Although the special cases are going to be sufficient for the purposes to which we put obfuscators today (keeping people from reverse-engineering your programs), they suggest other uses for the sort of perfect obfuscator they worked on.
For example, if you had a perfect obfuscator, you could use your (simple) private-key cryptosystem rather than your (complex) public-key one (by obfuscating the private key and calling it your public key). You wouldn't trust your credit card number to the idea that this particular private key probably isn't one of the ones that the obfuscator fails on.
Their proof seems valid (I haven't completed my analysis), so it's good science, but it doesn't mean I'd throw away my obfuscators. For those purposes, I've found that alpha-renaming (just renaming all of the variables) makes it sufficiently hard to prevent software reverse-engineering; it would be easier to just break into my office and steal my computer.
"It is important to remember that work in the public domain not only supports those who freely distribute it, but also those who publish it commercially."
Yes, indeed, it does benefit those people, but the one person whom it fails to benefit is the original author of the work. A creative work (book, movie, computer program) takes a lot of money and a lot of effort, often invested with the intent of making a profit.
Why should that effort ever become yours to take, seventy years later or seventy thousand? If I write a book, why should the rights to it not pass on to my heirs, like my house or my money, in perpetuity? Or sold, like any other asset, to a corporation.
Slashdot seems to contain a great many people who like to do work and then contribute that work to the world. I applaud their efforts, and contribute some of my own. But that is their voluntary gift to the world. If an author chooses not to do so, I don't see why the law should force them to. I am not a lawyer, but it sounds to me like the removal of copyright protection is a "taking".
Much has been written so far about how society as a whole benefits from placing works in public domain. I do not deny this. Society would probably benefit from my other possessions as well, but they have no right to them and are not allowed to take them, no matter how long I've owned them.
A caveat: I benefit from the copyright freedom of classic works of literature. I am a Shakespearean actor, in a community theater troupe, and we can barely afford to pay for our space, much less royalties on a 400 year old play. It gives me great pleasure to use these works, and if I had to pay more than a token amount for them, I'd be out of luck.
But if I had to, and could afford it, I would. These plays mean a lot to me. If I couldn't, then it would be my loss, and perhaps also a smaller one of the foundation administering the copyright.
There was some talk about requiring manufacturers to use "taggants" back in 1996, in the wake of the McVeigh bombing. There's an article on it at CNN. It consisted of various-colored microscopic plastic bits.
The goal was not to detect explosives at a distance, but to be able to identify it after the fact. The usual debates: the NRA, the ATF, etc. It was above board, at the congressional level, not a consipriacy. In the end, nothing came of it.
Yeah, there's modulation and demodulation involved. And it's already built into your cell phone. Why should you have to add another layer on top of it?
The second generation of cellular phone networking is already in place, and is already digital and packetized. Layering protocols on that would be much more efficient that turning bits into sound, sound back into bits, and then into waves, and back.
First off, it's unlikely that we'll have the ability to "create the species from a given genetic code" any time soon. Our ability to create proteins from specific sequences goes to mabye hundreds or thousands of base pairs, not tens or hundreds of millions.
And even from there it's a long way to living cells, and still further to multi-cellular organisms.
Second, Celera may make it look easy to sequence a genome, but it still takes months to do and millions of dollars. Plus you still get lots of errors, any one of which could make it impossible to reproduce an organism.
And finally, there's a lot that goes on in cells that's not coded up by the nuclear DNA. There's mitochondiral DNA, for starters. And the whole bootstrapping problem: producing an organism requires an incredibly complex environment provided by its mother. The instructions for that are, of course, largely in the DNA, but it's incredibly tricky to bootstrap it from there.
The Chromatics are an a capella group of NASA employees and other space geeks at Goddard Space Flight Center. Their album AstroCappella is full of astronomy-related songs designed for educational use. And they sing really well, too.
If nothing else, I learned that Wolf 359 isn't just a place on Star Trek. It's the third closest star to ours (which makes great sense as the last defense of Earth from the Borg.)
"anyone actively disagreeing with policies of the U.S is now automatically rendered a 'terrorist' in the eyes of national security."
Perhaps that's so, but I'd venture to say that those disagreeing with the policies of the US and publishing information on how to make bombs are more likely to get noticed than those who simply disagree. They claim that "The sysop of this site does not endorse nor use any method of violence" but bomb-making and anti-government rhetoric on the same site are at the very least an implicit threat.
IANAL, so I can't speak to the legalities of it. But I know that if I were a FBI agent, I too would have wanted armor when I went in there.
Point well taken, thank you. I believe I now understand their concern. If this article had not been published, the police might have deployed hundreds of "face recognition" cameras which actually had a more nefarious purpose, since the face recognition didn't work.
While I appreciate and commend the ACLU's work protecting me from overzealous police, the antagonistic tone may be counterproductive. I'd like to believe that the police would say, "Gee, this doesn't work, let's wait a few years and try again" rather than try to use it as cover for a genuinely Orwellian plot.
Perhaps I'm naive, but as long as this is framed in terms of the ACLU wanting absolute privacy, and the police depicted as the agents of Big Brother, it's unlikely that we'll actually find any sort of useful compromise.
Mind you, I live in Prince George's County, Maryland, where the police _are_ actively engaged in covering up abuses, as documented in The Washington Post. So perhaps I'm deliberately ignoring ugly truths rather than being simply naive.
The ACLU's statement of fact, that face recognition doesn't work, is interesting and useful. It means that more work is necessary for this to be a functional technology.
But I'm not sure how that leads to their conclusion, "the technology does not deliver security benefits sufficient to justify the Orwellian dangers that they present." If the stuff doesn't work, then it doesn't present any dangers.
At least, not any more dangers than the police officer standing out there looking for people. I'm not sure that the ACLU would grant police that right, actually, since it is a violation of what they seem to consider an absolute right of privacy.
In my opinion, a society will always make exchanges of some about of liberty for security. For example, I don't have the liberty to shoot people. The boundaries will always be contentious, but it seems to be as if this sort of absolutism does not comprise a reasonable discussion of where the boundaries are most appropriately set.
Slashdot Mirror
Although the special cases are going to be sufficient for the purposes to which we put obfuscators today (keeping people from reverse-engineering your programs), they suggest other uses for the sort of perfect obfuscator they worked on.
For example, if you had a perfect obfuscator, you could use your (simple) private-key cryptosystem rather than your (complex) public-key one (by obfuscating the private key and calling it your public key). You wouldn't trust your credit card number to the idea that this particular private key probably isn't one of the ones that the obfuscator fails on.
Their proof seems valid (I haven't completed my analysis), so it's good science, but it doesn't mean I'd throw away my obfuscators. For those purposes, I've found that alpha-renaming (just renaming all of the variables) makes it sufficiently hard to prevent software reverse-engineering; it would be easier to just break into my office and steal my computer.
From an interview with Lawrence Lessig:
"It is important to remember that work in the public domain not only supports those who freely distribute it, but also those who publish it commercially."
Yes, indeed, it does benefit those people, but the one person whom it fails to benefit is the original author of the work. A creative work (book, movie, computer program) takes a lot of money and a lot of effort, often invested with the intent of making a profit.
Why should that effort ever become yours to take, seventy years later or seventy thousand? If I write a book, why should the rights to it not pass on to my heirs, like my house or my money, in perpetuity? Or sold, like any other asset, to a corporation.
Slashdot seems to contain a great many people who like to do work and then contribute that work to the world. I applaud their efforts, and contribute some of my own. But that is their voluntary gift to the world. If an author chooses not to do so, I don't see why the law should force them to. I am not a lawyer, but it sounds to me like the removal of copyright protection is a "taking".
Much has been written so far about how society as a whole benefits from placing works in public domain. I do not deny this. Society would probably benefit from my other possessions as well, but they have no right to them and are not allowed to take them, no matter how long I've owned them.
A caveat: I benefit from the copyright freedom of classic works of literature. I am a Shakespearean actor, in a community theater troupe, and we can barely afford to pay for our space, much less royalties on a 400 year old play. It gives me great pleasure to use these works, and if I had to pay more than a token amount for them, I'd be out of luck.
But if I had to, and could afford it, I would. These plays mean a lot to me. If I couldn't, then it would be my loss, and perhaps also a smaller one of the foundation administering the copyright.
There was some talk about requiring manufacturers to use "taggants" back in 1996, in the wake of the McVeigh bombing. There's an article on it at CNN. It consisted of various-colored microscopic plastic bits.
The goal was not to detect explosives at a distance, but to be able to identify it after the fact. The usual debates: the NRA, the ATF, etc. It was above board, at the congressional level, not a consipriacy. In the end, nothing came of it.
Yeah, there's modulation and demodulation involved. And it's already built into your cell phone. Why should you have to add another layer on top of it?
The second generation of cellular phone networking is already in place, and is already digital and packetized. Layering protocols on that would be much more efficient that turning bits into sound, sound back into bits, and then into waves, and back.
First off, it's unlikely that we'll have the ability to "create the species from a given genetic code" any time soon. Our ability to create proteins from specific sequences goes to mabye hundreds or thousands of base pairs, not tens or hundreds of millions.
And even from there it's a long way to living cells, and still further to multi-cellular organisms.
Second, Celera may make it look easy to sequence a genome, but it still takes months to do and millions of dollars. Plus you still get lots of errors, any one of which could make it impossible to reproduce an organism.
And finally, there's a lot that goes on in cells that's not coded up by the nuclear DNA. There's mitochondiral DNA, for starters. And the whole bootstrapping problem: producing an organism requires an incredibly complex environment provided by its mother. The instructions for that are, of course, largely in the DNA, but it's incredibly tricky to bootstrap it from there.
If nothing else, I learned that Wolf 359 isn't just a place on Star Trek. It's the third closest star to ours (which makes great sense as the last defense of Earth from the Borg.)
Titles from the album:
Nine Planets
Sun Song
Habitable Zone
Lunar Love
HST Bop
Come and Visit Mars
A Little Bit of Rock
Dance of the Planets
Doppler Shifting
Wolf 359
Cosmic Radio Show
High Energy Groove
Swift
Posted on the raisethefist.com site:
"anyone actively disagreeing with policies of the U.S is now automatically rendered a 'terrorist' in the eyes of national security."
Perhaps that's so, but I'd venture to say that those disagreeing with the policies of the US and publishing information on how to make bombs are more likely to get noticed than those who simply disagree. They claim that "The sysop of this site does not endorse nor use any method of violence" but bomb-making and anti-government rhetoric on the same site are at the very least an implicit threat.
IANAL, so I can't speak to the legalities of it. But I know that if I were a FBI agent, I too would have wanted armor when I went in there.
"The Story of the Ping" site is slashdotted, but it is available from Google's cache
Google, I suspect, is harder to slashdot.
Forrest Gump
The Godfather
Some people say 2001. I'd argue for Jurassic Park.
Actually, Michelin only goes up to three stars.
Point well taken, thank you. I believe I now understand their concern. If this article had not been published, the police might have deployed hundreds of "face recognition" cameras which actually had a more nefarious purpose, since the face recognition didn't work.
While I appreciate and commend the ACLU's work protecting me from overzealous police, the antagonistic tone may be counterproductive. I'd like to believe that the police would say, "Gee, this doesn't work, let's wait a few years and try again" rather than try to use it as cover for a genuinely Orwellian plot.
Perhaps I'm naive, but as long as this is framed in terms of the ACLU wanting absolute privacy, and the police depicted as the agents of Big Brother, it's unlikely that we'll actually find any sort of useful compromise.
Mind you, I live in Prince George's County, Maryland, where the police _are_ actively engaged in covering up abuses, as documented in The Washington Post. So perhaps I'm deliberately ignoring ugly truths rather than being simply naive.
The ACLU's statement of fact, that face recognition doesn't work, is interesting and useful. It means that more work is necessary for this to be a functional technology.
But I'm not sure how that leads to their conclusion, "the technology does not deliver security benefits sufficient to justify the Orwellian dangers that they present." If the stuff doesn't work, then it doesn't present any dangers.
At least, not any more dangers than the police officer standing out there looking for people. I'm not sure that the ACLU would grant police that right, actually, since it is a violation of what they seem to consider an absolute right of privacy.
In my opinion, a society will always make exchanges of some about of liberty for security. For example, I don't have the liberty to shoot people. The boundaries will always be contentious, but it seems to be as if this sort of absolutism does not comprise a reasonable discussion of where the boundaries are most appropriately set.