Technically, since Pi is infinitely long and never repeats, any finite series of digits must appear at some point.
Don't think that's true. Counter example: consider the stream of digits comprised of pi with all 7's removed. Still infinitely long and never repeating, but 7 never appears now.
Gmail is largely based on the idea that if a user keeps almost every message they ever get, then Google Inc., has a far far larger base of data in which they can mine.
I don't disagree with your overall point, just want to point out one shouldn't assume that deleting a given message results in Google not having access to it. Google may well hold onto some or all of what a user marks for deletion, but simply remove it from being available to the user. Whatever cap on per-user storage space that Google officially states, that's merely a number they need to meet by allowing the user to officially retain that amount of "non-deleted" email.
That goes without saying, right? It is, after all, a record. People don't usually turn to the Guinness book of world records for guidance on, say, what a realistic number of hotdogs is to consume within 12 minutes.
Interesting argument, though I'd counter that the Guinness Book is rather pointedly not a research journal, so people don't interpret "guy eats 200 hotdogs in one hour" to mean that there's a large corporation working feverishly to figure out how to make it possible for joe schmoe to do the same so that dollars can change hands.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of scroogle before. I understand the basic mechanism as described on their website, but the info given there is skimpy and I'd appreciate more detail if you have any pointers. From a technical standpoint:
How does scroogle prevent google from blocking it? I found an article mentioning that google tried to block it, but no details about how this was evaded.
Does (or will) scroogle support queries like "http://www.scroogle.com/search?q=test" such that it could be configured in firefox to work as a search without explicitly visiting the search?
From a privacy standpoint: is there any assurance other than the site's say-so that logs aren't kept? If not, shouldn't that absence of assurance be troubling?
Yes (as mentioned in the GP post). Most proxy servers I tried didn't work at all. The few that did were slow, and stopped working within twelve hours every time.
You seem to be implying that scroogle is well known, but I never heard of it before today, and would wager that if I asked fifty random people on the street I'd get fifty likewise "never heard of it" shrugs. More importantly, you seem to be implying that scroogle is trustable. Why? Because it has a website claiming it doesn't keep logs? What mechanism do I have to verify that that is true now, and remains true in the future? What if the site owner is in fact running a psych experiment to see what information people worried about privacy search for when they think they're not being watched? What if the site owner is compelled by court order to (a) keep and turn over logs, and (b) not disclose that fact publicly? What if keeping logs becomes irrelevant if someone starts sniffing traffic between me and scroogle?
And in addition to all of the above, don't forget about the pedestrian yet show-stopping possibility that scroogle could have its ip range banned by google, or simply run out of server bandwidth if it becomes too popular.
Note that none of these problems apply to the solution I've proposed.
To me, one of the biggest threats to privacy is google's logging of what I search for. I tried using foxyproxy, but found it hard to find reliable and speedy proxy servers (which btw need to be in the US else google renders the version tailored for whatever country the ip address comes from). So my solution: I'm writing a little script that will periodically read random entries from a text file I have and submit a search to google for the data. For example, my data file contains "kill the president", "blowjobs from hookers", "boiling dead dogs", "where purchase drugs", "flowers for wifey", "plumbing supplies", etc. More sophisticated versions will include clicking on some of the links returned by google, and better combinatorics for the seach data. All I need do is make the fake google searches outnumber the real searches, and I've got plausible deniability on anything.
I need to see a 35 year old movie in high def because....?
The above line says it all as far as how I feel about HD movies (except that I feel that way about all movies, not just 35-yr-old ones). High-definition picture would be a bonus if tv/movies were an immersive medium, but I don't see them as such; to me, tv and movies are a *storytelling* medium, not an immersive medium.
I don't see why the hostility.
These guys claim to be doing exactly what a layman should do when he thinks he has discovered technology which challenges a fundamental scientific principle.
The hostility probably comes from a commercial company seeking to make money off of something that runs against a basic (i.e. non-esoteric), foundational model of physics. That the model has been long tested doesn't mean that it won't ever be replaced by a better model, but it does call for skepticism. But the company isn't exhibiting skepticism. They're attitude seems to be, "After three years, we're convinced." Their attitude should be, "We know something's wrong, we just need to know what". In a commercial setting, anything else smells of upsell and false hype for personal gain. Whether strictly against the law or not, it's worthy of hostility in my opinion.
Invite as many credible scientific experts as you can find to test it and report the results of such testing in peer reviewed scientific publications and on the Internet.
I barely skimmed TFA but I only recall them seeking evaluations from 12 scientists. Whereas seeking as many experts as one can find would be better served by publishing the work on the internet.
We need to form the MCAA - Media Consumer's Association of America, get Congress to insist on a levy on blank tapes and CDs and DVDs etc in order to to allow the members to participate in [rampant piracy] exercising their rights and be indemnified for all their legal costs!
You don't have to be a citizen to be sued by the RIAA, so [preferring the term "citizens" to "consumers"] wouldn't be accurate.
In the suit at hand against Debbie Foster the target is a citizen of the US.
I'm assuming you're referring to the distinction between US citizens vs citizens of non-US nations, as opposed to people who have somehow lost or never formally obtained legal citizenship. I admit I wasn't thinking about suits outside the US, though in discussions of such I would still prefer the concept of a "citizen" (of the world, or of humanity perhaps). In the context of these suits I don't think that "consumer" is needed to clarify the distinction between "consumers of music" vs "producers of music", and "citizen" sufficiently delineates an entity as a non-corporation. Besides, even from the RIAA's standpoint, the term "consumer" would blur the contextually important distinction between downloading music from p2p vs buying cds from the RIAA.
Add to that the idea that the term "consumer" just fits too nicely with corporations' view that humans exist merely to be induced/tricked/herded into forking over money.
I'd be fine going with the term "people".
... they're suits against ordinary people, not suits against businesses, and not suits against "pirates".
As far as I understand, the suit alleges that Foster participated in illegal downloading, which would seem to make the suit being discussed one against a "pirate".
I'm wonder if Treach^H^H^H^H^H Trusted Computing (the TC chip in the computer itself) might *prevent* a software solution from interfering with a compromised keyboard...???
The TC chip only has power to do such things, against the user's will, if (a) the OS is written to prevent the user from running non-signed software even when the user wants to, and (b) the software solution being discussed isn't signed. (a) will generally not be true of linux; I'm not clear on what Windoze Vista's position will be on allowing the users to run non-signed software. In a way, this becomes an interesting argument against forced "trusted" (nee treacherous) computing, where a corporation forcing employees to run a locked-down TC OS would be the most unable to prevent the leaking of information due to this type of keylogger.
For forced TC OS machines, an approach might be to proxy your network connections through some other machine where you CAN run a network stack tweaked to obfuscate time-encoded information. More simply than running a tweaked network stack, you could do rlogins through a machine with a tweaked rlogin shell, moving this logic to the application layer.
Could you get around this by adding your own random jitter to outgoing packets? I'm thinking of something like an option in OpenBSD to do this for all TCP connections, say.
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Yes, that'd work.
As an alternative or supplemental approach, it'd also be useful to intersperse "chaffe" packets, i.e. garbage packets. Such chaffe packets could be inserted by a low level option in OpenBSD like you describe, or even by any link in the transmission chain, without application software even knowing about it; all that would be required would be sufficient info for the chaffe insertion layer to discard garbage packets. Maybe the right layer to do this in would be the encryption layer, e.g. within OpenSSH.
No, you can't get around this, because if it's built into the keyboard, then it's a hardware thing, and any software based solution will be insufficient.
Incorrect. It's true that there'd be no way to prevent the keyboard from collecting data, but one could certainly prevent the successful transmission of the collected data. The way the data would be encoded would be via the timing of the packets sent in response to keystrokes; that logic path most definitely involves software levels, specifically (in the example given of a remote terminal session) the choice of the software to send a packet once per keystroke. The proposed solution of introducing jitter to the packets is indeed a solution, and a simple straightforward one at that.
Who in their right mind would type their social security number in a search box, in plain text??? I mean, really???
As long as they type in their SSN only when surfing through a proxy, they should be safe. Sadly, most people are too naive to follow this simple safety procedure.
[jobs passed over by India are] likely to go to Nigeria.
(ring ring ring) Hello, welcome to the Nigerian call center, my name is, um, Bill, and I will be assisting you today. Before we get into addressing your problem, I want to take this opportunity to tell you about a very exciting business arrangement that I would like to offer you. You see, I also represent the estate of a deceased billionaire who died with no next of kin, and...
At the rist of godwinning myself as well, I am sure the guards in the concentration camps used a similar argument to justify their actions to themselves and others. You are agreeing to their persecution of their fellow citizens for MONEY? What kind of morally bankrupt POS are you?
Your argument hinges on there being an equality between (a) meeting a quota for number of people marked for hassle at an airport, and (b) gassing people to death. While there are vague abstract similarities, I think the practical difference is too big to make the argument a good one.
If true, these people have just admitted they weren't subjecting innocent people to punishment because they'd lose their job otherwise and be unable to support their family -- an understandable, if still morally weak position. No, they did it because they wanted more money. Or a dental plan. Or a longer vacation. That's what's known as being stunning and embarassingly selfish.
So it's stunningly selfish to want a dental plan to keep your teeth from rotting out of your mouth? To want your salary to have a chance to keep up with inflation? To want a better lot in life than what you happen to have at the moment? Then book me Dano.
The Ayn Rand quote is right on the money. The guilt she's talking about is the very same guilt being relied upon to make people accept an arbitrary watch list with no oversight and no process.
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Don't think that's true. Counter example: consider the stream of digits comprised of pi with all 7's removed. Still infinitely long and never repeating, but 7 never appears now.
For these people, $30k is wallet change.
I don't disagree with your overall point, just want to point out one shouldn't assume that deleting a given message results in Google not having access to it. Google may well hold onto some or all of what a user marks for deletion, but simply remove it from being available to the user. Whatever cap on per-user storage space that Google officially states, that's merely a number they need to meet by allowing the user to officially retain that amount of "non-deleted" email.
Interesting argument, though I'd counter that the Guinness Book is rather pointedly not a research journal, so people don't interpret "guy eats 200 hotdogs in one hour" to mean that there's a large corporation working feverishly to figure out how to make it possible for joe schmoe to do the same so that dollars can change hands.
... but all I want this for is so I can put it on and then scream, "Get away from her, you BITCH!"
- How does scroogle prevent google from blocking it? I found an article mentioning that google tried to block it, but no details about how this was evaded.
- Does (or will) scroogle support queries like "http://www.scroogle.com/search?q=test" such that it could be configured in firefox to work as a search without explicitly visiting the search?
From a privacy standpoint: is there any assurance other than the site's say-so that logs aren't kept? If not, shouldn't that absence of assurance be troubling?Yes (as mentioned in the GP post). Most proxy servers I tried didn't work at all. The few that did were slow, and stopped working within twelve hours every time.
You seem to be implying that scroogle is well known, but I never heard of it before today, and would wager that if I asked fifty random people on the street I'd get fifty likewise "never heard of it" shrugs. More importantly, you seem to be implying that scroogle is trustable. Why? Because it has a website claiming it doesn't keep logs? What mechanism do I have to verify that that is true now, and remains true in the future? What if the site owner is in fact running a psych experiment to see what information people worried about privacy search for when they think they're not being watched? What if the site owner is compelled by court order to (a) keep and turn over logs, and (b) not disclose that fact publicly? What if keeping logs becomes irrelevant if someone starts sniffing traffic between me and scroogle?
And in addition to all of the above, don't forget about the pedestrian yet show-stopping possibility that scroogle could have its ip range banned by google, or simply run out of server bandwidth if it becomes too popular.
Note that none of these problems apply to the solution I've proposed.
Umm indeed.
To me, one of the biggest threats to privacy is google's logging of what I search for. I tried using foxyproxy, but found it hard to find reliable and speedy proxy servers (which btw need to be in the US else google renders the version tailored for whatever country the ip address comes from). So my solution: I'm writing a little script that will periodically read random entries from a text file I have and submit a search to google for the data. For example, my data file contains "kill the president", "blowjobs from hookers", "boiling dead dogs", "where purchase drugs", "flowers for wifey", "plumbing supplies", etc. More sophisticated versions will include clicking on some of the links returned by google, and better combinatorics for the seach data. All I need do is make the fake google searches outnumber the real searches, and I've got plausible deniability on anything.
The above line says it all as far as how I feel about HD movies (except that I feel that way about all movies, not just 35-yr-old ones). High-definition picture would be a bonus if tv/movies were an immersive medium, but I don't see them as such; to me, tv and movies are a *storytelling* medium, not an immersive medium.
Because then the explanation would simply transform to being about the difference between "freedom to modify" vs "freedom to obtain without paying".
The hostility probably comes from a commercial company seeking to make money off of something that runs against a basic (i.e. non-esoteric), foundational model of physics. That the model has been long tested doesn't mean that it won't ever be replaced by a better model, but it does call for skepticism. But the company isn't exhibiting skepticism. They're attitude seems to be, "After three years, we're convinced." Their attitude should be, "We know something's wrong, we just need to know what". In a commercial setting, anything else smells of upsell and false hype for personal gain. Whether strictly against the law or not, it's worthy of hostility in my opinion.
Invite as many credible scientific experts as you can find to test it and report the results of such testing in peer reviewed scientific publications and on the Internet.
I barely skimmed TFA but I only recall them seeking evaluations from 12 scientists. Whereas seeking as many experts as one can find would be better served by publishing the work on the internet.
Better yet: we need to abolish copyright.
In the suit at hand against Debbie Foster the target is a citizen of the US.
I'm assuming you're referring to the distinction between US citizens vs citizens of non-US nations, as opposed to people who have somehow lost or never formally obtained legal citizenship. I admit I wasn't thinking about suits outside the US, though in discussions of such I would still prefer the concept of a "citizen" (of the world, or of humanity perhaps). In the context of these suits I don't think that "consumer" is needed to clarify the distinction between "consumers of music" vs "producers of music", and "citizen" sufficiently delineates an entity as a non-corporation. Besides, even from the RIAA's standpoint, the term "consumer" would blur the contextually important distinction between downloading music from p2p vs buying cds from the RIAA.
Add to that the idea that the term "consumer" just fits too nicely with corporations' view that humans exist merely to be induced/tricked/herded into forking over money.
I'd be fine going with the term "people".
As far as I understand, the suit alleges that Foster participated in illegal downloading, which would seem to make the suit being discussed one against a "pirate".
We are citizens. I object to being branded "consumers". Language is where many battles are framed.
The TC chip only has power to do such things, against the user's will, if (a) the OS is written to prevent the user from running non-signed software even when the user wants to, and (b) the software solution being discussed isn't signed. (a) will generally not be true of linux; I'm not clear on what Windoze Vista's position will be on allowing the users to run non-signed software. In a way, this becomes an interesting argument against forced "trusted" (nee treacherous) computing, where a corporation forcing employees to run a locked-down TC OS would be the most unable to prevent the leaking of information due to this type of keylogger.
For forced TC OS machines, an approach might be to proxy your network connections through some other machine where you CAN run a network stack tweaked to obfuscate time-encoded information. More simply than running a tweaked network stack, you could do rlogins through a machine with a tweaked rlogin shell, moving this logic to the application layer.
Yes, that'd work.
As an alternative or supplemental approach, it'd also be useful to intersperse "chaffe" packets, i.e. garbage packets. Such chaffe packets could be inserted by a low level option in OpenBSD like you describe, or even by any link in the transmission chain, without application software even knowing about it; all that would be required would be sufficient info for the chaffe insertion layer to discard garbage packets. Maybe the right layer to do this in would be the encryption layer, e.g. within OpenSSH.
Incorrect. It's true that there'd be no way to prevent the keyboard from collecting data, but one could certainly prevent the successful transmission of the collected data. The way the data would be encoded would be via the timing of the packets sent in response to keystrokes; that logic path most definitely involves software levels, specifically (in the example given of a remote terminal session) the choice of the software to send a packet once per keystroke. The proposed solution of introducing jitter to the packets is indeed a solution, and a simple straightforward one at that.
As long as they type in their SSN only when surfing through a proxy, they should be safe. Sadly, most people are too naive to follow this simple safety procedure.
(ring ring ring) Hello, welcome to the Nigerian call center, my name is, um, Bill, and I will be assisting you today. Before we get into addressing your problem, I want to take this opportunity to tell you about a very exciting business arrangement that I would like to offer you. You see, I also represent the estate of a deceased billionaire who died with no next of kin, and...
I would. So would the majority of people I personally know as friends. Doesn't mean most people would (or wouldn't), but we do exist.
Your argument hinges on there being an equality between (a) meeting a quota for number of people marked for hassle at an airport, and (b) gassing people to death. While there are vague abstract similarities, I think the practical difference is too big to make the argument a good one.
So it's stunningly selfish to want a dental plan to keep your teeth from rotting out of your mouth? To want your salary to have a chance to keep up with inflation? To want a better lot in life than what you happen to have at the moment? Then book me Dano.
The Ayn Rand quote is right on the money. The guilt she's talking about is the very same guilt being relied upon to make people accept an arbitrary watch list with no oversight and no process.