Joe Brockmeier and I have teamed up in a story on NewsForge to point out how the mainstream and trade press misrepresent the annual summary of vulnerabilities from US-CERT. They're doing it again this year to make it appear as if it is more secure than UNIX/Linux.
"it is more secure than UNIX/Linux"? What is it? I guess it goes without saying? (Or should that be, it goes without saying?)
There is an important issue being glossed over here: is the release of this information illegal or not?
The top article implies that it is illegal for the phone companies to share this data. They point to unscrupulous insiders, and acts of fraud on the part of private investigators and data miners.
But the information from EPIC and the FCC suggests a very different situation. According to these sites it is perfectly legal to share this data if the company adopts an "opt-out" policy and if the consumer has not exercised his right to opt-out. Well, of course most people have never heard of this and so they have not opted-out. Therefore it is completely legal for the companies to share your phone call lists!
I'm annoyed and frustrated that the press reports are getting this so wrong (as usual). By implying that the problem is a few illegal acts, necessarily commited furtively and relatively rarely, they hide the fact that this is a perfectly legal, above-board business which is presumably going along at a brisk rate selling everyone's call info!
I can confirm this story - I, too, worked for Network Associates in those years until my group was spun off under the new management.
Two things are being left out though. The first is the name of the CEO who caused all the trouble: Bill Larson. Larson's larger-than-life personality and love of risk sent him down the Enron path, requiring the company to resort to falsified records in order to keep his precarious house of cards afloat. Unfortunately Larson left with a "golden parachute" and is living in wealth and comfort, paying no penalty for his dishonest actions.
The second thing is that the crash of NETA's stock should be put into perspective. It happened in early 2000 and was generally part of the overall dot-com crash. NETA's fall was worse than most as the facts about the fraud began to come out, but it was far from the only company to experience a stock crash that year, and far from the worst.
George Samenuk deserves enormous credit for turning around the corporate culture of Network Associates and helping the company find a way to be profitable and successful with honest business practices. It's not easy - once a company gets hooked on lying, it's like a heroin addition. There's enormous pain in getting clean, and some of that pain is being felt today. Fifty million is a heavy blow and I don't know if the company is going to make it. But at least they have cleaned up their act and hopefully they will finally be able to put the sad episode of Bill Larson behind them.
There are a lot of falsehoods and misleading information being reported about this case. A full set of court documents is available; scroll down to "Elektra v. Santangelo".
First, Ms. Santangelo is not being charged with just downloading. The complaint actually says that Ms. Santangelo used Kazaa "to download the Copyrighted Recordings, to distribute the Copyrighted Recordings to the public, and/or to make the Copyrighted Recordings available for distribution to others." As evidence for this charge they present a series of screen shots of Kazaa showing an account that is offering thousands of songs available for upload. Their claim is that this account corresponds to Ms. Santangelo's computer, although no evidence for that has been presented yet at this stage of the proceedings.
They did not inspect Ms. Santangelo's computer, which supposedly is in her ex-husband's possession and has had the disk wiped due to virus infections. They got the data from Kazaa by looking at the files which were (supposedly) being offered by her computer for upload.
So this is not a case of "downloading", it is a case of downloading and/or offering to upload. If that account actually does correspond to Ms. Santangelo's computer, the simplest explanation is that her kids were doing it, and she is responsible for their actions.
Even if it is the kids' friend, it's unlikely that he downloaded thousands of songs onto their computer without the kids knowing it. And even if he did, Ms. Santangelo could still be liable herself, and then she would have to sue the friend to recover damages on her own. In other words, she would owe millions of dollars to the RIAA, and then she would sue the friend for millions to cover her debts. But the RIAA would not depend on her success in suing the friend.
In short, instead of paying a few thousand to settle this and make it go away (and punishing the kids for getting the family into this mess), she is now out many times that already, and is likely to end up owing an astronomical sum. Her only recourse will be to declare bankruptcy.
There are two lessons from this. The first is that parents ought to keep better track of what their kids (and their kids' friends) are doing on the family computer. But the deeper lesson is that even with cases like this in the press, the odds are still so much against any given person being caught that most parents still don't worry about it. Unless or until we reach the point where most people have personal friends who have been sued, or at least friends of friends, nobody is going to take these threats seriously. At this point it's still like being struck by lightning or killed by bears, a theoretical threat that is so abstract and rare that few people take it seriously.
I thought the whole idea behind BT was that it had built-in economics? If somebody is downloading and not uploading (say by using a hacked client, or highly limiting upload rate), then other clients will deprioritize traffic to them.
That's exactly right. I've studied the BT protocol closely and made some experimental mods to the standard client. Generally, a client has to be uploading while it's downloading in order to get good performance; and in fact, most clients do so.
The problem is that these incentives are not present for seeders - people who have finished downloading and are continuing to just upload. Since they have nothing to download they have no incentive or reward from uploading. But the BT network benefits a great deal from seeders. The higher the percentage of seeders, generally the better the download experience for everyone else.
It sounds like these private trackers fix this problem by rewarding people for seeding (or more accurately, punishing people for not seeding). This is what is missing from BT and why the private networks will work better.
Security-expert-turned-law-prof Nick Szabo predicted this kind of thing many years ago. He called it a Smart Contract. The idea was to use technology to make contracts self-enforcing. Like many of Nick's ideas, he was and is way ahead of his time. These kinds of things are inevitable.
Re:Can AJAX finally bring us "push technology"
on
Ajax in Action
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· Score: 1
People today are too young to remember, but "push" has always been about polling. What was the classic "killer app" for push, circa 1997? Anyone remember something called PointCast? It was the biggest thing on the net back then. You'd subscribe to the channels you were interested in and presto, real time information came pouring into your PC. But behind the scenes, the PointCast client was POLLING the server to find out if there was new data available! It always worked that way.
Push was more of a conceptual shift than an actual technology where servers would send data to clients unannounced. The same concepts would work fine with Ajax.
It's funny to read Josephson this and Josephson that in the summary. Brian Josephson is of course a very famous Nobel prize winner, but he has become a pariah in the scientific community.
Look at his web page! He's pushing cold fusion, ESP and other paranormal powers, and all kinds of bizarre theories. He's gotten into fights with the highly respected archiv.org physics publication site over their habit of removing crackpot papers. In short Josephson is an embarrassment to the scientific community, someone who refuses to go along with the conventional wisdom and insists on using his reputation to attack conventional scientific beliefs.
I know what you really want to know: who's right? Josephson or the scientists? Here's a tip. Any time it's one guy against the scientific community, bet on the scientific community. You'll be right 99+% of the time. The fact that Josephson did good work back in the 1960s with his junction doesn't make him an expert on ESP and cold fusion. If there were any substance to those fields, the normal scientific process would have found it. That's the safe way to bet.
The blurb has nearly no meaningfull information whatsoever. The only meaningfull bit is the recommendation not to use aggressive mode.
That's not the problem. Read the report, http://www.ee.oulu.fi/research/ouspg/protos/testin g/c09/isakmp/index.html, and look at the table at the bottom. There were just as many failures in main mode (i.e. non-aggressive mode) as in aggressive mode. Disabling aggressive mode is no counter-measure.
And these are implementation failures, not protocol failures. Generally they are the result of insufficient validation of bogus inputs.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 1
Here's some info from a story a few days ago in the NY Times about the 1918 flu:
Despite the fact that those [bird flu] viruses have been circulating in China more than a dozen years, almost no human-to-human spread has occurred.
"The virus has been around for more than a dozen years, but it hasn't jumped into the human population," said Dr. Peter Palese of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "I don't think it has the capability of doing it."
That's right, and that's why the 1918 virus was so exceptional. It was able to evolve to a high degree of fatality without killing itself off, because it was able to breed in the trenches and refugee camps of World War I. The unsanitary and close conditions prevailing at that time were perfect for breeding a virus of exceptional fatality, which then burned its way around the world. Today it will be much more difficult for a flu virus to evolve with the mortality of the 1918 virus.
More plausible is a repeat of the Hong Kong flu of the 1960s, the most recent pandemic.
I'd say this is obviously more of a political statement than an actual attempt to improve effectiveness of the malware. There simply aren't enough machines out there with the Sony software installed to make them a reasonable malware target.
Someone hacked a pre-existing trojan slightly, to change the filenames to use $sys$, to change the channel it listens on to #sony, and to add the string SonyEnabled. It was done solely so that someone could write an article about it and it would add to the pressure against Sony. My guess is that the trojan was sent directly to the antivirus company, if it wasn't actually created by that company for publicity purposes.
Re:The $sys$ prefixing thing was apparently wrong
on
Sony Rootkit Phones Home
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Just my luck, when I make it to slashdot it's something I've analyzed wrong. I tested to rename my ripping software to begin with $sys$ and it ripped it fine, but apparently something else was the deciding factor. I can't reproduce that effect!
Too late. This is the kind of falsehood which will become true merely by repetition. It is too good a story not to tell. You will see it repeated over and over on site after site. Occasionally people will try to follow up with corrections but they will never get the attention that the original false report got.
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." - Mark Twain
Los Angeles-based Flexilis set the world record for transmitting data to and from a "passive" radio frequency identification (RFID) card -- covering a distance of more than 69 feet. (Active RFID -- the kind being integrated into foreign passports, for example -- differs from passive RFID in that it emits its own magnetic signal and can only be detected from a much shorter distance.)
This article (from the WaPost blog) is confused. Active RFID has a battery attached to the chip. It has MUCH higher power and MUCH higher range. It can be used for tracking animals in the field and similar purposes. You can receive a signal from hundreds of yards away or even more. It's really unlimited depending on how much power you use.
Passive RFID has no internal power supply. It gets power from the radio signal that is used to query it. These chips have a much lower range. Generally, the power required to query a passive RFID goes as the fourth power of the distance. I can't imagine successfully querying one of these things from 70 feet. That is some pretty impressive antenna technology, either that or they were using a microwave beam so intense that it would be dangerous to get in front of it.
AFAIK all passports would be passive RFID. Nobody has proposed to put batteries in them, because of battery lifetime issues among other problems.
California already has a bunch of Hydrogen fueling stations. It is probably the best place in the world to be driving a Hydrogen car. See this map of station locations. There are 16 in operation now and another 15 in construction. There would be no need for home fueling if you lived in the Los Angeles or San Francisco area.
Here's one I came up with myself. It's not hard, but the answer is surprising.
What is the angle at the point of the "wide" version of the seven pointed star? This is the figure you would create if you start with a circle and draw 7 equally spaced dots, then connect every dot to the 2nd one following. Express the answer in degrees as a mixed fraction (e.g. 23 1/3 degrees).
The number seven is considered lucky, and you might find the answer surprisingly lucky!
They just turn their nanobots loose on it. These eat the disk and simultaneously create an atomic-level scan of the device, so that the whole disk has an exact representation in software. Using the known specs for CD-ROMs, along with error correction algorithms to account for degradation in the CD-ROM medium, they can turn the encoded data back into raw digital form.
The way I thought this kind of thing should work is, you are on a platform whose surface is like a conveyor belt that can move in 2 dimensions. (I know it sounds impossible, but I'm sure someone like Rubik could invent one.) Then there is a sensor which tracks where you are, and the belt is constantly moved to keep you in the middle of the platform.
Now, the problem with this is, as you start to move you expect your momentum to change in certain ways. You lean forward a little as you start to walk and then lean back as you stop. But if the belt is moving, and given that there will be some time lag, you're going to feel your momentum changes in a different way. When the belt starts moving you'll feel a jerk in that direction. Any motion will feel odd and you might tend to lose your balance.
So nothing along these lines will be perfect. Even in the holodeck this should have been noticeable, unless their "tractor beams" can directly affect your inner ear balance sensors.
It's pretty straightforward: the force of the storm depends on the temperature on the ocean's surface. Higher temperature means nastier storms.
That's not quite right. Hurricanes are heat engines. They are driven by temperature differentials between the warm ocean and the cold upper atmosphere. This causes uplift of air which leads to all of the other effects.
To get stronger hurricanes, then, you need a greater differential between the ocean and atmosphere temperatures. Warming the ocean won't matter, if the atmosphere warms too. In fact if the atmosphere warms faster than the ocean you could see a decrease in intensity.
The point is that the actual outcome is complex and requires careful analysis. Simple statements like the one you made about warmer oceans meaning stronger storms are widely believed, but are fundamentally misleading.
RC4 is a stream cipher which has been on shaky ground for a long time. There are two problems with RC4. The first is that the data is not as random as it could be, at the beginning. The way RC4 works, you put in a key and then it generates a string of random bytes which you XOR with your plaintext to encrypt. But there are weaknesses in the randomness of the first part of RC4's key stream. To fix this experts recommend throwing away the first N bytes. The problem is that nobody can agree on what N should be and it keeps going up. It used to be that 256 bytes was enough, then a thousand; now they say several thousand. Such progressive weakness is a bad sign in a cipher.
The other problem is that stream ciphers in general are hard to use correctly. There have been manynotoriouscases of RC4 being misused. If you use the same keystream twice you get very bad results (similar to using a one time pad twice), and you can xor bits of the ciphertext and have them go straight through to the plaintext. Again and again people make these mistakes.
RC4 has probably been the cause of more security flaws than any other crypto algorithm. The most recent one (the first link above) was just this year. It is time for Microsoft to retire RC4 in new protocols and products.
The gas moves into the chamber under pressure. The chamber is shaped to send the gas into a whirling vortex. Then the hot molecules go one way and the cold ones go the other. But I think it takes very high pressures to produce the required speeds.
The real issue with hydrogen is whether it is better to use hydrogen to generate electricity in the car, that then runs electric motors, or to use electric vehicles directly. These are two good approaches for a post-oil future. The main alternatives are biodiesel and ethanol, but both are questionable as sources of energy, at least in temperate climates. Several studies have found that they take in more energy in fertilizer and processing than they create.
But back to hydrogen. Basically a hydrogen car is an electric car, but the energy is stored in hydrogen rather than batteries. The hydrogen is then oxidized in a fuel cell to produce electricity. Hydrogen in a post-oil future will be produced from electricity. So basically hydrogen can be thought of as a physical way of carrying electrical energy.
Hydrogen has several pros and cons vs transporting and storing electricity via wires and batteries. It's biggest advantage is that it can be used to fuel cars very quickly. Hydrogen stores a lot of energy per kilogram and cars could be refueled in a similar amount of time as they are today with gasoline. To recharge a pure electric car's battery in five minutes, on the other hand, would require enormous currents on the order of a megawatt! Such currents would be difficult for unskilled drivers to handle safely and reliably.
Beyond this one big advantage, most other considerations would favor battery powered electric vehicles. They can be charged at night, when electrical demand is low, so not much new infrastructure is needed for carrying additional electrical power. Commuting and local trips could be handled completely by overnight recharging and there would be no need to refuel on the road at all. Only for long trips does the refueling problem mentioned above arise.
Hydrogen would require an enormous new infrastructure of manufacturing facilities, pipelines and filling stations. Some of this can be retrofit from existing oil infrastructure, but not that much. Hydrogen is a tiny molecule that can penetrate many types of pipelines. Likewise gasoline storage tanks do not have to be air tight. Piping the nation or the world with hydrogen is a herculean task.
As far as cost, both batteries and hydrogen fuel cells are high, but batteries are almost practical, as we have seen with the small existing fleet of commercial battery powered vehicles. Hydrogen fuel cell cars, on the other hand, would have to sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover their current costs. Much work is needed before these fuel cells become economically viable.
In short, by almost every measure, pure electric vehicles are more efficient and cost effective than hydrogen power. The one big problem they have is effective, fast refueling. That is where hydrogen wins hands down. The question is whether the other problems with hydrogen can be overcome more cheaply than finding an effective, safe way to provide megawatts of electricity needed to recharge electric vehicles when they are going on long trips.
The lesson here is important: Change is Bad. Whatever happens, change is bad. A perfect world is one which never changes. Any change in the world is going to force people to change! No one should ever have to change. Everyone's life should stay the same, forever. A perfect world is one of perfect stasis.
Change is bad. Remember that when you read any article like this. It is the fundamental basis of modern philosophy.
Anyone who says they will be modded as a Troll will be modded +5
I always mod people Troll when they say they'll probably be modded Troll. Likewise I always mod people down when they say they'll probably be modded down. This is to punish people for trying to manipulate the mod system.
So much for Moore's Law. So much for the supposedly inexorable march of technology. So much for that nonsense about increasing CPU performance, you all didn't really want 4 GHz anyway, did you?
People have been predicting the demise of Moore's Law for years. It's funny that it's happened and nobody seems to notice.
Slashdot Mirror
Joe Brockmeier and I have teamed up in a story on NewsForge to point out how the mainstream and trade press misrepresent the annual summary of vulnerabilities from US-CERT. They're doing it again this year to make it appear as if it is more secure than UNIX/Linux.
"it is more secure than UNIX/Linux"? What is it? I guess it goes without saying? (Or should that be, it goes without saying?)
There is an important issue being glossed over here: is the release of this information illegal or not?
The top article implies that it is illegal for the phone companies to share this data. They point to unscrupulous insiders, and acts of fraud on the part of private investigators and data miners.
But the information from EPIC and the FCC suggests a very different situation. According to these sites it is perfectly legal to share this data if the company adopts an "opt-out" policy and if the consumer has not exercised his right to opt-out. Well, of course most people have never heard of this and so they have not opted-out. Therefore it is completely legal for the companies to share your phone call lists!
I'm annoyed and frustrated that the press reports are getting this so wrong (as usual). By implying that the problem is a few illegal acts, necessarily commited furtively and relatively rarely, they hide the fact that this is a perfectly legal, above-board business which is presumably going along at a brisk rate selling everyone's call info!
I can confirm this story - I, too, worked for Network Associates in those years until my group was spun off under the new management.
Two things are being left out though. The first is the name of the CEO who caused all the trouble: Bill Larson. Larson's larger-than-life personality and love of risk sent him down the Enron path, requiring the company to resort to falsified records in order to keep his precarious house of cards afloat. Unfortunately Larson left with a "golden parachute" and is living in wealth and comfort, paying no penalty for his dishonest actions.
The second thing is that the crash of NETA's stock should be put into perspective. It happened in early 2000 and was generally part of the overall dot-com crash. NETA's fall was worse than most as the facts about the fraud began to come out, but it was far from the only company to experience a stock crash that year, and far from the worst.
George Samenuk deserves enormous credit for turning around the corporate culture of Network Associates and helping the company find a way to be profitable and successful with honest business practices. It's not easy - once a company gets hooked on lying, it's like a heroin addition. There's enormous pain in getting clean, and some of that pain is being felt today. Fifty million is a heavy blow and I don't know if the company is going to make it. But at least they have cleaned up their act and hopefully they will finally be able to put the sad episode of Bill Larson behind them.
There are a lot of falsehoods and misleading information being reported about this case. A full set of court documents is available; scroll down to "Elektra v. Santangelo".
First, Ms. Santangelo is not being charged with just downloading. The complaint actually says that Ms. Santangelo used Kazaa "to download the Copyrighted Recordings, to distribute the Copyrighted Recordings to the public, and/or to make the Copyrighted Recordings available for distribution to others." As evidence for this charge they present a series of screen shots of Kazaa showing an account that is offering thousands of songs available for upload. Their claim is that this account corresponds to Ms. Santangelo's computer, although no evidence for that has been presented yet at this stage of the proceedings.
They did not inspect Ms. Santangelo's computer, which supposedly is in her ex-husband's possession and has had the disk wiped due to virus infections. They got the data from Kazaa by looking at the files which were (supposedly) being offered by her computer for upload.
So this is not a case of "downloading", it is a case of downloading and/or offering to upload. If that account actually does correspond to Ms. Santangelo's computer, the simplest explanation is that her kids were doing it, and she is responsible for their actions.
Even if it is the kids' friend, it's unlikely that he downloaded thousands of songs onto their computer without the kids knowing it. And even if he did, Ms. Santangelo could still be liable herself, and then she would have to sue the friend to recover damages on her own. In other words, she would owe millions of dollars to the RIAA, and then she would sue the friend for millions to cover her debts. But the RIAA would not depend on her success in suing the friend.
In short, instead of paying a few thousand to settle this and make it go away (and punishing the kids for getting the family into this mess), she is now out many times that already, and is likely to end up owing an astronomical sum. Her only recourse will be to declare bankruptcy.
There are two lessons from this. The first is that parents ought to keep better track of what their kids (and their kids' friends) are doing on the family computer. But the deeper lesson is that even with cases like this in the press, the odds are still so much against any given person being caught that most parents still don't worry about it. Unless or until we reach the point where most people have personal friends who have been sued, or at least friends of friends, nobody is going to take these threats seriously. At this point it's still like being struck by lightning or killed by bears, a theoretical threat that is so abstract and rare that few people take it seriously.
I thought the whole idea behind BT was that it had built-in economics? If somebody is downloading and not uploading (say by using a hacked client, or highly limiting upload rate), then other clients will deprioritize traffic to them.
That's exactly right. I've studied the BT protocol closely and made some experimental mods to the standard client. Generally, a client has to be uploading while it's downloading in order to get good performance; and in fact, most clients do so.
The problem is that these incentives are not present for seeders - people who have finished downloading and are continuing to just upload. Since they have nothing to download they have no incentive or reward from uploading. But the BT network benefits a great deal from seeders. The higher the percentage of seeders, generally the better the download experience for everyone else.
It sounds like these private trackers fix this problem by rewarding people for seeding (or more accurately, punishing people for not seeding). This is what is missing from BT and why the private networks will work better.
Security-expert-turned-law-prof Nick Szabo predicted this kind of thing many years ago. He called it a Smart Contract. The idea was to use technology to make contracts self-enforcing. Like many of Nick's ideas, he was and is way ahead of his time. These kinds of things are inevitable.
People today are too young to remember, but "push" has always been about polling. What was the classic "killer app" for push, circa 1997? Anyone remember something called PointCast? It was the biggest thing on the net back then. You'd subscribe to the channels you were interested in and presto, real time information came pouring into your PC. But behind the scenes, the PointCast client was POLLING the server to find out if there was new data available! It always worked that way.
Push was more of a conceptual shift than an actual technology where servers would send data to clients unannounced. The same concepts would work fine with Ajax.
It's funny to read Josephson this and Josephson that in the summary. Brian Josephson is of course a very famous Nobel prize winner, but he has become a pariah in the scientific community.
Look at his web page! He's pushing cold fusion, ESP and other paranormal powers, and all kinds of bizarre theories. He's gotten into fights with the highly respected archiv.org physics publication site over their habit of removing crackpot papers. In short Josephson is an embarrassment to the scientific community, someone who refuses to go along with the conventional wisdom and insists on using his reputation to attack conventional scientific beliefs.
I know what you really want to know: who's right? Josephson or the scientists? Here's a tip. Any time it's one guy against the scientific community, bet on the scientific community. You'll be right 99+% of the time. The fact that Josephson did good work back in the 1960s with his junction doesn't make him an expert on ESP and cold fusion. If there were any substance to those fields, the normal scientific process would have found it. That's the safe way to bet.
The blurb has nearly no meaningfull information whatsoever. The only meaningfull bit is the recommendation not to use aggressive mode.
n g/c09/isakmp/index.html, and look at the table at the bottom. There were just as many failures in main mode (i.e. non-aggressive mode) as in aggressive mode. Disabling aggressive mode is no counter-measure.
That's not the problem. Read the report, http://www.ee.oulu.fi/research/ouspg/protos/testi
And these are implementation failures, not protocol failures. Generally they are the result of insufficient validation of bogus inputs.
That's right, and that's why the 1918 virus was so exceptional. It was able to evolve to a high degree of fatality without killing itself off, because it was able to breed in the trenches and refugee camps of World War I. The unsanitary and close conditions prevailing at that time were perfect for breeding a virus of exceptional fatality, which then burned its way around the world. Today it will be much more difficult for a flu virus to evolve with the mortality of the 1918 virus.
More plausible is a repeat of the Hong Kong flu of the 1960s, the most recent pandemic.
I'd say this is obviously more of a political statement than an actual attempt to improve effectiveness of the malware. There simply aren't enough machines out there with the Sony software installed to make them a reasonable malware target.
Someone hacked a pre-existing trojan slightly, to change the filenames to use $sys$, to change the channel it listens on to #sony, and to add the string SonyEnabled. It was done solely so that someone could write an article about it and it would add to the pressure against Sony. My guess is that the trojan was sent directly to the antivirus company, if it wasn't actually created by that company for publicity purposes.
Just my luck, when I make it to slashdot it's something I've analyzed wrong. I tested to rename my ripping software to begin with $sys$ and it ripped it fine, but apparently something else was the deciding factor. I can't reproduce that effect!
Too late. This is the kind of falsehood which will become true merely by repetition. It is too good a story not to tell. You will see it repeated over and over on site after site. Occasionally people will try to follow up with corrections but they will never get the attention that the original false report got.
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." - Mark Twain
Los Angeles-based Flexilis set the world record for transmitting data to and from a "passive" radio frequency identification (RFID) card -- covering a distance of more than 69 feet. (Active RFID -- the kind being integrated into foreign passports, for example -- differs from passive RFID in that it emits its own magnetic signal and can only be detected from a much shorter distance.)
This article (from the WaPost blog) is confused. Active RFID has a battery attached to the chip. It has MUCH higher power and MUCH higher range. It can be used for tracking animals in the field and similar purposes. You can receive a signal from hundreds of yards away or even more. It's really unlimited depending on how much power you use.
Passive RFID has no internal power supply. It gets power from the radio signal that is used to query it. These chips have a much lower range. Generally, the power required to query a passive RFID goes as the fourth power of the distance. I can't imagine successfully querying one of these things from 70 feet. That is some pretty impressive antenna technology, either that or they were using a microwave beam so intense that it would be dangerous to get in front of it.
AFAIK all passports would be passive RFID. Nobody has proposed to put batteries in them, because of battery lifetime issues among other problems.
California already has a bunch of Hydrogen fueling stations. It is probably the best place in the world to be driving a Hydrogen car. See this map of station locations. There are 16 in operation now and another 15 in construction. There would be no need for home fueling if you lived in the Los Angeles or San Francisco area.
Here's one I came up with myself. It's not hard, but the answer is surprising.
What is the angle at the point of the "wide" version of the seven pointed star? This is the figure you would create if you start with a circle and draw 7 equally spaced dots, then connect every dot to the 2nd one following. Express the answer in degrees as a mixed fraction (e.g. 23 1/3 degrees).
The number seven is considered lucky, and you might find the answer surprisingly lucky!
They just turn their nanobots loose on it. These eat the disk and simultaneously create an atomic-level scan of the device, so that the whole disk has an exact representation in software. Using the known specs for CD-ROMs, along with error correction algorithms to account for degradation in the CD-ROM medium, they can turn the encoded data back into raw digital form.
The way I thought this kind of thing should work is, you are on a platform whose surface is like a conveyor belt that can move in 2 dimensions. (I know it sounds impossible, but I'm sure someone like Rubik could invent one.) Then there is a sensor which tracks where you are, and the belt is constantly moved to keep you in the middle of the platform.
Now, the problem with this is, as you start to move you expect your momentum to change in certain ways. You lean forward a little as you start to walk and then lean back as you stop. But if the belt is moving, and given that there will be some time lag, you're going to feel your momentum changes in a different way. When the belt starts moving you'll feel a jerk in that direction. Any motion will feel odd and you might tend to lose your balance.
So nothing along these lines will be perfect. Even in the holodeck this should have been noticeable, unless their "tractor beams" can directly affect your inner ear balance sensors.
It's pretty straightforward: the force of the storm depends on the temperature on the ocean's surface. Higher temperature means nastier storms.
That's not quite right. Hurricanes are heat engines. They are driven by temperature differentials between the warm ocean and the cold upper atmosphere. This causes uplift of air which leads to all of the other effects.
To get stronger hurricanes, then, you need a greater differential between the ocean and atmosphere temperatures. Warming the ocean won't matter, if the atmosphere warms too. In fact if the atmosphere warms faster than the ocean you could see a decrease in intensity.
The point is that the actual outcome is complex and requires careful analysis. Simple statements like the one you made about warmer oceans meaning stronger storms are widely believed, but are fundamentally misleading.
RC4 is a stream cipher which has been on shaky ground for a long time. There are two problems with RC4. The first is that the data is not as random as it could be, at the beginning. The way RC4 works, you put in a key and then it generates a string of random bytes which you XOR with your plaintext to encrypt. But there are weaknesses in the randomness of the first part of RC4's key stream. To fix this experts recommend throwing away the first N bytes. The problem is that nobody can agree on what N should be and it keeps going up. It used to be that 256 bytes was enough, then a thousand; now they say several thousand. Such progressive weakness is a bad sign in a cipher.
The other problem is that stream ciphers in general are hard to use correctly. There have been many notorious cases of RC4 being misused. If you use the same keystream twice you get very bad results (similar to using a one time pad twice), and you can xor bits of the ciphertext and have them go straight through to the plaintext. Again and again people make these mistakes.
RC4 has probably been the cause of more security flaws than any other crypto algorithm. The most recent one (the first link above) was just this year. It is time for Microsoft to retire RC4 in new protocols and products.
How can you rotate anything without moving parts?
The gas moves into the chamber under pressure. The chamber is shaped to send the gas into a whirling vortex. Then the hot molecules go one way and the cold ones go the other. But I think it takes very high pressures to produce the required speeds.
The real issue with hydrogen is whether it is better to use hydrogen to generate electricity in the car, that then runs electric motors, or to use electric vehicles directly. These are two good approaches for a post-oil future. The main alternatives are biodiesel and ethanol, but both are questionable as sources of energy, at least in temperate climates. Several studies have found that they take in more energy in fertilizer and processing than they create.
But back to hydrogen. Basically a hydrogen car is an electric car, but the energy is stored in hydrogen rather than batteries. The hydrogen is then oxidized in a fuel cell to produce electricity. Hydrogen in a post-oil future will be produced from electricity. So basically hydrogen can be thought of as a physical way of carrying electrical energy.
Hydrogen has several pros and cons vs transporting and storing electricity via wires and batteries. It's biggest advantage is that it can be used to fuel cars very quickly. Hydrogen stores a lot of energy per kilogram and cars could be refueled in a similar amount of time as they are today with gasoline. To recharge a pure electric car's battery in five minutes, on the other hand, would require enormous currents on the order of a megawatt! Such currents would be difficult for unskilled drivers to handle safely and reliably.
Beyond this one big advantage, most other considerations would favor battery powered electric vehicles. They can be charged at night, when electrical demand is low, so not much new infrastructure is needed for carrying additional electrical power. Commuting and local trips could be handled completely by overnight recharging and there would be no need to refuel on the road at all. Only for long trips does the refueling problem mentioned above arise.
Further, generating the power can be done largely using existing electrical generating capacity. See this article which shows that California's unused nighttime generating capacity could power a 100% electrical vehicle fleet in that state.
Hydrogen would require an enormous new infrastructure of manufacturing facilities, pipelines and filling stations. Some of this can be retrofit from existing oil infrastructure, but not that much. Hydrogen is a tiny molecule that can penetrate many types of pipelines. Likewise gasoline storage tanks do not have to be air tight. Piping the nation or the world with hydrogen is a herculean task.
As far as cost, both batteries and hydrogen fuel cells are high, but batteries are almost practical, as we have seen with the small existing fleet of commercial battery powered vehicles. Hydrogen fuel cell cars, on the other hand, would have to sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover their current costs. Much work is needed before these fuel cells become economically viable.
In short, by almost every measure, pure electric vehicles are more efficient and cost effective than hydrogen power. The one big problem they have is effective, fast refueling. That is where hydrogen wins hands down. The question is whether the other problems with hydrogen can be overcome more cheaply than finding an effective, safe way to provide megawatts of electricity needed to recharge electric vehicles when they are going on long trips.
The lesson here is important: Change is Bad. Whatever happens, change is bad. A perfect world is one which never changes. Any change in the world is going to force people to change! No one should ever have to change. Everyone's life should stay the same, forever. A perfect world is one of perfect stasis.
Change is bad. Remember that when you read any article like this. It is the fundamental basis of modern philosophy.
Anyone who says they will be modded as a Troll will be modded +5
;-)
I always mod people Troll when they say they'll probably be modded Troll. Likewise I always mod people down when they say they'll probably be modded down. This is to punish people for trying to manipulate the mod system.
Go ahead, mod me down for this!
So much for Moore's Law. So much for the supposedly inexorable march of technology. So much for that nonsense about increasing CPU performance, you all didn't really want 4 GHz anyway, did you?
People have been predicting the demise of Moore's Law for years. It's funny that it's happened and nobody seems to notice.