Saw it, only because my company had an outing to see it and my ticket was paid for. It was garbage. No soul, and a shamelessly dangling ending calling for T4. Boo.
[an official at the Japan Magazine Publishers Association] said it was unclear if digital shoplifting is tantamount to a crime as the copyright law only covers use of information for commercial purposes.
The copyright laws I've heard of don't allow for non-commercial distribution. I wonder if this situation is different in Japan.
Sure, it will work IF the airplane is so equipped. What's to stop me from [using a cessna]
Perhaps nothing, although we would still have the beneficial effect of having reduced terrorists incentives to grab commercial passenger flights. That could help restore citizen confidence in air travel.
Back around 1994 Apple was developing a crop of new machines, which all had code names internally. One of them was code-named "Carl Sagan". Carl Sagan found out about this and made angry noise (perhaps he should have bought a higher grade of weed to smoke) so the Apple hardware team renamed the project "Butthead Astronomer".
Maybe we could re-coin "spam" something like
"litigious sh*tloaf".
Then, quite simply, you don't understand.
Your X-Box example is just about perfect though. IIRC was out for several weeks before it was hacked. The fact that the key hasn't been brute forced did not prevent people from making some delightful little Linux boxes out of the things.
It sounds to me like I do understand: the xbox was hacked via mod chips, so the sense in which its encryption has been shown to be compromisible is via a means other than cryptographic attacks. I'm not trying to claim that the xbox or other similar things can't be repurposed via hardware mods. My point is that the encryption involved is not the weak link. In other words, if I encrypted my credit card number with a 2048 bit key, posted it to the internet, and waited for someone to crack it, I'd still be waiting five years from now. To me, that qualifies as a perfectly sufficient answer when someone asks (as the parent post did) how on earth people can go about making claims of impenetrable encryption.
Bart: One move, and the nigger gets it!
Harriett Johnson: Isn't someone going to help that poor man?
Dr. Sam Johnson: Hush, Harriett! That's sure to get him killed!
Bart: Help me, help me!
[Bart maneuvers his hostage (himself) into an empty building]
>But by entwining PC software and data in an impenetrable layer of encryption
COME ON! please, why do they make such claims?!
My understanding is that if the chosen key is sufficiently large, like 2048 bits, then the encryption really is impenetrable, i.e. not breakable even by brute force given even the computing power years from now. Example: the xbox, a device with a 2048-bit key, has not been compromised, and a large scale distributed attack was dismissed even by those who dislike Microsoft as a pointless exercise. Doesn't mean that someone can't spill the key on purpose, but if that's what we mean by "not impenetrable" then I just want to be sure it's understood that we're not just talking about technological approaches.
So millions of people doing the wrong thing somehow makes it right. I don't think so.
BUTT millions of people doing something that is morally ambiguous can catalyze a movement towards recognition of the activity as legal. Especially when the "right" vs "wrong" camps correspond largely with "top-down control" vs "the population supposedly being served by that control". Prohibition is an example.
The sonny bono act came into being saying copyright should be for 14 years and all was good. There was no copyright before that
Unless I misunderstand what you're saying, the above is quite untrue. Copyright existed long before the Sony Bono act, which I think occurred in the late 1990s, and the act increased copyright far beyond 14 years; something like "death of copyright holder plus 50 years".
For the units without dvdrom, I don't see a way to boot if/when the internal disk develops some problem. Would you just have to ship it back to them for reconfiguring?
One thing I like about bittorrent's download model is that aside from the machine serving the root of the torrent, sources for downloads are the downloaders themselves for the duration that they are downloading. So for sources - other than the root - this provides anonymity (no easy way to harvest IP addresses of uploaders) as well as innoculating individual uploader against charges that they uploaded 100s of copies (in all likelihood they uploaded 1 copy).
Nice foamy rant Malleus, but what happened was that I bought it just before the announcement. Not that I'd count on every customer to be aware of Apple's announcement patterns, but I happened to be and got the short end anyway. As for my being a fool, if it helps you to think of me that way you're more than welcome to.:)
reason I don't have a copy of OSX is because I don't want to mess with another hardware platform
To say nothing of it costing $120 each time Apple upgrades the OS. I paid for 10.1 just in time to watch 10.2 get released. I thought I'd simply do without the luxury of 10.2, but began encountering an increasing number of pieces of software that required 10.2 - not 10.1 - to work. The Apple OS is slick and beautiful, but may not be worth the extra $100+ every N months.
So he did he finally get around to legally changing his name to Linux Torvalds! I knew if would happen eventually. Now if only he could change that "Torvalds" to something catchier and sexier... perhaps "de Beaumarche".
Cowboy Neal: Now there's an effective way of showing the problems of the status quo.
Michael: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Cowboy Neal: I don't even know anymore.
-
looking for "substantially identical" code
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 3, Funny
From the BSD/byte article:
SCO's lawyers have been poring over the Linux code for much of the past year, looking for fragments and routines which are
substantially identical to code from the various releases of UNIX
Would that be like "substantially pregnant", or "substantially dead"? For me this calls to mind a similar abuse of the word "identical", as found in Futurama:
Or, if you want to mess with the system, switch 'em around [re-code.com].
Not trying to be a party pooper, but re-code.com has been neutered by walmart. And how would you switch tags the size of a grain of sand that you have no idea where they are anyhow?
For a consumer to detect a tag is pretty obvious, they are not that small
I've read up on these things and they are described as the size of a grain of sand. I don't know if you've heard differently or if your vision is just that much better than mine.
# [Point 1 paraphrase: it's too expensive for stores to track instances of things instead of classes of things]
I din't see how this claim is supportable. I would definitely believe that the databases needed track instances rather than classes would have many more entries in their tables, but for non-perishables (i.e. things like shirts rather than cans of coke) it does not at all seem clear to me that the cost of such larger dbases is prohibitive or would remain so.
# One added side-benefit of RFIDs is controling shrinkage, i.e. shoplifting. For that to actually work, and assuming instance-tracking is out of the question (see above) paid-off items have to be de-activated by the store itself upon checkout. Your questions are thus moot.
One simple answer could be that the stores choose to not use this to combat shoplifting. Another could be that they check their database to see if a detected item is marked as purchased in their dbase before sounding the alarm.
# Target will set up a truck in a Wal-Mart parking lot and start measuring their sales. Do you think Wal-Mart will let that happen?
The range for detecting rfid info has been described as perhaps six feet; whether a truck could be placed withing six feet of where customers would walk is questionable. And this sounds like it might be on the illegal side of existing laws (laws protecting corporations, not citizens btw). And it doesn't seem far fetched to believe that vendors could get individually coded rfid tags that they need not reveal the interpretations of to competitors.
I agree that bad ethics is morally bad business, but there appears to be no significant correlation between what is morally good and what turns a profit. Make no mistake: if opportunity and the legal climate allowed a public company to corner the market on oxygen and gouge you and everyone else on the planet for every penny you were worth until your last gasping breath, they would do it. The only role that morality would play would be if the appearance of immorality would somehow reduce the company's profit. "Morality" comes in a couple of subtley different flavors:
Self-imposed morality: avoiding the harming of others because you empathize with others, or trust others when they say they can be harmed; in other words, harming others makes you feel bad despite their being no practical consequences to you.
Feigned morality: avoiding the harming of others to whatever extent you believe that doing so will benefit you in a practical way.
As an example, consider two people who work at the same company. The company has a strict policy against sexual harrassment. Neither of these people makes sexual comments to coworkers. Person#1 refrains from doing so because of a belief that to do so would be wrong; the other refrains because of a fear of punishment. "Okay", one could say, "the system works: neither is violating the policy. What's the significance of the morality distinction?" The significance is this: if person#2 can think of a way to violate the policy without being caught, person#2 will violate the policy; person#1 would not.
The above example can be cast in a variety of situations, and the restriction in place can be less perjorative( e.g. speed limits: person#1 obeys because "laws should be obeyed", person#2 because they dislike traffic tickets). The point is the same: feigned morality evaporates with opportunity, and it is most certainly feigned morality that commercial entities engage in, if any.
WE NEED TO ORGANISE... an organisation that can both patent and fight for us.
To put this slashdot engine to work for us, how about a system like this: we post a message on slashdot calling for people interested in being the initial organizational head. This post is placed in a volunteer's journal or as a response to a semi-relevant article. Word is spread via a link to the post in many volunteers' sigs. All respondents to that message by a certain date are in "the pool". At a fixed date thereafter, all pool members view the slashdot postings of all other pool members and use that info (along with any out of band communication they'd like) as a basis to determine who they'd like to elect. All pool members post a ranking of whoever they'd like to see elected. Votes are tallied up and an officer declared elected.
All of the above is achievable using existing slashdot mechanisms, and all is publicly verifiable. Spuriously created accounts are prohibited from voting by cutting off at a maximum account number as of, say, today, or two months ago. Splinter or competing posts can be differentiated by a minimal application of public key cryptography signing. No special server need be set up, and postings serve as a history of what has been written by whom and as a starting point for evaluating people.
Once the above is achieved, there is of course a ton more to do: figuring out the charter, constructing a legally sound document to protect donated money from non-related uses (thereby paving the way for actual donations), electing other officers... but despite so much to do, at that point we have already achieved recognition of a seed group of people who care enough to have put in the time to vote, and someone who has been elected by them as the initial officer probably will have the initiative and skill to organize for that stage.
I'm ready to do things. Who likes this? What changes would make this better?
Slashdot Mirror
Saw it, only because my company had an outing to see it and my ticket was paid for. It was garbage. No soul, and a shamelessly dangling ending calling for T4. Boo.
Perhaps nothing, although we would still have the beneficial effect of having reduced terrorists incentives to grab commercial passenger flights. That could help restore citizen confidence in air travel.
Maybe we could re-coin "spam" something like "litigious sh*tloaf".
Let me try to keep up: if someone asks whether Martha Stewart might avoid jail time, I'll ask "Did Jeffrey Dahmer avoid jail time?"
It sounds to me like I do understand: the xbox was hacked via mod chips, so the sense in which its encryption has been shown to be compromisible is via a means other than cryptographic attacks. I'm not trying to claim that the xbox or other similar things can't be repurposed via hardware mods. My point is that the encryption involved is not the weak link. In other words, if I encrypted my credit card number with a 2048 bit key, posted it to the internet, and waited for someone to crack it, I'd still be waiting five years from now. To me, that qualifies as a perfectly sufficient answer when someone asks (as the parent post did) how on earth people can go about making claims of impenetrable encryption.
[Bart holds his gun to his own head]
Bart: One move, and the nigger gets it!
Harriett Johnson: Isn't someone going to help that poor man?
Dr. Sam Johnson: Hush, Harriett! That's sure to get him killed!
Bart: Help me, help me!
[Bart maneuvers his hostage (himself) into an empty building]
Bart: (to self) Oh baby, you are so talented.
My understanding is that if the chosen key is sufficiently large, like 2048 bits, then the encryption really is impenetrable, i.e. not breakable even by brute force given even the computing power years from now. Example: the xbox, a device with a 2048-bit key, has not been compromised, and a large scale distributed attack was dismissed even by those who dislike Microsoft as a pointless exercise. Doesn't mean that someone can't spill the key on purpose, but if that's what we mean by "not impenetrable" then I just want to be sure it's understood that we're not just talking about technological approaches.
BUTT millions of people doing something that is morally ambiguous can catalyze a movement towards recognition of the activity as legal. Especially when the "right" vs "wrong" camps correspond largely with "top-down control" vs "the population supposedly being served by that control". Prohibition is an example.
Unless I misunderstand what you're saying, the above is quite untrue. Copyright existed long before the Sony Bono act, which I think occurred in the late 1990s, and the act increased copyright far beyond 14 years; something like "death of copyright holder plus 50 years".
For the units without dvdrom, I don't see a way to boot if/when the internal disk develops some problem. Would you just have to ship it back to them for reconfiguring?
One thing I like about bittorrent's download model is that aside from the machine serving the root of the torrent, sources for downloads are the downloaders themselves for the duration that they are downloading. So for sources - other than the root - this provides anonymity (no easy way to harvest IP addresses of uploaders) as well as innoculating individual uploader against charges that they uploaded 100s of copies (in all likelihood they uploaded 1 copy).
Nice foamy rant Malleus, but what happened was that I bought it just before the announcement. Not that I'd count on every customer to be aware of Apple's announcement patterns, but I happened to be and got the short end anyway. As for my being a fool, if it helps you to think of me that way you're more than welcome to. :)
To say nothing of it costing $120 each time Apple upgrades the OS. I paid for 10.1 just in time to watch 10.2 get released. I thought I'd simply do without the luxury of 10.2, but began encountering an increasing number of pieces of software that required 10.2 - not 10.1 - to work. The Apple OS is slick and beautiful, but may not be worth the extra $100+ every N months.
So he did he finally get around to legally changing his name to Linux Torvalds! I knew if would happen eventually. Now if only he could change that "Torvalds" to something catchier and sexier... perhaps "de Beaumarche".
Michael: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Cowboy Neal: I don't even know anymore.
-
Fry: Four identical castles!
Bender: Each more identical than the last!!
-
Homer: You had me at comfort.
Not trying to be a party pooper, but re-code.com has been neutered by walmart. And how would you switch tags the size of a grain of sand that you have no idea where they are anyhow?
I've read up on these things and they are described as the size of a grain of sand. I don't know if you've heard differently or if your vision is just that much better than mine.
I din't see how this claim is supportable. I would definitely believe that the databases needed track instances rather than classes would have many more entries in their tables, but for non-perishables (i.e. things like shirts rather than cans of coke) it does not at all seem clear to me that the cost of such larger dbases is prohibitive or would remain so.
One simple answer could be that the stores choose to not use this to combat shoplifting. Another could be that they check their database to see if a detected item is marked as purchased in their dbase before sounding the alarm.
The range for detecting rfid info has been described as perhaps six feet; whether a truck could be placed withing six feet of where customers would walk is questionable. And this sounds like it might be on the illegal side of existing laws (laws protecting corporations, not citizens btw). And it doesn't seem far fetched to believe that vendors could get individually coded rfid tags that they need not reveal the interpretations of to competitors.
- Self-imposed morality: avoiding the harming of others because you empathize with others, or trust others when they say they can be harmed; in other words, harming others makes you feel bad despite their being no practical consequences to you.
- Feigned morality: avoiding the harming of others to whatever extent you believe that doing so will benefit you in a practical way.
As an example, consider two people who work at the same company. The company has a strict policy against sexual harrassment. Neither of these people makes sexual comments to coworkers. Person#1 refrains from doing so because of a belief that to do so would be wrong; the other refrains because of a fear of punishment. "Okay", one could say, "the system works: neither is violating the policy. What's the significance of the morality distinction?" The significance is this: if person#2 can think of a way to violate the policy without being caught, person#2 will violate the policy; person#1 would not.The above example can be cast in a variety of situations, and the restriction in place can be less perjorative( e.g. speed limits: person#1 obeys because "laws should be obeyed", person#2 because they dislike traffic tickets). The point is the same: feigned morality evaporates with opportunity, and it is most certainly feigned morality that commercial entities engage in, if any.
Sounds like something Ghandi would say.
To put this slashdot engine to work for us, how about a system like this: we post a message on slashdot calling for people interested in being the initial organizational head. This post is placed in a volunteer's journal or as a response to a semi-relevant article. Word is spread via a link to the post in many volunteers' sigs. All respondents to that message by a certain date are in "the pool". At a fixed date thereafter, all pool members view the slashdot postings of all other pool members and use that info (along with any out of band communication they'd like) as a basis to determine who they'd like to elect. All pool members post a ranking of whoever they'd like to see elected. Votes are tallied up and an officer declared elected.
All of the above is achievable using existing slashdot mechanisms, and all is publicly verifiable. Spuriously created accounts are prohibited from voting by cutting off at a maximum account number as of, say, today, or two months ago. Splinter or competing posts can be differentiated by a minimal application of public key cryptography signing. No special server need be set up, and postings serve as a history of what has been written by whom and as a starting point for evaluating people.
Once the above is achieved, there is of course a ton more to do: figuring out the charter, constructing a legally sound document to protect donated money from non-related uses (thereby paving the way for actual donations), electing other officers... but despite so much to do, at that point we have already achieved recognition of a seed group of people who care enough to have put in the time to vote, and someone who has been elected by them as the initial officer probably will have the initiative and skill to organize for that stage. I'm ready to do things. Who likes this? What changes would make this better?