to pay? :^).
That's what they tell us every time we tell them it's not going to work. The problem here is how those DRM systems fail. They are not broken instance by instance. Once a single instance is broken, all instances are broken because the newly discovered way of circumventing can be encoded in a piece of software and thus be used by everyone. The argument of keeping the honest people honest is therefore kind of invalid. Once someone has broken a system, everyone has broken it.
That's why they need another legal hammer, a DMCA-like one that makes it illegal to talk about circumvention, not to tell implementing it. It's the only protection against honest people who happen to download some software from the Internet -- it ensures that software they don't like is verboten, as is all information that could lead to implementation of such software.
Well, I prefer to choose myself who's going to make me happy, and there aren't many whom I allow to do so. People I have a business relationship with might well be among them -- as long as they are people. My local bakery could make me happy by remembering my preferences. British Airways can't, and if they try, it will be used against them.
At least until you read how they think about it. Until you understand that those companies are the same that calculate the customer lifetime value -- your customer lifetime value. Do you understand that they might consider you worthless some day? They aren't interested in you. They are interested in your money.
Mh, the pictures look like coming from a ray tracer. Does this watch exist or is this just a funny Web page?
From a scientific point of view, is there any evidence that technologies could be invented which enable producers of digital content to control how this digital content is used, and by whom? Should there be a difference between theory and real life, I'd be interested in an answer under real-world assumptions, that is, there is an Internet and people connect to it using devices fully under their own control.
We have read similar rants about {open source|free} software licences before. The usual answer was: If you don't like this licence, use that licence, or this alternative one, or ..., or roll your own. This is what {open source|free} software people have done for years. No one is forced to use a paricular licence. There are plenty of them, and there is freedom of choice.
The most important thing about EFF's OAL is not its particular content, but its existence. It just shows that open licences for music are possible, and it may serve as a prototype. A development similar to that of {open source|free} software licences seems to have begun -- people start to think about what they expect from an {open|free} music licence, write it down, and use their licences. Look here to see another example.
And there's a second, related property specific to games: They are creating their own tasks. The sole purpose of a serious application is to help its user with an external task. The same is not true for computer games, which create their own tasks out of nothing. This is a rather fundamental difference. Application programs help you to accomplish tasks, games create tasks for you so you can spend time on them without getting bored. The user interface may even be part of this.
Computer games aren't easy to use, they just keep the initial treshold low. It is easy to learn how to move around your character in a 3D shooter, how to shoot, and how to pick up things. But there is more in the game, and in its user interface. It takes considerable effort to learn all the things that make you a skillfull player, e.g. of Quake. Find weapons and ammo and other stuff, identify enemies and shoot them quickly, without wasting too much ammo and health, remember secret rooms and buttons, find your way through the map -- all these things are not easy. The player has to learn them the hard way, and this learning is part of the fun of gaming.
Quoting http://www.mastercard.com/education/shoppingtips/:
Will payment by credit card still be the safest way if there is a computer on the card? After all, computers don't err, and if the technology makes it harder to use the card unauthorized, it may also become harder to dispute transactions, just because the technology is believed to be secure.
Recommended reading:
both by Ross Anderson.
The traditional credit card system may be smarter than the smart card, because it accepts the possibility of failure and distributes the risk over all customers of the card issuer.
Uhm, perhaps we should license a couple of distinguished politicians.
It depends. If we think of cryptographic hash functions, you are right. They are designed that way in order to avoid collisions and forging of messages that are mapped to a given value by a particular function.
But if we think of error correcting codes, the situation is different. They are designed with the opposite goal in mind -- changing gracefully when certain errors (i.e., small changes for some definition of "small") occur, to allow for reconstruction of the original data.
Ususally both the checksum and the corrupted data (or the corrupted data + checksum string, to be precise) is needed in the case of error correcting codes. But perhaps concepts from both -- closely related -- fields could be combined to create something usable for spam detection under hostile spammer conditions?
#, just #.
In fifteen years you will be 30. And you will remember the day when you had forgotten a password for the first time.
They do. And this can be really funny if U.S. infomercials are equipped with overlaid (but in no case synchronised) voices in the respective native language.
Certainly not. Even if perfectly targeted to my needs and preferences, advertising remains advertising. What is the goal of a company advertising their products or services? Now that's simple: selling more of them than they would without advertising. The hope is to earn more in return from increased sales than spent for advertising.
As a customer, or a potential customer, I have no interest in any kind of advertising beyond pure, easy-to-compare lists of products and prices, and perhaps some additional, context-depenent information. The selection of products I am interested in can change very quickly. If, for instance, my car is running out of fuel during a trip, my interest in anything but gas stations will immediately drop to zero. In this situation there are also additional constraints -- I need a gas station I can reach with the remaining amount of fuel and will probably not care about price or service. As a customer I am driven by needs, be they rational like in the example above or irrational like the "need" for entertainment.
A company advertising something is not in a position to really care about my needs. (Free coffee in the morning, anywhere?) Remember, the company tries to sell as much as possible with as little effort as possible, in order to increase profit. So there is a principal conflict of interests between the customer and the company. They want to make as much profit as possible out their customers. Me as a customer wants to satisfy my needs at the lowest price possible, since saving money means I can satisfy even more needs.
How does targeted advertising resolve this conflict? It does not. Targeted advertising does not mean a company suddenly starts to adopt satisfaction of my needs as their primary goal. After all that's not their job; their job is to make profit. So to a company doing advertising, targeting means targeting to my wallet. It means to make me pay to them whatever the can get out of me. If they have to satisfy my needs in order to get my money, they will do so. But if there is any way for them to make me perceive more needs, or to overestimate existing ones, or to ignore all the other companies, they will try that.
Targeted advertising means to find the personal winning strategy against every single customer, while making him not recognise his role as a money delivery servant.
Turning configuration into a game just makes obvious that Linux no longer needs elaborate configuration. Fiddling around with configuration has become pure fun and entertainment in many cases cases, and this new style is nothing but a consequence of it.
My company, a research agency, has an inhouse library. We buy books and let everyone read it. As a further service, the library staff even borrows books from other libraries, again for everyone in the company.
What do you think, who is going to ruin whom? And who do you think will design your next copy protection scheme if R&D has died because of every single bit of thought being licensed material without any option to share it with others?
Oh, BTW, every buck counts for us, too. To us scientists, pay per view would mean we had to fill in a form for every access to any publication, calculate the number of readings needed in a project in advance, and being unable to work if the planned amount had been spent.
Now research is much older than your business, as are old-style publishing companies, who survived it. Did you ever consider the possibility of your business model being seriously flawed in that it relies on people who paid you to enforce your rather arbitrary do-not-look-over-my-shoulders rules?
Remember who has won the war?
Anti-competitiveness is an inherent characteristics of the whole IP industry. Competition requires that, at least in principle, a competitor could produce a similar or better product. That's what competition is all about.
Producing a competing product is something that works fine for hadware of all kinds. If company X sells cars, company Y could build better, cheaper, or just different cars; the same for computers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and so on.
To a certain degree, such plain competition may work for software as well. If company M sells operating systems, company L could sell their own operating system. Compatibility is however an issue here and can make competition really hard to achieve. But, as the open source movement shows, it is still possible to compete. It works because such software still has a connection to hardware. One will need software when and only when using a computer. One can chose which software to use on any given computer, but on cannot use software without a computer, i.e. without hardware.
Now consider movies, music, and books. These are completely virtual by nature. Usually they are distributed on carriers of various kinds, like DVD, paper, or the Internet. But in principle they are independent from specific carriers or types of carriers. That's BTW why the IP industry has a problem with copying of such products -- it's an inherent feature of them, as we all know. What the industry actually does is to charge for distribution, not for the work itself. They won't sell you music, they will sell you CDs.
How could a competitor compete here? Of course by distributing the same product in a somehow different way, e.g. cheaper, in different colors, or more convenient. But the product is protected by copyright, it cannot be distributed by competitors. (There is also little room for improvements exept for the price; having still one single owner of the artwork limits the freedom to make better prices.) Making a similar product to a piece of music, a book, or a movie, of course would be possible, but change nothing -- nobody would by this instead of the original one, since it would be considered just a different thing. There is only one Star Trek XXVI. movie -- who could compete and how could this reduce DVD prices?