Putting on my tin-foil hat, it almost seems like there is a coordinated program to backdoor security products, and attribute them to a 'mistake'. But that's just me being paranoid.
In fairness, intentionally weakening crypto requires as much understanding of it as doing it right.
Screwing it up, however, can be done by any moron.
You know, it depends on how you flip it, which apparently you can do without having any ill intent.
Years ago in playing some games with co-workers, a coin toss was part of something. I would occasionally get about 8-10 in a row.
People used to kind of freak out, because I'd flip the same thing a bunch of times and they said it was statistically impossible. I said I just flipped the coin and they could see me do it.
Much later I saw things which suggested if you know how to flip it, you can control the outcome... which means you can possibly do it by accident.
Is it still a fair coin toss if I have no idea how it happened? I sure wasn't cheating, and I couldn't do it on command, it just happened sometimes.
Really, statistically unlikely means just that -- given enough samples the chances pretty much become 100%.
Oooh, 3 of 100 times you could get that outcome, quick, call the witch doctor.
Statistically unlikely stuff happens all the freakin' time.
"It's stuff that might get hits and make dice more money."
Dice sold Slashdot. Maybe you missed it?
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
The particulars of who wants to sell ads to us isn't really something we much care about, though I'm sure the new owners will have their own spin on pissing off the users depending on what their favorite things to shill for are.
Sure... but it always comes down to "trust, but verify". Which really means you can't trust.
People will keep trying to cheat, and sometimes might even find ways to make it work. The higher the stakes, the higher the reward.
I consider it an unfortunate fact of human nature that, someone, somewhere will ALWAYS be motivated to cheat. Correspondingly, I think people would cheat just because you had rules.
Irrational? You don't think there are perfectly rational reasons for cheating?
But if there's nothing to be gained outside of the knowledge that, yes, you won, where is the benefit?
Because, smug is a surprising motivator... either beating you without you knowing how, or just because the act was fun. Because it was there. Because they could.
I honestly don't understand this. This makes simply no sense whatsoever. Not even by human standards.
Wait, what? Since when are human standards supposed to make sense? Did I miss a memo?
So, my very cynical view of humans boils down to: humans are bastards, capable of great depths of terrible things -- and they'll do those terrible things for both fun and profit, and that in a large enough sample of humans, you should expect sociopathic behavior, because it will happen.
At the individual scale, humans can have a lot of redeeming qualities. But at the macro level, we're anything but.
Look, if people will cheat for FUN, they'll sure as hell cheat for MONEY.
EVERY endeavor with rules has had someone cheat. The Olympics, car racing, the fucking stock market... all of it.
Are you so naive as to think that the higher the stakes the less likely someone is to cheat? Because if you are, you need to get out into the fucking real world and look at what humans are really like.
Yes, they're all very bad people who should be punished with spankings and sentenced to hard labor to atone for their sins... now grow the hell up and stop acting like you just fell of the hay wagon.
I don't play online games because a) I have no desire to interact with some smart ass 12 year old half way around the world who can kick my ass, and b) because I prefer to pick up a game, play for a couple of hours, and put it down. On-line gaming provides no value to me. In fact, it's a negative.
The fact you tried to argue this leads me to suspect you are the type of person who would buy these hacks.
The fact that you felt the need to make an ad hominem attack tells me you're fucking asshole with an inflated sense of self importance, in addition to a woefully incomplete picture of what human nature really is.
I'm not advocating cheating in multi-player games.
But I am saying people who are shocked it happens are probably idiots.
Of course my Skyrim example is nothing like cheating where money is on the line, because it was about why people might choose to define "fun" other than the game designer intended.
But if you think your moral outrage will change the world... good luck with that. Humans will ALWAYS cheat in large enough samples.
"Kansai Science City" suggests to me this is as much about investigating it and building the technology as it is about a business model.
But, I don't think they're ignoring that either:
Relying on lessons learned from their first farm in Kameoka, SPREAD says their new business model will cut labor costs by 50 percent. The company claims sustainability is at the heart of what they do, and that the new 47,300 square feet Vegetable Factory in Kansai Science City will also reduce construction costs by 25 percent and energy demand by 30 percent.
I for one welcome our new robotic, lettuce-growing overlords.
But a game is supposed to be entertainment, Why bother playing a game if you are not actually playing the game?
Because not everybody wants to play the way the game designers meant.
When I play Skyrim I now just ignore the major quests and mostly just explore and collect stuff and level up... because the free-roaming aspect of it is what I consider more "fun" than trying to beat the quests. Who needs a plot line when I can just go kill some time wandering around? I make a point to not accidentally advance the plot any more.
perhaps the A/C's reply is right they do it not to play but to troll and piss others off.
Well, yeah.. for some people the cheating or messing with other people is the fun part.
I used to play some tabletop games with friends, and they could never figure out my "strategy"... they were shocked when I told then "I don't play to win, I play to wound". Mostly I just randomly screwed up outcomes and their carefully made plans by utterly defying expectations.
There will always be people for whom the disruptive element is the whole point, or those who cheat because they can.
As I said, people are selfish bastards.
That for some annoying others is a goal surprises you... well, are you new to the internet or something? The internet is a giant "annoy other people" machine.
This is why I continue to prefer console games with no internet access... I don't have to worry about the other guy cheating, but if the company made ways for me to "cheat" it doesn't hurt anybody.
If I want infinite ammo and can't die, who cares if I'm sitting in my basement and nobody else is affected?
Cheat codes used to be part of the fun of one-player games.
Yeah. Shame on Microsoft for making people get off an OS that isn't receiving updates and for pushing for people to get off an OS that will stop receiving them in a handful of years.
The biggest problem is they've decided that users don't get a vote in if they want this, they've decided to shove in additional tracking and ad infrastructure without telling people or having them opt-in, and have more or less decided it's their computer and not yours.
It is, and remains MY FUCKING COMPUTER. Whether or not I upgrade it isn't their choice.
And given their track record, I'm also betting they're going to leave people with borked systems, and then refuse to do anything about it.
Everything about this upgrade is largely stuff which benefits Microsoft, and which is being done TO their users... because all those people who will now get "you must get auto-updates which we will do anything we wish with your computer", those people are eventually going to get screwed by that idiotic policy.
Don't fucking act like Microsoft is doing this to benefit people. All that extra telemetry and ad information is to benefit them.
AMD still make machines that people actually use (I'm running an FX-8320E eight core now, and for my needs it's a great CPU).
I'll also point out that x64 was created by AMD.
It's a little bit on the bullshit side to claim they had a "brief period of success in the early 2000's"... they're still a company with multi-billion dollar revenues.
No, they'll deliver something they claim delivers those speeds, but which really only works under a few cases, but which they'll claim they can't really afford to sustain... and then you'll just end up paying 30% more for the same shitty network.
You know, what they've done with the last several iterations of this stuff. ZOMG, look at teh super fast network, followed by no, you can't really have those speeds.
I've pretty much come to the conclusion this stuff really only exists for marketing purposes, and then they cry poor when people try to use what they've been sold.
When I first saw the Windows 10 update in my tray and went "wait, WTF is this shit", while I was identifying it and tracking it down, some of the updates were literally updating the Windows Update and other system components to add "telemetry" and other shit.
They were updating the OS to help them track how successful they are at updating the OS, the adoption rates, and track how badly they fucked up the process. They were also adding ad frameworks and other crap.
They really did start pushing updates which bakes all of this shit into the existing OS's, so they could update you to an OS with even more of this shit.
To hell with Windows 10, I'm simply only taking security updates for my 8.1 desktop... I'm not running that shit.
When I bought Windows 8.1, it was with the knowledge Windows 10 was coming and I didn't want it.
Them subsequently deciding I wasn't allowed the product I paid for, and that I wasn't supposed to have a vote in the upgrade wasn't part of the option.
I've pretty much decided I'll take security updates, but that I otherwise don't give a damn about their updates.
It's still MY MACHINE, and the version of their software I bought didn't have an implied contract of being required to do whatever the fuck they wanted.
I've seen a couple of places do this with a forced bell curve.
They had pre-defined that you can only have so many at each level, and had to fit -- if you had 10 people, the number at each level was defined by a formula.
Which meant the ranking system couldn't say "wow, I have a bunch of good people", or "shit, I have a bunch of dullards".
Morons who manage by arbitrary metric tend to do a lousy job of it. Because apparently reality is a problem for such people.
I find that style of management pretty pathetic, because it's just drooling idiots blindly following stuff they don't understand, and can't see why it's failing them.
OK, what's the "crazy, strident, screeching nut job" fallacy one?
Sorry, I've seen the posts, and you don't get to be taken seriously by being a ranting idiot who is only a half a degree of crazy away from the time cube guy. At that point you should just accept that nobody is ever going to decide to try your "product" or listen to what you say.
Crazy internet troll posting isn't a criteria for ever trusting the crap you keep claiming is awesome.
Look, seriously this isn't fucking Twitter... stop using bloody URL shorteners... https://goo.gl/uLqxCT
If you can't post a proper link, don't publish the damned story.
Why do we keep acting like we're supposed to trust third parties to know where we're going or to not want to monetize this fact?
Oh, wait, between this and the fact that the summary has unicode artifacts, somehow I must be assuming timothy know how to be an "editor"... what a quaint notion.
So, root it, built it from a kit, forego the apps you really wanted, and hope you can trust these 3rd parties.
While technically correct, people generally don't wish to build their phone from a kit and have to take that level of control. Because it's a pain in the ass.
I've pretty much decided I'll use Firefox with no javascript or cookies enbaled for most of my browsing, I'll uninstall any app which is just a wrapper around content I can get from the web or which can't run in airplane mode, I'll mostly leave my wifi off, and when I used the native Google apps I just go "la la la". But for most people, that's not going to be acceptable either.
Your solution? I'd probably just stop using the device altogether... at a certain point in one's life, endlessly fiddling with technology ceases to be fun, and just becomes a chore.
How Do I Reduce Information Leakage From My Personal Devices?
You haven't been given the same tools on your mobile device as we have on desktops, because the ad revenue from mobile devices is what everybody most wants.
The OS, and every app largely exist to track you and serve you ads.
I'd be surprised if there was an easy mechanism, which worked on multiple devices, and didn't require a rooted device. Because this is precisely the kind of thing which isn't nearly as available as it should be.
Me, I'm betting the OS makers have pretty much decided no way in hell you're getting that kind of control, and if they gave it to you malicious apps would use it to take over where your device really goes.
Being able to control that is a two way street, and the potable devices don't surrender as much control.
What PC Perspective proved here is that users often claiming that RAIDs "feel faster" despite a lack of bandwidth result to prove it, are likely correct. Measurements now show that the latency of IO operations improves dramatically as you add drives to an array, giving a feeling of "snappiness" to a system beyond even what a single SSD can offer.
So, basically it partly takes seek time out of the equation, or something similar?
Because then in theory I guess you can be serving multiple requests instead of just one at a time.
Doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. If the latency is spread out a little, it may not seem as big for any individual transaction.
Me, I don't much give a crap about you not giving a crap about things I don't give a crap about, but if you insist on discussing how much you don't give a crap about me not giving a crap... well, I don't give a crap.
Like every other piece of drivel on the internet, just pretend it's not even there.
Slashdot Mirror
In fairness, intentionally weakening crypto requires as much understanding of it as doing it right.
Screwing it up, however, can be done by any moron.
Which happened here? Who the hell knows.
You know, it depends on how you flip it, which apparently you can do without having any ill intent.
Years ago in playing some games with co-workers, a coin toss was part of something. I would occasionally get about 8-10 in a row.
People used to kind of freak out, because I'd flip the same thing a bunch of times and they said it was statistically impossible. I said I just flipped the coin and they could see me do it.
Much later I saw things which suggested if you know how to flip it, you can control the outcome ... which means you can possibly do it by accident.
Is it still a fair coin toss if I have no idea how it happened? I sure wasn't cheating, and I couldn't do it on command, it just happened sometimes.
Really, statistically unlikely means just that -- given enough samples the chances pretty much become 100%.
Oooh, 3 of 100 times you could get that outcome, quick, call the witch doctor.
Statistically unlikely stuff happens all the freakin' time.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
The particulars of who wants to sell ads to us isn't really something we much care about, though I'm sure the new owners will have their own spin on pissing off the users depending on what their favorite things to shill for are.
Sure ... but it always comes down to "trust, but verify". Which really means you can't trust.
People will keep trying to cheat, and sometimes might even find ways to make it work. The higher the stakes, the higher the reward.
I consider it an unfortunate fact of human nature that, someone, somewhere will ALWAYS be motivated to cheat. Correspondingly, I think people would cheat just because you had rules.
Irrational? You don't think there are perfectly rational reasons for cheating?
Because, smug is a surprising motivator ... either beating you without you knowing how, or just because the act was fun. Because it was there. Because they could.
Wait, what? Since when are human standards supposed to make sense? Did I miss a memo?
So, my very cynical view of humans boils down to: humans are bastards, capable of great depths of terrible things -- and they'll do those terrible things for both fun and profit, and that in a large enough sample of humans, you should expect sociopathic behavior, because it will happen.
At the individual scale, humans can have a lot of redeeming qualities. But at the macro level, we're anything but.
Look, if people will cheat for FUN, they'll sure as hell cheat for MONEY.
EVERY endeavor with rules has had someone cheat. The Olympics, car racing, the fucking stock market ... all of it.
Are you so naive as to think that the higher the stakes the less likely someone is to cheat? Because if you are, you need to get out into the fucking real world and look at what humans are really like.
Yes, they're all very bad people who should be punished with spankings and sentenced to hard labor to atone for their sins ... now grow the hell up and stop acting like you just fell of the hay wagon.
I don't play online games because a) I have no desire to interact with some smart ass 12 year old half way around the world who can kick my ass, and b) because I prefer to pick up a game, play for a couple of hours, and put it down. On-line gaming provides no value to me. In fact, it's a negative.
The fact that you felt the need to make an ad hominem attack tells me you're fucking asshole with an inflated sense of self importance, in addition to a woefully incomplete picture of what human nature really is.
I'm not advocating cheating in multi-player games.
But I am saying people who are shocked it happens are probably idiots.
Of course my Skyrim example is nothing like cheating where money is on the line, because it was about why people might choose to define "fun" other than the game designer intended.
But if you think your moral outrage will change the world ... good luck with that. Humans will ALWAYS cheat in large enough samples.
Acting like they don't is naive and childish.
Have you met any humans?
Because, really ... if it's got rules, someone is cheating.
Winning by cheating doesn't seem to bother people, and it never has.
Are you seriously surprised by this? Has anything about human nature left you thinking you should expect otherwise?
"Kansai Science City" suggests to me this is as much about investigating it and building the technology as it is about a business model.
But, I don't think they're ignoring that either:
I for one welcome our new robotic, lettuce-growing overlords.
Because not everybody wants to play the way the game designers meant.
When I play Skyrim I now just ignore the major quests and mostly just explore and collect stuff and level up ... because the free-roaming aspect of it is what I consider more "fun" than trying to beat the quests. Who needs a plot line when I can just go kill some time wandering around? I make a point to not accidentally advance the plot any more.
Well, yeah .. for some people the cheating or messing with other people is the fun part.
I used to play some tabletop games with friends, and they could never figure out my "strategy" ... they were shocked when I told then "I don't play to win, I play to wound". Mostly I just randomly screwed up outcomes and their carefully made plans by utterly defying expectations.
There will always be people for whom the disruptive element is the whole point, or those who cheat because they can.
As I said, people are selfish bastards.
That for some annoying others is a goal surprises you ... well, are you new to the internet or something? The internet is a giant "annoy other people" machine.
Oh, come now ... people are selfish bastards, and if there are rules, someone is always trying to get around them.
Don't go expecting noble acts from video gamers or the internet just because you seem outraged.
This is really no different than real life ... someone is always trying to bypass the rules and not get caught.
This is why I continue to prefer console games with no internet access ... I don't have to worry about the other guy cheating, but if the company made ways for me to "cheat" it doesn't hurt anybody.
If I want infinite ammo and can't die, who cares if I'm sitting in my basement and nobody else is affected?
Cheat codes used to be part of the fun of one-player games.
The biggest problem is they've decided that users don't get a vote in if they want this, they've decided to shove in additional tracking and ad infrastructure without telling people or having them opt-in, and have more or less decided it's their computer and not yours.
It is, and remains MY FUCKING COMPUTER. Whether or not I upgrade it isn't their choice.
And given their track record, I'm also betting they're going to leave people with borked systems, and then refuse to do anything about it.
Everything about this upgrade is largely stuff which benefits Microsoft, and which is being done TO their users ... because all those people who will now get "you must get auto-updates which we will do anything we wish with your computer", those people are eventually going to get screwed by that idiotic policy.
Don't fucking act like Microsoft is doing this to benefit people. All that extra telemetry and ad information is to benefit them.
Windows 10 is basically spyware.
Because they're kind of forcing people to update, whether they want to or not.
AMD still make machines that people actually use (I'm running an FX-8320E eight core now, and for my needs it's a great CPU).
I'll also point out that x64 was created by AMD.
It's a little bit on the bullshit side to claim they had a "brief period of success in the early 2000's" ... they're still a company with multi-billion dollar revenues.
They're doing just fine.
No, they'll deliver something they claim delivers those speeds, but which really only works under a few cases, but which they'll claim they can't really afford to sustain ... and then you'll just end up paying 30% more for the same shitty network.
You know, what they've done with the last several iterations of this stuff. ZOMG, look at teh super fast network, followed by no, you can't really have those speeds.
I've pretty much come to the conclusion this stuff really only exists for marketing purposes, and then they cry poor when people try to use what they've been sold.
You'll never see this as a consumer.
Pretty much, yes.
When I first saw the Windows 10 update in my tray and went "wait, WTF is this shit", while I was identifying it and tracking it down, some of the updates were literally updating the Windows Update and other system components to add "telemetry" and other shit.
They were updating the OS to help them track how successful they are at updating the OS, the adoption rates, and track how badly they fucked up the process. They were also adding ad frameworks and other crap.
They really did start pushing updates which bakes all of this shit into the existing OS's, so they could update you to an OS with even more of this shit.
To hell with Windows 10, I'm simply only taking security updates for my 8.1 desktop ... I'm not running that shit.
When I bought Windows 8.1, it was with the knowledge Windows 10 was coming and I didn't want it.
Them subsequently deciding I wasn't allowed the product I paid for, and that I wasn't supposed to have a vote in the upgrade wasn't part of the option.
I've pretty much decided I'll take security updates, but that I otherwise don't give a damn about their updates.
It's still MY MACHINE, and the version of their software I bought didn't have an implied contract of being required to do whatever the fuck they wanted.
They can blow me.
I've seen a couple of places do this with a forced bell curve.
They had pre-defined that you can only have so many at each level, and had to fit -- if you had 10 people, the number at each level was defined by a formula.
Which meant the ranking system couldn't say "wow, I have a bunch of good people", or "shit, I have a bunch of dullards".
Morons who manage by arbitrary metric tend to do a lousy job of it. Because apparently reality is a problem for such people.
I find that style of management pretty pathetic, because it's just drooling idiots blindly following stuff they don't understand, and can't see why it's failing them.
OK, what's the "crazy, strident, screeching nut job" fallacy one?
Sorry, I've seen the posts, and you don't get to be taken seriously by being a ranting idiot who is only a half a degree of crazy away from the time cube guy. At that point you should just accept that nobody is ever going to decide to try your "product" or listen to what you say.
Crazy internet troll posting isn't a criteria for ever trusting the crap you keep claiming is awesome.
Yeah, no shit ... by browser just blocks NYT entirely ... no, I'm not turning on cookies and javascript so I can see your paywall.
I've just cut out the crap and blocked it entirely. NYT has ceased to exist as far as I'm concerned.
Look, seriously this isn't fucking Twitter ... stop using bloody URL shorteners ... https://goo.gl/uLqxCT
If you can't post a proper link, don't publish the damned story.
Why do we keep acting like we're supposed to trust third parties to know where we're going or to not want to monetize this fact?
Oh, wait, between this and the fact that the summary has unicode artifacts, somehow I must be assuming timothy know how to be an "editor" ... what a quaint notion.
So, root it, built it from a kit, forego the apps you really wanted, and hope you can trust these 3rd parties.
While technically correct, people generally don't wish to build their phone from a kit and have to take that level of control. Because it's a pain in the ass.
I've pretty much decided I'll use Firefox with no javascript or cookies enbaled for most of my browsing, I'll uninstall any app which is just a wrapper around content I can get from the web or which can't run in airplane mode, I'll mostly leave my wifi off, and when I used the native Google apps I just go "la la la". But for most people, that's not going to be acceptable either.
Your solution? I'd probably just stop using the device altogether ... at a certain point in one's life, endlessly fiddling with technology ceases to be fun, and just becomes a chore.
You haven't been given the same tools on your mobile device as we have on desktops, because the ad revenue from mobile devices is what everybody most wants.
The OS, and every app largely exist to track you and serve you ads.
I'd be surprised if there was an easy mechanism, which worked on multiple devices, and didn't require a rooted device. Because this is precisely the kind of thing which isn't nearly as available as it should be.
Me, I'm betting the OS makers have pretty much decided no way in hell you're getting that kind of control, and if they gave it to you malicious apps would use it to take over where your device really goes.
Being able to control that is a two way street, and the potable devices don't surrender as much control.
So, basically it partly takes seek time out of the equation, or something similar?
Because then in theory I guess you can be serving multiple requests instead of just one at a time.
Doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. If the latency is spread out a little, it may not seem as big for any individual transaction.
You're entirely free to ignore it.
Me, I don't much give a crap about you not giving a crap about things I don't give a crap about, but if you insist on discussing how much you don't give a crap about me not giving a crap ... well, I don't give a crap.
Like every other piece of drivel on the internet, just pretend it's not even there.