that kind of info could help you secure all your property, so the work I've done is probably worth at least your laptop or TV isn't it?
Sure. If you manage to disassemble one of my houses parked all over the city, reverse engineer it to see how it is built, install a backdoor only a few hackers know how to use, and return it to service in a usable condition, I will be happy to buy you a TV set and a laptop computer.
Hey, sorry but it sounds to me that they are using a hole in a digital system to allow free usage of the PHYSICAL property of somebody else. (...) STEALING (...) VANDALISM (...)
You didn't read the article, did you? Here is its last paragraph:
Finally, we have to admit that the technical design of the CallABike is very good. The only way to tamper with the bikes is probably the route we chose, namely to open and reflash the EEPROM. The only thing that was missed was to set the lockbits that prevent the firmware from being read. Our attack is probably worth the purchase price of a few dozen of these CallABikes, seeing the time and manpower that went into accomplishing it.
What they really have been doing was an in-depth security analysis of the system. They put in quite some effort and resources, and the only thing they are charging for their service is a couple of free bicycle rides. To me this sounds like they saved the Rent-a-Bike company some money. The company can fix the few glitches found and be pretty sure their system is sufficiently secure for the given environment and purpose.
That's ridiculous. Let's talke real 3D, glasses and all. This would completely change everything and for the better. Putting things in a real background, 3D video, parking windows, 3D representations of CD cases instead of ID3 tags, 3D website deisgn, remote control of real world objects, etc.
Yeah! Let's get rid of those word processors and use virtual 3D typewriters instead. This will make text processing much more intuitive and user friendly. It will also allow us to put a virtual 3D TV set next to the virtual 3D typewriter and zap through its channels using a virtual 3D remote control. Not to mention the virtual 3D video recorder, programming of which will be so easy and intuitive in a virtual 3D world that even grandma will be able to do it.
The question of how to verify online identity has been bugging me for a while now, so eventually I just sat down and wrote a prototype for an Online ID Registry.
But I think the software patent issue is more complicated than you think.
The software patent issue is more complicated than you think, too.
Laws should be designed to solve actual problems, not to promote some ideology or to force consistency upon things that might be different. Since our world is complex, law might not be perfect; trade-offs are to be made. Policy is about making such trade-offs, and about finding a good balance between contradicting needs.
What does this imply for patents? First of all, the fact that inventions in the traditional sense are patentable alone is a weak justification for software patents. Secondly, we need to understand the specific problems of software development, and how they relate to patents.
One issue is software development is re-use of both specific implementations -- which are protected by copyright -- and concepts. I'm doing software development in a research context (i.e. demonstrators and prototypes, rarely products). One problem I encounter again and again is the urge of many software developers to re-invent wheels. Usually this involves re-making all mistakes that have been made before. Implications are waste of time, money and humans; poor quality; and security issues.
For systems connected to or built upon a worldwide infrastructure like the Internet, there are usually few right ways to solve certain problems, and many wrong ways. What we need today more than ever is an environment -- technical, cultural, and legal -- that encourages doing things the right way, and discourages poor quality and insecurity. What patents do encourage, however, is re-invention, and avoidance of approved solutions that are or might be patented.
The other issue is cooperation. While open source software development is kind of the ultimate form of it, cooperative development also becomes increasingly important in the realm of proprietary products. Which, by the way, is strongly encouraged by the European Union: all EU-supported research involves cooperation of multiple organizations from different countries.
Not only patents but the entire concept of intellectual property needs to be reconsidered for such cooperations between multiple organizations. Sure, there are contracts. But there is also an issue contracts cannot really solve: if cooperation is close -- think extreme programming -- it might become impossible to assign ownership of a piece of work to entities in an non-arbitrary way. What you end up with generally is a mess. Patents don't solve that problem either, but might make it worse.
It does not even take cooperation to create an intellectual property mess. I'm grateful to SCO for demonstrating this is in a pretty convincing manner. Sell your "intellectual property" a couple of times, and no one will understand any more who formally "owns" what.
These are problems that do exist today. Policymakers should address them, rather than worsening them for the sake of intellectual property and patent ideology.
Keep in mind that 3d desktops have the ability to increase system performance because of rendering into pixmaps instead of rendering into the framebuffer...
(...)
This is good.
Good and irrelevant, to be precise. System performance does not matter. User performance does.
One should be able to "EXPOSE Part Number, Zip Code" and have the database "know the relationship" and produce the correct vector of tuples.
But that doesnt happen.
So what is the correct vector of tuples? Zip codes of all customers that bought [part number]? Zip code of the manufacturer's headquarters? Manufacturing facilities? Warehouse?...
Your EXPOSE thingy is just underspecified. You are dreaming AI.
I mentioned Antivirus software 3 times because I think it's at least 3 times as important as the others.
It is also 3 times as unlikely to be available as high quality OSS as the others. Antivirus software is not so much about software, it's about services. The software is almost trivial; what matters is the patterns it is scanning for, the virus signatures. For antivirus software to be of any use, someone has to analyze worms and viruses and update signatures to look for. I don't see how those could be produced by the OSS community, for two reasons:
No fun. Why should an OSS developer want to analyze worms and viruses? I guess it would be more rewarding to write something new, or do some debugging.
There is no point:
For Windows viruses, why the fsck should OSS people try to solve someone else's problem?
For OSS viruses, why produce a fscking workaround if one could fix the problem right away with half the effort?
I don't think we are going to see much OSS antivirus software.
Additionally, it looks like the improvements will really make a usability difference in how we interact with the UI. Keeping notes on an application window, tilting the windows to keep most of the perceptual information (btw, using foreshortening to effectively compress windows is a great idea), making multiple desktops more perceptual, etc are all good ideas that will help people interact more intelligently with their programs.
Unfortunately, none of these good ideas justifies 3D. Consider this layered model of human-computer interaction. What do we change when moving from a 2D desktop environment to a 3D desktop environment? It's the lower layers: physical, alphabetic, lexical, syntax. The system gains new capabilities to arrange information on screen, and the users gain new operations to perform with their mice and keyboards. What does not change are the higher layers. A 3D desktop does not change the way we interact with the World Wide Web and its search engines, with our word processors and file systems, or with each other using e-mail and instant messaging. Even through a 3D looking glass, the Web is hypertext, and in your word processor you handle letters consisting of paragraphs and other elements. Your files are still organized in the same hierarchical model as before. Your buddy list does not change. (You will receive the same amount of spam and spim, too.) Nothing of importance does change.
The 3D desktop changes the way you interact with your operating system. Which is something the user shouldn't have to care about. Human-computer interaction is about interacting with your information to accomplish tasks, rather than interacting with systems to flip windows, and about making the system disappear so the user can focus on taks and information. 3D does not achieve this. It requires you to interact in more sophisticated ways with systems, and adds nothing to the way you interact with information or people.
The features you mention might be useful, but the are not really new, and don't require 3D. You can attach notes to documents or objects without 3D in quite a useful way; have a look at MS Word. There, notes are not simply attached to documents but to specific parts of a document, e.g. a heading or a paragraph, which is even more useful and usable than notes on the backside of a window.
Tabbed browsing has been invented quite a while ago. It does effectively compress windows, takes not much screen real estate, and provides for logical grouping of tabs within windows according to the user's needs. A key idea of tabbed browsing is to not simply make the representation of a window smaller, but also more abstract by stripping off everything except the title. 3D lacks such abstraction, trying to replace it with magic.
Multiple desktops work just fine the way they do in 2D. There we do need a map already to find out way around. Having some 3D thing and needing a map to find your way around is inlinkely to make interaction any easier.
3D desktops are misplaced innovation. They make basic interaction harder -- mind that mice and screens are 2D --, and they do not add anything to higher levels. Have a look at nooface.com for more examples of failing 3D interfaces.
Don't get me wrong, being a security researcher I fully agree with the proposal to have devices that are secure out of the box. However, I doubt those devices could gain any market share against devices that are fun out of the box before any major disaster occured. Security, as well as vulnerability, tends to be invisible unless it gets in your way. The majority of the users of cellphones has no idea how vulnerable their devices are, and how it might affect them. What they are aware of are all the funny new features in their next-generation phone that shouldn't be there at all from a security point of view. In such a market, I guess, we will achieve security only after disaster.
What really will happen is this: some day somebody develops a killer application based on Bluetooth, something that implies fun. Handset manufacturers will happily add it to their products. Their usability tests will yield that Bluetooth must be enabled out of the box, or most users won't even notice the new killer app. So they will not only enable Bluetooth by default, but also firmly believe they have to do it this way.
In related news, AdTI announces more shocking research results. "After our discovery of the hybrid source nature of Linux we extended our research into other fields," an AdTI spokesperson said. He continued: "In the beginning we were just curious whether hybrid source concepts could be found in other fields as well. But soon we learned that the entire history of mankind would have taken a different turn, had hybrid source not been allowed to spread for so many years." While only excerpts of AdTI's upcoming book have been published yet, one can see the big picture already.
Sir Isaac Newton did not invent from scratch the theory of gravitation, or the laws of motion. Newton even did admit his disrespect for intellectual property, pointing out: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
The steam engine, one of the triggers and enablers of the industrial revolution, was not invented by James Watt from scratch.
Albert Einstein received his Nobel Price for results he did not invent from scratch. Alfred Nobel, by the way, did not invent explosives from scratch.
Where would mankind stand today if there had been appropriate protection of intellectual assets throughout history? The AdTI spokesperson refused to comment on this question, emphasizing that AdTI is doing sound research, not writing science fiction. However, their results give "clear indication that hybrid source is linked to war, murder, and terrorism. For instance, Adolf Hitler impossibly could have invented mass murder and world war from scratch, and Osama bin Laden is not the inventor of terrorism."
Your house would be more secure if you had bullet-resistent windows, steel-reinforced cross-bar doors, one-time pad electronic access, and 24/7 security guards, but most people the find much "weaker" deadbolt/key combination to be the BETTER solution.
Thank you, unknown moderators, for verifying my point: Semantic attacks like e.g. phishing are easily carried out; it only takes a moderate understanding of the victim's expectations. Fit your attack to something they know and believe they understand, and they will react as desired, clicking first and thinking never.
During our regular verification of accounts we couldn't verify your current information. Either your information has changed or it is incomplete. If the accoutn is not updated to current information within 5 days, your access to
word processing and spreadsheet on IBM Lotus Workplace will be restricted.
Let's say they traced, in 6 months, every line of code that went thru the kernel's CVS back thru its committer, and back thru them to its submitter, supposedly its "programmer". How do they know of all those "programmers", none copied someone else's code?
What SCO ist demonstrating are inherent flaws of the concept of intellectual property treated much like a physical asset. The one flaw is that after a number of sales, licences, and contracts, nobody does know any more who owns what, and whether the owners actually do possess what they own. This is a non-issue for phyical items: One can easily follow a chain of subsequent sales of an item, verify each individual one, and find out in finite time and memory whether the ultimate buyer got what they paid for. This is not the case for intellectual property. Nobody knows who owns what part of Unix, and any court decision will be arbitrary to an extent. There is s simple post-condition for sales of phyical items: When X sells item I to Y, then after the contract has been fulfilled, Y does possess I, and X does not possess I. This is not the case for intellectual property: After selling intellectual property rights in a virtual item I to Y, X may still retain intellectual property rights in the same item I, leading to kind of a mess after a number of sales.
The other flaw is caused by the fact that virtual goods are easily modified or extended, and it is hard to find out later who made what modification or extension. To describe clearly and beyond doubt the intellectual property sold or licenced, one would have to include the entire item with the contract as its own description. Which is close to impossible.
Honestly, I'm amazed that more people don't view a company running around yelling, "Linux insurance! Protect yourself from the risks of Linux!" at least somewhat negatively.
To really scare us, it would take a large international insurance company saying something to the effect of: "We are not going to insure such a risk." A company offering insurance means that somebody out there believes that money can be made this way. Which is good news.
How is trying to replicate the natural interface that we use every day a dumb idea?
Nice idea. Unfortunately, natural interfaces do not exist, so any attempt to replicate them inevitably leads to an interface that replicates arbitrary features of arbitrary physical artifacts while failing to support the user's tasks.
What exactly is the point of replicating, say, a typewriter on screen in 3D? Would it make text processing any easier because it's more "natural"? Of course not.
Slashdot Mirror
So what?
Which is a dangerous goal for a society to pursue:
It shouldn't be too hard to build a religious cult around such an idea.
Not true. In the long run, the exact same number would have died.
Sure. If you manage to disassemble one of my houses parked all over the city, reverse engineer it to see how it is built, install a backdoor only a few hackers know how to use, and return it to service in a usable condition, I will be happy to buy you a TV set and a laptop computer.
You didn't read the article, did you? Here is its last paragraph:
What they really have been doing was an in-depth security analysis of the system. They put in quite some effort and resources, and the only thing they are charging for their service is a couple of free bicycle rides. To me this sounds like they saved the Rent-a-Bike company some money. The company can fix the few glitches found and be pretty sure their system is sufficiently secure for the given environment and purpose.
Yeah! Let's get rid of those word processors and use virtual 3D typewriters instead. This will make text processing much more intuitive and user friendly. It will also allow us to put a virtual 3D TV set next to the virtual 3D typewriter and zap through its channels using a virtual 3D remote control. Not to mention the virtual 3D video recorder, programming of which will be so easy and intuitive in a virtual 3D world that even grandma will be able to do it.
SCNR
Try POSTIDENT.
The software patent issue is more complicated than you think, too.
Laws should be designed to solve actual problems, not to promote some ideology or to force consistency upon things that might be different. Since our world is complex, law might not be perfect; trade-offs are to be made. Policy is about making such trade-offs, and about finding a good balance between contradicting needs.
What does this imply for patents? First of all, the fact that inventions in the traditional sense are patentable alone is a weak justification for software patents. Secondly, we need to understand the specific problems of software development, and how they relate to patents.
One issue is software development is re-use of both specific implementations -- which are protected by copyright -- and concepts. I'm doing software development in a research context (i.e. demonstrators and prototypes, rarely products). One problem I encounter again and again is the urge of many software developers to re-invent wheels. Usually this involves re-making all mistakes that have been made before. Implications are waste of time, money and humans; poor quality; and security issues.
For systems connected to or built upon a worldwide infrastructure like the Internet, there are usually few right ways to solve certain problems, and many wrong ways. What we need today more than ever is an environment -- technical, cultural, and legal -- that encourages doing things the right way, and discourages poor quality and insecurity. What patents do encourage, however, is re-invention, and avoidance of approved solutions that are or might be patented.
The other issue is cooperation. While open source software development is kind of the ultimate form of it, cooperative development also becomes increasingly important in the realm of proprietary products. Which, by the way, is strongly encouraged by the European Union: all EU-supported research involves cooperation of multiple organizations from different countries.
Not only patents but the entire concept of intellectual property needs to be reconsidered for such cooperations between multiple organizations. Sure, there are contracts. But there is also an issue contracts cannot really solve: if cooperation is close -- think extreme programming -- it might become impossible to assign ownership of a piece of work to entities in an non-arbitrary way. What you end up with generally is a mess. Patents don't solve that problem either, but might make it worse.
It does not even take cooperation to create an intellectual property mess. I'm grateful to SCO for demonstrating this is in a pretty convincing manner. Sell your "intellectual property" a couple of times, and no one will understand any more who formally "owns" what.
These are problems that do exist today. Policymakers should address them, rather than worsening them for the sake of intellectual property and patent ideology.
Only that men don't multitak particularly well, and women prefer real-world tasks over computer stuff.
They might remain useless even after that. Mind that we need maps, GPS and navigation systems to find out way around in large 3D environments.
Good and irrelevant, to be precise. System performance does not matter. User performance does.
So what is the correct vector of tuples? Zip codes of all customers that bought [part number]? Zip code of the manufacturer's headquarters? Manufacturing facilities? Warehouse? ...
Your EXPOSE thingy is just underspecified. You are dreaming AI.
It is also 3 times as unlikely to be available as high quality OSS as the others. Antivirus software is not so much about software, it's about services. The software is almost trivial; what matters is the patterns it is scanning for, the virus signatures. For antivirus software to be of any use, someone has to analyze worms and viruses and update signatures to look for. I don't see how those could be produced by the OSS community, for two reasons:
I don't think we are going to see much OSS antivirus software.
Unfortunately, none of these good ideas justifies 3D. Consider this layered model of human-computer interaction. What do we change when moving from a 2D desktop environment to a 3D desktop environment? It's the lower layers: physical, alphabetic, lexical, syntax. The system gains new capabilities to arrange information on screen, and the users gain new operations to perform with their mice and keyboards. What does not change are the higher layers. A 3D desktop does not change the way we interact with the World Wide Web and its search engines, with our word processors and file systems, or with each other using e-mail and instant messaging. Even through a 3D looking glass, the Web is hypertext, and in your word processor you handle letters consisting of paragraphs and other elements. Your files are still organized in the same hierarchical model as before. Your buddy list does not change. (You will receive the same amount of spam and spim, too.) Nothing of importance does change.
The 3D desktop changes the way you interact with your operating system. Which is something the user shouldn't have to care about. Human-computer interaction is about interacting with your information to accomplish tasks, rather than interacting with systems to flip windows, and about making the system disappear so the user can focus on taks and information. 3D does not achieve this. It requires you to interact in more sophisticated ways with systems, and adds nothing to the way you interact with information or people.
The features you mention might be useful, but the are not really new, and don't require 3D. You can attach notes to documents or objects without 3D in quite a useful way; have a look at MS Word. There, notes are not simply attached to documents but to specific parts of a document, e.g. a heading or a paragraph, which is even more useful and usable than notes on the backside of a window.
Tabbed browsing has been invented quite a while ago. It does effectively compress windows, takes not much screen real estate, and provides for logical grouping of tabs within windows according to the user's needs. A key idea of tabbed browsing is to not simply make the representation of a window smaller, but also more abstract by stripping off everything except the title. 3D lacks such abstraction, trying to replace it with magic.
Multiple desktops work just fine the way they do in 2D. There we do need a map already to find out way around. Having some 3D thing and needing a map to find your way around is inlinkely to make interaction any easier.
3D desktops are misplaced innovation. They make basic interaction harder -- mind that mice and screens are 2D --, and they do not add anything to higher levels. Have a look at nooface.com for more examples of failing 3D interfaces.
f*ck
sh*t
motherf*cker
Don't get me wrong, being a security researcher I fully agree with the proposal to have devices that are secure out of the box. However, I doubt those devices could gain any market share against devices that are fun out of the box before any major disaster occured. Security, as well as vulnerability, tends to be invisible unless it gets in your way. The majority of the users of cellphones has no idea how vulnerable their devices are, and how it might affect them. What they are aware of are all the funny new features in their next-generation phone that shouldn't be there at all from a security point of view. In such a market, I guess, we will achieve security only after disaster.
What really will happen is this: some day somebody develops a killer application based on Bluetooth, something that implies fun. Handset manufacturers will happily add it to their products. Their usability tests will yield that Bluetooth must be enabled out of the box, or most users won't even notice the new killer app. So they will not only enable Bluetooth by default, but also firmly believe they have to do it this way.
This website, by the way, attempts to track Euro banknotes based on their unique numbers.
In related news, AdTI announces more shocking research results. "After our discovery of the hybrid source nature of Linux we extended our research into other fields," an AdTI spokesperson said. He continued: "In the beginning we were just curious whether hybrid source concepts could be found in other fields as well. But soon we learned that the entire history of mankind would have taken a different turn, had hybrid source not been allowed to spread for so many years." While only excerpts of AdTI's upcoming book have been published yet, one can see the big picture already.
The shocking findings of AdTI include:
Where would mankind stand today if there had been appropriate protection of intellectual assets throughout history? The AdTI spokesperson refused to comment on this question, emphasizing that AdTI is doing sound research, not writing science fiction. However, their results give "clear indication that hybrid source is linked to war, murder, and terrorism. For instance, Adolf Hitler impossibly could have invented mass murder and world war from scratch, and Osama bin Laden is not the inventor of terrorism."
Which it might really be, considering that all technology is embedded in a social and legal context. Ross Anderson has written two pretty interesting papers about such issues, Why Cryptosystems Fail and Liability and Computer Security: Nine Principles.
Thank you, unknown moderators, for verifying my point: Semantic attacks like e.g. phishing are easily carried out; it only takes a moderate understanding of the victim's expectations. Fit your attack to something they know and believe they understand, and they will react as desired, clicking first and thinking never.
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What SCO ist demonstrating are inherent flaws of the concept of intellectual property treated much like a physical asset. The one flaw is that after a number of sales, licences, and contracts, nobody does know any more who owns what, and whether the owners actually do possess what they own. This is a non-issue for phyical items: One can easily follow a chain of subsequent sales of an item, verify each individual one, and find out in finite time and memory whether the ultimate buyer got what they paid for. This is not the case for intellectual property. Nobody knows who owns what part of Unix, and any court decision will be arbitrary to an extent. There is s simple post-condition for sales of phyical items: When X sells item I to Y, then after the contract has been fulfilled, Y does possess I, and X does not possess I. This is not the case for intellectual property: After selling intellectual property rights in a virtual item I to Y, X may still retain intellectual property rights in the same item I, leading to kind of a mess after a number of sales.
The other flaw is caused by the fact that virtual goods are easily modified or extended, and it is hard to find out later who made what modification or extension. To describe clearly and beyond doubt the intellectual property sold or licenced, one would have to include the entire item with the contract as its own description. Which is close to impossible.
To really scare us, it would take a large international insurance company saying something to the effect of: "We are not going to insure such a risk." A company offering insurance means that somebody out there believes that money can be made this way. Which is good news.
Nice idea. Unfortunately, natural interfaces do not exist, so any attempt to replicate them inevitably leads to an interface that replicates arbitrary features of arbitrary physical artifacts while failing to support the user's tasks.
What exactly is the point of replicating, say, a typewriter on screen in 3D? Would it make text processing any easier because it's more "natural"? Of course not.