Some things are better mechanised, others AREN'T. The big problem with simple paper ballots was the ridiculously designed election system, which insists on less than a 24 hour voting period, and to have it always during a normal workday,
The simplist solution here is to hold elections on a weekend or even have polling stations open between something like 6am to 10pm. No technology or mechanisation needed.
they also control the debates, how any third party can get on the ballot or an independent,
The solution here is to have the same nomination rules for every candidate. Part of the issue here appears to be unique to the US, possibly related to voters' political affiliations being recorded on voter registers.
they also contro the media and who gets covered and who doesn't, brainwashing generation after generation that voting for criminal globalist party Candiate A over B will somehow result in "change for the better" and "choice".
Except that there is little choice on issues where both candidates A and B take similar positions. Such that many voters can be effectivly disenfranchised due to there being no candidate who represents their position.
Ok, in the public-key case why would the encryption keys (the ones used to create the DVDs) become known?
Because they are likely to be used by multiple, potentially untrusted, entities. If keeping the encryption key secret then you need a security audit before every DVD production run. N.B. it is probably equally easy for someone to copy the entire "keyring".
It's much more likely that the decryption keys (the ones housed on all the DVD players) would become known.
In order to get these keys you'd need to either attack the DVD player or get hold of the keys when the players are manufactured. With an asymetric cypher the decryption keys only need to be present in pieces of hardware which are widely scattered. With a symetric cypher there are multiple copies of keys usable for decryption. Security of a key is inversely proportional to the number of copies of the key.
As for why the UN doesn't prosecute Bush? There are many reasons. 1) The US will immediately withdraw from the UN
Is the US actually up to date with it's UN fees.
2) The US is on the Security Council and can block most UN resolutions. 3) Nobody from the UN will risk invading the US in order to carry out the resolution indicting Bush.
At some level the US must fear the international community. Otherwise seeking special exemption from the ICC would be pointless.
Each copy could have watermarks in unique locations so that when they download the leaked copy from the Internet and they see that noise covers up the watermarks at [x] location on the screen at [y] time in the movie, that corresponds to the copy sent out to person [z].
If the "pirate" has multiple copies they can replace such a watermark with good data. Take 3 copies, only use data which is common to 2 of them (on a frame by frame basis). If the watermark is in the same place this fails because some parts of it may be always present and if you get 3 different versions of the data you know you have "watermark"
To have multi-users upon a single system would need to establish the environment's restrictions; which is near impossible because the verry nature of USB devices is Plug'N'Play which is impossible to limit to any specific setting and is constrantly changing on the USB's identification chain.
It's not quite a big a problem as it appears since many modern onboard USB interfaces present as multiple root hubs.
The last piece of adware I encountered on a school computer kept 3 copies of the same executable running at once. To delete one, you had to kill the process, but each one is constantly monitoring the other 2 to restart it if it's killed and replace the exe if it's deleted.
This is a very old malware trick. First encountered on mainframes...
To be quite honest, Microsoft has a God given right to couple IE with Windows.
It's usually Linux advocates who get accused of being "religious fanatics"...
You can't regulate proper business practice.
Governments can and do regulate all sorts of business practices. Including who may or may not conduct certain types of business even outlawing the comercial sale of certain goods and services. "Proper business practice" is subject to a whole set of constraints, some of which are statute law, some of which are case law and some of which are unwritten but understood by most people.
Also, to be quite frank, the hole bloat argument no longer applies to IE being bundled with windows. Harddrives are huge these days, a gig is a normal amount of ram, and the space IE takes up on an XP or Win2k/2k3 system in negligiable.
It becomes an issue when bloat effectivly "compensates" for the effects of "Moore's law".
Its also legitimatly neccessary for Microsoft to bundle the html rendering engine of IE with windows to display help files.
There is no requirement for help files to use HTML. Even if they are written in HTML it is unlikely (even undesirable) for them to include everything which might be found on a webpage.
The part that they did forbid is shipping Linux for the same PC model number as the ones that shipped with OEM Windows. This was done solely to make it easier (and cheaper) for OEMs to count how many licenses they have to pay for.
Given that Dell puts serial numbers and "service tags" on their machines I doubt that this reasoning actually makes sense. If that system can cope with different machines of the same model number having different hardware specifications it can certainly cope with and differances in bundled software. More likely the restriction is to make it more difficult for Dell to ship anything other than Windows (including no OS).
Anybody that starts with that assumption, or the stated and equally unlikely "cannot be hacked" has already lost whatever battle they imagined they were fighting.
You'd think someone would have learned from RMS Titanic (the ship, not the movie).
There are probably more holes in making the discs than there are in distributing them. How many hands does a film pass through before it even gets to be a master copy waiting to be encrypted?
You've also got the same issues surrounding the manufacturing of the DVDs for the "general release". Including such issues as "does it make sense to come back later and get these DVDs made?"
If it has a video-out port, it can be used to copy the disk. Unless they plan on shipping integrated DVD players with a built-in screen it's not going to work.
Even then there are multiple methods of circumvention.
3 acedemy members acting in cahoots can also defeat watermarking efforts - simply compare the three streams and throw away any artifacts that appear in only 1 stream.
Or replace with white noise:) Get enough samples and you might be able to work out the watermarking algorithm.
This would probably be even easier to do when you (have to) depend on analogue outputs. It only makes the challenge greater.
How many "waterwatermarking" schemes will actually survive lossy compression and/or multiple D->A->D transformations in any case?
Suppose this new system has only one key per disc, coded for a particular private player, using 256-bit Rijndael encryption.
It would probably be easier to use a public key encryption algorithm. Player contains the private key, disk creation is done with the public key. The difficult bit is the distribution, since making sure 6,000 pieces of physical media wind up where they should go is rather more difficult than using PGP/GPG for email.
It will indeed be uncrackable given only the disc, which is what the quote said.
When it comes to security what is important is the whole system. With 6,000 people involved it's a little unlikely that all of them are completly honest or un-bribable/blackmailable.
I can already choose from about 6 24-hour news channels that are all showing the same footage of the latest big event.
Possibly slightly out of sync, due to differences in travel time for the signals. You'd thing all these supposedly independent news channels would cover different news...
Furthermore, as you pointed out, the niche channels can't get enough viewers because the appeal isn't broad enough. (Hence the term "niche" I guess:-). In order to have broader appeal the niche channels end up expanding their coverage until they start to clash.
Which could easily wind up reducing the number of viewers...
With themed clusters of channels -- sports, news, movies, music, home life (home improvement, cooking), children, international (non-English channels for immigrant communities), etc -- people would be able to get the kinds of channels they want and new channels would have ready audiences.
This sounds good until you realise that this is still an arbitary bundling. With plenty of scope for different opinions abou what belongs in which bundle.
When no-one is watching, when the channel is just there to "park" for future use, they can get away with a lot more oddball programming. Unfortunately if the audience increases, the executives take notice and ruin everything.
e.g. by removing whatever it was which made the channel attractive to viewers in the first place. The issue of execs who don't understand their audiance appears to be common with broadcast TV. Whatever the details of the technology used to broadcast.(BTW, I work for Spike TV, the ailing "Network For Men." Why is it ailing? Perhaps because an inordinate amount of high-level execs are middle-aged women who have no idea what their target audience-- 18-30 year old men-- want to see.)
But things would be little better off if the execs were middle aged men.
I used to think like that, until I worked for a Satellite TV company. You'd be surprised at how many people who just wanted to pay for only one premium channel used to call in and switch from HBO to Cinemax, to Starz to Showtime every day to watch the shows/movies that they wanted to see.
Imagine if EVERYONE was able to do this. You'd never be able to get a live person to answer the phone and your bill would go up because of the additional staffind needed.
Do you actually need a "live person" to handle this? It sounds a good task for a machine. No doubt all the "live person" is doing is acting as an interface to a machine anyway...
The problem is that OEMs are not free to change the browser. If you are a Microsoft OEM, you CANNOT replace IE at all. This is the root of the problem. Computers are bought as a package deal from OEMs, and Microsoft has prevented OEMs from including competitive software in the default installs.
Include != replace. They cannot even include an alternative browser. Which is even more restrictive than their not being able to replace MSIE.
Apache and sendmail can be acquired for zero cost. If one could (legally) get MS Windows XP with IE for zero cost as well, then it would be in the same boat as Apache/sendmail.
Not quite, even if Win XP + IE was zero cost but still proprietary it would not be "free". In the sense that you would not have the source and the ability to make it work exactly as you wanted it to, formally audit the code, etc.
However, I know that if I spend money on a product, I expect that product to live up to its claimed specifications. Just because MS (and other commercial companies) put crap in their EULA, doesn't mean that those EULA are legal in court and that those commercial companies are not liable due to negligence.
Problem is that you need to spend lots of money on taking a case to court to find out what combination of statute law, case law and EULA actually apply... With the risk that if Microsoft look like losing the can try and drag out the case until you go bankrupt.
Imagine if you purchased a car from Ford and Ford knew that the brakes had problems and needed to be replaced. However, Ford did not tell you about the brakes and chose not to do a recall because that information is corporate "IP". I am sure you (and many others) would have a case against Ford for negligence if you were in an accident.
In such a senario you could probably sue Ford not only for the bad brakes but also for any consequences resulting from them. Though it would probably be the motor insurance industry, as an interested party, who would sue Ford first:)
This is no differenct the the MS situation. MS has access to their code "IP" and are aware of tons of security problems since MS as a company have not taken security seriously until the last two years or so. However, they are keeping that information from end-users because it is their "IP" and the end-users suffer from it. These problems have cost MS customers billions of dollars in recovery and prevention costs. Those costs you will never see in an MS funded TCO study.
It such a study the "T" does not appear to actually stand for "Total". Similarly costs which apply exclusivly to proprietary software often get ignored in such studies.
For one thing, most burglers don't break in through windows. They look for unlocked windows and doors, or try to pick a door lock. Smashing a window is fairly dangerous; a shard of glass can seriously wound or even kill you, plus it makes a lot of noise that alerts neighbors.
Also blood provides nice forensic evidence. If a burgler is going to try and break something then it is more likely to be a wooden part of a door...
Back to computers, Windows is the other way; it costs a lot more than its OSS competitors which are much more secure, and it's insecure by design. There's no good reason for Windows to be insecure (this is a product of shoddy design), and other OSes have demonstrated that it's not that hard to make a secure system that's still usable (Linux, MacOS X).
At least some aspects of the Windows design are deliberate decisions made by Microsoft. e.g. writing intermingled code to make it harder for a third party to write drop-in replacements for Windows components.
I believe the poster was referring to a company knowing about a severe defect in a product and simply failing to address the issue for a ridiculously extended period of time. It's especially dreadful when the same general problem keeps recurring. For major OS products, when a problem is revealed it is quickly fixed, and the problem *stays* fixed. You simply can NOT say this about Microsoft's products.
Could it be that rather than actually fixing Microsoft are making "band-aid" patches for specific exploits as they come along. Either that or the real problem is something requiring some radical rewriting to fix.
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Some things are better mechanised, others AREN'T. The big problem with simple paper ballots was the ridiculously designed election system, which insists on less than a 24 hour voting period, and to have it always during a normal workday,
The simplist solution here is to hold elections on a weekend or even have polling stations open between something like 6am to 10pm. No technology or mechanisation needed.
they also control the debates, how any third party can get on the ballot or an independent,
The solution here is to have the same nomination rules for every candidate. Part of the issue here appears to be unique to the US, possibly related to voters' political affiliations being recorded on voter registers.
they also contro the media and who gets covered and who doesn't, brainwashing generation after generation that voting for criminal globalist party Candiate A over B will somehow result in "change for the better" and "choice".
Except that there is little choice on issues where both candidates A and B take similar positions. Such that many voters can be effectivly disenfranchised due to there being no candidate who represents their position.
Ok, in the public-key case why would the encryption keys (the ones used to create the DVDs) become known?
Because they are likely to be used by multiple, potentially untrusted, entities. If keeping the encryption key secret then you need a security audit before every DVD production run.
N.B. it is probably equally easy for someone to copy the entire "keyring".
It's much more likely that the decryption keys (the ones housed on all the DVD players) would become known.
In order to get these keys you'd need to either attack the DVD player or get hold of the keys when the players are manufactured.
With an asymetric cypher the decryption keys only need to be present in pieces of hardware which are widely scattered. With a symetric cypher there are multiple copies of keys usable for decryption. Security of a key is inversely proportional to the number of copies of the key.
As for why the UN doesn't prosecute Bush? There are many reasons. 1) The US will immediately withdraw from the UN
Is the US actually up to date with it's UN fees.
2) The US is on the Security Council and can block most UN resolutions. 3) Nobody from the UN will risk invading the US in order to carry out the resolution indicting Bush.
At some level the US must fear the international community. Otherwise seeking special exemption from the ICC would be pointless.
Why would a public key encryption algorithm be easier in this case?
Because it dosn't matter if the encryption keys become known. With a symetric cypher you need to keep the keys used for encryption secure.
Each copy could have watermarks in unique locations so that when they download the leaked copy from the Internet and they see that noise covers up the watermarks at [x] location on the screen at [y] time in the movie, that corresponds to the copy sent out to person [z].
If the "pirate" has multiple copies they can replace such a watermark with good data. Take 3 copies, only use data which is common to 2 of them (on a frame by frame basis). If the watermark is in the same place this fails because some parts of it may be always present and if you get 3 different versions of the data you know you have "watermark"
To have multi-users upon a single system would need to establish the environment's restrictions; which is near impossible because the verry nature of USB devices is Plug'N'Play which is impossible to limit to any specific setting and is constrantly changing on the USB's identification chain.
It's not quite a big a problem as it appears since many modern onboard USB interfaces present as multiple root hubs.
The last piece of adware I encountered on a school computer kept 3 copies of the same executable running at once. To delete one, you had to kill the process, but each one is constantly monitoring the other 2 to restart it if it's killed and replace the exe if it's deleted.
This is a very old malware trick. First encountered on mainframes...
To be quite honest, Microsoft has a God given right to couple IE with Windows.
It's usually Linux advocates who get accused of being "religious fanatics"...
You can't regulate proper business practice.
Governments can and do regulate all sorts of business practices. Including who may or may not conduct certain types of business even outlawing the comercial sale of certain goods and services.
"Proper business practice" is subject to a whole set of constraints, some of which are statute law, some of which are case law and some of which are unwritten but understood by most people.
Also, to be quite frank, the hole bloat argument no longer applies to IE being bundled with windows. Harddrives are huge these days, a gig is a normal amount of ram, and the space IE takes up on an XP or Win2k/2k3 system in negligiable.
It becomes an issue when bloat effectivly "compensates" for the effects of "Moore's law".
Its also legitimatly neccessary for Microsoft to bundle the html rendering engine of IE with windows to display help files.
There is no requirement for help files to use HTML. Even if they are written in HTML it is unlikely (even undesirable) for them to include everything which might be found on a webpage.
No, because MS did so-called "per-CPU" licensing" where the OEM payed per computer shipped, whether it had the MS product on it or not.
When Microsoft was barred from doing this, by a previous DoJ ruling, they came up with a way to emulate it in their OEM agreements.
Oh and the idea that dell couldn't count which PCs shipped with which OS unless they were different models is just too silly for words.
Especially on models where everything, except the OS, can be changed...
The part that they did forbid is shipping Linux for the same PC model number as the ones that shipped with OEM Windows. This was done solely to make it easier (and cheaper) for OEMs to count how many licenses they have to pay for.
Given that Dell puts serial numbers and "service tags" on their machines I doubt that this reasoning actually makes sense. If that system can cope with different machines of the same model number having different hardware specifications it can certainly cope with and differances in bundled software. More likely the restriction is to make it more difficult for Dell to ship anything other than Windows (including no OS).
Anybody that starts with that assumption, or the stated and equally unlikely "cannot be hacked" has already lost whatever battle they imagined they were fighting.
You'd think someone would have learned from RMS Titanic (the ship, not the movie).
There are probably more holes in making the discs than there are in distributing them. How many hands does a film pass through before it even gets to be a master copy waiting to be encrypted?
You've also got the same issues surrounding the manufacturing of the DVDs for the "general release". Including such issues as "does it make sense to come back later and get these DVDs made?"
Even with an intergrated screen chances are the video singal will be something you can use at some point.
Possibly even a better source, since with an integrated display there is no point at all in the signal ever being converted to YUV or composite video.
If it has a video-out port, it can be used to copy the disk. Unless they plan on shipping integrated DVD players with a built-in screen it's not going to work.
Even then there are multiple methods of circumvention.
3 acedemy members acting in cahoots can also defeat watermarking efforts - simply compare the three streams and throw away any artifacts that appear in only 1 stream.
:) Get enough samples and you might be able to work out the watermarking algorithm.
Or replace with white noise
This would probably be even easier to do when you (have to) depend on analogue outputs. It only makes the challenge greater.
How many "waterwatermarking" schemes will actually survive lossy compression and/or multiple D->A->D transformations in any case?
And this only applies when you are relying for the algorithm to be the secret part.
Effectivly this makes the algorithm part of the key.
Something modern cryptotheory considers inadequate.
Not actually that modern, this aspect of cryptotheory dates from the 19th century.
Suppose this new system has only one key per disc, coded for a particular private player, using 256-bit Rijndael encryption.
It would probably be easier to use a public key encryption algorithm. Player contains the private key, disk creation is done with the public key. The difficult bit is the distribution, since making sure 6,000 pieces of physical media wind up where they should go is rather more difficult than using PGP/GPG for email.
It will indeed be uncrackable given only the disc, which is what the quote said.
When it comes to security what is important is the whole system. With 6,000 people involved it's a little unlikely that all of them are completly honest or un-bribable/blackmailable.
What would they put on 500 channels?
:-). In order to have broader appeal the niche channels end up expanding their coverage until they start to clash.
That is the real question, lack of content.
I can already choose from about 6 24-hour news channels that are all showing the same footage of the latest big event.
Possibly slightly out of sync, due to differences in travel time for the signals. You'd thing all these supposedly independent news channels would cover different news...
Furthermore, as you pointed out, the niche channels can't get enough viewers because the appeal isn't broad enough. (Hence the term "niche" I guess
Which could easily wind up reducing the number of viewers...
With themed clusters of channels -- sports, news, movies, music, home life (home improvement, cooking), children, international (non-English channels for immigrant communities), etc -- people would be able to get the kinds of channels they want and new channels would have ready audiences.
This sounds good until you realise that this is still an arbitary bundling. With plenty of scope for different opinions abou what belongs in which bundle.
When no-one is watching, when the channel is just there to "park" for future use, they can get away with a lot more oddball programming. Unfortunately if the audience increases, the executives take notice and ruin everything.
e.g. by removing whatever it was which made the channel attractive to viewers in the first place. The issue of execs who don't understand their audiance appears to be common with broadcast TV. Whatever the details of the technology used to broadcast.(BTW, I work for Spike TV, the ailing "Network For Men." Why is it ailing? Perhaps because an inordinate amount of high-level execs are middle-aged women who have no idea what their target audience-- 18-30 year old men-- want to see.)
But things would be little better off if the execs were middle aged men.
I used to think like that, until I worked for a Satellite TV company. You'd be surprised at how many people who just wanted to pay for only one premium channel used to call in and switch from HBO to Cinemax, to Starz to Showtime every day to watch the shows/movies that they wanted to see.
Imagine if EVERYONE was able to do this. You'd never be able to get a live person to answer the phone and your bill would go up because of the additional staffind needed.
Do you actually need a "live person" to handle this? It sounds a good task for a machine. No doubt all the "live person" is doing is acting as an interface to a machine anyway...
The problem is that OEMs are not free to change the browser. If you are a Microsoft OEM, you CANNOT replace IE at all. This is the root of the problem. Computers are bought as a package deal from OEMs, and Microsoft has prevented OEMs from including competitive software in the default installs.
Include != replace. They cannot even include an alternative browser. Which is even more restrictive than their not being able to replace MSIE.
The difference is that youpaid MS for their software, so they should be liable up to the retail value of their useless software.
In the car analogy Ford would be liable for the damage their faulty car did. Rather than the retail price of the car...
Apache and sendmail can be acquired for zero cost. If one could (legally) get MS Windows XP with IE for zero cost as well, then it would be in the same boat as Apache/sendmail.
:)
Not quite, even if Win XP + IE was zero cost but still proprietary it would not be "free". In the sense that you would not have the source and the ability to make it work exactly as you wanted it to, formally audit the code, etc.
However, I know that if I spend money on a product, I expect that product to live up to its claimed specifications. Just because MS (and other commercial companies) put crap in their EULA, doesn't mean that those EULA are legal in court and that those commercial companies are not liable due to negligence.
Problem is that you need to spend lots of money on taking a case to court to find out what combination of statute law, case law and EULA actually apply... With the risk that if Microsoft look like losing the can try and drag out the case until you go bankrupt.
Imagine if you purchased a car from Ford and Ford knew that the brakes had problems and needed to be replaced. However, Ford did not tell you about the brakes and chose not to do a recall because that information is corporate "IP". I am sure you (and many others) would have a case against Ford for negligence if you were in an accident.
In such a senario you could probably sue Ford not only for the bad brakes but also for any consequences resulting from them. Though it would probably be the motor insurance industry, as an interested party, who would sue Ford first
This is no differenct the the MS situation. MS has access to their code "IP" and are aware of tons of security problems since MS as a company have not taken security seriously until the last two years or so. However, they are keeping that information from end-users because it is their "IP" and the end-users suffer from it. These problems have cost MS customers billions of dollars in recovery and prevention costs. Those costs you will never see in an MS funded TCO study.
It such a study the "T" does not appear to actually stand for "Total". Similarly costs which apply exclusivly to proprietary software often get ignored in such studies.
For one thing, most burglers don't break in through windows. They look for unlocked windows and doors, or try to pick a door lock. Smashing a window is fairly dangerous; a shard of glass can seriously wound or even kill you, plus it makes a lot of noise that alerts neighbors.
Also blood provides nice forensic evidence. If a burgler is going to try and break something then it is more likely to be a wooden part of a door...
Back to computers, Windows is the other way; it costs a lot more than its OSS competitors which are much more secure, and it's insecure by design. There's no good reason for Windows to be insecure (this is a product of shoddy design), and other OSes have demonstrated that it's not that hard to make a secure system that's still usable (Linux, MacOS X).
At least some aspects of the Windows design are deliberate decisions made by Microsoft. e.g. writing intermingled code to make it harder for a third party to write drop-in replacements for Windows components.
I believe the poster was referring to a company knowing about a severe defect in a product and simply failing to address the issue for a ridiculously extended period of time. It's especially dreadful when the same general problem keeps recurring. For major OS products, when a problem is revealed it is quickly fixed, and the problem *stays* fixed. You simply can NOT say this about Microsoft's products.
Could it be that rather than actually fixing Microsoft are making "band-aid" patches for specific exploits as they come along. Either that or the real problem is something requiring some radical rewriting to fix.