I did not know another Grand Theft Auto game was looming. Now I am curious and want to play it! Thanks you, Jack, for helping to generate publicity for these fine products!:)
Is there a single shred of evidence to substantiate any of the claims made in the so-called “source” article? Following a number of speculative bullet points (with dubious technical merit), we are left with “[f]acts are hard to come by about Windows Vienna”. Indeed, so what worth is there to any of it?
To compliment comments made by the first response, there are only two situations where you need an administrator to supply the password. Once when the system is first brought online and then every time afterwards the system experiences a critical fault or scheduled maintenance that requires services to be restarted. In both cases, there has to be staff available. Especially if a system goes down (which it should not typically do) then there is likely a problem that demands attention. Otherwise, under nominal operating conditions, the service requiring the credentials would run without any additional attention.
I see a lot of elaborate answers, but we all seem to be forgetting something obvious. When the service comes up, have it prompt an administrator for the password then store it in memory. Ultimately this is only obfuscation, but despite passwords getting stored in memory all the time and I think the rate of compromise remains fairly low. At any rate, it is a lot less likely an attacker will find it there than in a plaintext file on the disk. Apache HTTPD and all the MTA services I use do this when using SSL certificates with encrypted private keys. Seems like a good start, at least. If you want to get a little more elaborate, your service can generate a random key on some interval which may be used to encrypt that password in memory. Advantages of all this? No plaintext storage, it becomes easy to change the password of your database (simply inform the administrators), none of the developers need to be concerned with the credentials, and your code keeps the password (and the key for encrypting it in memory) a moving target.
Amazing! It turns out that there is a risk that data might be lost when the systems storing it fail. Indded, this is a remarkable revelation.
People need to get real. There is no magic with any service. Faults occur and mistakes are made. If anything, your data is safer with Google than anyone else because they know how to properly deal with huge volumes of data and how to preserve it correctly. Many service providers and most home users have no clue how to survive data loss and client applications that store mails on your disk do little to improve reliability in the absense of redundancy and backups.
To tangentally plug Apple, I am looking forward to Time Machine on Mac OS X 10.5 which uses the copy-on-write features of ZFS to provide incremental backups.
Can someone explain to me exactly what is innovative about this? I do not understand how a hardware upgrade is innovative. Can I get on this list since I put a new video card in my machine this year?
Content protection in Vista will not hurt Microsoft or their sales. Two reasons for this. Consumers are not educated enough to understand digital restrictions management. They will interpret it as “just how it works” and deal with it one way or another. Claiming these impedences to copying will damage Vista is similar to claiming that content scrambling of movies will damage the DVD market. The second reason comes from established expectations. People appear used to dealing with technology not working how they want it to or think it should. Crashing computers and malware are just part of life. Pretty soon, the inability to copy files will become subject to the same perception. That is, not being able to copy media will be seen as a technical limitation or just another failing on the part of the industry. People will buy it all the same because the water is being brough to a boil slowly and we all seem to have such ridiculously short-term memories.
... [W]hen artificial intelligence is finally developed.
Artificial intelligence is all around us today. It is very common for machines to react based on intelligence we provide them. What you are thinking of is consciousness, period. The term “artificial” is not needed. Something is either conscious or it is not, but let us use the term here to distinguish between our own brand (that produced by our chemical and electronic brains) and that of a machine we create.
After all, the robot would merely be acting under the control of whatever computer program controlled its consciousness.
If you think a program—a defined procedure—can somehow result in free will, you are terribly mistaken. A series of instructions that can only be followed one way is the opposite of free weill. Any such machine that may exhibit consciousness will be purely signal-driven, just like our own brains, and will determine behaviors in very much the same fashion: by comparing acquired information with past experience. In otherwords, there is no program for consciousness. It will be the result of evolution and of developmental upbringing. If it makes mistakes, it will have to be corrected, the same way a parent may correct the behavior of children. And indeed, all the same moral dilemmas which apply to us will apply to any entity that thinks it is alive.
Deterministic and random processes are in contradiction with many notions of free will.
If you do not subscribe to the theory that the universe is entirely deterministic (every effect can be traced to a cause with regress to the beginning), only then we can discuss free will. Ultimately, for humans, behavior is determined by the state of our brains. That state may be influenced by everything from what we see, to radiation we are exposed to, and to the food that we eat. Ultimately, it is not random, whether you accept to the idea of a deterministic universe or not. The only exception I can imagine is if forces resulting from as of yet misunderstood quantum events that appear random are affecting the brain.
The question here is not if, but when. The human brain is a computer. A very sophisticated machine that consists of busses and switches. We do not yet fully understand how, but it will inevitably be explained and at the very least, it is obvious this machine is capable of producing consciousness. It is only a matter of time before we start creating machines of equivalent sophistication with similar means to observe, interpret, and react to stimili. When we do achieve these developments, it will obviously not be the result of any explicit programming. The foundational work will be laid by us for sure, but eventually any such device will follow an evolutionary path, perhaps something similar to our own. So summarize, if you think it is nonsense to believe silicon can be the basis for a self-aware entity, then you must equally accept the same of carbon.
People buy things all the time that they cannot fully utilize and I see force compelling them to do so. If you have the money to buy a Ferrari Enzo and split it in half because you have no idea how to buy a sports car, that is also your choice. If you want to drop a few thousand on a high-end personal computer to surf the web sites and traffic email, more power to you. In a free market, you can make and sell a product for whatever you want (generally) and consumers can pretty much spend their money however they damn well please. Is there something wrong with this?
I suppose some people like spending well over $600 on a super-computer (by current standards) gaming machine. At least they can run Folding@home and turn it into a winter space-heater.
The Bible says you are supposed to murder homosexuals and misbehaved children. (This is just getting started, by the way. I am in too much a hurry to find references where God commands the murder those who worship other gods or those work on the Sabbath.) Do not say you actually do what the Bible states you should do because I am sure you are far too moral to even contemplate enacting its numerous violent precepts.
I am going to buy a gun, completely ignorant of how to use it, and start playing around with it. If someone gets shot (including myself) I will sue the company that made it. Horray for logic!
It is probably a fake. Note the letter is dated April 20, which could signify either the special day we all like smoke up or Hitler's birthday. Considering the latter, note the similarity between “Adam Hilliker” and “Adolf Hitler”. The most important indicator the Snopes write-up makes are the properly angled quotation marks that are probably not available on most typewriters.
Maybe we should ignore religious fundamentalists who are trying dictate their doctrine over science? You know, pay little heed to people who say the universe is 10,000 years old, or that evolution is false, or that stem cell research should be forbidden. It is a simplification to say in so few words, but it seems intuitive to me that assigning greater importance to bizarre ramblings of a few desert death cults from a thousand years ago over the tenants of science is a great way to quickly lose your “edge”.
That's why it's OK to go to a Larp and show your scuba license as a form of ID.
I agree with “OK” since it is an acronym for orl korrect. Otherwise, why is it alright to remove proper case from “Larp” and “scuba” by not write “NASA” as “Nasa”?
i suppose ITS ok to Just ignore proper capitalizatioN in english Today.
“PIN” is “personal identification number” and “ATM” is “automatic teller machine”. These are acronyms and correctly capitalized. However, I know that people would certainly find it weird if they saw “avenue” abbreviated as “AVE” or “January” shorted to “JAN”.
Why do people insist on abbreviating the word “identification” as “ID”. It is not an acronym but rather a shortened form of the word. Big difference. The proper abbrevation is all lowercase as “id” (or you capitalize only the first letter as necessary, such as if it starts a sentence).
(No need to remind me that we often pronounce it as “eye-dee”. I think that is a side effect of the incorrect form commonly in use.)
... refocusing the scope of [their] work to better align resources with [their] revenues...
Or to put it in English: “we are not making enough money and we have to cut back.”
Reminds me of this one study I heard a while ago that found the more obfuscated and elaborate the wording is used by companies the worse their financial situations are. Very appropriate in this case.
Frankly the use of tactical nukes is overdue. Turn it into green glass and the insurgents will quickly get the message.
It is amazing to me that anyone can think this way.
In short: wrong answer. How do I know that? Ask yourself what you would think if a nuclear weapon were detonated on our soil by any adversary. Would you be cowed into submission and give our attacker free reign? Or would you redouble your efforts in the battle against this hypothetical enemy?
If you thought the latter, congratulations on being human—just like everyone else, including terrorists and insurgents. It is always the case that the greater force one side uses, the greater force the other side will use. You may be familiar with expressions like “arms race” and “cycle of violence”. Conflicts only end under two circumstances: when both sides lay down arms or when one side is completely annihilated. We will never achieve the latter because with every bomb we drop and every bullet we fire, one more person will feel inspired or even compelled to take part in the fighting. Our remaining options do not involve increasing firepower.
The in-out group mentality is so dangerous and counterproductive and I am amazed it persists to this day. Whether it is race or religion or any other distinguishing trait, people continue to dehumanize others because of what are trivial differences. There are endless examples in history which evidence the destructiveness of disregarding the humanity of others. With examples like the German persecution Jews, how could any learned individual think that just wiping out or slaughtering any group of people will solve our problems? Of course I am not trying to feign ignorance that there are people out there bent on destroying us or the West at large (on the contrary, I agree whole heartedly with Sam Harris on this topic), but it should be clear this mentality lies at the heart of the major conflicts transpiring right now.
... [I]nsurgents deserve only one fate: slaughter.
You mean the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and other American revolutionaries, also once called insurgents by the British?
Slashdot Mirror
I did not know another Grand Theft Auto game was looming. Now I am curious and want to play it! Thanks you, Jack, for helping to generate publicity for these fine products! :)
I wish I could moderate your reply as funny. :)
Leob, I just thought of a New Years Resolution for you.
Gee, I am surprised that every cloud did not contain the word “developers” in huge, bright-white type!
Is there a single shred of evidence to substantiate any of the claims made in the so-called “source” article? Following a number of speculative bullet points (with dubious technical merit), we are left with “[f]acts are hard to come by about Windows Vienna”. Indeed, so what worth is there to any of it?
To compliment comments made by the first response, there are only two situations where you need an administrator to supply the password. Once when the system is first brought online and then every time afterwards the system experiences a critical fault or scheduled maintenance that requires services to be restarted. In both cases, there has to be staff available. Especially if a system goes down (which it should not typically do) then there is likely a problem that demands attention. Otherwise, under nominal operating conditions, the service requiring the credentials would run without any additional attention.
I see a lot of elaborate answers, but we all seem to be forgetting something obvious. When the service comes up, have it prompt an administrator for the password then store it in memory. Ultimately this is only obfuscation, but despite passwords getting stored in memory all the time and I think the rate of compromise remains fairly low. At any rate, it is a lot less likely an attacker will find it there than in a plaintext file on the disk. Apache HTTPD and all the MTA services I use do this when using SSL certificates with encrypted private keys. Seems like a good start, at least. If you want to get a little more elaborate, your service can generate a random key on some interval which may be used to encrypt that password in memory. Advantages of all this? No plaintext storage, it becomes easy to change the password of your database (simply inform the administrators), none of the developers need to be concerned with the credentials, and your code keeps the password (and the key for encrypting it in memory) a moving target.
Amazing! It turns out that there is a risk that data might be lost when the systems storing it fail. Indded, this is a remarkable revelation.
People need to get real. There is no magic with any service. Faults occur and mistakes are made. If anything, your data is safer with Google than anyone else because they know how to properly deal with huge volumes of data and how to preserve it correctly. Many service providers and most home users have no clue how to survive data loss and client applications that store mails on your disk do little to improve reliability in the absense of redundancy and backups.
To tangentally plug Apple, I am looking forward to Time Machine on Mac OS X 10.5 which uses the copy-on-write features of ZFS to provide incremental backups.
Can someone explain to me exactly what is innovative about this? I do not understand how a hardware upgrade is innovative. Can I get on this list since I put a new video card in my machine this year?
Content protection in Vista will not hurt Microsoft or their sales. Two reasons for this. Consumers are not educated enough to understand digital restrictions management. They will interpret it as “just how it works” and deal with it one way or another. Claiming these impedences to copying will damage Vista is similar to claiming that content scrambling of movies will damage the DVD market. The second reason comes from established expectations. People appear used to dealing with technology not working how they want it to or think it should. Crashing computers and malware are just part of life. Pretty soon, the inability to copy files will become subject to the same perception. That is, not being able to copy media will be seen as a technical limitation or just another failing on the part of the industry. People will buy it all the same because the water is being brough to a boil slowly and we all seem to have such ridiculously short-term memories.
Artificial intelligence is all around us today. It is very common for machines to react based on intelligence we provide them. What you are thinking of is consciousness, period. The term “artificial” is not needed. Something is either conscious or it is not, but let us use the term here to distinguish between our own brand (that produced by our chemical and electronic brains) and that of a machine we create.
If you think a program—a defined procedure—can somehow result in free will, you are terribly mistaken. A series of instructions that can only be followed one way is the opposite of free weill. Any such machine that may exhibit consciousness will be purely signal-driven, just like our own brains, and will determine behaviors in very much the same fashion: by comparing acquired information with past experience. In otherwords, there is no program for consciousness. It will be the result of evolution and of developmental upbringing. If it makes mistakes, it will have to be corrected, the same way a parent may correct the behavior of children. And indeed, all the same moral dilemmas which apply to us will apply to any entity that thinks it is alive.
If you do not subscribe to the theory that the universe is entirely deterministic (every effect can be traced to a cause with regress to the beginning), only then we can discuss free will. Ultimately, for humans, behavior is determined by the state of our brains. That state may be influenced by everything from what we see, to radiation we are exposed to, and to the food that we eat. Ultimately, it is not random, whether you accept to the idea of a deterministic universe or not. The only exception I can imagine is if forces resulting from as of yet misunderstood quantum events that appear random are affecting the brain.
The question here is not if, but when. The human brain is a computer. A very sophisticated machine that consists of busses and switches. We do not yet fully understand how, but it will inevitably be explained and at the very least, it is obvious this machine is capable of producing consciousness. It is only a matter of time before we start creating machines of equivalent sophistication with similar means to observe, interpret, and react to stimili. When we do achieve these developments, it will obviously not be the result of any explicit programming. The foundational work will be laid by us for sure, but eventually any such device will follow an evolutionary path, perhaps something similar to our own. So summarize, if you think it is nonsense to believe silicon can be the basis for a self-aware entity, then you must equally accept the same of carbon.
Nobody is making consumers do anything.
People buy things all the time that they cannot fully utilize and I see force compelling them to do so. If you have the money to buy a Ferrari Enzo and split it in half because you have no idea how to buy a sports car, that is also your choice. If you want to drop a few thousand on a high-end personal computer to surf the web sites and traffic email, more power to you. In a free market, you can make and sell a product for whatever you want (generally) and consumers can pretty much spend their money however they damn well please. Is there something wrong with this?
I suppose some people like spending well over $600 on a super-computer (by current standards) gaming machine. At least they can run Folding@home and turn it into a winter space-heater.
Tyler Durden says: use SOAP?
The Bible says you are supposed to murder homosexuals and misbehaved children. (This is just getting started, by the way. I am in too much a hurry to find references where God commands the murder those who worship other gods or those work on the Sabbath.) Do not say you actually do what the Bible states you should do because I am sure you are far too moral to even contemplate enacting its numerous violent precepts.
On a lighter note, some have written up ideas on how to make the Left Behind games more violent, based on the contents of the Bible. Enjoy!
Satire.
I am going to buy a gun, completely ignorant of how to use it, and start playing around with it. If someone gets shot (including myself) I will sue the company that made it. Horray for logic!
It is probably a fake. Note the letter is dated April 20, which could signify either the special day we all like smoke up or Hitler's birthday. Considering the latter, note the similarity between “Adam Hilliker” and “Adolf Hitler”. The most important indicator the Snopes write-up makes are the properly angled quotation marks that are probably not available on most typewriters.
Maybe we should ignore religious fundamentalists who are trying dictate their doctrine over science? You know, pay little heed to people who say the universe is 10,000 years old, or that evolution is false, or that stem cell research should be forbidden. It is a simplification to say in so few words, but it seems intuitive to me that assigning greater importance to bizarre ramblings of a few desert death cults from a thousand years ago over the tenants of science is a great way to quickly lose your “edge”.
Thank you, that pretty much nails it for me.
I agree with “OK” since it is an acronym for orl korrect. Otherwise, why is it alright to remove proper case from “Larp” and “scuba” by not write “NASA” as “Nasa”?
i suppose ITS ok to Just ignore proper capitalizatioN in english Today.
“PIN” is “personal identification number” and “ATM” is “automatic teller machine”. These are acronyms and correctly capitalized. However, I know that people would certainly find it weird if they saw “avenue” abbreviated as “AVE” or “January” shorted to “JAN”.
Why do people insist on abbreviating the word “identification” as “ID”. It is not an acronym but rather a shortened form of the word. Big difference. The proper abbrevation is all lowercase as “id” (or you capitalize only the first letter as necessary, such as if it starts a sentence).
(No need to remind me that we often pronounce it as “eye-dee”. I think that is a side effect of the incorrect form commonly in use.)
Or to put it in English: “we are not making enough money and we have to cut back.”
Reminds me of this one study I heard a while ago that found the more obfuscated and elaborate the wording is used by companies the worse their financial situations are. Very appropriate in this case.
It is amazing to me that anyone can think this way.
In short: wrong answer. How do I know that? Ask yourself what you would think if a nuclear weapon were detonated on our soil by any adversary. Would you be cowed into submission and give our attacker free reign? Or would you redouble your efforts in the battle against this hypothetical enemy?
If you thought the latter, congratulations on being human—just like everyone else, including terrorists and insurgents. It is always the case that the greater force one side uses, the greater force the other side will use. You may be familiar with expressions like “arms race” and “cycle of violence”. Conflicts only end under two circumstances: when both sides lay down arms or when one side is completely annihilated. We will never achieve the latter because with every bomb we drop and every bullet we fire, one more person will feel inspired or even compelled to take part in the fighting. Our remaining options do not involve increasing firepower.
The in-out group mentality is so dangerous and counterproductive and I am amazed it persists to this day. Whether it is race or religion or any other distinguishing trait, people continue to dehumanize others because of what are trivial differences. There are endless examples in history which evidence the destructiveness of disregarding the humanity of others. With examples like the German persecution Jews, how could any learned individual think that just wiping out or slaughtering any group of people will solve our problems? Of course I am not trying to feign ignorance that there are people out there bent on destroying us or the West at large (on the contrary, I agree whole heartedly with Sam Harris on this topic), but it should be clear this mentality lies at the heart of the major conflicts transpiring right now.
You mean the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and other American revolutionaries, also once called insurgents by the British?