One minor nit - Unicode is not always 16 bits/character. There are at least three modes, requiring 8-, 16- and 32-bit wide characters. For practical reasons the 32-bit mode is rarely used today (imagine managing a font with hundreds of thousands of glyphs!), but a properly written Unicode application should be able to handle it.
In the meanwhile, the 40,000-odd characters in UTF-16 (not 2^16 since a big chunk is reserved for local use, etc.) is enough to handle all of the alphabetic languages *and* the most common words in common ideogrammatic languages. It's not sufficient for the most demanding tasks, but it will be nirvana for anyone coming out of ASCII-land.
I *really* hate it when people misquote the rhetorical questions used to illustrate legal principles....
The original rhetorical question is "if one were to leave a loaded gun ON AN OPEN WINDOWSILL and a passerby picked it up..." The key phrase is "open windowsill" - it's at a location where the owner is nominally in control of it, but anyone passing on the street could easily grab it. Hell, it's at a location where it could be easily knocked out of house without deliberate effort. The gunowner is clearly acting negligently.
(A modern analogue to this question is someone leaving a gun in plain sight in a locked car. This requires smashing a car window, but the risks of a parking lot "smash & grab" are less than a home burglary.)
In contrast, put the gun more than an arm's length away from the window and it's *far* harder to claim that the owner is negligent. Put the gun out of reach and out of plain sight (e.g., in a closed nightstand or a locked glove compartment) and claims that the gunowner was negligent if the gun is subsequently stolen start to wear very thin - by that metric, some people will argue that their responsibility *requires* that they keep their gun on their person at all times!
N.B., the cited quote doesn't even posit that the gun was stolen from a house or other area where the gunowner has a reasonable expectation of sole dominion - he's trying to bring to mind the image of a latter-day Johnny Appleseed prancing through a park tossing out loaded guns. Of course that's an unspeakably reckless act.
For some reason most people here seem to assume that he's refering to home burglaries, and while it's true that some jurisdictions have vicarious liability laws the general principal remains - as a rule people aren't held responsible for reasonable omissions, and almost never when those omissions are required by reasonable actions.
(E.g., you put a pie on the windowsill to cool, someone steals it, burns their fingers or mouth, and sues you. They'll have a *very* hard time winning since you had to put the pie *somewhere* to cool.)
Argh! Whatever you think you know about the McDonald's "coffee" suit, it's wrong. It's been discussed before repeatedly on both Slashdot and elsewhere, so I'm not going to repeat it yet again here.
However, if you really want to believe that Rush Limbaugh and the like are the only ones with the guts (no pun intended) to report the "real" story - without all of the distracting "trivia" that the rest of us insist is important (like the fact that this coffee was served something like 20F hotter than at any other restaurant in town, or that the manager ignored multiple prior credible scalding compliants), then there's nothing I can do.
One reason for submitting the language to a standards body is to prevent others from producing their own, competing implementations.
Granted, the standards route will eventually force them to open up the language to others, but that's years down the road. In contrast, if it were open today I'm there are plenty of language theorists who could name a handful of "obvious" improvements that would leave MS playing catch-up for years. (E.g., inner classes, something that both C++ and Java have found necessary.)
You use that random data to eliminate most of the "known plaintext" on the disk. That's the same reason you need to use a real cryptographic PRNG, not a weak one which is easily cracked.
On the one hand, this doesn't offer you *that* much more protection - I would rather use a strong algorithm and zero-initialized blocks than a weak algorithm and random blocks. On the other hand, if you feel it's appropriate to use an encrypted FS in the first place you shouldn't begrudge small improvements with definite benefits.
1) I'm not sure about the serpent cipher, but DES (and others) use an "initial vector" dependent upon the disk blocks relative (or absolute) position. Identical plaintext blocks will *not* give you identical ciphertext blocks, so something is wrong. (If serpent doesn't have an IV key, then it's an inappropriate cipher to use in this application.)
A secondary factor, already mentioned, is that the cipher should be run in CBC mode within the disk block. That shouldn't be a problem since any block cipher can be run in CBC mode - it's coded at a higher abstraction level.
2) the "randomness" in a well-encrypted file is not due to the encryption - it's due to the compression that occurs before the encryption. Non-randomness is a problem with byte-wide encryption (including variants like Viriege(sp?) and Playfair ciphers), but it's far harder to attribute any significance to non-randomness in a 8- or 16-byte cipher running in CBC mode.
3) the reason for preloading the disk with random data is simple: you eliminate the implicit "known-text" problem that occurs with empty (and nulled) sectors. With random data the only known-text on the entire encrypted disk is the superblock, plus *maybe* a file or two at an unknown location.
In this case, the tangible media is the hard disk and - arguably - the RAM used by the web server and browser, the OS file caches, etc.
The key idea behind "tangible" is that it's sufficiently permanent for someone to disprove a claim of infringement. Or as I like to reword it, it's tangible enough that you can prove the Vice President really did say what Jay Leno was mocking him for saying. One minicassette recorder can disprove a roomful of eyewitnesses.
The appeals court acted BEFORE they got the actual appeals paperwork - which means that they accepted the case BEFORE they could possibly decide whether the appeal had any merit. The appeals court acted BEFORE the trial judge could address the question of whether the DoJ was legally entitled to request the appeal be initially heard by the Supreme Court.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like they've just made it an absolutely certainty that the Supreme Court *will* ultimately accept the appeal, if only to publicly chastise the lower (appeal) court for acting with such unseemly haste as to cast the impartiality of the entire judiciary into serious doubt.
Think about it, after jumping the gun like this will anyone be able to view this court's overturning the trial judge's decisions with anything other than profoundly deep cynicism? They couldn't even wait 24 hours (for the papers to be delivered) for even the appearance of impartiality - no, it's clear at least some of those judges are foaming at the mouth to have their say. And that is precisely why they can't be permitted to have the final word.
Maybe there will be justice (pun unintended) and the Supreme Court will announce that they, not the appeals court, will be hearing the appeal directly since the appeals court has demonstrated itself incapable of acting in the Constitutionally mandated fashion. Or, at the very least, the Surpremes will accept the case, but immediately return it to a *different* lower court for the first round of appeals.
Meanwhile I want a list of the names of those justices. Appointment to the federal bench is for life, but I want to do be sure that this little trick is remembered if any of them are ever nominated for a higher court.
The FCC was created because the airwaves *were* becoming a big ball o' static. There's nothing theoretical about it - read your history books.
The FCC continues to exist because some politicians found it a convenient backdoor way to regulate content. The "ownership" issue is also coming up in defending the seizure of frequencies used for one purpose so they can be sold, SOLD, to another group for some quick bucks.
These are fairly separate issues and it is possible for both sides to be correct.
Apt-get will install an updated package, but (unless you --force it) won't reinstall a currently installed version. This means cracked applications stay cracked.
(And don't make me laugh by suggesting that a cron job running apt-get install --force... will be enough to stop a knowledgeable intruder who already has root access on your system.)
Running apt-get religiously is a good start, but you also need a well-configured tripwire, log host, etc.
It seems that I can't say it enough. Install and use Kerberos. NOW!
SSH is great for connecting to a shell account, but you may still leak passwords once you've established a secure connection to your "trusted" network. Kerberos, properly installed, ensures that your passwords *NEVER* appear *ANYWHERE* in plaintext, and rarely appear in ciphertext. After all, you never know when someone has compromised one of your local tools, e.g., psql.
Strictly speaking, many types of contracts don't need *any* signature to be legally binding. Unless one is required by the Statue of Frauds all a court needs is proof that both/all parties agreed on mutually beneficial acts and that at least one part did an overt act in compliance with that understanding.
In other words - a verbal contract.:-)
*So*, in many cases if two parties exchanged digital signatures in the expectation that they were binding then they were, in fact, binding. If the contract was covered by the Statue of Frauds and they exchanged traditional documents stating that digital signatures would be considered binding for the purposes of the SoF, then these signatures would be binding. If they tried to use only digital signatures for something covered by the SoF, they were never binding.
Even in the case where one party exchanged digital signatures with the expectation that they would not be binding, if the other party/ies thought they were doing a good-faith negotiation then these signatures would probably be declared binding for the purposes of a criminal complaint for fraud.
The only thing this bill really does is 1) state that digital signatures are acceptable under the SoF, so you can buy real estate and the like with them, and 2) deny shady characters the chance to try claiming that the digital signature "wasn't really valid" in hopes that the other party will give up and walk away from a legitimate claim.
Is this the same bill that had other gems "expediting" business transactions over the net, e.g., allowing companies to send e-mail in lieu of paper mail, even certified mail, without requiring any type of proof of delivery to the receipient?
The risks of that should be obvious. I already get enough crap from companies insisting that they gave me plenty of notification of rate changes/fee changes/etc in the 5-point print on the bottom of a statement bundled with "valuable information" on return address labels, travel clubs, $10 'CD' players!, and similar junk. Now they can just eliminate even that step and just mail it to me at "friend@public.com" and it's totally my fault that the message is dropped as spam by either my ISP or myself. *sheesh*
I must remember. No email is ever misdirected. No email is ever lost. All mail I received should be carefully reviewed, in its entirety, for important information. I must always run attached Office and VBS documents - it might contain a self-extracting signed document concerning some critical financial issue such as my long distance charges (which average less than $20/month). And in a totally unprovoked dig, MS Exchange only has problems because of all of those unconfigurable sendmail servers.:-)
Sounds great, but don't forget that the Debian definition of "free" excludes some code because it's *too* free. E.g., a classic "non-free" license is one that prohibits the inclusion of the package on any media for which *any* charge is incurred. Not even media charges. That means you can't get that package on a $2 disk, or bundled with your "Quick-Start Linux" book, or (arguably) even shrink-wrapped with the current issue of Linux Journal.
Other items in non-free include free software which must be distributed in source form only, or software whose "source" tarballs must be distributed unmodified. (That doesn't sound unreasonable, until you try to add packaging information. That's a modification of the tarballs!)
Another example? Crypto software which can finally be exported from US mirrors should still be "non-free" since it may be illegal to import and use in some countries. That breaks the DFSG (at least, in some people's views) because its discrimination on the basis of nationality if the license says you can't use the software where it's illegal to do so.
Finally, and arguably the biggest category, is software which is free for personal, non-commercial use but which requires a license for commercial use. E.g., the latest version of ghostscript or mysql. N.B., these packages often define "commercial use" very narrowly. It's important to acknowledge the restriction, but it generally doesn't affect the legal status of any system in question.
It's easy to see "non-free" and think "oh, that's software that you must pay for" but that's rarely the case - few Debian supporters want to use *that* type of non-free software. To me, this is nothing more than an ideological pissing contest similar to that seen between the GPL and BSD license camps -- a lot of heat and noise produced by zealots on both sides, with the vast majority of Debian maintainers and users baffled why the minor problems have been blown up into a crisis.
(disclaimer) I haven't read the original paper, only the Analog precise' of it. It's been months since I read the article, and decades since I actively studied physics, so use a large crystal of NaCl. (/disclaimer)
IIRC, Yilmaz's GR says that *singularities* don't exist because the graviational field itself will counterbalance collapse past a certain point, not that event horizons/black holes can't exist. The minimum stellar mass required to form a black hole will increase, but that's only an issue with the remnants of supernovae, not galactic black holes.
The best analogy is probably the "speed limit" imposed by SR. Your mass increases as you approach the speed of light, so a fixed amount of extra momentum or energy gives you an increasingly smaller increase in velocity. The increase is just enough that it requires an infinite amount of energy to reach c.
Likewise, as I understand Yilmaz's GR spacetime itself will resist further collapse with increasing force as the gravitational gradient increases. To actually pierce spacetime (singularity) requires an infinite amount of mass. This has happened exactly once - the big bang.
Even if I misunderstood/misrecall Yilmaz's predictions and it really does prevent the phase change that occurs at the event horizon, this is a difference that has little effect outside of the traditional event horizon. You're still talking about an incredibly high gravitational field and gradient so you'll still have profound redshifts, time dilation, frame dragging, etc. The *only* difference is that your atoms won't fall through an event horizon, they'll impact the degenerate matter on the surface of the "black hole." Big whoop.
Religion is not considered a choice. Most people follow the religion of their parents, something totally beyond their control. Even those of us who have chosen a different path than our parents do so on values introduced to us as children.
Other problematic areas? What about sexual orientation? Is that a choice, a biological condition, or something largely set by early childhood experiences?
What about drug use and addictions? There is absolutely no doubt that addiction has a strong biological component. Are you arguing against discriminating against a stoner in the cockpit since it's a biological condition?
How about obesity? Morbid obesity is (always?) due to biological factors, not "lack of willpower," "lack of exercise," etc. (That's not to say that such factors have no influences, only that someone won't drop from 400 pounds to the covergirl status without doing some pretty severe damage to her body.) Does that mean that obesity jokes should be deemed as socially unacceptable as racist jokes?
Finally, never ever forget the possibility that pedophilia is due to a biological defect. We can have compassion for people burdened with inappopriate desires while simultaneously denying them the right to freely exercise those desires because of the cost to others.
I'm not claiming to have the answer to the questions... only that your analysis of the situation is over-simplistic. By law, some things are not considered "choices." Other things are considered a "choice" by some, and a biological condition by others. Yet other things may be viewed as biological conditions by all-- yet still rejected by society at large.
I agree 100%, and wish the ISP was identified for this reason. Hell, even Belgium tried to stop the Nazi advance at the beginning of WW-II. This ISP, in contrast, can only be compared (unfavorably) to Chamberlain. In many ways the scariest thing about this story is that there was probably no direct connection between the DOS and the controversial site. This would make the situation analogous to a bomb going off in a city, one terrorist group claiming responsibility... and being handed the corpse of their political opponent on a platter without a struggle. The next time a bomb goes off (another DDOS attack occurs) will anyone be surprised by a dozen terrorists claiming responsibility - and they will all want different things to go away. Will this ISP terminate a dozen accounts because *one* *might* have offended someone?
You missed the first step - figuring out what your power outages look like.
In my area (Boulder, Colo) I've noticed that nearly every outage has fallen into one of two categories:
<li>a momentary glitch which blinks the lights... and takes down any non-UPS'd computer, and
<li>major outages (due to snow-laden trees?) that frequently last 8 hours and up.
We're also starting to see a third category, rolling brownouts due to gross undercapacity in the local power grid (gee, didn't anyone at PSC notice that Colorado lead the national growth rate for several years running?), but those are still easily predicted because they're tied to unusually hot summer days.
Given this, if the lights go out you count to ten and then start shutting down computers. Only a generator will keep systems up for many hours. Deciding what to do would be far harder if you're in an area where 10-60 minute outages are common. That's long enough that a decent UPS may, or may not, suffice.
Actually, you *could* work 20 hours a week right now and be able to support a family of four...
... provided you're willing to accept a 1960's lifestyle. A small house in a cookie cutter neighborhood far from anything interesting, perhaps 1200 sq ft, two bedrooms, 1 bathroom. No central air. No laundry facilities. A carport, or maybe a single-car garage. Your only car will have no ABS or CD player.
Your entertainment? A (as in *one*) TV, with only broadcast stations. No VCR, no rented movies, no cable. No video games. No personal computers.
Want to talk to friends and family? One telephone, no fancy features (caller ID, call waiting), no answering machine. No long distance calls.
Your diet? No soft drinks, or maybe a few cans per week. No frozen meals popped into a microwave, and few restaurant meals. Don't plan on eating meat with every meal either.
I was a kid in the 60's, but I don't want to trust my memory when comparing the two eras. But I also set up a post-college household a mere 15 years ago and recall spending more on a small color TV and a microwave oven, each, than I did on my monthly rent. Today I could buy a microwave, a midsize TV, a good VCR, and a mini-fridge for one month's rent for the same unit.
Someone I trust said that he looked at one of the XML-formatted documents produced by Office 2000... 'and when the people in the building held up the sign saying "you are in a helicopter" the pilot said "aha, we're over the Microsoft campus - only they give you an answer which is technically correct while providing absolutely no information" and safely landed the helicopter in the fog.'
The Bad Old Format was [unintelligable garbage].
The New, Improved XML Format is <ms-office>[unitelligable garbage]</ms-office>.
Strictly speaking, and you can be damn sure that the Microsoft lawyers will insist you acknowledge it, this is valid XML since the DTD for the ms-office element is CDATA. However it provides absolutely no additional information of any value to anyone.
(P.S., the full joke I paraphrased to summarize my friend's comments is that a helicopter pilot is lost in a fog over Seattle. He carefully descends until he can see an office building, then holds up a sign saying he is lost and could they tell him where he is...)
This reminds me of the articles in the Weekly World News were some raving "feminist" (made up, I pray) vehemently argues that "most rapes aren't reported, all men are rapists, let's lock up EVERY MAN for a full week each year as punishment for unreported rapes they commited."
If someone knowingly sells counterfeit software in an auction, throw the book at them. Criminal prosecution, revocation of eBay account, etc. If they honestly acquired the counterfeit software, throw the book at the company that sold them the counterfeit software. (E.g., they got it with their Discount Dave's system - throw Dave in the slammer!)
But DON'T punish people because they *might* be commiting a crime. And don't tempt the Gods by demanding punishment for people who *might* have commited a crime when you yourself have been convicted of a federal felony and are in the penalty phase of the trial!
They better not ban my sale of demon-summoning paraphenalia - I'll sue for violation of my civil rights to peaceful exercise of my religion!
Well, maybe the *demon-summoning paraphenalia will have to go - they do tend to get wild, although in a college town who can tell? - but the pentagram is entitled to precisely as much legal protection as the bibles. A quick check shows _2971_ items matching the search word "bible," so they can't claim that they ban all auctions of religious articles.
But what happens when my girlfriend, a defrocked nun, attempts to sell her old paraphenalia? Is the mummified toe of a saint religious paraphenalia, or a mere human body part?
(To be fair, eBay shows 247 items matching "pentagram", 335 items matching "satan", and a bit more seriously 908 items matching Wicca, 1349 matching Buddha, yet only 242 items matching Baptist. They haven't been totally taken over by the crazies, yet, but have clearly let specific controversies lead their policy decisions and are establishing bad precedences.)
I know that the standard advice du jour is to have *nothing* in the/etc/issue file other than an "unauthorized access prohibited" message, but I believe that's asking for trouble down the road.
The problem? Consider the analogy to "stealing a car" in a crowded parking lot. If you drive a white Neon but are trying to get into a blue pickup, you've got some explaining to do. But if you drive a white Neon and you're trying to get into another white Neon - esp. in the same general area as your car - it's an innocent mistake. People aren't required to verify license plates and VINs before driving off, and there have been cases where a person innocently drove off in the wrong car because everything - even the keys - matched.
Of course, we all know that the same thing could never happen on the internet. People never misspell hostnames or IP addresses. The DNS system is never fscked up. (*snort*)
You can probably guess my point now. An "unauthorized access prohibited" message begs the question - *who is authorized*? You seem to leak a little information with
This system is maintained by Megacorp Corp. Unauthorized access prohibited.
but that information is available to attackers anyway via "whois" on the IP address. (It's also available to people making honest mistakes... but when's the last time you checked the plates on *your* car?!) In the meanwhile, with that additional statement it's *much* harder for someone to argue that they innocently mistook your system for another one. After all, other than the/etc/issue file most systems are totally indistinguishable - a world full of Ford Model T's, all in black.
Beyond that, I agree completely with the minimalist approach. Some people would add a telephone number, but I would usually discourage that.
IIRC, the atomic clock experiments demonstrated that time passes slower on the surface of the earth than in orbit, and by the factor predicted by GR. This theory, taken to extremes, is why black holes are "black" -- the time dilation is so severe that that *all* wavelengths are red-shifted into oblivion.
"Frame dragging" is a far more subtle effect that says that a rotating mass will actually "drag" spacetime around with it. That means that a full circle is less than 360 degrees if you go in the same direction as the rotation. This effect is far more subtle than time dilation, and far harder to measure.
To test for this effect, you set something pointing at a known distant point, let it orbit once, then measure the angle it's been deflected. A gyroscope will keep pointing in the same direction, but only if you remove all other influences. Even in orbit that's not easy - there's the earth's magnetic field and its interaction with the solar wind, the thin atmosphere, gravitational anomolies, tidal forces from the moon and sun, etc. You can't stay too close to the earth, yet if you go out too far the "frame dragging" effect becomes immeasurable. And if you make the gyroscrope *totally* immune from outside influences, how do you determine how it's spinning?
One of the pop science magazines, possibly Discover, had an in-depth article on this mission a year or so ago.
I stopped going to movies a *long* time ago because I would be "in" the movie when the an actor said a particularly dumb line and *bam* I'm sitting in a dark room surrounded by a bunch of slackjawed droolers. That's why I ROTFL'ing during Keanu's "wake-up" sequence in _Matrix_ -- I've been there!
If the "error" is critical to the plot I'm able to live with it. (E.g., who monitored & unplugged the traitor in _Matrix_? Obviously the meeting occured while he was sitting in the chair & Neo approached, but if he could interact like that then why did anyone need to get plugged in?)
But a lot of these errors are totally pointless oversights. E.g., the Star Trek: Borg movie (which may be the last movie I saw in a theater) had people casually walk around as an ICBM launched a few feet away. I've been a few *miles* away from a Shuttle launch, and seen plenty of footage of actual silo launches. People will *not* casually notice a launch a few hundred feet away... and that 2-second sequence left me sitting in a dark room. How hard would it be for them to put the launch silo a few hundred yards out of town? Did this missile base have a *single* silo?!
Maybe I'm being "unreasonable," but I don't have the same problem suspending disbelief when watching older movies. To be fair, that might be a "selection effect" where only the best 5% of movies from the 30's through 60's are aired, vs. *all* contemporary movies. Somehow I doubt _Battlefield Earth_ will be aired on the classic movies channel in 2035.
Slashdot Mirror
One minor nit - Unicode is not always 16 bits/character. There are at least three modes, requiring 8-, 16- and 32-bit wide characters. For practical reasons the 32-bit mode is rarely used today (imagine managing a font with hundreds of thousands of glyphs!), but a properly written Unicode application should be able to handle it.
In the meanwhile, the 40,000-odd characters in UTF-16 (not 2^16 since a big chunk is reserved for local use, etc.) is enough to handle all of the alphabetic languages *and* the most common words in common ideogrammatic languages. It's not sufficient for the most demanding tasks, but it will be nirvana for anyone coming out of ASCII-land.
I *really* hate it when people misquote the rhetorical questions used to illustrate legal principles....
The original rhetorical question is "if one were to leave a loaded gun ON AN OPEN WINDOWSILL and a passerby picked it up..." The key phrase is "open windowsill" - it's at a location where the owner is nominally in control of it, but anyone passing on the street could easily grab it. Hell, it's at a location where it could be easily knocked out of house without deliberate effort. The gunowner is clearly acting negligently.
(A modern analogue to this question is someone leaving a gun in plain sight in a locked car. This requires smashing a car window, but the risks of a parking lot "smash & grab" are less than a home burglary.)
In contrast, put the gun more than an arm's length away from the window and it's *far* harder to claim that the owner is negligent. Put the gun out of reach and out of plain sight (e.g., in a closed nightstand or a locked glove compartment) and claims that the gunowner was negligent if the gun is subsequently stolen start to wear very thin - by that metric, some people will argue that their responsibility *requires* that they keep their gun on their person at all times!
N.B., the cited quote doesn't even posit that the gun was stolen from a house or other area where the gunowner has a reasonable expectation of sole dominion - he's trying to bring to mind the image of a latter-day Johnny Appleseed prancing through a park tossing out loaded guns. Of course that's an unspeakably reckless act.
For some reason most people here seem to assume that he's refering to home burglaries, and while it's true that some jurisdictions have vicarious liability laws the general principal remains - as a rule people aren't held responsible for reasonable omissions, and almost never when those omissions are required by reasonable actions.
(E.g., you put a pie on the windowsill to cool, someone steals it, burns their fingers or mouth, and sues you. They'll have a *very* hard time winning since you had to put the pie *somewhere* to cool.)
Argh! Whatever you think you know about the McDonald's "coffee" suit, it's wrong. It's been discussed before repeatedly on both Slashdot and elsewhere, so I'm not going to repeat it yet again here.
However, if you really want to believe that Rush Limbaugh and the like are the only ones with the guts (no pun intended) to report the "real" story - without all of the distracting "trivia" that the rest of us insist is important (like the fact that this coffee was served something like 20F hotter than at any other restaurant in town, or that the manager ignored multiple prior credible scalding compliants), then there's nothing I can do.
One reason for submitting the language to a standards body is to prevent others from producing their own, competing implementations.
Granted, the standards route will eventually force them to open up the language to others, but that's years down the road. In contrast, if it were open today I'm there are plenty of language theorists who could name a handful of "obvious" improvements that would leave MS playing catch-up for years. (E.g., inner classes, something that both C++ and Java have found necessary.)
You use that random data to eliminate most of the "known plaintext" on the disk. That's the same reason you need to use a real cryptographic PRNG, not a weak one which is easily cracked.
On the one hand, this doesn't offer you *that* much more protection - I would rather use a strong algorithm and zero-initialized blocks than a weak algorithm and random blocks. On the other hand, if you feel it's appropriate to use an encrypted FS in the first place you shouldn't begrudge small improvements with definite benefits.
1) I'm not sure about the serpent cipher, but DES (and others) use an "initial vector" dependent upon the disk blocks relative (or absolute) position. Identical plaintext blocks will *not* give you identical ciphertext blocks, so something is wrong. (If serpent doesn't have an IV key, then it's an inappropriate cipher to use in this application.)
A secondary factor, already mentioned, is that the cipher should be run in CBC mode within the disk block. That shouldn't be a problem since any block cipher can be run in CBC mode - it's coded at a higher abstraction level.
2) the "randomness" in a well-encrypted file is not due to the encryption - it's due to the compression that occurs before the encryption. Non-randomness is a problem with byte-wide encryption (including variants like Viriege(sp?) and Playfair ciphers), but it's far harder to attribute any significance to non-randomness in a 8- or 16-byte cipher running in CBC mode.
3) the reason for preloading the disk with random data is simple: you eliminate the implicit "known-text" problem that occurs with empty (and nulled) sectors. With random data the only known-text on the entire encrypted disk is the superblock, plus *maybe* a file or two at an unknown location.
In this case, the tangible media is the hard disk and - arguably - the RAM used by the web server and browser, the OS file caches, etc.
The key idea behind "tangible" is that it's sufficiently permanent for someone to disprove a claim of infringement. Or as I like to reword it, it's tangible enough that you can prove the Vice President really did say what Jay Leno was mocking him for saying. One minicassette recorder can disprove a roomful of eyewitnesses.
I honestly can't figure this out.
The appeals court acted BEFORE they got the actual appeals paperwork - which means that they accepted the case BEFORE they could possibly decide whether the appeal had any merit. The appeals court acted BEFORE the trial judge could address the question of whether the DoJ was legally entitled to request the appeal be initially heard by the Supreme Court.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like they've just made it an absolutely certainty that the Supreme Court *will* ultimately accept the appeal, if only to publicly chastise the lower (appeal) court for acting with such unseemly haste as to cast the impartiality of the entire judiciary into serious doubt.
Think about it, after jumping the gun like this will anyone be able to view this court's overturning the trial judge's decisions with anything other than profoundly deep cynicism? They couldn't even wait 24 hours (for the papers to be delivered) for even the appearance of impartiality - no, it's clear at least some of those judges are foaming at the mouth to have their say. And that is precisely why they can't be permitted to have the final word.
Maybe there will be justice (pun unintended) and the Supreme Court will announce that they, not the appeals court, will be hearing the appeal directly since the appeals court has demonstrated itself incapable of acting in the Constitutionally mandated fashion. Or, at the very least, the Surpremes will accept the case, but immediately return it to a *different* lower court for the first round of appeals.
Meanwhile I want a list of the names of those justices. Appointment to the federal bench is for life, but I want to do be sure that this little trick is remembered if any of them are ever nominated for a higher court.
The FCC was created because the airwaves *were* becoming a big ball o' static. There's nothing theoretical about it - read your history books.
The FCC continues to exist because some politicians found it a convenient backdoor way to regulate content. The "ownership" issue is also coming up in defending the seizure of frequencies used for one purpose so they can be sold, SOLD, to another group for some quick bucks.
These are fairly separate issues and it is possible for both sides to be correct.
Apt-get will install an updated package, but (unless you --force it) won't reinstall a currently installed version. This means cracked applications stay cracked.
... will be enough to stop a knowledgeable intruder who already has root access on your system.)
(And don't make me laugh by suggesting that a cron job running apt-get install --force
Running apt-get religiously is a good start, but you also need a well-configured tripwire, log host, etc.
It seems that I can't say it enough. Install and use Kerberos. NOW!
SSH is great for connecting to a shell account, but you may still leak passwords once you've established a secure connection to your "trusted" network. Kerberos, properly installed, ensures that your passwords *NEVER* appear *ANYWHERE* in plaintext, and rarely appear in ciphertext. After all, you never know when someone has compromised one of your local tools, e.g., psql.
Strictly speaking, many types of contracts don't need *any* signature to be legally binding. Unless one is required by the Statue of Frauds all a court needs is proof that both/all parties agreed on mutually beneficial acts and that at least one part did an overt act in compliance with that understanding.
:-)
In other words - a verbal contract.
*So*, in many cases if two parties exchanged digital signatures in the expectation that they were binding then they were, in fact, binding. If the contract was covered by the Statue of Frauds and they exchanged traditional documents stating that digital signatures would be considered binding for the purposes of the SoF, then these signatures would be binding. If they tried to use only digital signatures for something covered by the SoF, they were never binding.
Even in the case where one party exchanged digital signatures with the expectation that they would not be binding, if the other party/ies thought they were doing a good-faith negotiation then these signatures would probably be declared binding for the purposes of a criminal complaint for fraud.
The only thing this bill really does is 1) state that digital signatures are acceptable under the SoF, so you can buy real estate and the like with them, and 2) deny shady characters the chance to try claiming that the digital signature "wasn't really valid" in hopes that the other party will give up and walk away from a legitimate claim.
Is this the same bill that had other gems "expediting" business transactions over the net, e.g., allowing companies to send e-mail in lieu of paper mail, even certified mail, without requiring any type of proof of delivery to the receipient?
:-)
The risks of that should be obvious. I already get enough crap from companies insisting that they gave me plenty of notification of rate changes/fee changes/etc in the 5-point print on the bottom of a statement bundled with "valuable information" on return address labels, travel clubs, $10 'CD' players!, and similar junk. Now they can just eliminate even that step and just mail it to me at "friend@public.com" and it's totally my fault that the message is dropped as spam by either my ISP or myself. *sheesh*
I must remember. No email is ever misdirected. No email is ever lost. All mail I received should be carefully reviewed, in its entirety, for important information. I must always run attached Office and VBS documents - it might contain a self-extracting signed document concerning some critical financial issue such as my long distance charges (which average less than $20/month). And in a totally unprovoked dig, MS Exchange only has problems because of all of those unconfigurable sendmail servers.
Sounds great, but don't forget that the Debian definition of "free" excludes some code because it's *too* free. E.g., a classic "non-free" license is one that prohibits the inclusion of the package on any media for which *any* charge is incurred. Not even media charges. That means you can't get that package on a $2 disk, or bundled with your "Quick-Start Linux" book, or (arguably) even shrink-wrapped with the current issue of Linux Journal.
Other items in non-free include free software which must be distributed in source form only, or software whose "source" tarballs must be distributed unmodified. (That doesn't sound unreasonable, until you try to add packaging information. That's a modification of the tarballs!)
Another example? Crypto software which can finally be exported from US mirrors should still be "non-free" since it may be illegal to import and use in some countries. That breaks the DFSG (at least, in some people's views) because its discrimination on the basis of nationality if the license says you can't use the software where it's illegal to do so.
Finally, and arguably the biggest category, is software which is free for personal, non-commercial use but which requires a license for commercial use. E.g., the latest version of ghostscript or mysql. N.B., these packages often define "commercial use" very narrowly. It's important to acknowledge the restriction, but it generally doesn't affect the legal status of any system in question.
It's easy to see "non-free" and think "oh, that's software that you must pay for" but that's rarely the case - few Debian supporters want to use *that* type of non-free software. To me, this is nothing more than an ideological pissing contest similar to that seen between the GPL and BSD license camps -- a lot of heat and noise produced by zealots on both sides, with the vast majority of Debian maintainers and users baffled why the minor problems have been blown up into a crisis.
(disclaimer) I haven't read the original paper, only the Analog precise' of it. It's been months since I read the article, and decades since I actively studied physics, so use a large crystal of NaCl. (/disclaimer)
IIRC, Yilmaz's GR says that *singularities* don't exist because the graviational field itself will counterbalance collapse past a certain point, not that event horizons/black holes can't exist. The minimum stellar mass required to form a black hole will increase, but that's only an issue with the remnants of supernovae, not galactic black holes.
The best analogy is probably the "speed limit" imposed by SR. Your mass increases as you approach the speed of light, so a fixed amount of extra momentum or energy gives you an increasingly smaller increase in velocity. The increase is just enough that it requires an infinite amount of energy to reach c.
Likewise, as I understand Yilmaz's GR spacetime itself will resist further collapse with increasing force as the gravitational gradient increases. To actually pierce spacetime (singularity) requires an infinite amount of mass. This has happened exactly once - the big bang.
Even if I misunderstood/misrecall Yilmaz's predictions and it really does prevent the phase change that occurs at the event horizon, this is a difference that has little effect outside of the traditional event horizon. You're still talking about an incredibly high gravitational field and gradient so you'll still have profound redshifts, time dilation, frame dragging, etc. The *only* difference is that your atoms won't fall through an event horizon, they'll impact the degenerate matter on the surface of the "black hole." Big whoop.
Religion is not considered a choice. Most people follow the religion of their parents, something totally beyond their control. Even those of us who have chosen a different path than our parents do so on values introduced to us as children.
Other problematic areas? What about sexual orientation? Is that a choice, a biological condition, or something largely set by early childhood experiences?
What about drug use and addictions? There is absolutely no doubt that addiction has a strong biological component. Are you arguing against discriminating against a stoner in the cockpit since it's a biological condition?
How about obesity? Morbid obesity is (always?) due to biological factors, not "lack of willpower," "lack of exercise," etc. (That's not to say that such factors have no influences, only that someone won't drop from 400 pounds to the covergirl status without doing some pretty severe damage to her body.) Does that mean that obesity jokes should be deemed as socially unacceptable as racist jokes?
Finally, never ever forget the possibility that pedophilia is due to a biological defect. We can have compassion for people burdened with inappopriate desires while simultaneously denying them the right to freely exercise those desires because of the cost to others.
I'm not claiming to have the answer to the questions... only that your analysis of the situation is over-simplistic. By law, some things are not considered "choices." Other things are considered a "choice" by some, and a biological condition by others. Yet other things may be viewed as biological conditions by all-- yet still rejected by society at large.
I agree 100%, and wish the ISP was identified for this reason. Hell, even Belgium tried to stop the Nazi advance at the beginning of WW-II. This ISP, in contrast, can only be compared (unfavorably) to Chamberlain. In many ways the scariest thing about this story is that there was probably no direct connection between the DOS and the controversial site. This would make the situation analogous to a bomb going off in a city, one terrorist group claiming responsibility... and being handed the corpse of their political opponent on a platter without a struggle. The next time a bomb goes off (another DDOS attack occurs) will anyone be surprised by a dozen terrorists claiming responsibility - and they will all want different things to go away. Will this ISP terminate a dozen accounts because *one* *might* have offended someone?
You missed the first step - figuring out what your power outages look like.
In my area (Boulder, Colo) I've noticed that nearly every outage has fallen into one of two categories:
<li>a momentary glitch which blinks the lights... and takes down any non-UPS'd computer, and
<li>major outages (due to snow-laden trees?) that frequently last 8 hours and up.
We're also starting to see a third category, rolling brownouts due to gross undercapacity in the local power grid (gee, didn't anyone at PSC notice that Colorado lead the national growth rate for several years running?), but those are still easily predicted because they're tied to unusually hot summer days.
Given this, if the lights go out you count to ten and then start shutting down computers. Only a generator will keep systems up for many hours. Deciding what to do would be far harder if you're in an area where 10-60 minute outages are common. That's long enough that a decent UPS may, or may not, suffice.
Actually, you *could* work 20 hours a week right now and be able to support a family of four...
... provided you're willing to accept a 1960's lifestyle. A small house in a cookie cutter neighborhood far from anything interesting, perhaps 1200 sq ft, two bedrooms, 1 bathroom. No central air. No laundry facilities. A carport, or maybe a single-car garage. Your only car will have no ABS or CD player.
Your entertainment? A (as in *one*) TV, with only broadcast stations. No VCR, no rented movies, no cable. No video games. No personal computers.
Want to talk to friends and family? One telephone, no fancy features (caller ID, call waiting), no answering machine. No long distance calls.
Your diet? No soft drinks, or maybe a few cans per week. No frozen meals popped into a microwave, and few restaurant meals. Don't plan on eating meat with every meal either.
I was a kid in the 60's, but I don't want to trust my memory when comparing the two eras. But I also set up a post-college household a mere 15 years ago and recall spending more on a small color TV and a microwave oven, each, than I did on my monthly rent. Today I could buy a microwave, a midsize TV, a good VCR, and a mini-fridge for one month's rent for the same unit.
Someone I trust said that he looked at one of the XML-formatted documents produced by Office 2000... 'and when the people in the building held up the sign saying "you are in a helicopter" the pilot said "aha, we're over the Microsoft campus - only they give you an answer which is technically correct while providing absolutely no information" and safely landed the helicopter in the fog.'
The Bad Old Format was [unintelligable garbage].
The New, Improved XML Format is <ms-office>[unitelligable garbage]</ms-office>.
Strictly speaking, and you can be damn sure that the Microsoft lawyers will insist you acknowledge it, this is valid XML since the DTD for the ms-office element is CDATA. However it provides absolutely no additional information of any value to anyone.
(P.S., the full joke I paraphrased to summarize my friend's comments is that a helicopter pilot is lost in a fog over Seattle. He carefully descends until he can see an office building, then holds up a sign saying he is lost and could they tell him where he is...)
This reminds me of the articles in the Weekly World News were some raving "feminist" (made up, I pray) vehemently argues that "most rapes aren't reported, all men are rapists, let's lock up EVERY MAN for a full week each year as punishment for unreported rapes they commited."
If someone knowingly sells counterfeit software in an auction, throw the book at them. Criminal prosecution, revocation of eBay account, etc. If they honestly acquired the counterfeit software, throw the book at the company that sold them the counterfeit software. (E.g., they got it with their Discount Dave's system - throw Dave in the slammer!)
But DON'T punish people because they *might* be commiting a crime. And don't tempt the Gods by demanding punishment for people who *might* have commited a crime when you yourself have been convicted of a federal felony and are in the penalty phase of the trial!
They better not ban my sale of demon-summoning paraphenalia - I'll sue for violation of my civil rights to peaceful exercise of my religion!
Well, maybe the *demon-summoning paraphenalia will have to go - they do tend to get wild, although in a college town who can tell? - but the pentagram is entitled to precisely as much legal protection as the bibles. A quick check shows _2971_ items matching the search word "bible," so they can't claim that they ban all auctions of religious articles.
But what happens when my girlfriend, a defrocked nun, attempts to sell her old paraphenalia? Is the mummified toe of a saint religious paraphenalia, or a mere human body part?
(To be fair, eBay shows 247 items matching "pentagram", 335 items matching "satan", and a bit more seriously 908 items matching Wicca, 1349 matching Buddha, yet only 242 items matching Baptist. They haven't been totally taken over by the crazies, yet, but have clearly let specific controversies lead their policy decisions and are establishing bad precedences.)
I know that the standard advice du jour is to have *nothing* in the /etc/issue file other than an "unauthorized access prohibited" message, but I believe that's asking for trouble down the road.
/etc/issue file most systems are totally indistinguishable - a world full of Ford Model T's, all in black.
The problem? Consider the analogy to "stealing a car" in a crowded parking lot. If you drive a white Neon but are trying to get into a blue pickup, you've got some explaining to do. But if you drive a white Neon and you're trying to get into another white Neon - esp. in the same general area as your car - it's an innocent mistake. People aren't required to verify license plates and VINs before driving off, and there have been cases where a person innocently drove off in the wrong car because everything - even the keys - matched.
Of course, we all know that the same thing could never happen on the internet. People never misspell hostnames or IP addresses. The DNS system is never fscked up. (*snort*)
You can probably guess my point now. An "unauthorized access prohibited" message begs the question - *who is authorized*? You seem to leak a little information with
This system is maintained by Megacorp Corp.
Unauthorized access prohibited.
but that information is available to attackers anyway via "whois" on the IP address. (It's also available to people making honest mistakes... but when's the last time you checked the plates on *your* car?!) In the meanwhile, with that additional statement it's *much* harder for someone to argue that they innocently mistook your system for another one. After all, other than the
Beyond that, I agree completely with the minimalist approach. Some people would add a telephone number, but I would usually discourage that.
IIRC, the atomic clock experiments demonstrated that time passes slower on the surface of the earth than in orbit, and by the factor predicted by GR. This theory, taken to extremes, is why black holes are "black" -- the time dilation is so severe that that *all* wavelengths are red-shifted into oblivion.
"Frame dragging" is a far more subtle effect that says that a rotating mass will actually "drag" spacetime around with it. That means that a full circle is less than 360 degrees if you go in the same direction as the rotation. This effect is far more subtle than time dilation, and far harder to measure.
To test for this effect, you set something pointing at a known distant point, let it orbit once, then measure the angle it's been deflected. A gyroscope will keep pointing in the same direction, but only if you remove all other influences. Even in orbit that's not easy - there's the earth's magnetic field and its interaction with the solar wind, the thin atmosphere, gravitational anomolies, tidal forces from the moon and sun, etc. You can't stay too close to the earth, yet if you go out too far the "frame dragging" effect becomes immeasurable. And if you make the gyroscrope *totally* immune from outside influences, how do you determine how it's spinning?
One of the pop science magazines, possibly Discover, had an in-depth article on this mission a year or so ago.
Yeah, sure. Whatever.
I stopped going to movies a *long* time ago because I would be "in" the movie when the an actor said a particularly dumb line and *bam* I'm sitting in a dark room surrounded by a bunch of slackjawed droolers. That's why I ROTFL'ing during Keanu's "wake-up" sequence in _Matrix_ -- I've been there!
If the "error" is critical to the plot I'm able to live with it. (E.g., who monitored & unplugged the traitor in _Matrix_? Obviously the meeting occured while he was sitting in the chair & Neo approached, but if he could interact like that then why did anyone need to get plugged in?)
But a lot of these errors are totally pointless oversights. E.g., the Star Trek: Borg movie (which may be the last movie I saw in a theater) had people casually walk around as an ICBM launched a few feet away. I've been a few *miles* away from a Shuttle launch, and seen plenty of footage of actual silo launches. People will *not* casually notice a launch a few hundred feet away... and that 2-second sequence left me sitting in a dark room. How hard would it be for them to put the launch silo a few hundred yards out of town? Did this missile base have a *single* silo?!
Maybe I'm being "unreasonable," but I don't have the same problem suspending disbelief when watching older movies. To be fair, that might be a "selection effect" where only the best 5% of movies from the 30's through 60's are aired, vs. *all* contemporary movies. Somehow I doubt _Battlefield Earth_ will be aired on the classic movies channel in 2035.