I say we specifically look for titles with this sticker, purchase them, give them a whirl in our PCs and see them not play, and return them. Vote with not just our money, but their overhead costs to handle all the returned merchandise and bad publicity when stores don't want CDs with those stickers
You actually managed to say something that could hurt the recording industry WITHOUT your speech being a crime under the DMCA. It's amazing that that's still possible!
I don't get all the objections to the FBI spyware thingy.
Consider this. If the virus/trojan scanner software refuses to report a certain password logger because it might be used by the FBI, then that logger is basically undetectable. An undetectable logger would be a terrible weapon in hands of criminals or terrorists.
But we don't have to worry about it falling into the hands of criminals or terrorists because the FBI only plans to send it to criminals and terrorists. Uhm, er there's no problem there right?
People at the FBI and the scanner companies aren't thinking this through.
Exactly! Apple engineers screwed up the copy protection on this release, big time. But that's no problem, Apple's lawyers can fix it all by prohibiting free speech. We've got a BIG problem when prohibiting speech is both possible and convenient.
I just did a web search on Rebol and while I can find scripts in Rebol and lots and lots of hype, I can't find any meaningful description of what the language is. You know something useful to an actual programmer like "rebol is a tiny interpreted, untyped functional language with idl bindings and libraries for email and tpcip" or somesuch.
Does it ever occur to you that everyone who's relatively satisified will advise you to do whatever he or she did, so all advice is essencially random?
//Algorithm: pick someone at random and get their advice:
string GetAdvice(set<SlashDotPosters> &posters)
{
set<SlashDotPosters>::const_iterator rover=posters::begin();
for (int i=rand(posters.size());i;--i) rover++;
return rover->AdviseToDoWhatIDid();
}
Obviously you should run screaming before you're crushed into the kind of geek who'd make posts like this one.
"If there is enough information in the picture to let the FBI know that there is a hidden message in it, there is probably enough information to allow them to extract that information."
Not at all true for lots of reasons! One is that, with the use of unbreakable computer cryptography the problem of detecting a message is completely separated from the problem of decoding it. Someone could make their steganograpy very weak so that it's easy to tell that something is hidden in a file, but if hidden message is encrypted with strong cryptography then even if you knew exactly what all of the bits of the encrpypted hidden message were, you'd be no closer to decrypting it.
"For the US to not take action is to invite further attacks. Indeed, those attacks will happen with or without our action. The US must make it understood that the worse we are attacked, the stronger our response, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons. Any nation that would make the mistake of attacking the US with biological agents must pay the ultimate price."
The situation isn't that simple. Our response is probably the one that Bin Laden and Co. were expecting and hoping for. What isn't going to go along with his plan is that the Muslim world is more disgusted than admiring of Al-Qa'ida's handiwork and he probably won't get all the help he was imagining, even from other terrorist groups.
Here's some better thought out analysis of Al-Qa'ida's rational from
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0109242145.htm (I'm pretty sure they won't mind the free publicity since this is from their free/non-subscription section).
The goals of Al-Qa'ida's members are essentially simple. They see the Islamic world as occupied by non-Islamic forces, either directly or through puppet regimes. They wish to end the occupation and unite Islam. The United States, as the leading power in the world and the patron of many Islamic regimes, is the center of gravity of the anti-Islamic world. If the United States can be broken, or at least expelled from the Islamic world, other anti-Islamic powers such as Russia, China and Israel will crumble.
Al-Qa'ida does not expect to destroy the United States directly. It fully understands the severe limits on its resources. Rather, bin Laden's strategy is to force the United States into a series of actions that will destabilize the governments of Washington's Islamic partners and lead to their collapse. For instance, such an outcome could occur for Islamic countries that cooperate -- due to pressure by Washington -- with the U.S. campaign against terrorism.
A collapse would likely force the United States into a direct occupation of these countries, exposing U.S. forces to attacks on terrain favorable to the enemy. In such an occupation, be it in Indonesia or Morocco, bin Laden is confident his forces could generate an uprising against the United States that would force its withdrawal.
Bin Laden does not believe the United States could defeat an uprising for several reasons. First, the experience of foreign powers in suppressing mass, popular uprisings has been poor. Second, although the United States has important interests in the Islamic world, they are not on a scale to justify the expense and casualties involved in a long-term occupation. Finally, bin Laden regards the United States as morally corrupt and incapable of major exertion in the face of adversity.
...
Second, within the United States, bin Laden's forces will continue intermittent attacks against a variety of targets with the aim of destabilizing U.S. psychology, creating doubts about the capabilities of the U.S. government, driving home the costs of the war to the American public and generating confidence in the Islamic world.
It would then be logical to assume other assault groups are already present in the United States, either awaiting activation or authorized to act on their own initiative. It is likely, given the extreme operational security maintained, that support-team members of the first assault group are unaware of the existence of these other groups and that minimal, if any, communication is taking place between them and Al-Qa'ida.
They have a natural advantage in that U.S. forces are weakened because they cannot define the enemy's target set with any certainty and therefore must be dissipated. Since the targets vastly outnumber the defenders, Al-Qa'ida has created at least a temporarily superior position.
In the first thoughts on a counterattack, the United States appears to have three missions. First, prevent any further attacks by Al-Qa'ida against American assets. Second, kill Osama bin Laden and destroy Al-Qa'ida and all of its linked organizations on a worldwide basis. And third, punish all countries that have supported Al-Qa'ida, beginning with Afghanistan.
...
Follow-on countries comprise the final theater of operations. The United States has already suggested that, in due course, Iraq would be added to the list of countries considered a state sponsor of the Sept. 11 attacks. Bin Laden would like to see several other countries added to that list. Indonesia is an excellent example of a country that is already destabilized, has a growing Islamic movement and is critical to U.S. interests. In other words, follow-on theaters of operation may not be areas of American choosing.
Each day this week, STRATFOR will discuss American responses in each theater. But in order to respond, the United States must remember the following: Its enemy is dispersed, has designed redundancy into its systems and seems to understand how our systems work, at least well enough to have evaded them on and prior to Sept. 11. It has shown it knows how to extract maximum advantage out of a relatively small numbers of operatives and has men who are prepared to go to their certain death.
It is also an enemy that may have structured a war plan based on a faulty assumption, which is that the Islamic world is perched on the edge of a volcano of populist Islam and that the U.S. response will trigger it.
The American perception of bin Laden is that, being isolated in Afghanistan, he is a marginal player with a sophisticated network of operatives and that his dream of an Islamic uprising is merely a fantasy. The United States also believes that an exercise of decisive force in Afghanistan, and the disabling and disruption of bin Laden's network in the United States and the rest of the world, will delegitimize him permanently.
Bin Laden has played his cards. We must now consider how the United States will play its hand.
Secondly, Does any one of you have any evidence linking Osama/Taliban directly with the WTC attacks? I have been following the news pretty closely, and I don't see anything like that.
Uhm, you haven't been following it very closely at all then. First of all, the guy who tried to blow up the world trade center some years back admitted that he was doing it for Bin Laden. There's plenty of evidence from that trial.
Second of all, if you've been reading Bin Laden's own statements since the attack, you might notice that, while he hasn't directly taken credit for the attack, he's praised the attack and the attackers every time; the latest time he said "When God blessed one of the groups of Islam, vanguards of Islam, they destroyed America. I pray to God to elevate their status and bless them." He also said "There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots. Its greatest buildings were destroyed, thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that."
You might notice that he's the only person in the world publicly praising the mass murder of innocent New Yorkers and the only person publicly praising the hijackers for killing them. I find that fact suggestive.
In his previous statement, Bin Laden vowed to take revenge "whereever there are Americans or Jews." This time he once again vowed "To America, I say only a few words to it and its people. I swear by God, who has elevated the skies without pillars, neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine, and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Mohammed, peace be upon him."
Read it for yourself (and watch Bin Laden on video) at
http://www.cbc.ca/news/indepth/us_strikingback/b ac kgrounders/binladen_speech011007.html
I've been listening to the interviews that Terry Gross has doing with people who've interviewed Bin Ladin, his opposition and his supporters. I've read articles by Christifer Hitchens (who did some of those interviews) and I've read Bin Ladin's recent statements. All I can say is that after all this I'm sure the guy is guilty as hell.
Exactly! These guys had the best leverage possible. They leveraged a few fanatical pilots and men with knives into destroying the Pentagon and World Trade Center. The only way we can prevent this is to post armed guards on planes and perhaps block the cabin off from the rest of the airplane.
2. A few fighting men with knives (that's what an eye witness reported).
3. A plane ticket for each man.
That's it! No big organization necessary! No money, no expensive weaponry, and no planing other than a little research on flight routes.
We may be thwarted by the tinyness of the operation. What's to look for? Where's the military solution - are we going to augment Star Wars so it can protect us from KNIVES?
This is a typical fascist neo-conservative attitude: less government for the holy corporations, more government for individuals and families....
While I agree with much what you say about attitudes in general, I don't think your observations are appropriate to this situation.
I don't see any appropriate way to regulate video game production. What's wrong with access to games by young children being limited in the obvious way, by their parents?
Also, the motivation for a study in Japan would not be the "fascist neo-conservative...the christian fundamentalist religious view."
It occurs to me that all compression involves quantization.
If you consider the case rounding 0.5 to an integer, it's clear that either possible choice 1 or 0 is equally good, and in fact the best answer in that case is usually to pick one value at random so as not to add a consitant bias. Therefor, in these rare cases the resulting bits must, by definition, be completely orthagonal to any properties of the resulting image - you could change them all you like.
A stenography routine that did it's own compression and only changed these bits would, by definition, be undetectable.
So, with some fairly heavy constraints, undetectable stenography is inherently possible.
There must be various ways of making stenography routines that used this property, even routines that don't do the original compression, by finding lsb's that by some measures are really good candidates for having orginally been rounded from near 0.5 and only touching those.
I don't THINK I'm posting this twice. The first time I tried to posting this, I left the Comment area blank and the software complained, so I tried again with the title repeated in the comment section and it refused saying this was already posted.
Whoever these guys are, they don't understand C++ programming very well.
I see this all the time, programmers who don't know all of the cool C++ tricks that could save them development/debugging time go on rants about how useless all of the features of C++ are.
For instance they got rid of operator overloading saying:
"The main applications for operator overloading seem to be implementing a complex floating point type, a string class, and smart pointers."
Uhm, how unimaginative. Some other uses for operator overloading I've implemented:
1. Objects that act like primitive types, but use the interlocked instructions that are necessary for multi-processor communication.
2. Debug-build only types (replaced by primitive types in the release build) that act like numbers, pointers or arrays, but do arbitrarily complex contract testing for algorithm.
For example, a numeric variable that in a range from a to b, who's value mod c must always be d. Of course flexible types like are best implemented with templates which they also left out.
3. All kinds of mathematical analysis. Just because these guys are mathematical ignorami who never use mathematical objects more advanced than complex numbers doesn't mean the rest of us are so limited. For example when I was doing some sound/filter design I wanted to analyze the effect that a numerical algorithm had on a symbolic representation of my problem, so I wrote a class of objects that formed a numeric ring (you can add, subtract and multiply) but were actually polynomials in hundreds of varibles. I plugged them into my numerical code instead of using the regular "double" type and got an instant symbolic answer. Do that in "D"!
4. Objects that act like normal primitive numeric types but automatically update the gui display when they change valuue. "Score += 100;" Dah!
I could go on and on and on about the very important tricks that the various omissions from "D" make impossible, but the main point would be lost. The main point is that C++, for all it's problems omissions has some very very powerful general purpose tools that "D" omits. "D"'s language designers seem to be inexperienced and unimaginative. Sorry. No one is going to replace an incomplete language with another one that's even more incomplete just because it claims to be a successor.
I predict (and hope) that "D" will sink without a trace.
I played with stegbreak a little bit and it seems totally useless since I couldn't find any data on its false positive rate or on what conditions cause false positives.
Since sd must report SOME false positives, any answer it gives you is pretty meaningless. The only way to be even slightly sure that someone is hiding data is to get enough positive matches on data from them that you can prove that it's unlikely for all of the positives to be false. Even then there may be some other factor, like photoshop effects that are causing false positives.
By the way, the original article had too many topics. Why mix a bunch of unrelated stuff together?
Trying again - the server lost my first post. Hope this doesn't appear twice.
Rueter's got it wrong. The limitation on Fraunhaufer's free version of their codec that keeps you from using it to encoded high quality MP3s HAS ALWAYS BEEN THERE. That's right, I remember using that codec in 1997 and it had that limitation back then. They are probably right that Window's XP comes with a crippled encoder, but then so did Windows 95! Got it?
You can pay hundreds of $$ for Fraunhaufer's uncrippled codec or you can get a much higher quality codec for free. Look up LAME. It's freeware and tests show it to be the highest quality MP3 encoder around.
By the way, Liquid Audio's implementation of MP2 AAC at 160k does sound better than MP3s at 160k, but it's the only thing I've heard that does. It's been a long time since I compared. LAMEs variable rate MP3s may be just as good, I've never tested that.
Also if you want to get the best sounding playback, get the MAD decoder for winamp. It does dithering which especially helps if you have to equalized the hell out of your speakers like I do (monsoon's little flat panel speakers are very clean but not flat).
Well if I can't play a "copy protected" CD on the player in my computer at work, I'll download the MP3 instead of buying the CD. Dohhh!!!!
Instead of keeping 10% of the poeple who might have pirated from doing so, they're insuring that 60% or 70% of them will!
Now I understand why record executives get the big bucks. A normal person couldn't think up a scheme this stupid, it takes someone SPECIAL!
Of course Napster is actually much needed free advertising and airplay for any artist that isn't in the top 100. Like everyone else, I search for, my favorate artists on Napster, then check out the collections of people who have similar tastes to myself. The record companies aren't bright enough to come up with a marketing aid as effective as Napster themselves, but they ARE "bright" enough to ruin it for themselves. Why is it that people too dumb to breath run the world?
Slashdot Mirror
You actually managed to say something that could hurt the recording industry WITHOUT your speech being a crime under the DMCA. It's amazing that that's still possible!
Rocky J. Squirrel
Consider this. If the virus/trojan scanner software refuses to report a certain password logger because it might be used by the FBI, then that logger is basically undetectable. An undetectable logger would be a terrible weapon in hands of criminals or terrorists.
But we don't have to worry about it falling into the hands of criminals or terrorists because the FBI only plans to send it to criminals and terrorists. Uhm, er there's no problem there right?
People at the FBI and the scanner companies aren't thinking this through.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Exactly! Apple engineers screwed up the copy protection on this release, big time. But that's no problem, Apple's lawyers can fix it all by prohibiting free speech. We've got a BIG problem when prohibiting speech is both possible and convenient.
Rocky J. Squirrel
I mean really. Do Apple's lawyers think any differently than Microsquash's?
Rocky J. Squirrel
I just did a web search on Rebol and while I can find scripts in Rebol and lots and lots of hype, I can't find any meaningful description of what the language is. You know something useful to an actual programmer like "rebol is a tiny interpreted, untyped functional language with idl bindings and libraries for email and tpcip" or somesuch.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Mod Re: what it buys you up.
Does it ever occur to you that everyone who's relatively satisified will advise you to do whatever he or she did, so all advice is essencially random?
//Algorithm: pick someone at random and get their advice:
string GetAdvice(set<SlashDotPosters> &posters)
{
set<SlashDotPosters>::const_iterator rover=posters::begin();
for (int i=rand(posters.size());i;--i) rover++;
return rover->AdviseToDoWhatIDid();
}
Obviously you should run screaming before you're crushed into the kind of geek who'd make posts like this one.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Not at all true for lots of reasons! One is that, with the use of unbreakable computer cryptography the problem of detecting a message is completely separated from the problem of decoding it. Someone could make their steganograpy very weak so that it's easy to tell that something is hidden in a file, but if hidden message is encrypted with strong cryptography then even if you knew exactly what all of the bits of the encrpypted hidden message were, you'd be no closer to decrypting it.
The situation isn't that simple. Our response is probably the one that Bin Laden and Co. were expecting and hoping for. What isn't going to go along with his plan is that the Muslim world is more disgusted than admiring of Al-Qa'ida's handiwork and he probably won't get all the help he was imagining, even from other terrorist groups.
Here's some better thought out analysis of Al-Qa'ida's rational from
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0109242145.htm (I'm pretty sure they won't mind the free publicity since this is from their free/non-subscription section).
The goals of Al-Qa'ida's members are essentially simple. They see the Islamic world as occupied by non-Islamic forces, either directly or through puppet regimes. They wish to end the occupation and unite Islam. The United States, as the leading power in the world and the patron of many Islamic regimes, is the center of gravity of the anti-Islamic world. If the United States can be broken, or at least expelled from the Islamic world, other anti-Islamic powers such as Russia, China and Israel will crumble.
Al-Qa'ida does not expect to destroy the United States directly. It fully understands the severe limits on its resources. Rather, bin Laden's strategy is to force the United States into a series of actions that will destabilize the governments of Washington's Islamic partners and lead to their collapse. For instance, such an outcome could occur for Islamic countries that cooperate -- due to pressure by Washington -- with the U.S. campaign against terrorism.
A collapse would likely force the United States into a direct occupation of these countries, exposing U.S. forces to attacks on terrain favorable to the enemy. In such an occupation, be it in Indonesia or Morocco, bin Laden is confident his forces could generate an uprising against the United States that would force its withdrawal.
Bin Laden does not believe the United States could defeat an uprising for several reasons. First, the experience of foreign powers in suppressing mass, popular uprisings has been poor. Second, although the United States has important interests in the Islamic world, they are not on a scale to justify the expense and casualties involved in a long-term occupation. Finally, bin Laden regards the United States as morally corrupt and incapable of major exertion in the face of adversity.
Second, within the United States, bin Laden's forces will continue intermittent attacks against a variety of targets with the aim of destabilizing U.S. psychology, creating doubts about the capabilities of the U.S. government, driving home the costs of the war to the American public and generating confidence in the Islamic world.
It would then be logical to assume other assault groups are already present in the United States, either awaiting activation or authorized to act on their own initiative. It is likely, given the extreme operational security maintained, that support-team members of the first assault group are unaware of the existence of these other groups and that minimal, if any, communication is taking place between them and Al-Qa'ida.
They have a natural advantage in that U.S. forces are weakened because they cannot define the enemy's target set with any certainty and therefore must be dissipated. Since the targets vastly outnumber the defenders, Al-Qa'ida has created at least a temporarily superior position.
In the first thoughts on a counterattack, the United States appears to have three missions. First, prevent any further attacks by Al-Qa'ida against American assets. Second, kill Osama bin Laden and destroy Al-Qa'ida and all of its linked organizations on a worldwide basis. And third, punish all countries that have supported Al-Qa'ida, beginning with Afghanistan.
Follow-on countries comprise the final theater of operations. The United States has already suggested that, in due course, Iraq would be added to the list of countries considered a state sponsor of the Sept. 11 attacks. Bin Laden would like to see several other countries added to that list. Indonesia is an excellent example of a country that is already destabilized, has a growing Islamic movement and is critical to U.S. interests. In other words, follow-on theaters of operation may not be areas of American choosing.
Each day this week, STRATFOR will discuss American responses in each theater. But in order to respond, the United States must remember the following: Its enemy is dispersed, has designed redundancy into its systems and seems to understand how our systems work, at least well enough to have evaded them on and prior to Sept. 11. It has shown it knows how to extract maximum advantage out of a relatively small numbers of operatives and has men who are prepared to go to their certain death.
It is also an enemy that may have structured a war plan based on a faulty assumption, which is that the Islamic world is perched on the edge of a volcano of populist Islam and that the U.S. response will trigger it.
The American perception of bin Laden is that, being isolated in Afghanistan, he is a marginal player with a sophisticated network of operatives and that his dream of an Islamic uprising is merely a fantasy. The United States also believes that an exercise of decisive force in Afghanistan, and the disabling and disruption of bin Laden's network in the United States and the rest of the world, will delegitimize him permanently.
Bin Laden has played his cards. We must now consider how the United States will play its hand.
Uhm, you haven't been following it very closely at all then. First of all, the guy who tried to blow up the world trade center some years back admitted that he was doing it for Bin Laden. There's plenty of evidence from that trial.
Second of all, if you've been reading Bin Laden's own statements since the attack, you might notice that, while he hasn't directly taken credit for the attack, he's praised the attack and the attackers every time; the latest time he said "When God blessed one of the groups of Islam, vanguards of Islam, they destroyed America. I pray to God to elevate their status and bless them." He also said "There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots. Its greatest buildings were destroyed, thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that."
You might notice that he's the only person in the world publicly praising the mass murder of innocent New Yorkers and the only person publicly praising the hijackers for killing them. I find that fact suggestive.
In his previous statement, Bin Laden vowed to take revenge "whereever there are Americans or Jews." This time he once again vowed "To America, I say only a few words to it and its people. I swear by God, who has elevated the skies without pillars, neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine, and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Mohammed, peace be upon him."
Read it for yourself (and watch Bin Laden on video) at
http://www.cbc.ca/news/indepth/us_strikingback/b ac kgrounders/binladen_speech011007.html
I've been listening to the interviews that Terry Gross has doing with people who've interviewed Bin Ladin, his opposition and his supporters. I've read articles by Christifer Hitchens (who did some of those interviews) and I've read Bin Ladin's recent statements. All I can say is that after all this I'm sure the guy is guilty as hell.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Rocky J Squirrel
1. Three guys who knew how to fly a plane.
2. A few fighting men with knives (that's what an eye witness reported).
3. A plane ticket for each man.
That's it! No big organization necessary! No money, no expensive weaponry, and no planing other than a little research on flight routes.
We may be thwarted by the tinyness of the operation. What's to look for? Where's the military solution - are we going to augment Star Wars so it can protect us from KNIVES?
Rocky J. Squirrel
While I agree with much what you say about attitudes in general, I don't think your observations are appropriate to this situation.
I don't see any appropriate way to regulate video game production. What's wrong with access to games by young children being limited in the obvious way, by their parents?
Also, the motivation for a study in Japan would not be the "fascist neo-conservative...the christian fundamentalist religious view."
Rocky J. Squirrel
It occurs to me that all compression involves quantization.
If you consider the case rounding 0.5 to an integer, it's clear that either possible choice 1 or 0 is equally good, and in fact the best answer in that case is usually to pick one value at random so as not to add a consitant bias. Therefor, in these rare cases the resulting bits must, by definition, be completely orthagonal to any properties of the resulting image - you could change them all you like.
A stenography routine that did it's own compression and only changed these bits would, by definition, be undetectable.
So, with some fairly heavy constraints, undetectable stenography is inherently possible.
There must be various ways of making stenography routines that used this property, even routines that don't do the original compression, by finding lsb's that by some measures are really good candidates for having orginally been rounded from near 0.5 and only touching those.
What cha all think?
I don't THINK I'm posting this twice. The first time I tried to posting this, I left the Comment area blank and the software complained, so I tried again with the title repeated in the comment section and it refused saying this was already posted.
What're all the filters that stop posts?
Rocky J Squirrel
Whoever these guys are, they don't understand C++ programming very well.
I see this all the time, programmers who don't know all of the cool C++ tricks that could save them development/debugging time go on rants about how useless all of the features of C++ are.
For instance they got rid of operator overloading saying:
"The main applications for operator overloading seem to be implementing a complex floating point type, a string class, and smart pointers."
Uhm, how unimaginative. Some other uses for operator overloading I've implemented:
1. Objects that act like primitive types, but use the interlocked instructions that are necessary for multi-processor communication.
2. Debug-build only types (replaced by primitive types in the release build) that act like numbers, pointers or arrays, but do arbitrarily complex contract testing for algorithm.
For example, a numeric variable that in a range from a to b, who's value mod c must always be d. Of course flexible types like are best implemented with templates which they also left out.
3. All kinds of mathematical analysis. Just because these guys are mathematical ignorami who never use mathematical objects more advanced than complex numbers doesn't mean the rest of us are so limited. For example when I was doing some sound/filter design I wanted to analyze the effect that a numerical algorithm had on a symbolic representation of my problem, so I wrote a class of objects that formed a numeric ring (you can add, subtract and multiply) but were actually polynomials in hundreds of varibles. I plugged them into my numerical code instead of using the regular "double" type and got an instant symbolic answer. Do that in "D"!
4. Objects that act like normal primitive numeric types but automatically update the gui display when they change valuue. "Score += 100;" Dah!
I could go on and on and on about the very important tricks that the various omissions from "D" make impossible, but the main point would be lost. The main point is that C++, for all it's problems omissions has some very very powerful general purpose tools that "D" omits. "D"'s language designers seem to be inexperienced and unimaginative. Sorry. No one is going to replace an incomplete language with another one that's even more incomplete just because it claims to be a successor.
I predict (and hope) that "D" will sink without a trace.
Rocky J. Squirrel
I played with stegbreak a little bit and it seems totally useless since I couldn't find any data on its false positive rate or on what conditions cause false positives.
Since sd must report SOME false positives, any answer it gives you is pretty meaningless. The only way to be even slightly sure that someone is hiding data is to get enough positive matches on data from them that you can prove that it's unlikely for all of the positives to be false. Even then there may be some other factor, like photoshop effects that are causing false positives.
By the way, the original article had too many topics. Why mix a bunch of unrelated stuff together?
Rocky J Squirrel
Trying again - the server lost my first post. Hope this doesn't appear twice.
Rueter's got it wrong. The limitation on Fraunhaufer's free version of their codec that keeps you from using it to encoded high quality MP3s HAS ALWAYS BEEN THERE. That's right, I remember using that codec in 1997 and it had that limitation back then. They are probably right that Window's XP comes with a crippled encoder, but then so did Windows 95! Got it?
You can pay hundreds of $$ for Fraunhaufer's uncrippled codec or you can get a much higher quality codec for free. Look up LAME. It's freeware and tests show it to be the highest quality MP3 encoder around.
By the way, Liquid Audio's implementation of MP2 AAC at 160k does sound better than MP3s at 160k, but it's the only thing I've heard that does. It's been a long time since I compared. LAMEs variable rate MP3s may be just as good, I've never tested that.
Also if you want to get the best sounding playback, get the MAD decoder for winamp. It does dithering which especially helps if you have to equalized the hell out of your speakers like I do (monsoon's little flat panel speakers are very clean but not flat).
Rocky J. Squirrel
Well if I can't play a "copy protected" CD on the player in my computer at work, I'll download the MP3 instead of buying the CD. Dohhh!!!!
Instead of keeping 10% of the poeple who might have pirated from doing so, they're insuring that 60% or 70% of them will!
Now I understand why record executives get the big bucks. A normal person couldn't think up a scheme this stupid, it takes someone SPECIAL!
Of course Napster is actually much needed free advertising and airplay for any artist that isn't in the top 100. Like everyone else, I search for, my favorate artists on Napster, then check out the collections of people who have similar tastes to myself. The record companies aren't bright enough to come up with a marketing aid as effective as Napster themselves, but they ARE "bright" enough to ruin it for themselves. Why is it that people too dumb to breath run the world?
Rocky Squirrel