My invention improves upon the 80 year old One-Time Pad encryption turning it into a 'Many-Time Pad'.
Information theory proves that the One-Time Pad (OTP) is optimal - it cannot be improved.
Sorry, I can't let that one pass - Information theory doesn't prove anything of the sort. OTP are provably unbreakable in one, limited sense. There's plenty of room for improvement in all the other senses however.
The OTP has no known-plaintext vulnerability.
Not true. The traditional XOR - OTP is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle active change attack. Picture a bank deposit protected with an XOR OTP. The MitM XORs the account number of the victim with (victim's account number ^ MitM's account number)
If you work in a local or state government you wouldn't ask that question. How would you like to have your bosses know you voted against them in the election?
It wouldn't bother me a bit, but I can see that some people would be easily intimidated by it.
However, anonymous voting means that instead of presuring me to vote a certain way, they can simply change my vote, and I can't tell.
If your boss leans on you, at least you know what happened. If I had a choice between a receipt that could be used to track my vote (if I want to) and trusting that the votes are being counted correctly, I'd take the receipt.
I challenge you to produce one paper in a reputable medical journal that demonstrates the effectiveness of these treatments.
Effective for what? Acupuncture has been tested and found effective for controlling pain;
Ulett GA. Acupuncture update 1984. Southern Medical Journal 78:233234, 1985.
Or do you think that's not "mainstream" enough to count?
IIRC, The skeptical inquirer did some research on it, and also found that it was more effective than a placebo at pain control. But that differing placement of the needles has no effect on pain reduction. (Traditional acupunture claims that the placement of the needles matters.) Alas, S.I.'s trial size was too small to be statistically significant.
It requires either extremely high current or very high voltage to move that much electrical energy that fast. Neither is practical -- that much current would be horribly inefficient unless you had a cable the diameter of your leg. The notion of very high voltages at filling stations is no better.
While a true recharge in under two hours may be out of the question, a "fill up" at a station could be as quick as changing a battery pack. If the batteries were cheap enough, then you could have one at home charging at all times. (Or only at night, when the rates are lower.)
The real problem is energy storage, not energy transfer.
Nuclear energy is environmentally the most harmful energy source imaginable because it leaves behind waste that is both highly toxic and completely indestructible by chemical or biological means. We should eliminate it completely as soon as possible--we just don't need it.
That toxic nuclear material came from the environment in the first place. After being "burned" in a power plant there's less of it than when you started, what with that pesky first law of thermodynamics and all. Then it's returned to the environment, typically in a more geologically stable place than where it came from.
-- Rattle snake venom may be 100% natural, but I wouldn't recommend drinking it.
If spammers were willing to pay all the costs of sending spam (not just the cost to click the 'Send' button), I think there'd be a lot less concern.
I think you're wrong about that. Spammers do pay to send their emails, and I think they'd be quite happy to pay double or even 10 times as much if it meant their ISP wouldn't terminate them.
And I for one would not consider 30 cents a month adequate recompense for the spam I receive.
As much as I do not like Verisign, I cannot see how Verisign can be held responsible for the transfer.
I agree that Verisign shouldn't be held liable because of the transfer - they were conned into it. But they didn't fix the mistake after it had been pointed out, and for that, they should be nailed. Maybe not for the full $65,000,000.00, say for a percentage equal to the amount of time they allowed to pass after being informed of their mistake, plus the few days it takes to fix it.
What I want to know is: Would this also work with email virus?
I could write one that beat it, but it does raise the difficulty significantly.
Could this be made part of the STMP protocol or built into the backbone layer of the network?
No. Why would you want to? You could build it into an email client. If it works, then sooner or later you'd have to, if you want to sell an email client.
Problems that I have with it are: Since each word is treated as a token and everything else is not, I'm sure that spammer would quickly figure out that a spam like this just might work: <HTML> <BODY> Enlarge <!-- elephant --> penis [etc..] </BODY> </HTML> which would show the message but hide the balancing words, so it could be possible to change the delta into your favor. Does anyone else have thoughts on how this might be broken?
Wouldn't Enl<!-- elephant -->arge pen<!-- elephant -->is... be more effective?
He isn't fighting spam, he is filtering it. There is a difference. Filtering still costs in bandwidth. Fighting it would eliminate the source and free up the gigabytes of bandwidth lost for this marketing purpose.
Filtering is fine for now, but ultimately it must be fought and defeated.
I assume by "it" you mean that spam must be fought and defeated, not filtering.
The real cost of spam isn't bandwidth, it's our time.
I submit that people who buy junk from email ads are the same people who watch and purchase from infomercials and they want to do it!
That's why it has to be fought at the source -- because I don't want my ISP spam filtering for me and Joe "Check out my BlueBlocker Sunglasses" Sixpack wants to see this crap.
Let me see if I've got this straight. You're claiming that spam needs to be stopped because most people want it?
So, are you thinking that what you want should be what everyone wants, or are you just hoping for the tyranny of the majority?
Maybe we should round up all those wrong thinking people and put them in camps or something.
Here's how: the spam should be written as a 'multipart/alternative' with an html version of the spam as the primary alternate. The text version contains an innocuous message intended to pass the statistical spam filter. The spam message is entirely contained as an/image/ within the html. The text of the spam becomes invisible to the reader but not to the poor schmuck who gets the email.
I'm guessing here that the inclusion of a single image tag in the html is unlikely to trigger the spam filter, and supplying a wealth of evidence that the email is 'not' spam in the unseen alternate text will let the letter through.
What you describe might beat a particular implementation, but I don't think it defeats the approach.
Just adjust the content filter to check the part of the message that your email client actually displays. If your client doesn't display the innocuous part, then the innocuous part won't be part of the filtering process either.
A nastier hack would be to tack the "innocuous" message (or several innocuous messages) to the end of the spam.
This too can be corrected for, but the approach would need to be improved to consider how humans read things, which is non-trivial.
Won't work. If Disney gave me $1000, I would put it in my pocket and keep it. If they gave me $1000 with the stipulation that I must donate to a candidate, I will donate it to the candidate of MY choide. And if they gave me $1000 with the stipulation that I must donate to the candidate of their choice, I will tear up the check.
They limit individual contributions to $95 so they can skirt the reporting laws. And yes, many pocket all the money, instead of just their cut. But most people don't. Probably more than 1% of the population is actually in favor of their pet politician, more than enough to funnel the money. They simply don't re-use the ones that don't write checks (that clear) to their pet politician.
Wouldn't it be amazing if campaign finance contributions could only come from valid, registered voters?
You know, that's the simplest and most effective suggestion for campaign finance reform I've ever heard. Why should any entity other than a citizen be allowed to influence the electoral process?
Unfortunately, I don't see any practical way to implement it. Companies pay registered voters to pay politicians. They do that already, just to hide how much money they're giving.
1. If he had the idea before he was hired, he should have listed it. If he did not list it then, he cannot credibly assert that he had it then. "If no list is attached, I represent that there are no such items."
I actually did this once, very early in my career. It came to 10 pages, and I still feel that I hadn't listed everything I should have.
Ideas aren't really that rare. Even if you limit it to good ideas, a creative person will have dozens per day. One per day for 10 years is several thousand. If I kept a journal of every idea I've had that had the potential to be marketable, I believe it would be several hundred pages by now.
But these days, I just don't sign the agreement. Since most companies are bureaucracy laden, they usually don't even notice until it's too late. I still remember being called in for an exit interview, and being told that the company didn't have an assignment of invention on file. I said "I guess you're fucked then". They still gave me two weeks severance.
The problem as I see it, is that lawyers' advice is usually one sided. If a deal is good for their client and terrible for the other guy, then they're ok with that. Business on the other hand is about working relationships. A deal that isn't good for both sides isn't a good deal. Instead of trying to own their employees thoughts, businesses should concentrate on protecting themselves, and only that.
For example, say that if an employee discloses an idea to the company, either in words or in deed, that the company has the right to use the idea without additional compensation, and without limitation. So the bread company can use the special racks that the driver builds into the company truck, and even put them in other trucks they own, but the driver retains the right to sell his improvement to other bread companies.
Looks like this shrink-wrap mentality is becoming a problem.
Here's my proposal. Let's make shrink-wrap licenses illegal. No, I do not mean "unenforceable". I mean, a law that makes putting a shrink-wrap license on something punishable by a large fine.
I know geeks tend to think of CG as a replacement for an actor, but I think the real power is going to be in letting multiple humans play a single actor.
In the really expensive video productions (a.k.a. commercials) it's already common to have multiple actors play different body parts.
The stars of the future are going to be entire teams of people, not just one guy. They might be blended together with CG, but the motions, expressions, voices, acrobatics, dancing will all be done by a human - and usually a human expert in that one field.
IIRC, The movie (from which the songs in dispute stem) was released in 1939. The Book was published in 1900. You can get a copy of the Book (and most of the other works of Frank L. Baum) from project Gutenberg
I'm not as scared of the idea that the government wants to give me a number, as I am by the idea that the government will track me without needing a number.
I think the problem here may be with the word that's used. Like it or not, the term "peering" implies an equivalance in traffic.
I disagree.
The noun "peer" might imply rival, or near equals, but the verb "peering" in a network context does not.
Even your example works only for a dial up provider in the First World. What does E-bay care if a farmer outside of Bangladore can't get to their site? His annual income doesn't equal the reserve price on a Welcome Back Kotter lunchbox!
E-bay pays the same price when someone from Bangladore downloads their web page as they do when an American downloads it.
If they can reduce their network bill by peering with an Indian ISP, then they save money, period. The same goes for the Indian ISP. It may well be that the total cost of the peering link is higher than the cost buying transit through a third party, (tier 2 networks exist for reason after all) but the principle is still valid, and has nothing to do with traffic ratios.
Peering only makes sense when traffic between networks is roughly equivalent,
Bullshit.
Whether peering makes sense for a network depends on a huge number of factors, and the ratio of traffic is rarely a factor when one or both networks are "endpoints", and often is not a factor even when both aren't.
For example, if Alice sells web hosting and Bob sells dialup, then peering between Alice and Bob makes economic sense for both of them, even though the vast majority of the traffic flows from Alice to Bob.
Q: When a package is shipped, who pays, the sender or the receiver? A: It depends. That's why FedEx allows either method.
If "demand" is the amount of money people are willing to pay per bit, then demand is increasing at an amazing pace.
But if "demand" is the total amount of money that people are willing to spend on internet access, then demand is only increasing moderately.
Consider dialup vs. ADSL. Dialup is about $20 a month. ADSL is about $45. Last year, some people switched from Dialup to ADSL. But most did not. And if you look at the ones that did switch, you find that most of them had a second phone line, (about $15 a month) which they terminated when they got ADSL. IOW, the demand in terms of money spent increased less than 20%.
My prediction for the future is that demand will continue to be inflexible, (i.e. people aren't going to pay more than $20-$30 a month for connectivity) and the cost of supply will continue to decrease at about the same rate it does now.
End result: every year, the total dollars spent will be approximately the same, but the amount of bandwidth we get for those dollars will increase. A larger percentage of the internet will be carried by a smaller number of providers. Worldcom is just the first in a long series of companies that will go under as the market shifts to more and more efficient providers.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I can't let that one pass -
Information theory doesn't prove anything of the sort.
OTP are provably unbreakable in one, limited sense.
There's plenty of room for improvement in all the other senses however.
Not true.
The traditional XOR - OTP is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle active change attack.
Picture a bank deposit protected with an XOR OTP.
The MitM XORs the account number of the victim with (victim's account number ^ MitM's account number)
At least we agree on something.
- this is not a
Yeah, I hate vending machines too.
.sig
-- this is not a
It wouldn't bother me a bit, but I can see that some people would be easily intimidated by it.
However, anonymous voting means that instead of presuring me to vote a certain way, they can simply change my vote, and I can't tell.
If your boss leans on you, at least you know what happened. If I had a choice between a receipt that could be used to track my vote (if I want to) and trusting that the votes are being counted correctly, I'd take the receipt.
-- this is not a
Silly question, but why is it important that votes be anonymous?
Effective for what? Acupuncture has been tested and found effective for controlling pain;
Ulett GA. Acupuncture update 1984. Southern Medical Journal 78:233234, 1985.
Or do you think that's not "mainstream" enough to count?
IIRC, The skeptical inquirer did some research on it,
and also found that it was more effective than a placebo at pain control.
But that differing placement of the needles has no effect on pain reduction.
(Traditional acupunture claims that the placement of the needles matters.)
Alas, S.I.'s trial size was too small to be statistically significant.
-- this is not a
It requires either extremely high current or very high voltage to move that much electrical energy that fast. Neither is practical -- that much current would be horribly inefficient unless you had a cable the diameter of your leg. The notion of very high voltages at filling stations is no better.
While a true recharge in under two hours may be out of the question,
a "fill up" at a station could be as quick as changing a battery pack.
If the batteries were cheap enough, then you could have one at home charging at all times.
(Or only at night, when the rates are lower.)
The real problem is energy storage, not energy transfer.
-- this is not a
That toxic nuclear material came from the environment in the first place.
After being "burned" in a power plant there's less of it than when you started,
what with that pesky first law of thermodynamics and all.
Then it's returned to the environment, typically in a more geologically stable place than where it came from.
-- Rattle snake venom may be 100% natural, but I wouldn't recommend drinking it.
Not any more, he can't afford it.
I think you're wrong about that.
Spammers do pay to send their emails, and I think they'd be quite happy to pay double or even 10 times as much if it meant their ISP wouldn't terminate them.
And I for one would not consider 30 cents a month adequate recompense for the spam I receive.
-- this is not a
I agree that Verisign shouldn't be held liable because of the transfer - they were conned into it.
But they didn't fix the mistake after it had been pointed out, and for that, they should be nailed.
Maybe not for the full $65,000,000.00, say for a percentage equal to the amount of time they allowed to pass after being informed of their mistake, plus the few days it takes to fix it.
-- this is not a
What I want to know is:
...
Would this also work with email virus?
I could write one that beat it, but it does raise the difficulty significantly.
Could this be made part of the STMP protocol or built into the backbone layer of the network?
No. Why would you want to?
You could build it into an email client.
If it works, then sooner or later you'd have to, if you want to sell an email client.
Problems that I have with it are:
Since each word is treated as a token and everything else is not, I'm sure that spammer would quickly figure out that a spam like this just might work:
<HTML>
<BODY>
Enlarge <!-- elephant --> penis [etc..]
</BODY>
</HTML>
which would show the message but hide the balancing words, so it could be possible to change the delta into your favor.
Does anyone else have thoughts on how this might be broken?
Wouldn't
Enl<!-- elephant -->arge pen<!-- elephant -->is
be more effective?
I assume by "it" you mean that spam must be fought and defeated, not filtering.
The real cost of spam isn't bandwidth, it's our time.
see- http://spamwolf.com/spaminfo.html#whatcost
Let me see if I've got this straight.
You're claiming that spam needs to be stopped because most people want it?
So, are you thinking that what you want should be what everyone wants,
or are you just hoping for the tyranny of the majority?
Maybe we should round up all those wrong thinking people and put them in camps or something.
-- this is not a
What you describe might beat a particular implementation, but I don't think it defeats the approach.
Just adjust the content filter to check the part of the message that your email client actually displays.
If your client doesn't display the innocuous part,
then the innocuous part won't be part of the filtering process either.
A nastier hack would be to tack the "innocuous" message (or several innocuous messages) to the end of the spam.
This too can be corrected for, but the approach would need to be improved to consider how humans read things, which is non-trivial.
Stop Spam Now, Ask Me How
Well, you could combine a content filter with a challenge system, and challenge anything you thought was spam.
That's what Spamwolf does.
-- Stop Spam Now, Ask Me How
They limit individual contributions to $95 so they can skirt the reporting laws.
And yes, many pocket all the money, instead of just their cut.
But most people don't.
Probably more than 1% of the population is actually in favor of their pet politician, more than enough to funnel the money.
They simply don't re-use the ones that don't write checks (that clear) to their pet politician.
-- this is not a
Unfortunately, I don't see any practical way to implement it.
Companies pay registered voters to pay politicians.
They do that already, just to hide how much money they're giving.
-- this is not a
I actually did this once, very early in my career.
It came to 10 pages, and I still feel that I hadn't listed everything I should have.
Ideas aren't really that rare. Even if you limit it to good ideas, a creative person will have dozens per day. One per day for 10 years is several thousand. If I kept a journal of every idea I've had that had the potential to be marketable, I believe it would be several hundred pages by now.
But these days, I just don't sign the agreement.
Since most companies are bureaucracy laden, they usually don't even notice until it's too late.
I still remember being called in for an exit interview, and being told that the company didn't have an assignment of invention on file.
I said "I guess you're fucked then".
They still gave me two weeks severance.
The problem as I see it, is that lawyers' advice is usually one sided.
If a deal is good for their client and terrible for the other guy, then they're ok with that.
Business on the other hand is about working relationships.
A deal that isn't good for both sides isn't a good deal.
Instead of trying to own their employees thoughts, businesses should concentrate on protecting themselves, and only that.
For example, say that if an employee discloses an idea to the company, either in words or in deed,
that the company has the right to use the idea without additional compensation, and without limitation.
So the bread company can use the special racks that the driver builds into the company truck, and even put them in other trucks they own, but the driver retains the right to sell his improvement to other bread companies.
-- this is not a
Looks like this shrink-wrap mentality is becoming a problem.
.sig
Here's my proposal.
Let's make shrink-wrap licenses illegal.
No, I do not mean "unenforceable".
I mean, a law that makes putting a shrink-wrap license on something punishable by a large fine.
-- this is not a
I know geeks tend to think of CG as a replacement for an actor, but I think the real power is going to be in letting multiple humans play a single actor.
.sig
In the really expensive video productions (a.k.a. commercials) it's already common to have multiple actors play different body parts.
The stars of the future are going to be entire teams of people, not just one guy. They might be blended together with CG, but the motions, expressions, voices, acrobatics, dancing will all be done by a human - and usually a human expert in that one field.
-- this is not a
IIRC,
The movie (from which the songs in dispute stem) was released in 1939.
The Book was published in 1900.
You can get a copy of the Book (and most of the other works of Frank L. Baum) from project Gutenberg
-- this is not a
I'm not as scared of the idea that the government wants to give me a number,
.sig
as I am by the idea that the government will track me without needing a number.
-- this is not a
The noun "peer" might imply rival, or near equals, but the verb "peering" in a network context does not. E-bay pays the same price when someone from Bangladore downloads their web page as they do when an American downloads it.
If they can reduce their network bill by peering with an Indian ISP, then they save money, period. The same goes for the Indian ISP. It may well be that the total cost of the peering link is higher than the cost buying transit through a third party, (tier 2 networks exist for reason after all) but the principle is still valid, and has nothing to do with traffic ratios.
-- this is still not a
Whether peering makes sense for a network depends on a huge number of factors,
and the ratio of traffic is rarely a factor when one or both networks are "endpoints",
and often is not a factor even when both aren't.
For example, if Alice sells web hosting and Bob sells dialup,
then peering between Alice and Bob makes economic sense for both of them,
even though the vast majority of the traffic flows from Alice to Bob.
Q: When a package is shipped, who pays, the sender or the receiver?
A: It depends. That's why FedEx allows either method.
-- this is not a
If "demand" is the amount of money people are willing to pay per bit, then demand is increasing at an amazing pace.
.sig
But if "demand" is the total amount of money that people are willing to spend on internet access,
then demand is only increasing moderately.
Consider dialup vs. ADSL.
Dialup is about $20 a month. ADSL is about $45.
Last year, some people switched from Dialup to ADSL. But most did not.
And if you look at the ones that did switch, you find that most of them had a second phone line,
(about $15 a month) which they terminated when they got ADSL.
IOW, the demand in terms of money spent increased less than 20%.
My prediction for the future is that demand will continue to be inflexible,
(i.e. people aren't going to pay more than $20-$30 a month for connectivity)
and the cost of supply will continue to decrease at about the same rate it does now.
End result: every year, the total dollars spent will be approximately the same, but the amount of bandwidth we get for those dollars will increase. A larger percentage of the internet will be carried by a smaller number of providers. Worldcom is just the first in a long series of companies that will go under as the market shifts to more and more efficient providers.
-- this is not a