Grab the whole password, and send it over the secure channel all at once.
SSH already does this. The issue is NOT NOT NOT with the initial password to establish the connection, but with passwords that you type DURING YOUR SESSION (say, for sudo).
Also, the number of people bringing computers to school with them and thinking that the archaic 8088 XT that they just dug out of the basement - usually because their parents can't or won't let them take the high-end 486 that the family uses - might be a bit surprising.
Once a girl down the hall asked me to help set her computer up. She had just gotten it shipped from Hawaii, and it was still in the box. I unpacked it and connected all the cords, and turned the switch on.
"Welcome to Windows 3.1"
She had paid $60 to ship the thing, easily twice what it was worth. I felt bad.
Almost as fashionable as pretending to be pragmatically cynical.
If we followed Dalroth's advice, we would repeatedly waste weeks at a time on other fringe languages as well. Sure it MIGHT pay off but this is the same logic people are criticized for when they spend money on lottery tickets.
I don't do things because I think they'll "pay off." I do them because I learn things from them, and because they're fun. Every time I learn a new language and compare it with the ones I already know, I learn something (and it's fun, too).
Someone coming out tommorow with the solution for *all* of these. For everyone. And having it verified.
I've thought about this before, but more from the perspective of "what if by some freak accident I was to stumble on the algorithm that makes factoring trivial? what would I do?"
Now, I don't believe everything I see in movies, but I also don't feel like putting my welfare or my sanity on the line by exposing something so momentous and dangerous. A lot of powerful people depend on the difficulty of factoring to keep their stuff secret.
Here's what I think I would do: Send an encrypted e-mail to Bruce Schneier describing the algorithm (he must have a public key posted somewhere), and forward it through a dozen anonymous remailers. Preface the explanation with this: The existence of the algorithm I am about to describe is terrifying to me, and I am not fit nor willing to take responsibility for it. I trust your judgement in how you feel is the best way to proceed.
The problem with that method of voting is that you ALWAYS get the compromise candidate.
So, for example, if half the people [loved Bush & hated Gore] and half the people [loved Gore & hated Bush], but everone kinda liked McCain - we'd always have the McCains.
How is this a bad thing? You think it's better to have a president that half the country hates than one whom everyone kinda likes?
What they really ought to use is Debian's method of vote counting, called concorde vote counting. A complete description can be found in The Debian Constitution, all the way at the bottom, but in a nutshell:
You vote not just for one person, but you rank the candidates in order of preference. ie. Ralph Nader first, Al Gore second, dubya third (see where I'm going with this?)
a candidate wins by being preferred to the others the most often, as opposed to having the most votes.
Imagine how much easier it would be for third parties to actually have a chance in elections! There would be no allegations of "throwing your vote away" or picking the lesser of two evils, and a candidate couldn't win by dividing the opposition, because everyone in the opposition would prefer BOTH of their candidates to the guy on the other side. (ie. Nader wouldn't have "stolen" the election from Al Gore, because anyone voting for Nader would prefer Al Gore to dubya.)
--
Because Ruby Rocks! :-)
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 5
I don't really know anything about Ruby; perhaps it provides something which Perl and/or Python simply can't.
Yes, it does.
A Few Things I like about Ruby, by Joshua Haberman
Everything is an object. Seriously. Even if you're not an all-out OO hippie, it gives great consistency:
variable punctuation determines scope, not type-- '@' is an instance variable, '@@' is a class variable, '$' is a global variable, and no prefix is local. This makes so much more sense than perl's confusing semantics ($foo[0] is part of @foo, but not $foo). It also lifts the ugliness of self.this and self.that. A constructor might look like this:
def initialize(foo, bar, baz)
@foo = foo
@bar = bar
@baz = baz
end
Reading or writing from a class attribute is always a method call. I absolutely love this! It means you get the syntactic clarity of foo.bar = baz (no foo.getBar or foo.setBar), but the safety of hiding it behind a procedure. For example (this one is from The Ruby Book, in the chapter on classes):
class Song
def durationInMinutes
@duration/60.0 # force floating point
end
def durationInMinutes=(value)
@duration = (value*60).to_i
end
end
And now you can read to or write from someSong.durationInMinutes as if it were a simple attribute when in truth they're methods!
I'm not a Ruby expert, and I'm sure that some of these features can be found in other languages: my point is that people shouldn't just assume that Ruby is another Perl or Python, because it offers several advantages that differentiate it from Perl or Python. (and these are just a start: it features iterators, blocks-as-arguments, threads, and more)
However I completely agree that not having something like CPAN is a serious disadvantage in comparison to perl.
i like getting a description of the package $ apt-cache show dpkg [...]
Description: Package maintenance system for Debian
This package contains the programs which handle the installation and
removal of packages on your system.
.
The primary interface for the dpkg suite is the `dselect' program;
a more low-level and less user-friendly interface is available in
the form of the `dpkg' command.
.
In order to unpack and build Debian source packages you will need to
install the developers' package `dpkg-dev' as well as this one.
[I like] being able to key-word search through the descriptions since i don't always already know what something is called. $ apt-cache search slashdot bk2site - Utility to turn bookmarks into Yahoo/Slashdot like pages
gnome-applets - Various applets for GNOME panel
lg-issue38 - Issue 38 of the Linux Gazette.
libapache-mod-perl - Integration of perl with the Apache web server
surfraw - a fast unix command line interface to WWW
ticker - configurable text scroller, with slashdot and freshmeat modules
wmheadlines - Linux news website headlines integrated to windowmaker's menus
Some people like dselect (and more power to them!) but I don't even touch it any more...
No the hang up there was not the hangup with Debian is that Debian does not put "non-free" software in main and the KDE people did not want to put it in non-free.
However, the GPL insists that you grant the right to modify the complete source of a program distributed under its terms, which is clearly in conflict with Qt's licence conditions. [...] So, we have been denied the right to ``distribute the Program at all''. (emphasis added)
It is fine to distribute GPLed and non-free software together just fine.
There you're correct. The issue for Debian is that they were linked together, which is a whole 'nother story.
GPL'd code is not accessable to everybody. It is only accessable to developers who are willing to release their code under the GPL license which excludes large portions of the community.
National parks are not accessable to everybody. They are only accessable to people who are willing to share them with everyone else. National parks are inaccesable to logging companies, real estate agents, and construction companies.
Government land should be in the public domain, not placed under restrictive rules that require you to share.
...if you're not running the client, do. If you are running the client and you're not affiliated with any other team, please join team Slashdot.org, if for no other reason than to spite these twits, who are ahead in daily counts these days (from their team page: "The best people. The best effort. The best platform. RC5 will fall again....")
Think of how many organizations and services provide forwarding e-mail addresses today. Tons. They all give the same argument (and a compelling argument it is): ISP's come and go, making permanent, forwarding e-mail addresses a smart idea. But by that argument alone, you'd never need more than one.
But the kicker about having several is that you can give out different e-mail addresses based on the role you're playing in that situation. An e-mail address is more than characters strung together, it is an identity, and often an affiliation with some organization.
For instance:
I use my debian.org e-mail address for any sort of work related to Debian
I give out my university address to anyone affiliated with my university--especially profs, various offices, etc.
I use my sourceforge address for any work related to projects hosted on sourceforge
I give out my main address to friends and family, people who are writing to "Josh the guy" as opposed to "Josh the student" or "Josh the Debian maintainer."
The fact that they all go the exact same place doesn't matter. They might not always. I might decide at some point to sort them differently or give them different priorities based on who the "To:" address in the headers is. If for some reason I cease to become a Debian maintainer in the future, I should no longer get Debian-related mail, and I could set up an auto-responder to indicate that I am no longer affiliated with the project.
So even though it may seem like just another forwarding e-mail address, I think that each one that captures a different capacity you serve is useful.
Ya know, it wouldn't be a huge project to write a program you plug your sound recording into and it writes the tabulature to the screen or file in real time. There's only a finite number of ways to finger to get notes out of a fretted instrument, so run a frequency analysis and then apply some simple algorithms for fingurability. Add basic harmonic analysis and it's easy to separate the bass from the guitar from whatever.
You, my friend, are talking straight out of your ass. If you could implement even a fraction of what you say "wouldn't be a huge project," you would single-handedly show up all of the current experts in the field.
I recommend you read the alt.binaries.sounds.midi FAQ, where the task of converting WAV->MIDI is discussed in depth (section 1.4). This is equivalent to the process you propose, the idea of taking a digital PCM sound file and decomposing it into musical "events." The discussion concludes with the following:
Think of it this way: If you don't mind spending more than the US national
debt on computer equipment and waiting a few years for the job to complete,
you can have a system that MIGHT accurately convert the digital waveform
data of a 5 minute song into a small, compact MIDI file.
This should catch the attention of any academic researcher -- do your part to help raise awareness in the academic community! Below is a letter I sent to my math advisor:
Dr. ******,
As you could probably guess, there are many political issues about which
I have strong feelings for whatever reason, especially in the realm of
computers and cyberspace. While it is normally most appropriate to keep
these to myself, an issue has come about which I believe has a very
direct impact on you and on other professors with respect to the
academic research you regularly conduct. This is why I am writing to you
today.
In September of 2000, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI)
announced an open contest to the computer community
(http://www.sdmi.org/pr/OL_Sept_6_2000.htm), inviting people to try and
break a watermarking scheme they had developed for digital sound files.
They challenged anyone to remove the watermark present in several audio
samples they published on their web site, without noticeably degrading
the quality of the signal. The reward was to be up to $10,000 in
exchange for non-disclosure of the solution.
A group of researchers from Princeton University led by Dr. Edward
Felten decided to take on the challenge and found several successful
methods for removing the watermark. The researchers decided against
accepting the prize money with the attached requirement that they keep
their research secret, and instead authored a paper titled _Reading
Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge_. It was their
intention to present it today at the 4th annual International
Information Hiding Workshop in Pittsburgh
(http://www.cert.org/IHW2001/).
However, on April 9th, they received a letter from the Recording
Industry Association of America (RIAA) threatening a lawsuit if they
presented the paper as planned, claiming that the contest agreement did
not "'expressly authorize' participants to disclose information and
research developed through participating in the Public challenge.
As a result, Dr. Felten made a public statement today that he and his
colleagues would not be presenting the paper as planned. "Litigation is
costly, time-consuming, and uncertain, regardless of the merits of the
other side's case," he announced. "Ultimately we, the authors, reached
a collective decision not to expose ourselves, our employers, and the
conference organizers to litigation at this time."
His statement, the letter from the RIAA threatening litigation, and the
paper itself can be viewed at (http://cryptome.org/sdmi-attack.htm).
I believe this is a frightening precedent, and a major blow to academic
freedom and the research community. Felten's crime was conducting
research that was seen as threatening by the business community--what
research will they decide they don't like next time? What can be said of
"academic freedom" when a rich company need only write threatening
letters to suppress troublesome knowledge?
If you agree that this is relevant and pertinent information, I would
appreciate it if you would forward this e-mail to any of your colleagues
who might be interested.
I have to recommend against installing whole systems of debian packages from third party sources (such as all of gnome or all of kde). Time has shown that they tend to be incompatible with the rest of Debian. I would refer you to threads on debian-devel, but I don't have the time to find them at the moment. Many developers, however, have found it solves a lot of problems just to purge all the ximian/helix packages from their system.
Usually the stuff in unstable is reasonably recent. I'm pretty sure KDE2 is in there, not sure about the version of Gnome.
You shouldn't expect to be a widely read and acknowledged writer after just fifty writeups.
But don't blame the E2 community just because you're not widely loved from the get-go.
I really wish people would stop accusing me of being egotistical or XP-centric. I don't give a fuck about my reputation on E2. I don't care about being well-known or widely read. I don't have aspirations of being the next P_I. Hell, I would probably post anonymously if I could.
However, I really cannot see a single reason why I would invest any amount of time into writing when so few people spend 3 seconds and 2 clicks to say "that's worth being part of this database." If no one gets anything out of my nodes, then why the hell am I writing them? If I were writing with the intention of my own self-gratification, I would write in a diary or a journal.
I was first inspired to node when I came across some writing on E2 that I thought was really outstanding, for whatever reason. Either I learned something, or I was introduced to a viewpoint, or I was let in on someone's remarkable stories. I got something out of these nodes, so I wanted other people to get something out of mine. If no one does, then I'm not accomplishing that goal, and I have no reason to contribute.
That's all a vote is to me. Not a notch on the belt or ego-boost, but a simple indication that I didn't waste the last hour or two of my life, because somebody took something away from something I wrote.
Silly boy, the E2 "elite" have nothing to do with that. Every E2 denizen, no matter how long they've been there, has exactly one vote per writeup.
I understand that, I've been around for almost a year, you know. However, I still stand by my original statment for two reasons.
1. Yes, everybody gets one vote--however the long-timers have enormous influence over the shaping of everything (this is acknowledged in the FAQ). So you're a newbie, first day on everything, and being the contientious netizen you are, you decide to lurk for a few days and see what flies and what doesn't. You come across crap like "REMOVE," written by a god no less, and see it voted through the roof and therefore take it as a model of supposedly good noding.
2. The E2 elite are comprised of every E2 noder. Yes, E2 has high literary standards, but it also has high standards of what is cool enough to warrant upvotes. Stuff that isn't cool enough will be immediately softlinked to "your radical ideas..." nodes, or "did you hear about the man who told his ass how to talk?" Who's going to upvote them now?
Factual noding doesn't get as many votes, but they're still loved and cherished and, gradually, voted up by people who find them interesting and/or can verify that they're accurate. Facts are what make e2 relevant, and they're what keep people coming back to the site time and time again.
I find this terribly hard to believe. Why? Nobody talks about them. Nobody upvotes them. Nobody/msg's you to say they liked them. "Node what you know," right? One of my nodes is American Boychoir, about a boarding choir school I attended for three years. (I hate to give away my E2 identity lest it be seen as an attempt at winning some sympathy votes, but the example was so good I had to). In my opinion it's reasonably entertaining, very informative, and a valuable addition to the database (and definitely a unique experience). Yet only 3 people decided they liked it enough to vote for it. Lack of exposure certainly wasn't the issue--it was cooled and therefore sat on the front page for a while. I probably spent an hour, at least, on that node (I'm a slow writer)--to see that only 3 people got anything out of it makes me unlikely to do it again. Organ is another good example, at 4 votes.
Of course, I wouldn't dare write anything like the above on E2 itself: at the very least, I'd get condescending softlinks like "your radical ideas about voting have already occured to others" and "quit your whining." Fine, I am quitting my whining, as well as any noding I might have done, and I don't just write drivel either. I guess I'm just not cool enough for E2.
(aside: it occured to me that this post as well as my previous one could be seen as hypocritical when compared with my sig. I don't have a problem discussing moderation, but statements like "Well, I know this is going to get moderated down, but here goes..." drive me nuts.)
Do you know what of the highest-rated writeup on E2 is? I will REMOVE the fucking toilet seat if you don't shut up, with a total of 357 votes at the moment. It's a stupid whiney rant by everything god moJoe, where he spends six paragraphs drawing out an argument that could be easily summarized in one sentence (women shouldn't complain about the way the toilet seat is left). What is so goddamn amazing about that node that it has more than three times the score of almost any other node in existance?
Meanwhile excellently written informative (as opposed to whiney or ranting) nodes sit in the single digits, too boring for the E2 elite to bother with. I'd come up with some examples, but E2 is so slow at the moment I don't have the patience (every page is taking at least a half-minute to load).
There are a lot of awesome things about E2, and I've read some amazing stuff there, but peoples' voting tendencies are one of the things that keeps me from noding more often. It sucks to put a lot of time into a node only to see it completely unappreciated.
Patents don't keep anyone from USING something, they keep someone from SELLING it (as their own).
With all due respect, what the hell are you talking about?
If that were true, then Unisys wouldn't have the ability to bully the GIMP and webmasters who create images with a non-licensed program. No one's selling anything. Because Unisys owns the patnent on LZW compression, no one else can USE it, period.
If that were true, then Amazon wouldn't have been able to force Barnes and Noble to eliminate their "one-click shopping" capability on their web site. Barnes and Noble doesn't sell anything but books. Amazon is preventing them from USING the IDEA of one-click shopping.
Make no mistake, when someone files a patent, they're claiming exclusive USE of an idea. From lawguru.com:
What competition does a patent prevent?
Patents provide the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering for sale or importing the invention described in the claims. This is perhaps the most powerful monopoly legally obtainable for products.
I've heard a lot of people allude to the story of CDDB at one time being free, supported and built up by volunteers entering information, and then at some point turning evil and proprietary. Can someone recount the story in a bit more detail? For instance, how did a company gain control over what was once a volunteer effort? At what point did it become clear that they were going to make everything so painfully commercial (patents, licencing, and other ugliness...)?
The Kerberos community was incensed when they saw this, but they had no way to stop it. Kerberos had been developed at MIT, and released as free software--but not under the GNU GPL. The lax license used for Kerberos was no bar to Microsoft's plans. If the Kerberos developers had released Kerberos under the GPL, Microsoft could not have undermined it in this way.
This doesn't make sense at all--Kerberos is an open protocol (RFC 1510), so how would GPLing one specific implementation prevent embrace-extend tactics? The worst that could happen is that Microsoft be declared non-compliant, but even that didn't happen because Microsoft was simply using bits specifically reserved for implementation-specific use.
This seems like such an obvious error, am I missing something?
Slashdot Mirror
Grab the whole password, and send it over the secure channel all at once.
SSH already does this. The issue is NOT NOT NOT with the initial password to establish the connection, but with passwords that you type DURING YOUR SESSION (say, for sudo).
Also, the number of people bringing computers to school with them and thinking that the archaic 8088 XT that they just dug out of the basement - usually because their parents can't or won't let them take the high-end 486 that the family uses - might be a bit surprising.
Once a girl down the hall asked me to help set her computer up. She had just gotten it shipped from Hawaii, and it was still in the box. I unpacked it and connected all the cords, and turned the switch on.
"Welcome to Windows 3.1"
She had paid $60 to ship the thing, easily twice what it was worth. I felt bad.
It is fashionable to pretend to be open-minded
Almost as fashionable as pretending to be pragmatically cynical.
If we followed Dalroth's advice, we would repeatedly waste weeks at a time on other fringe languages as well. Sure it MIGHT pay off but this is the same logic people are criticized for when they spend money on lottery tickets.
I don't do things because I think they'll "pay off." I do them because I learn things from them, and because they're fun. Every time I learn a new language and compare it with the ones I already know, I learn something (and it's fun, too).
Someone coming out tommorow with the solution for *all* of these. For everyone. And having it verified.
I've thought about this before, but more from the perspective of "what if by some freak accident I was to stumble on the algorithm that makes factoring trivial? what would I do?"
Now, I don't believe everything I see in movies, but I also don't feel like putting my welfare or my sanity on the line by exposing something so momentous and dangerous. A lot of powerful people depend on the difficulty of factoring to keep their stuff secret.
Here's what I think I would do: Send an encrypted e-mail to Bruce Schneier describing the algorithm (he must have a public key posted somewhere), and forward it through a dozen anonymous remailers. Preface the explanation with this: The existence of the algorithm I am about to describe is terrifying to me, and I am not fit nor willing to take responsibility for it. I trust your judgement in how you feel is the best way to proceed.
--
The problem with that method of voting is that you ALWAYS get the compromise candidate.
So, for example, if half the people [loved Bush & hated Gore] and half the people [loved Gore & hated Bush], but everone kinda liked McCain - we'd always have the McCains.
How is this a bad thing? You think it's better to have a president that half the country hates than one whom everyone kinda likes?
--
Imagine how much easier it would be for third parties to actually have a chance in elections! There would be no allegations of "throwing your vote away" or picking the lesser of two evils, and a candidate couldn't win by dividing the opposition, because everyone in the opposition would prefer BOTH of their candidates to the guy on the other side. (ie. Nader wouldn't have "stolen" the election from Al Gore, because anyone voting for Nader would prefer Al Gore to dubya.)
--
Yes, it does.
A Few Things I like about Ruby, by Joshua Haberman
> 65.chr
"A"
> "hello".length
5
> [1, 2, 3].last.to_s
"3"
def initialize(foo, bar, baz)
@foo = foo
@bar = bar
@baz = baz
end
class Song
def durationInMinutes
@duration/60.0 # force floating point
end
def durationInMinutes=(value)
@duration = (value*60).to_i
end
end
And now you can read to or write from someSong.durationInMinutes as if it were a simple attribute when in truth they're methods!
I'm not a Ruby expert, and I'm sure that some of these features can be found in other languages: my point is that people shouldn't just assume that Ruby is another Perl or Python, because it offers several advantages that differentiate it from Perl or Python. (and these are just a start: it features iterators, blocks-as-arguments, threads, and more)
However I completely agree that not having something like CPAN is a serious disadvantage in comparison to perl.
--
i like getting a description of the package
$ apt-cache show dpkg
[...]
Description: Package maintenance system for Debian
This package contains the programs which handle the installation and
removal of packages on your system.
.
The primary interface for the dpkg suite is the `dselect' program;
a more low-level and less user-friendly interface is available in
the form of the `dpkg' command.
.
In order to unpack and build Debian source packages you will need to
install the developers' package `dpkg-dev' as well as this one.
[I like] being able to key-word search through the descriptions since i don't always already know what something is called.
$ apt-cache search slashdot
bk2site - Utility to turn bookmarks into Yahoo/Slashdot like pages
gnome-applets - Various applets for GNOME panel
lg-issue38 - Issue 38 of the Linux Gazette.
libapache-mod-perl - Integration of perl with the Apache web server
surfraw - a fast unix command line interface to WWW
ticker - configurable text scroller, with slashdot and freshmeat modules
wmheadlines - Linux news website headlines integrated to windowmaker's menus
Some people like dselect (and more power to them!) but I don't even touch it any more...
--
No the hang up there was not the hangup with Debian is that Debian does not put "non-free" software in main and the KDE people did not want to put it in non-free.
You just made that up. Read Debian's official stance on the (previous) situation. Note:
However, the GPL insists that you grant the right to modify the complete source of a program distributed under its terms, which is clearly in conflict with Qt's licence conditions. [...] So, we have been denied the right to ``distribute the Program at all''. (emphasis added)
It is fine to distribute GPLed and non-free software together just fine.
There you're correct. The issue for Debian is that they were linked together, which is a whole 'nother story.
--
GPL'd code is not accessable to everybody. It is only accessable to developers who are willing to release their code under the GPL license which excludes large portions of the community.
National parks are not accessable to everybody. They are only accessable to people who are willing to share them with everyone else. National parks are inaccesable to logging companies, real estate agents, and construction companies.
Government land should be in the public domain, not placed under restrictive rules that require you to share.
--
I WANT COPIES OF MS DOS 1,2,3,4,5 WIN 1.0 (exists?)
Yup, and you can see screenshots of it (and MANY more) at http://pla-netx.com/linebackn/guis/
--
...if you're not running the client, do. If you are running the client and you're not affiliated with any other team, please join team Slashdot.org, if for no other reason than to spite these twits, who are ahead in daily counts these days (from their team page: "The best people. The best effort. The best platform. RC5 will fall again....")
--
But the kicker about having several is that you can give out different e-mail addresses based on the role you're playing in that situation. An e-mail address is more than characters strung together, it is an identity, and often an affiliation with some organization.
For instance:
The fact that they all go the exact same place doesn't matter. They might not always. I might decide at some point to sort them differently or give them different priorities based on who the "To:" address in the headers is. If for some reason I cease to become a Debian maintainer in the future, I should no longer get Debian-related mail, and I could set up an auto-responder to indicate that I am no longer affiliated with the project.
So even though it may seem like just another forwarding e-mail address, I think that each one that captures a different capacity you serve is useful.
--
You, my friend, are talking straight out of your ass. If you could implement even a fraction of what you say "wouldn't be a huge project," you would single-handedly show up all of the current experts in the field.
I recommend you read the alt.binaries.sounds.midi FAQ, where the task of converting WAV->MIDI is discussed in depth (section 1.4). This is equivalent to the process you propose, the idea of taking a digital PCM sound file and decomposing it into musical "events." The discussion concludes with the following:
--
This should catch the attention of any academic researcher -- do your part to help raise awareness in the academic community! Below is a letter I sent to my math advisor:
Dr. ******,
As you could probably guess, there are many political issues about which
I have strong feelings for whatever reason, especially in the realm of
computers and cyberspace. While it is normally most appropriate to keep
these to myself, an issue has come about which I believe has a very
direct impact on you and on other professors with respect to the
academic research you regularly conduct. This is why I am writing to you
today.
In September of 2000, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI)
announced an open contest to the computer community
(http://www.sdmi.org/pr/OL_Sept_6_2000.htm), inviting people to try and
break a watermarking scheme they had developed for digital sound files.
They challenged anyone to remove the watermark present in several audio
samples they published on their web site, without noticeably degrading
the quality of the signal. The reward was to be up to $10,000 in
exchange for non-disclosure of the solution.
A group of researchers from Princeton University led by Dr. Edward
Felten decided to take on the challenge and found several successful
methods for removing the watermark. The researchers decided against
accepting the prize money with the attached requirement that they keep
their research secret, and instead authored a paper titled _Reading
Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge_. It was their
intention to present it today at the 4th annual International
Information Hiding Workshop in Pittsburgh
(http://www.cert.org/IHW2001/).
However, on April 9th, they received a letter from the Recording
Industry Association of America (RIAA) threatening a lawsuit if they
presented the paper as planned, claiming that the contest agreement did
not "'expressly authorize' participants to disclose information and
research developed through participating in the Public challenge.
As a result, Dr. Felten made a public statement today that he and his
colleagues would not be presenting the paper as planned. "Litigation is
costly, time-consuming, and uncertain, regardless of the merits of the
other side's case," he announced. "Ultimately we, the authors, reached
a collective decision not to expose ourselves, our employers, and the
conference organizers to litigation at this time."
His statement, the letter from the RIAA threatening litigation, and the
paper itself can be viewed at (http://cryptome.org/sdmi-attack.htm).
I believe this is a frightening precedent, and a major blow to academic
freedom and the research community. Felten's crime was conducting
research that was seen as threatening by the business community--what
research will they decide they don't like next time? What can be said of
"academic freedom" when a rich company need only write threatening
letters to suppress troublesome knowledge?
If you agree that this is relevant and pertinent information, I would
appreciate it if you would forward this e-mail to any of your colleagues
who might be interested.
Sincerely,
Joshua Haberman
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Thank you for posting the only comment in recent history to even remotely deserve the "Funny" moderation.
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I have to recommend against installing whole systems of debian packages from third party sources (such as all of gnome or all of kde). Time has shown that they tend to be incompatible with the rest of Debian. I would refer you to threads on debian-devel, but I don't have the time to find them at the moment. Many developers, however, have found it solves a lot of problems just to purge all the ximian/helix packages from their system.
Usually the stuff in unstable is reasonably recent. I'm pretty sure KDE2 is in there, not sure about the version of Gnome.
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Bruised egos do not a moderation failure make
You shouldn't expect to be a widely read and acknowledged writer after just fifty writeups.
But don't blame the E2 community just because you're not widely loved from the get-go.
I really wish people would stop accusing me of being egotistical or XP-centric. I don't give a fuck about my reputation on E2. I don't care about being well-known or widely read. I don't have aspirations of being the next P_I. Hell, I would probably post anonymously if I could.
However, I really cannot see a single reason why I would invest any amount of time into writing when so few people spend 3 seconds and 2 clicks to say "that's worth being part of this database." If no one gets anything out of my nodes, then why the hell am I writing them? If I were writing with the intention of my own self-gratification, I would write in a diary or a journal.
I was first inspired to node when I came across some writing on E2 that I thought was really outstanding, for whatever reason. Either I learned something, or I was introduced to a viewpoint, or I was let in on someone's remarkable stories. I got something out of these nodes, so I wanted other people to get something out of mine. If no one does, then I'm not accomplishing that goal, and I have no reason to contribute.
That's all a vote is to me. Not a notch on the belt or ego-boost, but a simple indication that I didn't waste the last hour or two of my life, because somebody took something away from something I wrote.
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The correct link to "American Boychoir."
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Silly boy, the E2 "elite" have nothing to do with that. Every E2 denizen, no matter how long they've been there, has exactly one vote per writeup.
/msg's you to say they liked them. "Node what you know," right? One of my nodes is American Boychoir, about a boarding choir school I attended for three years. (I hate to give away my E2 identity lest it be seen as an attempt at winning some sympathy votes, but the example was so good I had to). In my opinion it's reasonably entertaining, very informative, and a valuable addition to the database (and definitely a unique experience). Yet only 3 people decided they liked it enough to vote for it. Lack of exposure certainly wasn't the issue--it was cooled and therefore sat on the front page for a while. I probably spent an hour, at least, on that node (I'm a slow writer)--to see that only 3 people got anything out of it makes me unlikely to do it again. Organ is another good example, at 4 votes.
I understand that, I've been around for almost a year, you know. However, I still stand by my original statment for two reasons.
1. Yes, everybody gets one vote--however the long-timers have enormous influence over the shaping of everything (this is acknowledged in the FAQ). So you're a newbie, first day on everything, and being the contientious netizen you are, you decide to lurk for a few days and see what flies and what doesn't. You come across crap like "REMOVE," written by a god no less, and see it voted through the roof and therefore take it as a model of supposedly good noding.
2. The E2 elite are comprised of every E2 noder. Yes, E2 has high literary standards, but it also has high standards of what is cool enough to warrant upvotes. Stuff that isn't cool enough will be immediately softlinked to "your radical ideas..." nodes, or "did you hear about the man who told his ass how to talk?" Who's going to upvote them now?
Factual noding doesn't get as many votes, but they're still loved and cherished and, gradually, voted up by people who find them interesting and/or can verify that they're accurate. Facts are what make e2 relevant, and they're what keep people coming back to the site time and time again.
I find this terribly hard to believe. Why? Nobody talks about them. Nobody upvotes them. Nobody
Of course, I wouldn't dare write anything like the above on E2 itself: at the very least, I'd get condescending softlinks like "your radical ideas about voting have already occured to others" and "quit your whining." Fine, I am quitting my whining, as well as any noding I might have done, and I don't just write drivel either. I guess I'm just not cool enough for E2.
(aside: it occured to me that this post as well as my previous one could be seen as hypocritical when compared with my sig. I don't have a problem discussing moderation, but statements like "Well, I know this is going to get moderated down, but here goes..." drive me nuts.)
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Do you know what of the highest-rated writeup on E2 is? I will REMOVE the fucking toilet seat if you don't shut up, with a total of 357 votes at the moment. It's a stupid whiney rant by everything god moJoe, where he spends six paragraphs drawing out an argument that could be easily summarized in one sentence (women shouldn't complain about the way the toilet seat is left). What is so goddamn amazing about that node that it has more than three times the score of almost any other node in existance?
Meanwhile excellently written informative (as opposed to whiney or ranting) nodes sit in the single digits, too boring for the E2 elite to bother with. I'd come up with some examples, but E2 is so slow at the moment I don't have the patience (every page is taking at least a half-minute to load).
There are a lot of awesome things about E2, and I've read some amazing stuff there, but peoples' voting tendencies are one of the things that keeps me from noding more often. It sucks to put a lot of time into a node only to see it completely unappreciated.
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With all due respect, what the hell are you talking about?
If that were true, then Unisys wouldn't have the ability to bully the GIMP and webmasters who create images with a non-licensed program. No one's selling anything. Because Unisys owns the patnent on LZW compression, no one else can USE it, period.
If that were true, then Amazon wouldn't have been able to force Barnes and Noble to eliminate their "one-click shopping" capability on their web site. Barnes and Noble doesn't sell anything but books. Amazon is preventing them from USING the IDEA of one-click shopping.
Make no mistake, when someone files a patent, they're claiming exclusive USE of an idea. From lawguru.com:
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I've heard a lot of people allude to the story of CDDB at one time being free, supported and built up by volunteers entering information, and then at some point turning evil and proprietary. Can someone recount the story in a bit more detail? For instance, how did a company gain control over what was once a volunteer effort? At what point did it become clear that they were going to make everything so painfully commercial (patents, licencing, and other ugliness...)?
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Several people have mentioned that you can get the list of files owned by a package with dpkg -L . This is true.
However, you can also do it the other way around, like you asked. dpkg -S <filename> will tell you, given a file, what package it belongs to.
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The Kerberos community was incensed when they saw this, but they had no way to stop it. Kerberos had been developed at MIT, and released as free software--but not under the GNU GPL. The lax license used for Kerberos was no bar to Microsoft's plans. If the Kerberos developers had released Kerberos under the GPL, Microsoft could not have undermined it in this way.
This doesn't make sense at all--Kerberos is an open protocol (RFC 1510), so how would GPLing one specific implementation prevent embrace-extend tactics? The worst that could happen is that Microsoft be declared non-compliant, but even that didn't happen because Microsoft was simply using bits specifically reserved for implementation-specific use.
This seems like such an obvious error, am I missing something?
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