Today, I found a link to a paper 'Thirty years later : Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation'.
In it, a whole study is done about Multics and its security features. Multics was designed from the ground up with security in mind, and yet, on several points, didn't pass the test.
In general security is hard. When it comes to DRM you have a very hard task, since the idea is often to use cryptography in order to give someone some cypher text, a cypher machine and decryption key. In such a way that they cannot obtain the key to use in another cypher machine, alter the workings of the cypher machine or do anything you don't want them to do with the plaintext. It's the last one which makes a nonsense of the whole idea. Even if you turned everyone into cyborgs there are still possible circumvention routes.
firstly, your OS doesn't have to support DRM in order to run on a DRM chip. if it doesn't, it's just untrusted and totally unable to play any protected media etc. (until someone cracks the protecten, which should happen much faster than microsoft/intel think.)
With the copyright terms we have now it's absolutly certain that this will be cracked before the term expires. Quite possibly future generations will only have access to works produced today because of piracy. Since copyright terms are longer than many media last, copyright libraries do not exist for many types of work and those dealing with books are overflowing.
We can keep our computers for so long before we are forced to buy a new one. How long will you hold off? 5, 8, 10 years? BillG doesn't care about you. He is a cunning and insidious man. He doesn't worry about the past or the present--as noted in several of the many stories surrounding the anti-trust case. He cares only for the future.
Thing is that Microsoft appears to be persuing a business model which requires ever increasing profit. At least ever increasing profit on paper. If a sizable number of customers don't ungrade this will cause Microsoft to fail sooner, rather than later.
The code in the Shuttle's launch system is old? The entire Space Shuttle is old. I'll bet a lot of slashdotters don't even remember the Columbia's maiden voyage.
The democratically elected (social democratic) governments of South America are usually very short lived, and are usually replaced by authoritarian regimes that support (US of ) American business interests.
There is a simple reason for this. Democratic governments tend to put the interests of their citizens and organisations before those of foreign businesses who operate in their country. The US has a long history of direct or indirect involvement in governments, frequently democratic governments, being toppled. This certainly isn't restricted to South and Central America either. Quite relevent to current news events would be what happened in Iran.
Something else to consider is that our two major parties are too strong. We actually have laws in place that protect and preserve our "two-party system".
In parts of the US where you have "open primaries" the situation might be closer to one party fielding two candidates.
Why do people believe that a two-party system is better? They use words like "stability". Yes indeed...a system that would allow consumers to rise up and protect their privacy could not be considered a "stable" place for corporations to do business.
You also end up with some things never being questioned. The classic example being the "war on (some) drugs".
After that, we could look at other ways for more people to feel like they are represented in government. How about proportional representation?
The problem in the US is something of a chicken and egg situation. Without being able to get an utter minimum of 3 candidates proportioanl systems tend to wind up being functionally equivalent to a simple majority voting system.
That means MS could ship a webserver (say, IIS 7.0) with dozens of buffer overflow vulnerabilities and as long as it was run in the trusted area of the system, no untrusted (ie, from attackers) could ever be executed.
At least until someone works out a way to subvert things. e.g. by getting an already trusted part of an overbloated program to run in some unexpected way. Even having such a trusted OS isn't an excuse for sloppy programming. Anyway how much do you trust Microsoft to actually write such an OS, let alone the applications?
Now, where do you get such a certificate to run or release your own programs? Oh from Microsoft only, and to make it worse you probably would have to sign an EULA stating that you will never make any viral gpl programs or make something that would compete agaisnt them!
Or even they insist you assign copyright to them in order to get a certificate. The only antidote to this is the GPL or similar, no wonder Microsoft don't like it.
And now, for a small question from me... What is the point of a science fiction channel without science fiction?
Assuming that "Sci-Fi" was intended to mean only addressing science fiction. The most obvious example being "Sightings", a "documentry" series about the paranormal.
One could easily surmise that the true audiences for these more thoughtful shows has already largely abandoned TV for the internet and games. Therefore the delivery media is out of sync with the potential audience.
One thing that the TV execs would rather fight than admit is that trying to chop the world up into geographical bits won't work any more. As soon as something is broadcast anywhere in the world it is likely to be available for download from some source or other.
People forget that Linux is not yet a true auto-configuring desktop operating system like Windows is now. That could result in a pretty frustrating experiences, especially when the desktop user starts updating hardware and adds hot-docked external devices.
Even more people forget that users, even home users, don't tend to add hardware that often. Also Linux actually manages some hot plugable devices better than Windows. e.g. being able to cope with a USB mouse being disconnected and plugged into a different USB socket.
Traditionally, you DO buy servers with an OS, but then quickly overwrite it with your site licensed version upon arrival. That is different from buying them without an OS. It's hard to find a vendor that will sell without at least SOMETHING pre-installed.
Much the same as with workstations, for much the same reason.
Patents in the real world only help the big corps. The small guys don't have the resources
to win a legal battle against an invalid patent, they usually don't have enough patents of
their own to fight back and do cross licensing.
Nor is a "little guy" likely to be able to easily defend against infringement by a large corp.
In the software scenario described, I agree that the inventor/programmer may not need the large company to provide manufacturing resources. In other words, it is possible that the inventor/programmer can ?get some money? by selling the software product directly to consumers.
One thing to remember is that most software is not and was never intended to be some kind of product. A lot of software is more at the level of construction work.
Patents were designed for inventions that needed a machine shop to construct. The lonely inventor in his garage could design and hand-mill a sample of his machine, but could never mass-produce one. The patent allowed him to get some money by selling the rights to manufacture it to a company that could. Without the patent, the large company had a huge advantage in that the little inventor would have to construct an entire manufacturing facility, while the large company already had one.
Even if the large company did not have a manufacturing facility they would be far more likely than the inventor to have the resources to create one
Unfortunately for software (and also for business ideas) the costs are exactly reversed. Anybody capable of inventing something already has spent 100% of the manufacturing costs and already possesses the machinery necessary to produce the invention (ie a computer).
Similar issues apply to patenting of GM organisms. Whilst you might need all sorts of complex kit to genetically modify a cell once you have done so it can generally manage mitosis by itself.
Well, What you need is imho a good argument. US politics view large businesses as the driving force of innovation. Patents became the way to protect industries who invested large ammounts of money into R&D. (Apart from the principal argument that the inventor should own an invention).
There is an assumption here that big business is always doing the R&D. As opposed to taking something where most of the R&D had already been done and churning out a product.
Microsoft and others will use this argument. They will say that making software is time-consuming (=very costly) and that their product should be protected.
The only real cost involved in software is writing it, there is no substantial cost behind creating and distributing copies (the same also applies to music and motion picture recordings). The problem with the situation we have now is that it is difficult to work out if Microsoft's costs are really realistic. e.g. the could be incredibly inefficent at writing software, but this would only show up were they competing.
The problem as I see it is that there are very few truly original, groundbreaking, fundamentally new ideas in computer science. Very very many incremental advances, yes, but perhaps not very many truly original inventions.
There are very few such ideas in any field. The problem is that the system for granting patents appears to be fundermentally broken. Both with far far too many patents being issued and a default of passing rather than rejecting.
Looks like someone needs an education about the evils of monopolies and how much damage they can do. Anti-trust legislation was established for a reason. A well run monopoly has enough money it basically destroy the free market within its subdomain, preventing, at least for a number of decades, the rise of any commercially viable alternative.
"Well run" in this context means from the companies POV, not from the POV of their customers or suppliers. Also the first victims tend to be already existing companies within the same kind of market.
Although the law in theory applies to corporations as if they were people, in practice it doesn't because there are fewer sentencing options to use against corporations. A person can be sentenced to prison, or in more barborous socities like the USA, even killed.
Also a person who is simply accused of something can have their liberty curtailed whilst awaiting trial.
I want to see PERSONAL responsibility brought back into the justice system. If a high-level manager makes a decision that amounts to committing a crime, don't drag the company to court - drag HIM to court. If people knew that the things they do at work are things they will be held responsible for, they'd be a lot less willing to do things they know are wrong.
The concept of "limited liability" originally was intended to protect those who invested in the company. If it went bankrupt the share/stock certificates would be worthless, but there would be no requirment for those people to pay over any more money. At some point this became twisted into protection for enguaging in stupid even criminal business practices. With stock market pricing having little relationship with actual profitability.
They have to bring them in for maintenance anyways to replace the cockpit doors with something more secure. Why can't they make other fixes at the same time?
Replacing an interior door isn't a major maintenance task on an aircraft. Replacing the wiring and electronics would require an HMV (heavy maintanance visit) which more or less involves taking the plane to bits and putting it back together.
As for the TCAS system, while it is mandated by the FAA (at least in the US), some may argue that it doesn't work all that well. [airdisaster.com] The pilots are told to follow the TCAS rather than ATC instructions. This has led to a few "interesting scenarios.
IIRC part of the problem is that some aircrews are trained to always take note of TCAS others are trained to follow ATC instructions.
However, while ATC usually keeps the aircraft apart, in high traffic areas TCAS can be useful. Especially when Joe pilot in his little Cessna flying VFR wanders across your approach unbeknownest to the tower. Of course visual awareness on the crews part is important there as well.
Unless either aircraft or ATC can track such a plane they are in real big trouble. The light aircraft can easily be tossed out of the sky even if it dosn't get that close to a big jet.
To give you an idea of how resistant the airline industry is to common-sense upgrades to plane equipment, one of the old Ask the Pilot columns [salon.com] on Salon explained the cause of a runway collision that lost something like 500 lives. The radios they use in cockpits are walkie-talkie style, so when you're talking you can't hear anyone talk to you. One plane didn't hear the other saying it was still on the runway, because they both spoke at the same time.
Whilst better radios might have helped the KLM captain should not have assumed that the Pan Am aircraft was clear. He should have assumed that the runway was in use until he had heard otherwise. Someone who drove a car at speed into thick fog would be considered a complete fool. The same must apply to someone doing the same with a 747.
Slashdot Mirror
Today, I found a link to a paper 'Thirty years later : Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation'.
In it, a whole study is done about Multics and its security features. Multics was designed from the ground up with security in mind, and yet, on several points, didn't pass the test.
In general security is hard. When it comes to DRM you have a very hard task, since the idea is often to use cryptography in order to give someone some cypher text, a cypher machine and decryption key. In such a way that they cannot obtain the key to use in another cypher machine, alter the workings of the cypher machine or do anything you don't want them to do with the plaintext. It's the last one which makes a nonsense of the whole idea. Even if you turned everyone into cyborgs there are still possible circumvention routes.
firstly, your OS doesn't have to support DRM in order to run on a DRM chip. if it doesn't, it's just untrusted and totally unable to play any protected media etc. (until someone cracks the protecten, which should happen much faster than microsoft/intel think.)
With the copyright terms we have now it's absolutly certain that this will be cracked before the term expires.
Quite possibly future generations will only have access to works produced today because of piracy. Since copyright terms are longer than many media last, copyright libraries do not exist for many types of work and those dealing with books are overflowing.
We can keep our computers for so long before we are forced to buy a new one. How long will you hold off? 5, 8, 10 years? BillG doesn't care about you. He is a cunning and insidious man. He doesn't worry about the past or the present--as noted in several of the many stories surrounding the anti-trust case. He cares only for the future.
Thing is that Microsoft appears to be persuing a business model which requires ever increasing profit. At least ever increasing profit on paper.
If a sizable number of customers don't ungrade this will cause Microsoft to fail sooner, rather than later.
The code in the Shuttle's launch system is old? The entire Space Shuttle is old. I'll bet a lot of slashdotters don't even remember the Columbia's maiden voyage.
:)
The computers didn't work right for that too
The democratically elected (social democratic) governments of South America are usually very short lived, and are usually replaced by authoritarian regimes that support (US of ) American business interests.
There is a simple reason for this. Democratic governments tend to put the interests of their citizens and organisations before those of foreign businesses who operate in their country.
The US has a long history of direct or indirect involvement in governments, frequently democratic governments, being toppled. This certainly isn't restricted to South and Central America either. Quite relevent to current news events would be what happened in Iran.
Something else to consider is that our two major parties are too strong. We actually have laws in place that protect and preserve our "two-party system".
In parts of the US where you have "open primaries" the situation might be closer to one party fielding two candidates.
Why do people believe that a two-party system is better? They use words like "stability". Yes indeed...a system that would allow consumers to rise up and protect their privacy could not be considered a "stable" place for corporations to do business.
You also end up with some things never being questioned. The classic example being the "war on (some) drugs".
After that, we could look at other ways for more people to feel like they are represented in government. How about proportional representation?
The problem in the US is something of a chicken and egg situation. Without being able to get an utter minimum of 3 candidates proportioanl systems tend to wind up being functionally equivalent to a simple majority voting system.
That means MS could ship a webserver (say, IIS 7.0) with dozens of buffer overflow vulnerabilities and as long as it was run in the trusted area of the system, no untrusted (ie, from attackers) could ever be executed.
At least until someone works out a way to subvert things. e.g. by getting an already trusted part of an overbloated program to run in some unexpected way.
Even having such a trusted OS isn't an excuse for sloppy programming.
Anyway how much do you trust Microsoft to actually write such an OS, let alone the applications?
Now, where do you get such a certificate to run or release your own programs? Oh from Microsoft only, and to make it worse you probably would have to sign an EULA stating that you will never make any viral gpl programs or make something that would compete agaisnt them!
Or even they insist you assign copyright to them in order to get a certificate. The only antidote to this is the GPL or similar, no wonder Microsoft don't like it.
If they aren't going to do space shows, does that mean SG1 is doomed? How about the rest of the Dune movies?
Depends what "space show" covers, not much space travel in Dune and not that much, most of the time in SG1.
And now, for a small question from me... What is the point of a science fiction channel without science fiction?
Assuming that "Sci-Fi" was intended to mean only addressing science fiction. The most obvious example being "Sightings", a "documentry" series about the paranormal.
One could easily surmise that the true audiences for these more thoughtful shows has already largely abandoned TV for the internet and games. Therefore the delivery media is out of sync with the potential audience.
One thing that the TV execs would rather fight than admit is that trying to chop the world up into geographical bits won't work any more. As soon as something is broadcast anywhere in the world it is likely to be available for download from some source or other.
People forget that Linux is not yet a true auto-configuring desktop operating system like Windows is now. That could result in a pretty frustrating experiences, especially when the desktop user starts updating hardware and adds hot-docked external devices.
Even more people forget that users, even home users, don't tend to add hardware that often.
Also Linux actually manages some hot plugable devices better than Windows. e.g. being able to cope with a USB mouse being disconnected and plugged into a different USB socket.
Traditionally, you DO buy servers with an OS, but then quickly overwrite it with your site licensed version upon arrival. That is different from buying them without an OS. It's hard to find a vendor that will sell without at least SOMETHING pre-installed.
Much the same as with workstations, for much the same reason.
Patents in the real world only help the big corps. The small guys don't have the resources to win a legal battle against an invalid patent, they usually don't have enough patents of their own to fight back and do cross licensing.
Nor is a "little guy" likely to be able to easily defend against infringement by a large corp.
In the software scenario described, I agree that the inventor/programmer may not need the large company to provide manufacturing resources. In other words, it is possible that the inventor/programmer can ?get some money? by selling the software product directly to consumers.
One thing to remember is that most software is not and was never intended to be some kind of product. A lot of software is more at the level of construction work.
Patents were designed for inventions that needed a machine shop to construct. The lonely inventor in his garage could design and hand-mill a sample of his machine, but could never mass-produce one. The patent allowed him to get some money by selling the rights to manufacture it to a company that could. Without the patent, the large company had a huge advantage in that the little inventor would have to construct an entire manufacturing facility, while the large company already had one.
Even if the large company did not have a manufacturing facility they would be far more likely than the inventor to have the resources to create one
Unfortunately for software (and also for business ideas) the costs are exactly reversed. Anybody capable of inventing something already has spent 100% of the manufacturing costs and already possesses the machinery necessary to produce the invention (ie a computer).
Similar issues apply to patenting of GM organisms. Whilst you might need all sorts of complex kit to genetically modify a cell once you have done so it can generally manage mitosis by itself.
Well, What you need is imho a good argument. US politics view large businesses as the driving force of innovation. Patents became the way to protect industries who invested large ammounts of money into R&D. (Apart from the principal argument that the inventor should own an invention).
There is an assumption here that big business is always doing the R&D. As opposed to taking something where most of the R&D had already been done and churning out a product.
Microsoft and others will use this argument. They will say that making software is time-consuming (=very costly) and that their product should be protected.
The only real cost involved in software is writing it, there is no substantial cost behind creating and distributing copies (the same also applies to music and motion picture recordings). The problem with the situation we have now is that it is difficult to work out if Microsoft's costs are really realistic. e.g. the could be incredibly inefficent at writing software, but this would only show up were they competing.
The problem as I see it is that there are very few truly original, groundbreaking, fundamentally new ideas in computer science. Very very many incremental advances, yes, but perhaps not very many truly original inventions.
There are very few such ideas in any field. The problem is that the system for granting patents appears to be fundermentally broken. Both with far far too many patents being issued and a default of passing rather than rejecting.
Looks like someone needs an education about the evils of monopolies and how much damage they can do. Anti-trust legislation was established for a reason. A well run monopoly has enough money it basically destroy the free market within its subdomain, preventing, at least for a number of decades, the rise of any commercially viable alternative.
"Well run" in this context means from the companies POV, not from the POV of their customers or suppliers. Also the first victims tend to be already existing companies within the same kind of market.
Although the law in theory applies to corporations as if they were people, in practice it doesn't because there are fewer sentencing options to use against corporations. A person can be sentenced to prison, or in more barborous socities like the USA, even killed.
Also a person who is simply accused of something can have their liberty curtailed whilst awaiting trial.
I want to see PERSONAL responsibility brought back into the justice system. If a high-level manager makes a decision that amounts to committing a crime, don't drag the company to court - drag HIM to court. If people knew that the things they do at work are things they will be held responsible for, they'd be a lot less willing to do things they know are wrong.
The concept of "limited liability" originally was intended to protect those who invested in the company. If it went bankrupt the share/stock certificates would be worthless, but there would be no requirment for those people to pay over any more money.
At some point this became twisted into protection for enguaging in stupid even criminal business practices. With stock market pricing having little relationship with actual profitability.
They have to bring them in for maintenance anyways to replace the cockpit doors with something more secure. Why can't they make other fixes at the same time?
Replacing an interior door isn't a major maintenance task on an aircraft. Replacing the wiring and electronics would require an HMV (heavy maintanance visit) which more or less involves taking the plane to bits and putting it back together.
As for the TCAS system, while it is mandated by the FAA (at least in the US), some may argue that it doesn't work all that well. [airdisaster.com] The pilots are told to follow the TCAS rather than ATC instructions. This has led to a few "interesting scenarios.
IIRC part of the problem is that some aircrews are trained to always take note of TCAS others are trained to follow ATC instructions.
However, while ATC usually keeps the aircraft apart, in high traffic areas TCAS can be useful. Especially when Joe pilot in his little Cessna flying VFR wanders across your approach unbeknownest to the tower. Of course visual awareness on the crews part is important there as well.
Unless either aircraft or ATC can track such a plane they are in real big trouble. The light aircraft can easily be tossed out of the sky even if it dosn't get that close to a big jet.
Why is NASA spending money on this. To date neither Boeing 737 or 747 go into space. People wonder how the ISS goes over budget.
The first "A" covers aircraft, it's the "S" which covers space. Also they operate at least one 747.
To give you an idea of how resistant the airline industry is to common-sense upgrades to plane equipment, one of the old Ask the Pilot columns [salon.com] on Salon explained the cause of a runway collision that lost something like 500 lives. The radios they use in cockpits are walkie-talkie style, so when you're talking you can't hear anyone talk to you. One plane didn't hear the other saying it was still on the runway, because they both spoke at the same time.
Whilst better radios might have helped the KLM captain should not have assumed that the Pan Am aircraft was clear. He should have assumed that the runway was in use until he had heard otherwise. Someone who drove a car at speed into thick fog would be considered a complete fool. The same must apply to someone doing the same with a 747.
ATC on many parts of the US and world is based on allocation of large amounts of air space for fixed times just like the old railroad lines.
Problem is that aircraft arn't trains. Also in old rail systems the trains would carry tokens, sometimes keys to unlock signalling systems.
Its designed so that radio failure isn't a problem.
Except that radio failure is considered an emergency, for very good reason.