Coincidence? Probably not considering the vendor stated "..I'm not sure we could fix it all anyway without a rewrite." Looks like they could fix it, but just needed a little full-disclosure motivation.
They might not have been lying. Fixing it properly might have required a rewrite, and instead they may have been forced to include a number of slapped-together kludges with Lord-knows-what side-effects under extreme time pressure. I know what kind of code *I* write when I'm under that kind of time constraint, and I've never seen evidence in any of the projects I've worked on where other people coding under an unreasonable schedule resulted in code I didn't want to completely scrap upon examination (but wasn't allowed to thanks to my own time constraints and lack of testing resources). Frankly, I've had bugs I couldn't fix without major rewrites thanks to the fixes that other people have put in.
So, who knows? Maybe these quick patches will result in other vulnerabilities or just nigh-impossible to maintain code. I've seen it before. While its good to put a little pressure to see bugs fixed, I wouldn't say public disclosure is a secret recipe for correct and functional software when it results in embarrassing a company into getting a fix -- ANY fix -- into place ASAP.
I do realize, though, that the alternative may be the company deprioritizing the bug and never fixing it at all. Companies are lazy that way. It seems like a lose-lose scenario.
The billing system HAS to keep track of all of this to properly bill for non-unlimited access. Furthermore, it has to keep track of this for unlimited billing customers because plan changes do NOT come through instantly. Usually plan changes come in once per day.
Also, there's absolutely no reason for Cingular to be sharing their billing data with the NSA when the modus operandi for wiretapping in the land-line world has been to simply provide a live copy of all the switch data as it comes through. I doubt that the NSA wants the billing records considering how many calls were just simply stripped out to prevent bug-created billing problems from overbilling the customer at the cell phone company I worked for. The NSA would probably prefer the raw records to draw their own conclusions from.
And super robot shows can have deeper plots than you suspect. It can come down to just looking cool but if you watch something like Getter robo you will see that you can have a plot where the mecha are important but the entire story doesn't revolve around them.
However, GoLion was NOT one of these shows. GoLion was utterly derivative crap that just happened to mix sentai and giant robots into a formula that sold well to little boys.
There is no depth and no subtlety to get -- all you do is combine, pull out the super weapon, and the episode is over. Everything else is just episodic filler of villians cackling, teammates bickering, and teammates unnecessarily getting injured because they're too stupid to combine and do their super attack until the right amount of time has been wasted. There was no deep metaplot, no social commentary, and no real character growth.
As long as the movie studio doesn't try to make it edgy, introduce unnecessary inter-party conflict, ditch the mystical elements of Voltron for "hard" science, or pick the most talentless actors they can for it, it's going to be hard to screw up. Of course, I have faith in Hollywood to do every single thing I just described, so...
67000 complaints indicate the prevalence of such material. Could't it be because there is a real demand?
Not necessarily. All it implies is that >=1 person has made =67,000 complaints. The actual number of people bothered by such a thing could be tiny or huge.
I've always been amused by the fact that the majority of what Japanese people consider rude or crass speech is the kind of speech that young children (especially boys) use before they learn how to properly talk around strangers.
The language does have a few obscene words that aren't meant to be used around kids (mostly sex terms), but much of what could get you punched in the face if you used it in a bar is literally childish speech.
If you really want to nail the people that read the story literally, ask them how the world was created in six literal, 24-hour solar days when the sun wasn't even created until the fourth day.
That's easy. The light and the dark cycled without a central source for the light and without "lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night." You're not even trying, or your targets are pretty ignorant of Genesis 1 or unimaginative if they think the Earth needed a normal source of light to have light when miracles are about.
After all, young-earth creationists are generally willing to accept the idea that physics didn't work the same way as it does now to get around all the physical evidence that points to the story not being literal.
Every time I criticize middle-eastern theocracies, some idiot (ok, MANY idiots) jump in screaming about how "that's their culture", and "we have no right to criticize".
I have seen a lot of rhetoric about people doing this, but I've never actually seen it. I've always considered it a conservative urban legend. Do you have any examples of people doing this where you're pretty sure that they're serious?
Someone who believes the universe is a divine monarchy can never honestly embrace secular democracy.
I respectfully disagree. There is a logically consistent course to desire to submit to the authority of God but to shy from submitting to the authority of other men.
Your quote is only true if we can know 100% the mind of God and act as he wills. Since we cannot, and since men are fallible, it makes sense not to concentrate too much power in the hands of people who, according to the Bible, are all sinners. Thus, to ensure that men have the freedom to pursue a righteous course not impeded by the will of a tyrant, a society with maximized freedom and minimized secular authority is essential.
In other words, because we don't know the mind of God, we can't trust any societal institution that places limits on the freedoms of people to adhere to their own moral codes unless their codes demand the restrictions of the freedoms of others or do universally recognized harm (e.g. murder).
Since we cannot trust the leadership of men who claim to be chosen by God if we cannot verify his words ourselves, democracy is the best course.
The phrase "for example" means I am providing you with a subset of data, so that you may better understand WTF I am talking about, and why it would be considered offensive. [...] However, you don't have any clue who I am, or what my personal cultural beliefs or biases might be, only those of America at large by my statement.
This is the sort of semantical parsing that I often see when people are embarrassed by having been caught in a bad argument and who are attempting to reframe it in a positive light. While it's true that I have no direct evidence of your beliefs, what you chose to read into my post is a pretty good indicator of what seems important to you. Especially, given the tone. I could be wrong, but go and reread the post from a neutral viewpoint and see if it's not a reasonable assumption.
Good for you, you pass. Look through this thread, nobody said all slaves were black. That would be your assumption.
Of course nobody said that all slaves were black. However, you did imply that it was the first association that someone should make when presented with the word "slave." It's largely irrelevant to the point being made, but it never even dawned on me to consider a racial element in the comment, nor would it occur to me to link the two into a declaration of the inferiority of people of color. It's just not the way I think about people.
You are equating the feelings and treatment of mice with slaves.
Of course I am -- PETA people do. The whole point of the question, like almost any Devil's Advocate question, is to force someone to perceive a different worldview than they're used to. In this case, I posed the question to force someone to question and think about the propositional difference between PETA members and the general populace: "Why do people have the right not to be bred for use and abuse, but animals do not?"
While I have an answer to that for myself, it's only because I've actually thought about it instead of just gut-reacting with, "Well, they just don't!" like most people do when confronted with this quandary. My question was meant to force people to consider the difference (or non-difference) as well as to illustrate that a dedicated member of PETA would easily see the parallels.
So what? What does that justify? That doesn't even make any sense, as you seem to despise PETA's true motives and actions as much as I do. Yet you are willing to use THEIR moral compass to justify YOUR actions?
Not really. However, it's a closed and self-limited mind that can't consider where people you disagree with are coming from. I constantly pose questions like this to myself when confronted with a puzzling philosophy, partially to see if I'm really right, partially to see how to argue against it if I am, and partially to see where I can find common ground and avoid unnecessarily bitter bickering if I don't have to.
I think a lot of the problem with politics in this country is the inability of people (of all political persuasions) to truly understand the people who have passionate beliefs different from theirs. It's too easy to just hate someone for being "wrong" instead of trying to understand why they're different and to see how they may be genuinely good (if wrong) people. I don't "despise PETA's true motives" (though I'm often not fond of their actions and condescending attitudes); I just disagree with their fundamental premise. Most PETA people are genuinely caring people who are just mad as a hornet at the perceived uncaring cruelty of people around them. They too fall into the trap of hating people who think differently because their way of thinking labels them as "evil," and thus they perform ridiculous stunts and snipe at people.
PETA members are like pro-lifers in this way, though both camps would most likely violently object to being lumped into the same group. They see inherent rights in a living entity that others don't, and they're horrified at the "callous" disregard of those rights b
Yadda yadda. You're talking about the law and valuable services that ham radio operators provide.
Meanwhile, we were talking about favoritism and why the FCC was willing to ignore every single point you just brought up for broadband over power lines and not for the new wireless devices which inconveniences TV instead.
1) Not all slaves were black. Slavery and forced breeding have been practiced world-wide throughout history. It is a function of your own cultural biases that you equated the two and immediately took offense from that when what you should've taken offense at was the suggestion that abuse of slaves can be justified by the reason for their birth.
2) PETA members equate all humans and animals in terms of the rights they share. To a PETA member, there is no difference between the two because both lines of reasoning result in justification of the abuse of a creature with inherent rights merely because it was bred for those purposes.
Personally, I disagree on the fundamental principle of which rights mice enjoy, and so the question has no real implications to me. However, to a PETA member, it frames the crux of their argument against animal experimentation, and to a British anti-vivisectionist it can justify even violence against other people.
The difference is how many people care about the two. Ham radio operators are mostly obscure hobbyists that most of the people in charge of the FCC may have never had any encounter with. Terrestrial broadcast TV watchers are a bit more ubiquitous, and so the FCC cares about them more. Plus, they tend to be from an elderly demographic that's a bit more politically active, especially in terms of contacting officials and donating to campaigns.
It's really no surprise that the FCC can brush one of them off but have to pay attention to the other.
I don't have satellite nor cable, and I don't see why I should lose them just so some geeks can have better Internet access.
You're using the TV version of free dial-up access if you're relying on terrestrial TV signals for entertainment. If you had access to wireless, high-speed internet, you could watch streaming video instead. I should even have to into the difference in choices of entertainment available between the two. Plus, most UHF stations in the upper numbers are really low-quality programming.
By the way, it's not just geeks that use the internet anymore, just so you know. They're replacing the generation that uses UHF anyway.
Or maybe you have a vested interest in everyone being subject to cable/satellite corporate monopolies...
I dunno. Sounds to me like maybe you have a vested interest in everyone being subject to cable/phone corporate monopolies. <g>
Opening up wireless spectrum to high-speed, two-way internet access might provide us with at least as much competition as there is in the cell phone market right now. At least, we'd no longer be dependent on whichever two companies run two types of wire to our houses.
There were even proposals on the table from a group that wanted to do free, ad-supported access, so if their long-shot proposal wins you'd get much of the same experience of free TV you have now if price is your concern. Even Google is making rumbles of ad-supported devices.
Still it's a shame their device wasn't properly engineered.
If the idiots at PITA didn't care more for a mouse than it did human life. They would realize that if we were not testing on these mice the mice would never even have been born.
I'm not much of a PETA supporter. I think that avoiding cruelty to animals is important, but I strongly object to the idea that we have no right to make use of them for food or for research into medicines that save human lives. However, I would like to point out that this line of reasoning is nigh-irrelevant in the context of their beliefs about the inherent rights of animals. Let me ask a simple, devil's advocate question to illustrate why:
Wouldn't this same justification for mistreatment apply to people born into slavery thanks to forced breeding?
Bit torrent have made a closed source client their mainline client, and have decided to fortify their rights to the protocol too (its closed, but an SDK can be requested).
Correction -- their SDK can be *paid for*.
I beginning to think that the whole point of acquiring the most popular closed source client was to allow them to close and charge for the SDK. The counterpoint to this argument is that if any one open source P2P grits it teeth and pays whatever fee they're going to charge open source clients, then their implementation becomes the new reference.
A lot of people here are talking about how the Mainline client has once again aggressively pursued irrelevance, but uTorrent's marketshare is going to be nigh impossible to unseat unless they do something self-destructive like removing a popular feature they don't like (like encrpytion). They have a really good chance of dictating the development of the future of the protocol with that client in hand.
I think that this finally explains the reason for the buy-out and the lack of open source. I had previously thought it was due to uTorrent's original developer's dislike of open source, but it may have more to do with control and with monetizing the SDK.
Not being up to snuff on trademark law, as far as I know, there are two important questions to determining the merits of this case.
1) Has J&J properly defended their trademark before? If the trademark is seen as having a universal meaning (like Kleenex or Xerox), then they can lose their right to it.
2) Does the ARC's previous use of the symbol in a relief charity context constitute use in the same general arena as J&J's medical supplies? After all, two companies not invovled the same market can often safely use a trademark without stepping on each other's legal rights. If not, then the ACR's century of use of the symbol is meaningless in considering whether their current use represents a violation for the new purposes they're putting it towards.
At any rate, J&J's lawyers have to have a feeling that they've got a good chance of winning or else they wouldn't even try. There's no company advantage to going head to head against one of the world's most recognized humanitarian aid charities (and almost certainly a good customer of J&J's) unless they're sure they can win.
Except, the immigrants of old, did not come to your country, and want to out and out destroy it and replace it with a theocracy.
Nah, you had to look at home grown movements for that sort of thing. Violent theocratic movements have long been a part of the American political landscape. Some were born that way like the modern Dominionist movement, and others were made that way through persecution like the LDS church's early days.
For the most part, though, it's worth mentioning that a desire to tear down American and replace it with a theocracy is extremely rare in immigrants and is no justification for actions taken against the immigrant population as a whole.
They also pretty much immigrated legally...
In those days, immigration was pretty much trivial. You got on a boat, and you did some paperwork when you got off. Immigration control didn't really start until after the Civil War (mostly as a means of protecting US workers' jobs from people who were willing to work for less). The Federal Government didn't really get deeply involved until 1891. Quotas didn't really start until after WWI to stop the flood of European refugees.
Back before that, anti-immigration sentiment was primarily expressed through discriminatory laws once you got here. Turning people away is a pretty recent thing in US history.
So, let's compare apples to apples here. Immigrants trying to imigrate today face legal barriers that their predecessors did not. Saying that they all immigrated legally is like saying that no one broke highway speed limits back in the early 19th century when there weren't cars.
I'm sure every time someone puts up a blog about how they raised a barn on the weekend (complete with happy snaps) the people in the developing world think "yeah, so what?"
Something tells me that the Amish aren't really all that into blogging.
You are confusing me with fyngyrz....Um. Yeah. Looks like I was -- to the point that responded to his post before even reading yours. Yeesh.
The software zooms in for me if I see an anomaly I want to edit, but it doesn't know the anomaly is there. It seems highly likely that it would be possible for an hacking interface to detect the presence of a firewall and show it to me, as well as showing me data, without it knowing what to do to break it.
The problem of course, is that image editing software isn't capable of making a subjective decision on what improves the look of an image. Hacking tools would be able to make an objective decision on whether an exploit is usable or not. The difficulty of recognition is different and thus more able to be automated. The tool would also require more access to present such information than a device could realistically have.
That's my main objection. The kinds of interfaces presented in popular cyberpunk fiction just aren't realistic.
Reading skills not so hot? You quoted me correctly: "Assuming it's meant to be used in a legitimate matter"
The rest of that clause is "...at some point," which you omit because it's the part that makes you sentence imply what I thought it meant. It does not directly imply that the interface cannot be misused, as would be the case for nearly anyone using it from the outside. It only implies that it would have to have *some* legitimate use -- thus justifying the presence of an interface for cyberspace hackers to use. It may have not been what you intended, but it's what you wrote.
Debugging is not hacking, and hacking is not debugging.
I'm well aware that the two are not synonymous, but there can be overlap. After all, most exploits in code are found by trying to mess with inputs to certain functions -- buffer overruns, stack smashing attempts, etc. Doing this requires some knowledge of how the code is organized and meant to work, and when you don't have source code available, you turn to tools for helping to analyze the executable. A debugger (even without symbol tables) is quite useful for this when you can host a copy of the application to be cracked into on your own machine since it lets you watch the flow of the program as it handles your malformed input.
When you can't, it's mostly flying blind using the interfaces provided by the program whether it be something as elaborate as RPC or something as common and simple as text input. However, you can't know everything that's available to try (outside of the normal flow of the program) without having some sort of read access to the entire application. If you don't, then you're as blind as someone trying to crack a CGI program by only interacting with the webpages it generates. This is still a viable approach (as seen repeatedly in the wild), but it's not anything like how hacking is portrayed in cyberpunk.
Thus, you're back to a magical tool that someone gets information about the application that it shouldn't have but which for some reason can't act on it without a human being. Thus, it's illogical and unrealistic.
As for the rest of your post, I tire of getting worked up over ad hominem attacks, so I'm ignoring it.
A candidate would focus their entire effort on the minimum number of locations where more than 60-70% of the voters are located. Nobody outside of those areas would count at all.
This fear is pretty unjustified. The current breakdown of votes between the parties is already strongly tied to population density. It would be nearly suicide for Republicans to try to court the city voters they've smeared for decades in the so-called "culture wars." Given the national reach of television and other media, there's more than enough ability and incentive to still chase rural voters.
However -- current political landscape ignored -- for the purposes of being as representative as possible, wouldn't targeting 60-70% of voters be more democratic and just than just only caring about the third that lives in swing states?
Direct fraud would be much, much easier if it was truely a national election.
How and why? The election mechanism doesn't change at all -- just the what the tallied votes mean. Nothing changes at the polling place or in mailing your vote in between the two methods of counting, and counting is just as easy to watch over in a national election as it is in an electoral election.
Losing a neavily Democratic district's votes would have a nationwide, direct result.
So could losing a heavily Republican district's votes. What's wrong with that? Districts only make sense when they're tied directly to a specific office -- otherwise, they're just a way of marginalizing the votes of people within them. This is why gerrymandering is such a problem.
Also in a direct election you would need nationwide standards rather than local control.
Why? We already elect national offices like the President with a patchwork of standards? Why do you think that proportional voting makes this worse than "winner-take-all" voting? Frankly, what's wrong with national standards for national elections?
This means the relatively well-known problems in Chicago would need to be fixed rather than just being ignored. Yes, vote fraud in Chicago could easily swing the entire election rather than being isolated to Illinois where the Republicans already know they are going to lose the state.
Two points: 1) National scrutiny and national standards might result in enough pressure being applied to fix this instead of it just being up to the state government. Is that bad? 2) Republican votes in Illinois would no longer by completely suppressed by fraud like you claim they are now since Illinois would no longer be winner-take-all. Is that bad?
Think of all the Republicans in northern California whose votes don't matter now. Think of the Republicans in upstate New York. Think of the Democrats in Texas. Think of the Democrats in Utah. Is there any reason that these people's votes shouldn't matter because of arbitrary lines on a map?
This is one thing that happened in 2000 that we are still recovering from - Gore was announced as the winner and then it was changed to Bush after some people went to bed knowing that Gore had won. They still haven't gotten over that and are still sure that somehow in the night Bush stole the election.
I hate to bog down in this for fear of having the more important philosophical sections of my post above ignored to bog down in partisan dead-horse-flogging, but...
Actually we were mostly bothered by the fact that the election was decided on a partisan court decision instead of a solid vote recount. Also important was a botched (or possibly malicious) felon purge that disproportionately affected black voters. Just people who were actual former felons but should've had voting rights restored at the end of their disqualification period totals over 2000, more than the 537 votes (.00009%) that Bush carried the state by. The number of people who were misidentified as felons thanks to "generous" matching of aliases to voters is still uncounted but anecdotal evidence suggest
What? You think targets provide the interface to hack them?
That's EXACTLY what YOU said, and I quote:
"Assuming it's meant to be used in a legitimate matter at some point, and that visual interfaces are a handy device, it would be logical to expect the abstraction to be provided by the node, not by the device being used to interact with it."
There is no "interface" to the code provided in the program or data itself.
I take it that you've never debugged code before, or you'd know that it's an extremely frustrating task unless you've built the code with debugging symbols. I digress, though -- the whole application providing the interface was your crazy idea, after all.
If the target was a corporation's site, the hacking interface wouldn't be provided by them, it'd be provided by your deck, even if the corporation defined the "normal" interface for end users. So a hacking deck, or a deck running hacking software could easily have any interface imaginable, whatever seemed to work. This is why your objections are pointless.
And now we get back to what I was arguing about two of my posts ago before I got distracted by YOUR assertion that the "node" would provide its own interface.
If you have an application that can recognize and present vulnerabilities, then the job is already done! Your magical interface tool is wasting effort presenting a puzzle for the human to futz around with instead of just presenting a list of exploitable holes and a list of tools to try against them. After all, your tool is capable of recognizing and presenting differences in the code that a human can use to identify exploits. Why not just use that recognition to do the work for you?
Any tool that increases the speed of visualization of the task at hand and your ability to get in there and make changes is feasible, presuming you have the computer power to pull it off.
Hacking is done (generally) with the same language and tools that the program you're exploiting is written in (or executes if it's an interpreter). That's because hacking is an *extremely* low-level task most of the time. You do not have fancy GUIs until all the real work of finding the hole is done because they just get in the way. Until you have programming languages whose low-level operations are entirely handled by fiddling with geometric VR patterns, I highly doubt that will change.
You certainly do not have a use for abstract puzzle games that most cyberspace hacking tools use in movies and games. The experience of poking around a physical object is so far removed from checking for the kinds of bugs that allow remote execution that it's useless.
The key to my objection to cyberspace portrayals of hacking is the nature of how the programmer interacts with the interface. It's just not even the slightest bit realistic unless you're hiding something that could better be accomplished by a simpler interface. (i.e. Your 16-sided ball example vs. say, a keyboard.)
Every time you presume that things work "just this way" you miss the entire point of hacking.
Arrgh!! You're missing my entire point, AGAIN. The point is that the interface in cyberpunk are abstracted to the point of not being useful for actual work unless that work is actually being done behind the scenes in an hidden fashion, in which case the operator is mostly irrelevant.
What's happening here is a workaround, and workarounds don't typically lead to solutions.
That's not necessarily true. Workarounds sometimes allow a problem to build to enough of a critical mass to demand attention instead of just causing people to quit trying like an intractable problem does. Voting in America is definitely a system that a majority of "users" think is flawed and don't bother with anymore.
Just because something is legal doesn't make it right. There might be something wrong with the election process in the U.S., but that doesn't mean people should be finding ways to circumvent it, legally or otherwise.
What exactly is morally or ethically wrong with doing this anyway? In an approval voting system, you'd be able to vote for both candidates. In a direct election system, your vote would be sure to matter.
If the system sucks and isn't as fully democratic as it could be, why not game it for the purposes of making sure the will of the people is reflected more accurately?
I think that the injuries the dude form Event Horizon also were pretty real too - his eyes were damaged, frost, and the bubbling of gas from his blood "the bends".
You mean the scene where he's repeatedly screaming about how he can't breathe (while taking big gasping breathes) and we can hear him through the vacuum? Yeah, that's pretty realistic except that eye damage (especially like he suffered) and frostbite aren't normal symptoms of actual space exposure as the article states. Event Horizon's portrayal of vacuum exposure was only slightly more realistic than Total Recall's.
Remember, this is the same movie where that same character poked his finger into a contained black hole and pulled it back out and where people had to get into acceleration couches to cushion them against high-G acceleration but left all their dirty dishes on the table and all their pictures pinned up to the wall.
Event Horizon ranks up there with Starship Troopers and Mission to Mars as one of the worst suspension of disbelief destroying stinkers I've ever watched. You could drive a truck through the holes in the parts of the plot based entirely on bad physics.
What I think you're missing is visualization provided by the firewall being cracked. Assuming it's meant to be used in a legitimate matter at some point, and that visual interfaces are a handy device, it would be logical to expect the abstraction to be provided by the node, not by the device being used to interact with it. Think of it as a VR style sheet.
Except that it's utterly bat**** insane to provide a handy GUI for disabling your own security device to outside users -- especially a handy GUI for authentication or debugging.
For internal use, that's okay. For control purposes after access has been granted, that's okay. For strangers trying to get in, that's nuts.
They just need to display what they are given, as well as perhaps adding some premade widgets to let you attempt to manipulate it. It would be easier to have a tool just display the data in a graphical form without actually understanding it than to make a tool which would know everything you need to do.
The problem is that any bits which are highlighted in the interface as significant to the end user have to be recognized as such by the tool. It's trivial at that point to say, "Oh, this suggests that the code has this sort of vulnerability. If so, then run this tool." Again, at that point, involving the human user is pointless.
Hacking in cyberspace is always presented as if the user is doing something novel and is solving problems on the spot -- not as if they're just finding the right key off of a keyring.
For instance, perhaps you are sniffing traffic going into the firewall in some way. Color coding packets based on port might let you spot a pattern that the interface doesn't notice, which would indicate a possible exploit that you know about.
Hacking doesn't work that way. You don't generally just look at the packets and know something is vulnerable, and even if you did, the information has been presented in a way that makes it easy for a machine to identify and to run a known exploit against the target.
Humans are MUCH better at pattern recognition than computers.
Humans are much better at certain kinds of pattern recognition than computers. I guarantee you that a machine will be better at sniffing out BitTorrent traffic and organizing it in a presentable fashion than a human reading a line trace would be. Don't forget that computer communication protocols are designed with easy computer recognition in mind -- otherwise the intended peer for communication would have a hard time understanding what was sent.
Even if software could identify possible exploits, it would probably be better to have a user decide which of many options is more likely to work without raising an alarm, given additional knowledge not available to the machine. Finding out about a honeypot via offline interaction with employees for instance.
Well, yes, but that's not how hacking in cyberspace works in the cyberpunk genre. It's always presented as being more like lock-picking than being a script kiddie.
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They might not have been lying. Fixing it properly might have required a rewrite, and instead they may have been forced to include a number of slapped-together kludges with Lord-knows-what side-effects under extreme time pressure. I know what kind of code *I* write when I'm under that kind of time constraint, and I've never seen evidence in any of the projects I've worked on where other people coding under an unreasonable schedule resulted in code I didn't want to completely scrap upon examination (but wasn't allowed to thanks to my own time constraints and lack of testing resources). Frankly, I've had bugs I couldn't fix without major rewrites thanks to the fixes that other people have put in.
So, who knows? Maybe these quick patches will result in other vulnerabilities or just nigh-impossible to maintain code. I've seen it before. While its good to put a little pressure to see bugs fixed, I wouldn't say public disclosure is a secret recipe for correct and functional software when it results in embarrassing a company into getting a fix -- ANY fix -- into place ASAP.
I do realize, though, that the alternative may be the company deprioritizing the bug and never fixing it at all. Companies are lazy that way. It seems like a lose-lose scenario.
The billing system HAS to keep track of all of this to properly bill for non-unlimited access. Furthermore, it has to keep track of this for unlimited billing customers because plan changes do NOT come through instantly. Usually plan changes come in once per day.
Also, there's absolutely no reason for Cingular to be sharing their billing data with the NSA when the modus operandi for wiretapping in the land-line world has been to simply provide a live copy of all the switch data as it comes through. I doubt that the NSA wants the billing records considering how many calls were just simply stripped out to prevent bug-created billing problems from overbilling the customer at the cell phone company I worked for. The NSA would probably prefer the raw records to draw their own conclusions from.
And super robot shows can have deeper plots than you suspect. It can come down to just looking cool but if you watch something like Getter robo you will see that you can have a plot where the mecha are important but the entire story doesn't revolve around them.
However, GoLion was NOT one of these shows. GoLion was utterly derivative crap that just happened to mix sentai and giant robots into a formula that sold well to little boys.
There is no depth and no subtlety to get -- all you do is combine, pull out the super weapon, and the episode is over. Everything else is just episodic filler of villians cackling, teammates bickering, and teammates unnecessarily getting injured because they're too stupid to combine and do their super attack until the right amount of time has been wasted. There was no deep metaplot, no social commentary, and no real character growth.
As long as the movie studio doesn't try to make it edgy, introduce unnecessary inter-party conflict, ditch the mystical elements of Voltron for "hard" science, or pick the most talentless actors they can for it, it's going to be hard to screw up. Of course, I have faith in Hollywood to do every single thing I just described, so...
67000 complaints indicate the prevalence of such material. Could't it be because there is a real demand?
Not necessarily. All it implies is that >=1 person has made =67,000 complaints.
The actual number of people bothered by such a thing could be tiny or huge.
I've always been amused by the fact that the majority of what Japanese people consider rude or crass speech is the kind of speech that young children (especially boys) use before they learn how to properly talk around strangers.
The language does have a few obscene words that aren't meant to be used around kids (mostly sex terms), but much of what could get you punched in the face if you used it in a bar is literally childish speech.
If you really want to nail the people that read the story literally, ask them how the world was created in six literal, 24-hour solar days when the sun wasn't even created until the fourth day.
That's easy. The light and the dark cycled without a central source for the light and without "lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night." You're not even trying, or your targets are pretty ignorant of Genesis 1 or unimaginative if they think the Earth needed a normal source of light to have light when miracles are about.
After all, young-earth creationists are generally willing to accept the idea that physics didn't work the same way as it does now to get around all the physical evidence that points to the story not being literal.
Every time I criticize middle-eastern theocracies, some idiot (ok, MANY idiots) jump in screaming about how "that's their culture", and "we have no right to criticize".
I have seen a lot of rhetoric about people doing this, but I've never actually seen it. I've always considered it a conservative urban legend. Do you have any examples of people doing this where you're pretty sure that they're serious?
In other words, [citation needed].
Someone who believes the universe is a divine monarchy can never honestly embrace secular democracy.
I respectfully disagree. There is a logically consistent course to desire to submit to the authority of God but to shy from submitting to the authority of other men.
Your quote is only true if we can know 100% the mind of God and act as he wills. Since we cannot, and since men are fallible, it makes sense not to concentrate too much power in the hands of people who, according to the Bible, are all sinners. Thus, to ensure that men have the freedom to pursue a righteous course not impeded by the will of a tyrant, a society with maximized freedom and minimized secular authority is essential.
In other words, because we don't know the mind of God, we can't trust any societal institution that places limits on the freedoms of people to adhere to their own moral codes unless their codes demand the restrictions of the freedoms of others or do universally recognized harm (e.g. murder).
Since we cannot trust the leadership of men who claim to be chosen by God if we cannot verify his words ourselves, democracy is the best course.
The phrase "for example" means I am providing you with a subset of data, so that you may better understand WTF I am talking about, and why it would be considered offensive. [...] However, you don't have any clue who I am, or what my personal cultural beliefs or biases might be, only those of America at large by my statement.
This is the sort of semantical parsing that I often see when people are embarrassed by having been caught in a bad argument and who are attempting to reframe it in a positive light. While it's true that I have no direct evidence of your beliefs, what you chose to read into my post is a pretty good indicator of what seems important to you. Especially, given the tone. I could be wrong, but go and reread the post from a neutral viewpoint and see if it's not a reasonable assumption.
Good for you, you pass. Look through this thread, nobody said all slaves were black. That would be your assumption.
Of course nobody said that all slaves were black. However, you did imply that it was the first association that someone should make when presented with the word "slave." It's largely irrelevant to the point being made, but it never even dawned on me to consider a racial element in the comment, nor would it occur to me to link the two into a declaration of the inferiority of people of color. It's just not the way I think about people.
You are equating the feelings and treatment of mice with slaves.
Of course I am -- PETA people do. The whole point of the question, like almost any Devil's Advocate question, is to force someone to perceive a different worldview than they're used to. In this case, I posed the question to force someone to question and think about the propositional difference between PETA members and the general populace: "Why do people have the right not to be bred for use and abuse, but animals do not?"
While I have an answer to that for myself, it's only because I've actually thought about it instead of just gut-reacting with, "Well, they just don't!" like most people do when confronted with this quandary. My question was meant to force people to consider the difference (or non-difference) as well as to illustrate that a dedicated member of PETA would easily see the parallels.
So what? What does that justify? That doesn't even make any sense, as you seem to despise PETA's true motives and actions as much as I do. Yet you are willing to use THEIR moral compass to justify YOUR actions?
Not really. However, it's a closed and self-limited mind that can't consider where people you disagree with are coming from. I constantly pose questions like this to myself when confronted with a puzzling philosophy, partially to see if I'm really right, partially to see how to argue against it if I am, and partially to see where I can find common ground and avoid unnecessarily bitter bickering if I don't have to.
I think a lot of the problem with politics in this country is the inability of people (of all political persuasions) to truly understand the people who have passionate beliefs different from theirs. It's too easy to just hate someone for being "wrong" instead of trying to understand why they're different and to see how they may be genuinely good (if wrong) people. I don't "despise PETA's true motives" (though I'm often not fond of their actions and condescending attitudes); I just disagree with their fundamental premise. Most PETA people are genuinely caring people who are just mad as a hornet at the perceived uncaring cruelty of people around them. They too fall into the trap of hating people who think differently because their way of thinking labels them as "evil," and thus they perform ridiculous stunts and snipe at people.
PETA members are like pro-lifers in this way, though both camps would most likely violently object to being lumped into the same group. They see inherent rights in a living entity that others don't, and they're horrified at the "callous" disregard of those rights b
Yadda yadda. You're talking about the law and valuable services that ham radio operators provide.
Meanwhile, we were talking about favoritism and why the FCC was willing to ignore every single point you just brought up for broadband over power lines and not for the new wireless devices which inconveniences TV instead.
Two points:
1) Not all slaves were black. Slavery and forced breeding have been practiced world-wide throughout history. It is a function of your own cultural biases that you equated the two and immediately took offense from that when what you should've taken offense at was the suggestion that abuse of slaves can be justified by the reason for their birth.
2) PETA members equate all humans and animals in terms of the rights they share. To a PETA member, there is no difference between the two because both lines of reasoning result in justification of the abuse of a creature with inherent rights merely because it was bred for those purposes.
Personally, I disagree on the fundamental principle of which rights mice enjoy, and so the question has no real implications to me. However, to a PETA member, it frames the crux of their argument against animal experimentation, and to a British anti-vivisectionist it can justify even violence against other people.
The difference is how many people care about the two. Ham radio operators are mostly obscure hobbyists that most of the people in charge of the FCC may have never had any encounter with. Terrestrial broadcast TV watchers are a bit more ubiquitous, and so the FCC cares about them more. Plus, they tend to be from an elderly demographic that's a bit more politically active, especially in terms of contacting officials and donating to campaigns.
It's really no surprise that the FCC can brush one of them off but have to pay attention to the other.
I don't have satellite nor cable, and I don't see why I should lose them just so some geeks can have better Internet access.
You're using the TV version of free dial-up access if you're relying on terrestrial TV signals for entertainment. If you had access to wireless, high-speed internet, you could watch streaming video instead. I should even have to into the difference in choices of entertainment available between the two. Plus, most UHF stations in the upper numbers are really low-quality programming.
By the way, it's not just geeks that use the internet anymore, just so you know. They're replacing the generation that uses UHF anyway.
Or maybe you have a vested interest in everyone being subject to cable/satellite corporate monopolies...
I dunno. Sounds to me like maybe you have a vested interest in everyone being subject to cable/phone corporate monopolies. <g>
Opening up wireless spectrum to high-speed, two-way internet access might provide us with at least as much competition as there is in the cell phone market right now. At least, we'd no longer be dependent on whichever two companies run two types of wire to our houses.
There were even proposals on the table from a group that wanted to do free, ad-supported access, so if their long-shot proposal wins you'd get much of the same experience of free TV you have now if price is your concern. Even Google is making rumbles of ad-supported devices.
Still it's a shame their device wasn't properly engineered.
If the idiots at PITA didn't care more for a mouse than it did human life. They would realize that if we were not testing on these mice the mice would never even have been born.
I'm not much of a PETA supporter. I think that avoiding cruelty to animals is important, but I strongly object to the idea that we have no right to make use of them for food or for research into medicines that save human lives. However, I would like to point out that this line of reasoning is nigh-irrelevant in the context of their beliefs about the inherent rights of animals. Let me ask a simple, devil's advocate question to illustrate why:
Wouldn't this same justification for mistreatment apply to people born into slavery thanks to forced breeding?
Bit torrent have made a closed source client their mainline client, and have decided to fortify their rights to the protocol too (its closed, but an SDK can be requested).
Correction -- their SDK can be *paid for*.
I beginning to think that the whole point of acquiring the most popular closed source client was to allow them to close and charge for the SDK. The counterpoint to this argument is that if any one open source P2P grits it teeth and pays whatever fee they're going to charge open source clients, then their implementation becomes the new reference.
A lot of people here are talking about how the Mainline client has once again aggressively pursued irrelevance, but uTorrent's marketshare is going to be nigh impossible to unseat unless they do something self-destructive like removing a popular feature they don't like (like encrpytion). They have a really good chance of dictating the development of the future of the protocol with that client in hand.
I think that this finally explains the reason for the buy-out and the lack of open source. I had previously thought it was due to uTorrent's original developer's dislike of open source, but it may have more to do with control and with monetizing the SDK.
Not being up to snuff on trademark law, as far as I know, there are two important questions to determining the merits of this case.
1) Has J&J properly defended their trademark before? If the trademark is seen as having a universal meaning (like Kleenex or Xerox), then they can lose their right to it.
2) Does the ARC's previous use of the symbol in a relief charity context constitute use in the same general arena as J&J's medical supplies? After all, two companies not invovled the same market can often safely use a trademark without stepping on each other's legal rights. If not, then the ACR's century of use of the symbol is meaningless in considering whether their current use represents a violation for the new purposes they're putting it towards.
At any rate, J&J's lawyers have to have a feeling that they've got a good chance of winning or else they wouldn't even try. There's no company advantage to going head to head against one of the world's most recognized humanitarian aid charities (and almost certainly a good customer of J&J's) unless they're sure they can win.
Except, the immigrants of old, did not come to your country, and want to out and out destroy it and replace it with a theocracy.
Nah, you had to look at home grown movements for that sort of thing. Violent theocratic movements have long been a part of the American political landscape. Some were born that way like the modern Dominionist movement, and others were made that way through persecution like the LDS church's early days.
For the most part, though, it's worth mentioning that a desire to tear down American and replace it with a theocracy is extremely rare in immigrants and is no justification for actions taken against the immigrant population as a whole.
They also pretty much immigrated legally...
In those days, immigration was pretty much trivial. You got on a boat, and you did some paperwork when you got off. Immigration control didn't really start until after the Civil War (mostly as a means of protecting US workers' jobs from people who were willing to work for less). The Federal Government didn't really get deeply involved until 1891. Quotas didn't really start until after WWI to stop the flood of European refugees.
Back before that, anti-immigration sentiment was primarily expressed through discriminatory laws once you got here. Turning people away is a pretty recent thing in US history.
So, let's compare apples to apples here. Immigrants trying to imigrate today face legal barriers that their predecessors did not. Saying that they all immigrated legally is like saying that no one broke highway speed limits back in the early 19th century when there weren't cars.
I'm sure every time someone puts up a blog about how they raised a barn on the weekend (complete with happy snaps) the people in the developing world think "yeah, so what?"
Something tells me that the Amish aren't really all that into blogging.
You are confusing me with fyngyrz. ...Um. Yeah. Looks like I was -- to the point that responded to his post before even reading yours. Yeesh.
The software zooms in for me if I see an anomaly I want to edit, but it doesn't know the anomaly is there. It seems highly likely that it would be possible for an hacking interface to detect the presence of a firewall and show it to me, as well as showing me data, without it knowing what to do to break it.
The problem of course, is that image editing software isn't capable of making a subjective decision on what improves the look of an image. Hacking tools would be able to make an objective decision on whether an exploit is usable or not. The difficulty of recognition is different and thus more able to be automated. The tool would also require more access to present such information than a device could realistically have.
That's my main objection. The kinds of interfaces presented in popular cyberpunk fiction just aren't realistic.
Reading skills not so hot? You quoted me correctly: "Assuming it's meant to be used in a legitimate matter"
The rest of that clause is "...at some point," which you omit because it's the part that makes you sentence imply what I thought it meant. It does not directly imply that the interface cannot be misused, as would be the case for nearly anyone using it from the outside. It only implies that it would have to have *some* legitimate use -- thus justifying the presence of an interface for cyberspace hackers to use. It may have not been what you intended, but it's what you wrote.
Debugging is not hacking, and hacking is not debugging.
I'm well aware that the two are not synonymous, but there can be overlap. After all, most exploits in code are found by trying to mess with inputs to certain functions -- buffer overruns, stack smashing attempts, etc. Doing this requires some knowledge of how the code is organized and meant to work, and when you don't have source code available, you turn to tools for helping to analyze the executable. A debugger (even without symbol tables) is quite useful for this when you can host a copy of the application to be cracked into on your own machine since it lets you watch the flow of the program as it handles your malformed input.
When you can't, it's mostly flying blind using the interfaces provided by the program whether it be something as elaborate as RPC or something as common and simple as text input. However, you can't know everything that's available to try (outside of the normal flow of the program) without having some sort of read access to the entire application. If you don't, then you're as blind as someone trying to crack a CGI program by only interacting with the webpages it generates. This is still a viable approach (as seen repeatedly in the wild), but it's not anything like how hacking is portrayed in cyberpunk.
Thus, you're back to a magical tool that someone gets information about the application that it shouldn't have but which for some reason can't act on it without a human being. Thus, it's illogical and unrealistic.
As for the rest of your post, I tire of getting worked up over ad hominem attacks, so I'm ignoring it.
A candidate would focus their entire effort on the minimum number of locations where more than 60-70% of the voters are located. Nobody outside of those areas would count at all.
This fear is pretty unjustified. The current breakdown of votes between the parties is already strongly tied to population density. It would be nearly suicide for Republicans to try to court the city voters they've smeared for decades in the so-called "culture wars." Given the national reach of television and other media, there's more than enough ability and incentive to still chase rural voters.
However -- current political landscape ignored -- for the purposes of being as representative as possible, wouldn't targeting 60-70% of voters be more democratic and just than just only caring about the third that lives in swing states?
Direct fraud would be much, much easier if it was truely a national election.
How and why? The election mechanism doesn't change at all -- just the what the tallied votes mean. Nothing changes at the polling place or in mailing your vote in between the two methods of counting, and counting is just as easy to watch over in a national election as it is in an electoral election.
Losing a neavily Democratic district's votes would have a nationwide, direct result.
So could losing a heavily Republican district's votes. What's wrong with that? Districts only make sense when they're tied directly to a specific office -- otherwise, they're just a way of marginalizing the votes of people within them. This is why gerrymandering is such a problem.
Also in a direct election you would need nationwide standards rather than local control.
Why? We already elect national offices like the President with a patchwork of standards? Why do you think that proportional voting makes this worse than "winner-take-all" voting? Frankly, what's wrong with national standards for national elections?
This means the relatively well-known problems in Chicago would need to be fixed rather than just being ignored. Yes, vote fraud in Chicago could easily swing the entire election rather than being isolated to Illinois where the Republicans already know they are going to lose the state.
Two points:
1) National scrutiny and national standards might result in enough pressure being applied to fix this instead of it just being up to the state government. Is that bad?
2) Republican votes in Illinois would no longer by completely suppressed by fraud like you claim they are now since Illinois would no longer be winner-take-all. Is that bad?
Think of all the Republicans in northern California whose votes don't matter now. Think of the Republicans in upstate New York. Think of the Democrats in Texas. Think of the Democrats in Utah. Is there any reason that these people's votes shouldn't matter because of arbitrary lines on a map?
This is one thing that happened in 2000 that we are still recovering from - Gore was announced as the winner and then it was changed to Bush after some people went to bed knowing that Gore had won. They still haven't gotten over that and are still sure that somehow in the night Bush stole the election.
I hate to bog down in this for fear of having the more important philosophical sections of my post above ignored to bog down in partisan dead-horse-flogging, but...
Actually we were mostly bothered by the fact that the election was decided on a partisan court decision instead of a solid vote recount. Also important was a botched (or possibly malicious) felon purge that disproportionately affected black voters. Just people who were actual former felons but should've had voting rights restored at the end of their disqualification period totals over 2000, more than the 537 votes (.00009%) that Bush carried the state by. The number of people who were misidentified as felons thanks to "generous" matching of aliases to voters is still uncounted but anecdotal evidence suggest
That's EXACTLY what YOU said, and I quote:
There is no "interface" to the code provided in the program or data itself.
I take it that you've never debugged code before, or you'd know that it's an extremely frustrating task unless you've built the code with debugging symbols. I digress, though -- the whole application providing the interface was your crazy idea, after all.
If the target was a corporation's site, the hacking interface wouldn't be provided by them, it'd be provided by your deck, even if the corporation defined the "normal" interface for end users. So a hacking deck, or a deck running hacking software could easily have any interface imaginable, whatever seemed to work. This is why your objections are pointless.
And now we get back to what I was arguing about two of my posts ago before I got distracted by YOUR assertion that the "node" would provide its own interface.
If you have an application that can recognize and present vulnerabilities, then the job is already done! Your magical interface tool is wasting effort presenting a puzzle for the human to futz around with instead of just presenting a list of exploitable holes and a list of tools to try against them. After all, your tool is capable of recognizing and presenting differences in the code that a human can use to identify exploits. Why not just use that recognition to do the work for you?
Any tool that increases the speed of visualization of the task at hand and your ability to get in there and make changes is feasible, presuming you have the computer power to pull it off.
Hacking is done (generally) with the same language and tools that the program you're exploiting is written in (or executes if it's an interpreter). That's because hacking is an *extremely* low-level task most of the time. You do not have fancy GUIs until all the real work of finding the hole is done because they just get in the way. Until you have programming languages whose low-level operations are entirely handled by fiddling with geometric VR patterns, I highly doubt that will change.
You certainly do not have a use for abstract puzzle games that most cyberspace hacking tools use in movies and games. The experience of poking around a physical object is so far removed from checking for the kinds of bugs that allow remote execution that it's useless.
The key to my objection to cyberspace portrayals of hacking is the nature of how the programmer interacts with the interface. It's just not even the slightest bit realistic unless you're hiding something that could better be accomplished by a simpler interface. (i.e. Your 16-sided ball example vs. say, a keyboard.)
Every time you presume that things work "just this way" you miss the entire point of hacking.
Arrgh!! You're missing my entire point, AGAIN. The point is that the interface in cyberpunk are abstracted to the point of not being useful for actual work unless that work is actually being done behind the scenes in an hidden fashion, in which case the operator is mostly irrelevant.
What's happening here is a workaround, and workarounds don't typically lead to solutions.
That's not necessarily true. Workarounds sometimes allow a problem to build to enough of a critical mass to demand attention instead of just causing people to quit trying like an intractable problem does. Voting in America is definitely a system that a majority of "users" think is flawed and don't bother with anymore.
Just because something is legal doesn't make it right. There might be something wrong with the election process in the U.S., but that doesn't mean people should be finding ways to circumvent it, legally or otherwise.
What exactly is morally or ethically wrong with doing this anyway? In an approval voting system, you'd be able to vote for both candidates. In a direct election system, your vote would be sure to matter.
If the system sucks and isn't as fully democratic as it could be, why not game it for the purposes of making sure the will of the people is reflected more accurately?
I think that the injuries the dude form Event Horizon also were pretty real too - his eyes were damaged, frost, and the bubbling of gas from his blood "the bends".
You mean the scene where he's repeatedly screaming about how he can't breathe (while taking big gasping breathes) and we can hear him through the vacuum? Yeah, that's pretty realistic except that eye damage (especially like he suffered) and frostbite aren't normal symptoms of actual space exposure as the article states. Event Horizon's portrayal of vacuum exposure was only slightly more realistic than Total Recall's.
Remember, this is the same movie where that same character poked his finger into a contained black hole and pulled it back out and where people had to get into acceleration couches to cushion them against high-G acceleration but left all their dirty dishes on the table and all their pictures pinned up to the wall.
Event Horizon ranks up there with Starship Troopers and Mission to Mars as one of the worst suspension of disbelief destroying stinkers I've ever watched. You could drive a truck through the holes in the parts of the plot based entirely on bad physics.
What I think you're missing is visualization provided by the firewall being cracked. Assuming it's meant to be used in a legitimate matter at some point, and that visual interfaces are a handy device, it would be logical to expect the abstraction to be provided by the node, not by the device being used to interact with it. Think of it as a VR style sheet.
Except that it's utterly bat**** insane to provide a handy GUI for disabling your own security device to outside users -- especially a handy GUI for authentication or debugging.
For internal use, that's okay. For control purposes after access has been granted, that's okay. For strangers trying to get in, that's nuts.
They just need to display what they are given, as well as perhaps adding some premade widgets to let you attempt to manipulate it. It would be easier to have a tool just display the data in a graphical form without actually understanding it than to make a tool which would know everything you need to do.
The problem is that any bits which are highlighted in the interface as significant to the end user have to be recognized as such by the tool. It's trivial at that point to say, "Oh, this suggests that the code has this sort of vulnerability. If so, then run this tool." Again, at that point, involving the human user is pointless.
Hacking in cyberspace is always presented as if the user is doing something novel and is solving problems on the spot -- not as if they're just finding the right key off of a keyring.
For instance, perhaps you are sniffing traffic going into the firewall in some way. Color coding packets based on port might let you spot a pattern that the interface doesn't notice, which would indicate a possible exploit that you know about.
Hacking doesn't work that way. You don't generally just look at the packets and know something is vulnerable, and even if you did, the information has been presented in a way that makes it easy for a machine to identify and to run a known exploit against the target.
Humans are MUCH better at pattern recognition than computers.
Humans are much better at certain kinds of pattern recognition than computers. I guarantee you that a machine will be better at sniffing out BitTorrent traffic and organizing it in a presentable fashion than a human reading a line trace would be. Don't forget that computer communication protocols are designed with easy computer recognition in mind -- otherwise the intended peer for communication would have a hard time understanding what was sent.
Even if software could identify possible exploits, it would probably be better to have a user decide which of many options is more likely to work without raising an alarm, given additional knowledge not available to the machine. Finding out about a honeypot via offline interaction with employees for instance.
Well, yes, but that's not how hacking in cyberspace works in the cyberpunk genre. It's always presented as being more like lock-picking than being a script kiddie.