Person A at (say) IBM notices a bug in CVS & submits a patch.
Suddenly, Person B, working 3000km from person A who has never heard of person A cannot use the free BK for some private purpose (maintaining pron lists for all I care).
> Not exactly. One time pads don't: > > * Disguise the length of a message
Easily done; simply chose a pad which is longer than the message, or see below.
> * Hide the fact that a message has been sent
Defeating traffic analysis isn't that hard, just expensive. For example, continously exchange one-time-pad encrypted messages of some arbitrary length; most of the time they just say "This space left blank", but sometimes they have the message.
1995 is extremely new in the printing industry! The printing industry moves pretty slowly - not least because the printers are very expensive, so replacing them isn't done casually...
I know of two people who were advised to terminate pregnancies here (Westmead Private Hospital, Sydney, Australia) on the basis of nucal translucency results alone.
Neither did so; the children were fine in both cases.
In both cases the test was flawed because the fetus was unusually large and thus the doctors involved got the conception date wrong.
In both cases the doctors ignored the mother's protests that the conception date was off by a couple of weeks...
We tendered for a [large recorded music seller]'s web site. In our tender, we pointed out that relying on plaintext, unsigned email for orders to the [large recorded music seller]'s suppliers would lead to people getting free CDs once they worked out all they had to do was send email to the right spot.
Our tender was rejected as "too complicated" because we designed something that would have been more secure.
The winners built the system; within a few weeks people were getting free CDs and the system was turned off.
The only good part was that the idiot who had run the tender evaluation was sacked...
> This will preserve binary compatibility, and save at least.5 megabytes...
Well, no, actually.
It'll save memory being mapped into the address space of the process, but if the process never uses the functions called, the pages will never get loaded into RAM.
In other words, if you're not using i18n, in general you won't have any i18n code in memory.
Actually, you might, iff the functions are arranged in a sufficiently bad way in the library; hopefully similar functions are close to each other so that loading, for example, strcpy, doesn't also get you fopen...
Although it's tempting to say "it serves them right", it's just one more example of how broken the US patent system has become!
The patent they have infringed is another one of these translate something from a normal environment where it's obvious to the Internet and then claim it's novel things.
Going into a music shop and listening to the music before I buy a CD is hardly earth-shattering in the real world. It shouldn't be on the Net either. I really wonder if the USPO assessors get out at all!:)
> I don't care if it doesn't recover from a crash because my linux box never crashes, seriously.
Your power 100% too? Ever accidentally turn off the machine or hit reset?
As someone up there pointed out, though, total persistence is not needed. You can treat part of the memory as a filesystem if you want and the rest as scratch storage (like current RAM). It's just that it becomes a rather strange and arbitrary distinction.
It's also hard to believe that one day these things will be cheaper than HDD - $0.01/MB sounds pretty cheap for any sort of silicon...
This sort of thing is what the persistent operating system groups have been working on doing for years.
It turns out that it's _hard_ to do - keeping the data around is the easy part; what do you do when the OS crashes? How do you recover?
You end up with a huge database like wrapper around the entire OS, and really heavy-weight recovery code to try to rebuild a consistent state of the system.
You've also got the problem that if something is wrong in the OS, when you reboot you'll quite possibly just trigger the same bug again! Makes Microsoft style "reboot to fix the problem" solutions not so good.
See some persistent OS sites, like:
http://www.psrg.cs.usyd.edu.au/
http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~aol/publicationlist.ht ml
I can see the capture (bttv and friends) and the playback (although I guess I'd need a video card which can drive a composite video signal(?)), but ideally it'd MPEG encode the data - is there any hardware MPEG encoding stuff under Linux?
The more I think about it, the better this idea sounds:) Once the video is in the system as an MPEG, I can replay it on my workstation over the LAN... Hours of fun!
It strikes me that unless every country in the world introduces such laws (and they enforce them - big ask for some third world countries), it's just a matter of the user picking a hosting machine somewhere that does allow anonymous hosting.
The thing governments could try to do is make setting up anonymously hosted pages illegal, but enforcement might be hard, what with the anonymous nature of the things...
"The helium we found within the fullerene cages of Australia's Murchison meteorite, for example, is similar to the helium that existed when our Solar System first formed," Becker stated.
Seems to contradict the presumption that the Helium is unlike any that existed within the solar system...
In Australia we have "optional preferential voting", which means you can rank the candidates from most to least prefered.
When it comes to counting, all the first ("primary") choices are added up. The candidate with the least primary votes is removed from the count and all their votes are given to their voters second preferences. This is repeated until someone has >50% of the vote.
If you really did/dev/random % 95 I think I see your problem - that's obviously going to skew your distribution (whatever you read is going to be a number of bytes, and thus a power of two).
Slashdot Mirror
The problem I see is something like this:
Person A at (say) IBM notices a bug in CVS & submits a patch.
Suddenly, Person B, working 3000km from person A who has never heard of person A cannot use the free BK for some private purpose (maintaining pron lists for all I care).
Does that seem reasonable?
Err, either the /. editor bozos are getting naughty and editing "silently", or you misread.
/. has been going over the last year or so, the former seems much more likely.
I hope it's the latter; however with the way
This is a well known attack, isn't it? I can remember giving a talk on how to use PGP and telling people to never:
a) Sign random garbage sent to them by anyone (and sent it back), or
b) Decrypt stuff and send it back.
Indeed, I have. I've been pretty thouroughly shouted down, though. I no longer bother.
> Well, I came to Linux from MacOS, so to me both KDE and Gnome seem too much like Windows :-)
Indeed, most of the "useability" stuff that's been going on in Gnome is either:
a) Changes to make it more like Windows, or
b) Removal of useful features that could confuse first time users.
It appears Gnome is increasignly aimed at people with limited short-term memory who have recently changed from Windows.
Sad really, it could have been good.
Hmm, I'm not sure sending a SAM to Iran would do much, except give the Iranians a nice gift...
Stephen
> Not exactly. One time pads don't:
>
> * Disguise the length of a message
Easily done; simply chose a pad which is longer than the message, or see below.
> * Hide the fact that a message has been sent
Defeating traffic analysis isn't that hard, just expensive. For example, continously exchange one-time-pad encrypted messages of some arbitrary length; most of the time they just say "This space left blank", but sometimes they have the message.
No more traffic analysis.
Stephen
This (or similar schemes) have been discussed on LKML several times in the last few years.
The basic objection is that the kernel doesn't develop like that; it's more like:
2.5.x
1 = x = 10 Unstable.
11 = x = 20 more stable
21 stable-ish
22 = x = 30 unstable again.
And so on. For example, I think 1.1.59 was the kernel of choice for distributions for about 6 months...
Stephen
1995 is extremely new in the printing industry! The printing industry moves pretty slowly - not least because the printers are very expensive, so replacing them isn't done casually...
I know of two people who were advised to terminate pregnancies here (Westmead Private Hospital, Sydney, Australia) on the basis of nucal translucency results alone.
Neither did so; the children were fine in both cases.
In both cases the test was flawed because the fetus was unusually large and thus the doctors involved got the conception date wrong.
In both cases the doctors ignored the mother's protests that the conception date was off by a couple of weeks...
Stephen
Here in Australia Dick Smith (at least) had some last Christmas. We got some - tiny little power supply, very long life, now voltages.
Just what you want! They weren't even that expensive...
>There is no proof that alien do not exist, either. You can't prove a negative condition.
Prove it.
We tendered for a [large recorded music seller]'s web site. In our tender, we pointed out that relying on plaintext, unsigned email for orders to the [large recorded music seller]'s suppliers would lead to people getting free CDs once they worked out all they had to do was send email to the right spot.
Our tender was rejected as "too complicated" because we designed something that would have been more secure.
The winners built the system; within a few weeks people were getting free CDs and the system was turned off.
The only good part was that the idiot who had run the tender evaluation was sacked...
Stephen
> This will preserve binary compatibility, and save at least .5 megabytes...
Well, no, actually.
It'll save memory being mapped into the address space of the process, but if the process never uses the functions called, the pages will never get loaded into RAM.
In other words, if you're not using i18n, in general you won't have any i18n code in memory.
Actually, you might, iff the functions are arranged in a sufficiently bad way in the library; hopefully similar functions are close to each other so that loading, for example, strcpy, doesn't also get you fopen...
Stephen
It's very misleading and emotive to try to load the two into the same barrow, the barrow which you are pushing so enthusiastically here...
Stephen
Although it's tempting to say "it serves them right", it's just one more example of how broken the US patent system has become!
The patent they have infringed is another one of these translate something from a normal environment where it's obvious to the Internet and then claim it's novel things.
Going into a music shop and listening to the music before I buy a CD is hardly earth-shattering in the real world. It shouldn't be on the Net either. I really wonder if the USPO assessors get out at all! :)
Stephen
Your power 100% too? Ever accidentally turn off the machine or hit reset?
As someone up there pointed out, though, total persistence is not needed. You can treat part of the memory as a filesystem if you want and the rest as scratch storage (like current RAM). It's just that it becomes a rather strange and arbitrary distinction.
It's also hard to believe that one day these things will be cheaper than HDD - $0.01/MB sounds pretty cheap for any sort of silicon...
Stephen
It turns out that it's _hard_ to do - keeping the data around is the easy part; what do you do when the OS crashes? How do you recover?
You end up with a huge database like wrapper around the entire OS, and really heavy-weight recovery code to try to rebuild a consistent state of the system.
You've also got the problem that if something is wrong in the OS, when you reboot you'll quite possibly just trigger the same bug again! Makes Microsoft style "reboot to fix the problem" solutions not so good.
See some persistent OS sites, like:
This is just a few I happen to know.
Stephen
It wasn't the April 1st edition was it?
I can see the capture (bttv and friends) and the playback (although I guess I'd need a video card which can drive a composite video signal(?)), but ideally it'd MPEG encode the data - is there any hardware MPEG encoding stuff under Linux?
The more I think about it, the better this idea sounds :) Once the video is in the system as an MPEG, I can replay it on my workstation over the LAN... Hours of fun!
Stephen
The thing governments could try to do is make setting up anonymously hosted pages illegal, but enforcement might be hard, what with the anonymous nature of the things...
It appears one of the not-reading-too-closely people was me - I meant "reading" not "ready" of course.
Seems to contradict the presumption that the Helium is unlike any that existed within the solar system...
Otherwise, interesting.
In Australia we have "optional preferential voting", which means you can rank the candidates from most to least prefered.
When it comes to counting, all the first ("primary") choices are added up. The candidate with the least primary votes is removed from the count and all their votes are given to their voters second preferences. This is repeated until someone has >50% of the vote.
Oh, and voting is compulsory.
If you really did /dev/random % 95 I think I see your problem - that's obviously going to skew your distribution (whatever you read is going to be a number of bytes, and thus a power of two).