If you don't know you're talking to the correct endpoint, you have no idea if you're the victim of a man-in-the-middle attack. That's why certificates exist.
That said, a self-signed cert is definitely better than no encryption at all, because it changes the attack mode from passive (just read the conversation as it passes by on the wire) to active (intercept all communication between Alice and Bob and pretend to be Bob when talking to Alice and pretend to be Alice when talking to Bob). However the latter will be scripted up soon enough if self-signed certs became the norm for web sites.
This is exactly the same problem as distributing server keys for SSH. The first time you connect to an SSH server, you're presented with a fingerprint of the server's key, which you're supposed to verify through other means (e.g. call the sysadmin). If it doesn't match, you're a MITM attack victim and you don't log in. After that, your SSH client typically remembers the server's key and warns you if it ever changes.
This is exactly what SSL sites should do, except that research like this shows users don't understand the warning messages, so how would they know how to use that method any better than the current one?
That's actually a completely fair question. I had read that but couldn't recall where, so I searched for it and couldn't immediately find it. I did find this study which claims the opposite:
So I don't have facts and figures at hand to substantiate my assertion. However, there are some interesting issues with the report. It claims that nearly 200m gaming-class PCs were sold from Q3 2005 to Q3 2008, while nearly 75m PS3/Xbox360/Wii consoles sold in that same time frame. I'm not sure that a gaming-class PC is always purchased for gaming, however; most new PCs could be considered "gaming-class" even if there's no intention of purchasing them for games. Consoles on the other hand are almost always intended as games machines.
The number of hardware units sold only determines the largest potential market for game software, but the number that actually matters is the number of software units sold. If the "potential" market for PC games is 2x the console market but console versions of a game outsell the PC versions by 5x (that number is in line with what I remember reading) then any business trying to survive would be foolish to focus on the PC.
I really hate console gaming. I don't like controllers, I prefer keyboard and mouse, and I prefer the depth to games developed specifically for the PC. But there are many, many more people who would love to play games from time to time and don't want to do it on a tiny screen; consoles make that possible, and spares people from the technical hassle of dealing with Windows and drivers and patches, etc.
You are assuming that the current crop of game publishers gives a rat's ass about the PC market. They don't. They see the entire PC market as a den of thieves just waiting to copy their precious IP, and it's a tiny fraction of the size of the console market. Higher risk, vastly smaller return on investment, it's a no-brainer for them in a business sense: skip it. This is why they can justify trying to boil the frog by upping the DRM ante all the time--they don't really care that much if they lose the market.
The good news is, if the big publishers abandon the PC market, it will leave a demand vacuum and smaller companies will emerge to fill the gap by offering products people want.
Not to mess up a good rant, but you do understand that when you hand off a key to a certificate authority for signing, you only give them the public portion of the key? The same portion everyone who communicates would need in order to encrypt anything?
The CA signs your public key. It's basically a third party that confirms to Alice that Bob uses a particular public key. And if you know the public key is correct, only the owner of the private portion of the key can use it for encryption.
The kind of attack that would be required, if the CIA actually had control of the CAs, would be to present a phony public key for Bob, signed by the CA. And that only works if they can control the dissemination of the certificate itself. Control of the CA doesn't allow them to snoop on all conversations with the keys presented to them.
This is not to say that PGP is a bad idea, just that certs do not work like you suggest they do.
Except they all recently did it at the exact same time, without any possible time for observing a dip in business. That's a fairly convincing case for collusion...
Funny, input forms in the GEM system used on Atari ST series computers allowed you to set up input masks to encourage data to be formatted properly. Not a regular expression, but similar in concept: data was validated as it was typed.
And that was considered ordinary, twenty years ago.
Upgrade all your existing workstations to a secure OS (Linux, Mac, whatever you think is appropriate) and create a Windows VM that runs the old applications. Now you can keep access to all that old stuff in a more controlled fashion, while still locking down the host OS.
Right now women really have no motivation to keep from getting pregnant with anyone but the poorest of guys. It's a free lunch for them.
Anyone who would label nine months of pregnancy followed by an expensive delivery a "free ride" for the woman has clearly never lived with a pregnant woman. Pregnancy puts a woman's body through the ringer and damn near incapacitates them, and at the end you either pay a ton of money for surgical removal of the baby or suffer in agony as its rips through a too-small opening to get out.
Poor, single women who repeatedly get pregnant aren't making smart choices when they get pregnant, but for some of them if they made smarter choices they wouldn't be poor and single and pregnant in the first place. Getting pregnant certainly is not a way out of being poor and single.
Oh, and day care costs so much that it's impractical unless you have just one child and a reasonably-paying job. If you make lousy wages or have multiple children you're just hosed.
Anyone who's self-employed finds out about that cut, usually sometime before April 15, when they fill out their taxes and discover how much they're screwed over.
On the contrary, Microsoft is a business, a publicly-held one, and they're expected to make the most profit possible. Looking out for their bottom line IS their business.
The problem for any business is really whether they elect to take short-term profits or invest for the long term. Any business can make a fast buck by screwing over their customers; the downside is that over the long haul they tarnish their reputation so much that the customers don't come back, the investors don't want to be associated with them, etc. Building for long-term growth means you weigh the cost of pissing off your most likely source of recurring revenue.
In the US there seems to have been a mentality of short-term focus. I guess the assumption is once you burn through one quick money-making scheme, you just move on to the next--sell your shares and move on to the next up-and-coming business. You can make money this way, but in the long run it's very inefficient and the market will punish such behavior.
Oh look. The market did. At least as far as repackaging debt is concerned. Eventually it will catch up with Microsoft, too. (By which time Ballmer and crew will be long gone...)
IANAL etc. etc. but the whole point of the takedown provisions was to provide an expedited removal process that didn't require the courts. Last time I read the DMCA it seemed like the process was pretty straightforward: you send a takedown notice to the site that informs them someone posted infringing copies of your material on their site, and you include all your relevant contact information. The site takes down the material and informs the poster they've done so. The poster can then request the material be restored if they provide full contact information for themselves, to be forwarded on to you. Now you have contact information for the infringer and you can file suit if you care to.
Everybody gets up in arms over the DMCA takedown notice process, but this actually seems like a pretty reasonable policy in an otherwise really bad law. By providing expedited takedown, sites limit their liability for hosting infringing material. Anyone who receives a takedown can request the material be restored, at which point there's no counter-counter-takedown notice, it just moves completely to the courts. Sites do not get caught in the battle between copyright holder and infringer, unless they want to be.
Nothing is stopping a site from ignoring the takedown notice if they know it's bogus. The biggest downside is that contesting the notice requires losing anonymity, which leaves open the possibility of abusing the process specifically to find anonymous critics.
It's not a perfect process, but I think actually this is one part of the law where they were at least trying to do the right thing. (I'd bet that the copyright cartels didn't want any counter-notice process.)
Well, for starters current 3D engines don't always do just a simple texture-mapping anyway; they can be doing environment-mapped reflections, bump maps, and so on in their fragment shaders. This is roughly the same level of complexity.
On top of that, though, is the issue that when you ray-trace, you only generate textures for pixels that actually appear on the screen. When you rasterize, you don't always have your polygons ordered front-to-back so you end up rendering a pixel's texture only to have it replaced by another polygon's texture within the same scene. This is redundant work that raytracing eliminates.
The big downside to procedurals is that you're limited by your algorithms; they can produce infinite, non-repeating textures but you have to be a bit of a mathemagician to come up with completely new ones. Artists, on the other hand, are much easier to come by...
This is what the environment of hysteria is doing to the US.
Who exactly is terrorizing us these days? Seems like our "elected officials" just want us to be scared all the time so we won't really think about what's going on.
Theoretically speaking, a secret string in a password and a secret string in a URL should be equivalent, since they both require "something you know". The difference is that URLs are not generally treated as secrets, so your browser handles them differently. Your browser automatically records all URLs, but generally ASKS before remembering passwords. Also, your users may not realize URLs with secrets in them should be treated differently; they may pass the URLs around to their friends without realizing they're supposed to be "secret". Finally, it's usually easier to assign individual passwords to users (and thus revoke them when leaked) than to assign individual URLs to users.
So it depends on your use. It's not always a bad thing, and in environments requiring only minimal security it can be "good enough" in exchange for high convenience. Just don't consider it the same as an actual password.
It's true that mathematical proportions and structures have been found in artwork for centuries, but what's different about these things is the role of the algorithm and raw computational power in producing this artwork. These are works that could not have been done before the availability of computers. The artist directs and controls the mathematics, using them like other artists use different kinds of paints, brushes, and canvas. But the computer does the mind-numbingly tedious work of billions of computations to render it on-screen. This is not all that different from artists using 3D sculpting and rendering tools; it's just a different set of algorithms.
Others have pointed out Electric Sheep and Apophysis; these focus on one particular type of non-linear iterated function system, the "fractal flame". There are many other fractal rendering tools out there, some free, some not. Wikipedia has a list if you're interested. This is a medium that has been in constant change for twenty years and doesn't look like it's ready to settle down any time soon.
While I understand and agree with the general sentiment of your post, I would suggest that there is no X sufficiently large that "receiving X spam emails is about as bad as being raped." To suggest that even a billion emails, enough to leave your personally-owned and lovingly-maintained mail server a smoldering slag heap in the co-lo rack, compares to the very personal, real, and in many ways unfixable feeling of violation that comes with rape is just a bit extreme.
Simple: sometimes such information gets lost, or doesn't get acted on, and the bug persists. That bug could be exposing thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of users of that site to risks they're not aware of. If one person found it, another surely can, so it's a reasonable assumption that someone else other than the site owner could know about the bug and be exploiting it for personal gain. At that point, being aware of the bug but not informing the users is allowing them to be exposed to unnecessary risk. Businesses are often reluctant or slow to fix problems because they assume nobody knows about them or they're costly to fix (just like auto companies hate to have to recall cars to fix problems). Sometimes, the only way to get the problem fixed is to announce it publicly and give the company a bit of a black eye.
What's you're supposed to do is suck it up and take it like a man.
Let me explain. You have to decide what it is you're trying to accomplish as a blacklist operator. Are you trying to advise people of spam sources? Or are you trying to punish spammers and their friends?
If you're just trying to advise people of spam sources, so that they can choose not to receive mail from spammers, then do just that. List spam sources, and stop there. Mission accomplished, although spammers will move around and you'll have to maintain your database. Don't like that? Don't run a blacklist.
If you're trying to punish spammers, or you're trying to evict them from the internet, then you're probably OK with the whole collateral damage thing. And that's fine... just be honest with your blacklist users that that's what you do, so they can make an informed decision about whether you're trustworthy or not.
The biggest problem with blacklists is that their operators tend to start out with the first attitude, but as the maintenance grinds them down, they shift over to the second group. So most blacklists start off well-intentioned before sliding down into ethics almost as questionable as the spammer.
The bug is that the Acrobat Reader runs the JavaScript.
Sites are "fixing" this by implementing work-arounds on the server to refuse serving the file if the script is tacked onto the URL. But these are kluges, stop-gap measures to reduce the damage until a proper patch can be made. The sites are not vulnerable; the reader is.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't know you're talking to the correct endpoint, you have no idea if you're the victim of a man-in-the-middle attack. That's why certificates exist.
That said, a self-signed cert is definitely better than no encryption at all, because it changes the attack mode from passive (just read the conversation as it passes by on the wire) to active (intercept all communication between Alice and Bob and pretend to be Bob when talking to Alice and pretend to be Alice when talking to Bob). However the latter will be scripted up soon enough if self-signed certs became the norm for web sites.
This is exactly the same problem as distributing server keys for SSH. The first time you connect to an SSH server, you're presented with a fingerprint of the server's key, which you're supposed to verify through other means (e.g. call the sysadmin). If it doesn't match, you're a MITM attack victim and you don't log in. After that, your SSH client typically remembers the server's key and warns you if it ever changes.
This is exactly what SSL sites should do, except that research like this shows users don't understand the warning messages, so how would they know how to use that method any better than the current one?
That's actually a completely fair question. I had read that but couldn't recall where, so I searched for it and couldn't immediately find it. I did find this study which claims the opposite:
http://www.edge-online.com/news/study-claims-pc-market-largest (Link to a summary since the full original report is expensive)
So I don't have facts and figures at hand to substantiate my assertion. However, there are some interesting issues with the report. It claims that nearly 200m gaming-class PCs were sold from Q3 2005 to Q3 2008, while nearly 75m PS3/Xbox360/Wii consoles sold in that same time frame. I'm not sure that a gaming-class PC is always purchased for gaming, however; most new PCs could be considered "gaming-class" even if there's no intention of purchasing them for games. Consoles on the other hand are almost always intended as games machines.
The number of hardware units sold only determines the largest potential market for game software, but the number that actually matters is the number of software units sold. If the "potential" market for PC games is 2x the console market but console versions of a game outsell the PC versions by 5x (that number is in line with what I remember reading) then any business trying to survive would be foolish to focus on the PC.
I really hate console gaming. I don't like controllers, I prefer keyboard and mouse, and I prefer the depth to games developed specifically for the PC. But there are many, many more people who would love to play games from time to time and don't want to do it on a tiny screen; consoles make that possible, and spares people from the technical hassle of dealing with Windows and drivers and patches, etc.
You are assuming that the current crop of game publishers gives a rat's ass about the PC market. They don't. They see the entire PC market as a den of thieves just waiting to copy their precious IP, and it's a tiny fraction of the size of the console market. Higher risk, vastly smaller return on investment, it's a no-brainer for them in a business sense: skip it. This is why they can justify trying to boil the frog by upping the DRM ante all the time--they don't really care that much if they lose the market.
The good news is, if the big publishers abandon the PC market, it will leave a demand vacuum and smaller companies will emerge to fill the gap by offering products people want.
Not to mess up a good rant, but you do understand that when you hand off a key to a certificate authority for signing, you only give them the public portion of the key? The same portion everyone who communicates would need in order to encrypt anything?
The CA signs your public key. It's basically a third party that confirms to Alice that Bob uses a particular public key. And if you know the public key is correct, only the owner of the private portion of the key can use it for encryption.
The kind of attack that would be required, if the CIA actually had control of the CAs, would be to present a phony public key for Bob, signed by the CA. And that only works if they can control the dissemination of the certificate itself. Control of the CA doesn't allow them to snoop on all conversations with the keys presented to them.
This is not to say that PGP is a bad idea, just that certs do not work like you suggest they do.
Oh how I wish I had mod points.
When there's real money at stake, there will be cheating. Rampant cheating. Lots of kids will get busted, but the money will make it worth the risk.
Except they all recently did it at the exact same time, without any possible time for observing a dip in business. That's a fairly convincing case for collusion...
Funny, input forms in the GEM system used on Atari ST series computers allowed you to set up input masks to encourage data to be formatted properly. Not a regular expression, but similar in concept: data was validated as it was typed.
And that was considered ordinary, twenty years ago.
I feel old.
No, they'll offer the same prices and pocket the difference. Still attractive to businesses, but not to the consumer.
Cookies + no XSRF protection = exploit.
I have seen the way out.
It is virtualization.
Upgrade all your existing workstations to a secure OS (Linux, Mac, whatever you think is appropriate) and create a Windows VM that runs the old applications. Now you can keep access to all that old stuff in a more controlled fashion, while still locking down the host OS.
Right now women really have no motivation to keep from getting pregnant with anyone but the poorest of guys. It's a free lunch for them.
Anyone who would label nine months of pregnancy followed by an expensive delivery a "free ride" for the woman has clearly never lived with a pregnant woman. Pregnancy puts a woman's body through the ringer and damn near incapacitates them, and at the end you either pay a ton of money for surgical removal of the baby or suffer in agony as its rips through a too-small opening to get out.
Poor, single women who repeatedly get pregnant aren't making smart choices when they get pregnant, but for some of them if they made smarter choices they wouldn't be poor and single and pregnant in the first place. Getting pregnant certainly is not a way out of being poor and single.
Oh, and day care costs so much that it's impractical unless you have just one child and a reasonably-paying job. If you make lousy wages or have multiple children you're just hosed.
Of course you're an AC just trolling...
Anyone who's self-employed finds out about that cut, usually sometime before April 15, when they fill out their taxes and discover how much they're screwed over.
On the contrary, Microsoft is a business, a publicly-held one, and they're expected to make the most profit possible. Looking out for their bottom line IS their business.
The problem for any business is really whether they elect to take short-term profits or invest for the long term. Any business can make a fast buck by screwing over their customers; the downside is that over the long haul they tarnish their reputation so much that the customers don't come back, the investors don't want to be associated with them, etc. Building for long-term growth means you weigh the cost of pissing off your most likely source of recurring revenue.
In the US there seems to have been a mentality of short-term focus. I guess the assumption is once you burn through one quick money-making scheme, you just move on to the next--sell your shares and move on to the next up-and-coming business. You can make money this way, but in the long run it's very inefficient and the market will punish such behavior.
Oh look. The market did. At least as far as repackaging debt is concerned. Eventually it will catch up with Microsoft, too. (By which time Ballmer and crew will be long gone...)
Just WPA. WEP was already hideously broken but now WPA should also be considered broken. WPA2 is still safe.
Although, if you really have data you're concerned about keeping safe, you should (a) use a wired network, (b) use IPSEC, or (c) both.
IANAL etc. etc. but the whole point of the takedown provisions was to provide an expedited removal process that didn't require the courts. Last time I read the DMCA it seemed like the process was pretty straightforward: you send a takedown notice to the site that informs them someone posted infringing copies of your material on their site, and you include all your relevant contact information. The site takes down the material and informs the poster they've done so. The poster can then request the material be restored if they provide full contact information for themselves, to be forwarded on to you. Now you have contact information for the infringer and you can file suit if you care to.
Everybody gets up in arms over the DMCA takedown notice process, but this actually seems like a pretty reasonable policy in an otherwise really bad law. By providing expedited takedown, sites limit their liability for hosting infringing material. Anyone who receives a takedown can request the material be restored, at which point there's no counter-counter-takedown notice, it just moves completely to the courts. Sites do not get caught in the battle between copyright holder and infringer, unless they want to be.
Nothing is stopping a site from ignoring the takedown notice if they know it's bogus. The biggest downside is that contesting the notice requires losing anonymity, which leaves open the possibility of abusing the process specifically to find anonymous critics.
It's not a perfect process, but I think actually this is one part of the law where they were at least trying to do the right thing. (I'd bet that the copyright cartels didn't want any counter-notice process.)
Well, for starters current 3D engines don't always do just a simple texture-mapping anyway; they can be doing environment-mapped reflections, bump maps, and so on in their fragment shaders. This is roughly the same level of complexity.
On top of that, though, is the issue that when you ray-trace, you only generate textures for pixels that actually appear on the screen. When you rasterize, you don't always have your polygons ordered front-to-back so you end up rendering a pixel's texture only to have it replaced by another polygon's texture within the same scene. This is redundant work that raytracing eliminates.
The big downside to procedurals is that you're limited by your algorithms; they can produce infinite, non-repeating textures but you have to be a bit of a mathemagician to come up with completely new ones. Artists, on the other hand, are much easier to come by...
This is what the environment of hysteria is doing to the US.
Who exactly is terrorizing us these days? Seems like our "elected officials" just want us to be scared all the time so we won't really think about what's going on.
Theoretically speaking, a secret string in a password and a secret string in a URL should be equivalent, since they both require "something you know". The difference is that URLs are not generally treated as secrets, so your browser handles them differently. Your browser automatically records all URLs, but generally ASKS before remembering passwords. Also, your users may not realize URLs with secrets in them should be treated differently; they may pass the URLs around to their friends without realizing they're supposed to be "secret". Finally, it's usually easier to assign individual passwords to users (and thus revoke them when leaked) than to assign individual URLs to users.
So it depends on your use. It's not always a bad thing, and in environments requiring only minimal security it can be "good enough" in exchange for high convenience. Just don't consider it the same as an actual password.
Have you checked the size of those "Baby" Bells lately? They've actually grown up quite a bit. They're even acting like unruly teenagers.
It's true that mathematical proportions and structures have been found in artwork for centuries, but what's different about these things is the role of the algorithm and raw computational power in producing this artwork. These are works that could not have been done before the availability of computers. The artist directs and controls the mathematics, using them like other artists use different kinds of paints, brushes, and canvas. But the computer does the mind-numbingly tedious work of billions of computations to render it on-screen. This is not all that different from artists using 3D sculpting and rendering tools; it's just a different set of algorithms.
Others have pointed out Electric Sheep and Apophysis; these focus on one particular type of non-linear iterated function system, the "fractal flame". There are many other fractal rendering tools out there, some free, some not. Wikipedia has a list if you're interested. This is a medium that has been in constant change for twenty years and doesn't look like it's ready to settle down any time soon.
While I understand and agree with the general sentiment of your post, I would suggest that there is no X sufficiently large that "receiving X spam emails is about as bad as being raped." To suggest that even a billion emails, enough to leave your personally-owned and lovingly-maintained mail server a smoldering slag heap in the co-lo rack, compares to the very personal, real, and in many ways unfixable feeling of violation that comes with rape is just a bit extreme.
Now, can we get back to lynching spammers?
Simple: sometimes such information gets lost, or doesn't get acted on, and the bug persists. That bug could be exposing thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of users of that site to risks they're not aware of. If one person found it, another surely can, so it's a reasonable assumption that someone else other than the site owner could know about the bug and be exploiting it for personal gain. At that point, being aware of the bug but not informing the users is allowing them to be exposed to unnecessary risk. Businesses are often reluctant or slow to fix problems because they assume nobody knows about them or they're costly to fix (just like auto companies hate to have to recall cars to fix problems). Sometimes, the only way to get the problem fixed is to announce it publicly and give the company a bit of a black eye.
What's you're supposed to do is suck it up and take it like a man.
Let me explain. You have to decide what it is you're trying to accomplish as a blacklist operator. Are you trying to advise people of spam sources? Or are you trying to punish spammers and their friends?
If you're just trying to advise people of spam sources, so that they can choose not to receive mail from spammers, then do just that. List spam sources, and stop there. Mission accomplished, although spammers will move around and you'll have to maintain your database. Don't like that? Don't run a blacklist.
If you're trying to punish spammers, or you're trying to evict them from the internet, then you're probably OK with the whole collateral damage thing. And that's fine... just be honest with your blacklist users that that's what you do, so they can make an informed decision about whether you're trustworthy or not.
The biggest problem with blacklists is that their operators tend to start out with the first attitude, but as the maintenance grinds them down, they shift over to the second group. So most blacklists start off well-intentioned before sliding down into ethics almost as questionable as the spammer.
The bug is that the Acrobat Reader runs the JavaScript.
Sites are "fixing" this by implementing work-arounds on the server to refuse serving the file if the script is tacked onto the URL. But these are kluges, stop-gap measures to reduce the damage until a proper patch can be made. The sites are not vulnerable; the reader is.
...and of course somehow I managed to post the same link twice... ...oops...