IMO widescreen browsing is a waste. Most web pages are limited in how much screen real estate they will use. A 1900 pixel wide web browser window will be 50% blank much of the time.
I recently got a fancy Dell flatscreen display. You can physically rotate it 90 degrees to portrait mode. This is perfect for web browsing. Web pages are tall and narrow. I can see an entire Slashdot or Google News page at a glance.
For watching movies, and maybe some games, widescreen is nice. But for web browsing, tall screen is the way to go.
What would you do about the spread of nuclear weapons and other WMDs? Iran is now working on the bomb while Europe wrings its hands. North Korea has the bomb. What is the Libertarian position? Would you ever support attacking Iran to prevent them from going nuclear?
I agree, but there's one thing that confuses me. Elsewhere in this discussion thare are claims that Microsoft has patented the PRA algorithm, Purported Responsible Address. This reads the mail headers to figure out where the mail claims to come from. Yet the IETF decision reads: With regard to items 3 and 4 above, it is also the opinion of the co-chairs that any attempt by the MARID working group to define any new scopes other than "mailfrom" and "pra" for the SPF syntax will at this time result in failure to find consensus within the working group.
This suggests that PRA actually is an effort which the Working Group will pursue. How can they do so if Microsoft has patented PRA with unknown terms?
I read Microsoft's Intellectual Property Disclosure. It says that the covered material is: Both Sender ID: Authenticating E-mail <draft-ietf-marid-core-03.txt> and Purported Responsible Address in E-mail Messages
in combination.
This does not make clear the exact scope of the PRA patent. It could just cover the one specific sequence of steps in the PRA document. Or it could cover the very idea of scanning the email to find the PRA. Or something in between.
Usually patents are written in a hierarchical manner. First you have the broadest possible claim covering the general idea of what you want to do. Then you have a series of dependent claims which expand on the earlier one(s) by providing more details about how it will work. This gives you the greatest possible coverage while allowing the patent to survive and be useful even if some of the broadest claims are invalidated.
I don't see how the IETF WG can proceed with PRA type algorithms when Microsoft has advised them that PRA is covered by a pending patent. And given that they are doing so, it certainly does not seem like they are rejecting Microsoft's approach.
Read any old Niven, most Heinlein, modern GRR Martin, Robert J Sawyer, Bruce Sterling, John C Wright, Greg Egan, Stephen Gould,... basically any author I would call good.
I recognize these names, and they are generally good... except for Stephen Gould. There is no science fiction author by that name. The late Stephen Jay Gould was a well known and highly successful evolutionary biologist and science writer.
I'm guessing you mean Stephen Baxter, or perhaps someone else with a similar name. Not Gould.
I have an older model Panasonic DVD recorder with hard drive, the DMR-E100H. It's got a 120 GB disk which they describe as holding 160 hours. I usually record in higher quality so it holds half that or less.
It does have a high-speed record feature and can record an hour DVD in a couple of minutes. I'm not sure how it works. Sometimes it seems like the quality is not as high when I do it like this, but maybe that's my imagination.
I also have a TiVo and what I miss most on the Panasonic is the lack of a program guide. The best you can do is use the VCR Plus codes from TV Guide but otherwise you have to manually enter the time and channel. And the worst is, you have to manually enter the program name! Using a letter grid that you move a cursor around with the remote control! It's awful. I hate it when I record a movie with a long title, but I'm too compulsive to allow myself to abbreviate it.
The remaining major problem is that you can't copy from a DVD to the HD, you can only go in the other direction. I'd think this was a copy protection thing, but you actually can do it if you use a DVD-RAM format disk, just not a DVD-video. So once you back up something from the HD to a DVD, you can't copy it back to re-edit it or burn to a new DVD. I don't know whether the new box will fix this.
...the helicopter pilot would have seen the problem, matched courses with the probe, and sent his chopper into a 100 MPH dive parallelling the probe. Someone on board would have tied a rope around his waist and leaped out, freefalling, and grabbed the probe. All the time the pilot would have been shouting out the altimeter readings... 10000 feet! 9000 feet! 8000 feet!
They would have gotten the probe on board just in time for the pilot to pull out of the dive one foot above land. Then as soon as they brought the probe back to base and got it out of the copter the charge would have gone off and the chutes would blast into the air, leaving the scientist member of the team covered with soot, while everyone laughed.
I read a lot about cold fusion when the controversy first erupted and in the next few years. It's much more difficult to evaluate than you would think.
The problem is that there is a pre-loading phase where you are running the current and nothing is happening. This is when the hydrogen is being taken up by the palladium electrodes. Then after a while you start to get some heat, often sporadically.
But is it excess heat? Or are you merely recovering energy you spent in the pre-loading phase?
This question is the subject of calorimetry, or heat measurement, and it is one of the most difficult types of measurements to do precisely. Making it harder is the fact that the experiments run for several days or even weeks and you have to monitor the energy spent and recovered throughout that time. Some of the early experiments went bad because the stirring of the water by convection wasn't properly taken into account. That's how subtle and difficult it is.
It seems clear that at least some of the early cold fusion results were merely calorimetric errors. Now, it's possible that they have improved their experimental technique and that the new data is more convincing. But the nature of the experiment - long periods of feeding energy in, then short bursts of heat out - makes it inherently difficult to come up with convincing proof of what is happening.
I think we are missing the real danger here. There was never all that much difference between SPF and Microsoft's Caller ID. The differences were in the details of how they were put into the DNS, the use of XML vs text formats, and maybe some issues about exactly which mail headers were checked. But the basic idea was almost identical.
This means that Microsoft's forthcoming Caller ID patents probably cover SPF. That's the real problem here.
We can't just tell Microsoft to get stuffed and then go ahead and use SPF. There's too much risk that Microsoft will surface with a patent in three or four years that covers a technology which is by then widely used on the net.
I think this decision kills SPF and everything along those lines. Some may cheer and some may be upset, but that is the reality we face. Going forward with SPF under these circumstances is far too risky. Microsoft has warned us about the patent applications and we can't ignore them.
I see a lot of posts complaining that "it's more of a ten year timeline" got turned into 2011. But no one seems to have noticed that 2011 is 7 years away, not 10. The slashdot headline, if taking the MS rep as literally as the critics are claiming, should have said that Windows would not be secure until 2014.
"Huygens isn't really designed to find life," he says. "The only way it would is if something sang into its microphones."
Doesn't it take pictures? If there is non-microscopic life, plants and animals, it seems like the cameras would have a good chance of picking it up. Of course it may be hard for us to tell Titanian life reliably from some kind of bizarre mineral formations or something, but if there are fractal-type structures there similar to trees and bushes, people are going to see life.
Terrorists would be stupid to try to hijack planes again
Not if there goal is to instill terror. If they hijack half a dozen planes and kill everyone on board in some grisly way, they will have been highly successful in that goal. It will once again lead to the grounding of the aviation fleet for at least several days, inflicting billions of dollars in costs. And if the planes can be brought down over populated areas, so much the better.
Taking steps to reduce the chances of such an attack is very much worthwhile. And part of those efforts are maintaining watch lists and checking people more carefully who are on those lists.
Look, it's been almost three years since 9/11 and there have been no more major terrorist attacks on American soil. Is that just coincidence? Is Al Qaida just taking a nice vacation, satisfied that they have accomplished their goal? I don't think so.
The reason for the delay is because the measures which have been taken have made the attackers' job more difficult. That's the only reasonable explanation. You can criticize the U.S. foreign policy and domestic security measures all you want, but the bottom line is that they have worked so far. Even though eventually there will probably be another attack, the fact that we have had so many years of domestic peace and tranquility is a testament to the success of the current policies.
You guys are all wrong. Here's the text of claim 1. Read it carefully.
1. In conjunction with an operating system configured to limit access privileges in accordance with defined privilege levels, said privilege levels including at least an administrative privilege level under which a plurality of administrative methods can be initiated and a non-administrative privilege level under which at least one of the administrative methods cannot be initiated, a method comprising:
executing an administrative security process under the administrative privilege level;
the administrative security process accepting a request from a user process executing under the non-administrative privilege level to initiate a particular administrative method, the user process calling the administrative security process with parameters comprising (a) an identification of the particular administrative method and (b) arguments to be provided to said particular administrative method; and
the administrative security process calling the identified particular administrative method on behalf of the user process and providing the arguments to said identified particular administrative method.
What this is describing is a proxy process (it very specifically says process) running as root/admin which accepts RPCs (remote procedure calls) for privileged operations, and then makes the call as root, on behalf of the user.
That's not what su or sudo do (say that five times fast). They use no separate root process waiting to receive and proxy privileged calls.
The patent specifically says that the request comes from a non-root user and goes to a root process; that the data sent across particularly describes an OS call and its arguments; and that the root process makes that precise call on behalf of the user.
Now, I'm not going to claim that no one has ever done this in the history of the universe. But it's not what sudo does, and the RPC based utilities that I can think of don't fit this exact pattern.
In cryptography, steganography has a particular meaning. In the same way that the goal of encryption is to prevent the message from being read, the goal of steganography is to prevent the message from being detected. A successful steganographic embedding is one in which a third party would not be able to find out if it is there. If you gave him two files, one with an embedded message and the other unprocessed, he should not be able to tell them apart.
For a method to truly be steganography, it's not enough just to embed some data into another. That's possible any time there's redundancy. The requirement is to make it so clever and/or subtle that there is no way to distinguish a processed file from an unprocessed one.
I doubt that this new method passes the test. Generally, while there are many synonyms possible in code, both in single instructions and in short sequences of instructions, the statistics of how these are distributed in unprocessed files are probably not random. Chances are that one synonym is used more than another. If you embed random data in a straightforward way, you will then have equal usages of both alternatives. This is a highly unusual condition, and to someone in the know, files like these will be easily distinguished.
Only if they have found a kind of synonym which already has purely random statistics, or where they are careful to precisely mimic the statistics of the original file as they add their data, can this truly be considered a form of steganography.
No offense, but bombing Canada's "Parliament Hill" would not have 1/100 the impact of destroying the Statue of Liberty! There is no comparison between the two.
This RSA public key can also be expressed in hex as:
000000 e7 d7 44 f2 a2 e2 78 8b 6c 1f 55 a0 8e b7 05 44 000010 a8 fa 79 45 aa 8b e6 c6 2c e5 f5 1c bd d4 dc 68 000020 42 fe 3d 10 83 dd 2e de c1 bf d4 25 2d c0 2e 6f 000030 39 8b df 0e 61 48 ea 84 85 5e 2e 44 2d a6 d6 26 000040 64 f6 74 a1 f3 04 92 9a de 4f 68 93 ef 2d f6 e7 000050 11 a8 c7 7a 0d 91 c9 d9 80 82 2e 50 d1 29 22 af 000060 ea 40 ea 9f 0e 14 c0 f7 69 38 c5 f3 88 2f c0 32 000070 3d d9 fe 55 15 5f 51 bb 59 21 c2 01 62 9f d7 33 000080 52 d5 e2 ef aa bf 9b a0 48 d7 b8 13 a2 b6 76 7f 000090 6c 3c cf 1e b4 ce 67 3d 03 7b 0d 2e a3 0c 5f ff 0000a0 eb 06 f8 d0 8a dd e4 09 57 1a 9c 68 9f ef 10 72 0000b0 88 55 dd 8c fb 9a 8b ef 5c 89 43 ef 3b 5f aa 15 0000c0 dd e6 98 be dd f3 59 96 03 eb 3e 6f 61 37 2b b6 0000d0 28 f6 55 9f 59 9a 78 bf 50 06 87 aa 7f 49 76 c0 0000e0 56 2d 41 29 56 f8 98 9e 18 a6 35 5b d8 15 97 82 0000f0 5e 0f c8 75 34 3e c7 82 11 76 25 cd bf 98 44 7b
a 2048 bit RSA public key. The exponent is hex 0x10001, which is decimal 65537, a very commonly used exponent for RSA encryption.
The fact that he just published the public but not private parts of the key suggests that Apple's product merely wants to see its input data encrypted with this key. I.e. anything encrypted with this key, it will play.
Normally a public key is just that, public, and available to anyone. It sounds like in this case Apple kept the key somewhat secret, and used knowledge of that public key as a form of authorization. Only Apple products knew the public key, so it would only play music from those products.
Now that the public key is published, anyone could encrypt data using it and get Apple's device to play the music.
Jon hasn't broken any encryption here. He has merely learned how to encrypt just like Apple does. It looks to me like the DMCA does not apply to this case.
Today's status quo is not good for consumers. Copyright terms are far too long.
The problem with this reasoning is that almost all copyrighted goods get the vast majority of their sales within a relatively short time. There is actually very little demand for 50 year old information goods, compared to the demand for new and modern content.
So even if you shortened copyright from 100 to 50 years, it would not add much value to consumers. The vast majority of what people consume is much newer than that. Being able to freely read 50 year old books and watch 50 year old movies is not of much interest to most people.
Of course there are exceptions; some people are interested in history and the classics and they'd get a thrill out of being able to see all that old stuff for free. But for "consumers" in general, the value of shortening copyright terms would be minimal. Most people just don't care that much about ancient history.
The Fair Use exemption to copyright protection is spelled out in the U.S. Code:
Sec. 107. - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
"Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
It seems clear that personal backups are for purposes of protection in case the disk breaks, not for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. None of those provisions would protect personal backups as fair use. The law goes on to say:
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
On point 1, personal backups are not for nonprofit educational purposes, but rather to save money in case the disk breaks, which counts as a commercial use. On point 2, the works are typically creative, original commercial works which have the full protection of the copyright laws. On point 3, it is the entirety of the work which is copied, not just an excerpt. And on point 4, the existence of free backups would reduce re-sales of replacement disks, not to mention that it might cut into new sales if the "backups" are illicitly shared.
Based on the text of the statute, personal backups fail every test that would make them fair use. Anyone disagree?
As I understand it, there is no legal right to make backups of movies, in the U.S. There is a right to make backups of computer software, but that provision is explicit and does not apply to other forms of content.
Some have argued that fair use would allow making backups of general content, but since such usage is not educational or for research purposes, and would have commercial impact, it seems like a weak argument to me. In any case, it has never been confirmed in the courts.
Everyone is asking the same question, over and over again: I want to send mail via host 1, and have it claim to be from host 2. Host 1 is my ISP, and host 2 is my university account. Or, host 2 is my home system, and host 1 is where I am travelling that day. And they all want to know, will this stop me from doing that?
The answer is no, not right now, and maybe not ever. The only checks initially will be for those hosts who do use SPF to limit who can send mail claiming to be from them.
But the point is, surely you can see that by enabling the behavior you want, it will also be possible for any spammer anywhere to send mail claiming to be from you! If you want the power to be able to send mail from anywhere claiming to be you, without any authentication or checking other than your say-so, then you have automatically granted that power to the entire world. Anyone can claim to be you, and their claims will look just as valid as yours.
You might say, this is not my problem, it's the recipient's problem, who is getting fooled by a fake From address. But it is your problem, because it's everyone's problem. It's one of the most annoying properties of spam and viruses, that they pretend to be from people you know and trust.
This From-line munging is obviously an untenable approach in the long run. People who are doing this need to start thinking about other ways to manage their email. Otherwise it's going to get to the point where the From line of a message is meaningless.
This has been (very!) widely discussed for the past few weeks. Here's the previous slashdot discussion. Also see the many pointers on Copyfight and Ernie Miller's blog. They've been posting on INDUCE almost daily. Good sources of information.
I've been fascinated by the concept of sensor networks ever since reading Vinge's earlier short story Fast Times at Fairmont High. From a review of that story:
So what is life like in Vinge's 2020?
The biggest technological change involves ubiquitous computing, wearables, and augmented reality (although none of those terms are used). Everyone wears contacts or glasses which mediate their view of the world. This allows computer graphics to be superimposed on what they see. The computers themselves are actually built into the clothing (apparently because that is the cheapest way to do it) and everything communicates wirelessly. Scientific American had an article about this in the April issue, http://www.sciam.com/techbiz/0402feiner.html.
In Vinge's hands this is an astonishingly powerful technology. Remember the mediatrons from Diamond Age, where any surface could be turned into a display? You have the same thing here, except it's all in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. If you want a computer display, it can appear in thin air, or be attached to a wall or any other surface. If people want to watch TV together they can agree on where the screen should appear and what show they watch. When doing your work, you can have screens on all your walls, menus attached here and there, however you want to organize things. But none of it is "really" there.
It goes beyond this. Does your house need a new coat of paint? Don't bother, just enter it into your public database and you have a nice new mint green paint job that everyone will see. Want to redecorate? Do it with computer graphics. You can have a birdbath in the front yard inhabited by Disneyesque animals who frolic and play. Even indoors, don't buy artwork, just download it from the net and have it appear where you want. You can change your decor theme instantly.
These kids are teenagers. Got a zit? No need to cover up with Clearsil, just erase it from your public face and people will see the improved version. You can dress up your clothes and hairstyle as well.
Of course, anyone can turn off their enhancements and see the plain old reality, but most people don't bother most of the time because things are ugly that way.
Augmented reality automatically produces sight-and-sound virtual reality. Some of the kids attending Fairmont Junior High do so remotely. They appear as "ghosts" indistinguishable from the other kids except that you can walk through them. They go to classes and raise their hands to ask questions just like everyone else. They see the school and everyone at the school sees them. Instead of visiting friends the kids can all instantly appear at one another's locations.
They even have tactile VR systems but you have to buy special clothes with "gaming stripes", whatever those are.
A related technology is the localizer network. These are small, inexpensive network relay nodes that are scattered about, solar and battery powered. Each one sets up connections to the local nodes and provides for network access. They also have some sensors, sight and sound apparently, which can enhance the augmented reality system.
The computer synthesizing visual imagery is able to call on the localizer network for views beyond what the person is seeing. In this way you can have 360 degree vision, or even see through walls. This is a transparent society with a vengeance!
The cumulative effect of all this technology was absolutely amazing and completely believable. It's as far beyond our current communications media as the net is beyond the telephone. It's very exciting to imagine this technology coming into existence.
I'm very much looking forward to the new novel.
And by the way for those interested in security issues in sensor networks, see the work by Adrian Perrig, he's got a book and a number of papers on the topic.
The EFF page lies about the broadcast flag in one important way:
Flagged content must be output only to "protected outputs" or in degraded form: through analog outputs or digital outputs with visual resolution of 720x480 pixels or less--less than 1/4 of HDTV's capability.
There are NO RESTRICTIONS ON ANALOG OUTPUT in the broadcast flag ruling. There are restrictions on digital outputs only. You will still be able to use your analog outputs to record signals at the full resolution possible.
73.9004 Compliance Requirements for Covered Demodulator Products: Marked Content. (a) A Covered Demodulator Product shall not pass, or direct to be passed, Marked Content to any output except (1) to an analog output;...
In other words, you can't pass Marked Content (ie. content marked with the Broadcast Flag) to anything except analog output (and some other things). That is, analog output is perfectly permissible for flagged content.
The part about downrating the video quality only applies to digital outputs, and is discussed later on that page:
(6) where such Covered Demodulator Product is incorporated into a Computer ct and passes, or directs to be passed, such content to an unprotected output operating in a mode compatible with the Digital Visual Interface (DVI) Rev. 1.0 Specification as an image having the visual equivalent of no more than 350,000 pixels per frame (e.g., an image with resolution of 720 x 480 pixels for a 4:3 (nonsquare pixel) aspect ratio), and 30 frames per second. Such an image may be attained by reducing resolution, such as by discarding, dithering or averaging pixels to obtain the specified value, and can be displayed using video processing techniques such as line doubling or sharpening to improve the perceived quality of the image.
That's a little complicated but it amounts to saying that they have to downgrade the resolution if they produce unencrypted digital output in DVI format.
As you can see, the EFF has misrepresented this part of the Broadcast Flag requirement in order to make it seem worse than it is. They make it sound like there is no way to record flagged HDTV content without DRM restrictions. But actually, analog recording will still be possible, just as it is today, under the currently proposed regulations.
The Broadcast Flag is bad law, but we should be honest in our claims about what it does and doesn't do. Exaggerating it to make it seem worse than it is does a disservce to everyone who relies on the EFF as a source of honest and unbiased information.
I am always allowed to make one archival copy of any copyrighted object that I purchase
Where exactly does it say that in the law? I ask because I've never been able to find any references which say that. There is a law that says you can make copies of computer programs (but not "any copyrighted object"), and there is a fair use exemption, which probably doesn't cover archival copies, because they are not for criticism or commentary, and their existence impacts the marketplace.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO widescreen browsing is a waste. Most web pages are limited in how much screen real estate they will use. A 1900 pixel wide web browser window will be 50% blank much of the time.
I recently got a fancy Dell flatscreen display. You can physically rotate it 90 degrees to portrait mode. This is perfect for web browsing. Web pages are tall and narrow. I can see an entire Slashdot or Google News page at a glance.
For watching movies, and maybe some games, widescreen is nice. But for web browsing, tall screen is the way to go.
"Dead or Alive", right?
What would you do about the spread of nuclear weapons and other WMDs? Iran is now working on the bomb while Europe wrings its hands. North Korea has the bomb. What is the Libertarian position? Would you ever support attacking Iran to prevent them from going nuclear?
I agree, but there's one thing that confuses me. Elsewhere in this discussion thare are claims that Microsoft has patented the PRA algorithm, Purported Responsible Address. This reads the mail headers to figure out where the mail claims to come from. Yet the IETF decision reads:
With regard to items 3 and 4 above, it is also the opinion of the co-chairs that any attempt by the MARID working group to define any new scopes other than "mailfrom" and "pra" for the SPF syntax will at this time result in failure to find consensus within the working group.
This suggests that PRA actually is an effort which the Working Group will pursue. How can they do so if Microsoft has patented PRA with unknown terms?
I read Microsoft's Intellectual Property Disclosure. It says that the covered material is:
Both Sender ID: Authenticating E-mail <draft-ietf-marid-core-03.txt>
and Purported Responsible Address in E-mail Messages
in combination.
This does not make clear the exact scope of the PRA patent. It could just cover the one specific sequence of steps in the PRA document. Or it could cover the very idea of scanning the email to find the PRA. Or something in between.
Usually patents are written in a hierarchical manner. First you have the broadest possible claim covering the general idea of what you want to do. Then you have a series of dependent claims which expand on the earlier one(s) by providing more details about how it will work. This gives you the greatest possible coverage while allowing the patent to survive and be useful even if some of the broadest claims are invalidated.
I don't see how the IETF WG can proceed with PRA type algorithms when Microsoft has advised them that PRA is covered by a pending patent. And given that they are doing so, it certainly does not seem like they are rejecting Microsoft's approach.
Read any old Niven, most Heinlein, modern GRR Martin, Robert J Sawyer, Bruce Sterling, John C Wright, Greg Egan, Stephen Gould, ... basically any author I would call good.
I recognize these names, and they are generally good... except for Stephen Gould. There is no science fiction author by that name. The late Stephen Jay Gould was a well known and highly successful evolutionary biologist and science writer.
I'm guessing you mean Stephen Baxter, or perhaps someone else with a similar name. Not Gould.
I have an older model Panasonic DVD recorder with hard drive, the DMR-E100H. It's got a 120 GB disk which they describe as holding 160 hours. I usually record in higher quality so it holds half that or less.
It does have a high-speed record feature and can record an hour DVD in a couple of minutes. I'm not sure how it works. Sometimes it seems like the quality is not as high when I do it like this, but maybe that's my imagination.
I also have a TiVo and what I miss most on the Panasonic is the lack of a program guide. The best you can do is use the VCR Plus codes from TV Guide but otherwise you have to manually enter the time and channel. And the worst is, you have to manually enter the program name! Using a letter grid that you move a cursor around with the remote control! It's awful. I hate it when I record a movie with a long title, but I'm too compulsive to allow myself to abbreviate it.
The remaining major problem is that you can't copy from a DVD to the HD, you can only go in the other direction. I'd think this was a copy protection thing, but you actually can do it if you use a DVD-RAM format disk, just not a DVD-video. So once you back up something from the HD to a DVD, you can't copy it back to re-edit it or burn to a new DVD. I don't know whether the new box will fix this.
...the helicopter pilot would have seen the problem, matched courses with the probe, and sent his chopper into a 100 MPH dive parallelling the probe. Someone on board would have tied a rope around his waist and leaped out, freefalling, and grabbed the probe. All the time the pilot would have been shouting out the altimeter readings... 10000 feet! 9000 feet! 8000 feet!
They would have gotten the probe on board just in time for the pilot to pull out of the dive one foot above land. Then as soon as they brought the probe back to base and got it out of the copter the charge would have gone off and the chutes would blast into the air, leaving the scientist member of the team covered with soot, while everyone laughed.
I read a lot about cold fusion when the controversy first erupted and in the next few years. It's much more difficult to evaluate than you would think.
The problem is that there is a pre-loading phase where you are running the current and nothing is happening. This is when the hydrogen is being taken up by the palladium electrodes. Then after a while you start to get some heat, often sporadically.
But is it excess heat? Or are you merely recovering energy you spent in the pre-loading phase?
This question is the subject of calorimetry, or heat measurement, and it is one of the most difficult types of measurements to do precisely. Making it harder is the fact that the experiments run for several days or even weeks and you have to monitor the energy spent and recovered throughout that time. Some of the early experiments went bad because the stirring of the water by convection wasn't properly taken into account. That's how subtle and difficult it is.
It seems clear that at least some of the early cold fusion results were merely calorimetric errors. Now, it's possible that they have improved their experimental technique and that the new data is more convincing. But the nature of the experiment - long periods of feeding energy in, then short bursts of heat out - makes it inherently difficult to come up with convincing proof of what is happening.
I think we are missing the real danger here. There was never all that much difference between SPF and Microsoft's Caller ID. The differences were in the details of how they were put into the DNS, the use of XML vs text formats, and maybe some issues about exactly which mail headers were checked. But the basic idea was almost identical.
This means that Microsoft's forthcoming Caller ID patents probably cover SPF. That's the real problem here.
We can't just tell Microsoft to get stuffed and then go ahead and use SPF. There's too much risk that Microsoft will surface with a patent in three or four years that covers a technology which is by then widely used on the net.
I think this decision kills SPF and everything along those lines. Some may cheer and some may be upset, but that is the reality we face. Going forward with SPF under these circumstances is far too risky. Microsoft has warned us about the patent applications and we can't ignore them.
I see a lot of posts complaining that "it's more of a ten year timeline" got turned into 2011. But no one seems to have noticed that 2011 is 7 years away, not 10. The slashdot headline, if taking the MS rep as literally as the critics are claiming, should have said that Windows would not be secure until 2014.
I've always wondered, what does "Blade Runner" mean? Is it some kind of literary reference? It's not an obvious title.
"Huygens isn't really designed to find life," he says. "The only way it would is if something sang into its microphones."
Doesn't it take pictures? If there is non-microscopic life, plants and animals, it seems like the cameras would have a good chance of picking it up. Of course it may be hard for us to tell Titanian life reliably from some kind of bizarre mineral formations or something, but if there are fractal-type structures there similar to trees and bushes, people are going to see life.
Terrorists would be stupid to try to hijack planes again
Not if there goal is to instill terror. If they hijack half a dozen planes and kill everyone on board in some grisly way, they will have been highly successful in that goal. It will once again lead to the grounding of the aviation fleet for at least several days, inflicting billions of dollars in costs. And if the planes can be brought down over populated areas, so much the better.
Taking steps to reduce the chances of such an attack is very much worthwhile. And part of those efforts are maintaining watch lists and checking people more carefully who are on those lists.
Look, it's been almost three years since 9/11 and there have been no more major terrorist attacks on American soil. Is that just coincidence? Is Al Qaida just taking a nice vacation, satisfied that they have accomplished their goal? I don't think so.
The reason for the delay is because the measures which have been taken have made the attackers' job more difficult. That's the only reasonable explanation. You can criticize the U.S. foreign policy and domestic security measures all you want, but the bottom line is that they have worked so far. Even though eventually there will probably be another attack, the fact that we have had so many years of domestic peace and tranquility is a testament to the success of the current policies.
That's not what su or sudo do (say that five times fast). They use no separate root process waiting to receive and proxy privileged calls.
The patent specifically says that the request comes from a non-root user and goes to a root process; that the data sent across particularly describes an OS call and its arguments; and that the root process makes that precise call on behalf of the user.
Now, I'm not going to claim that no one has ever done this in the history of the universe. But it's not what sudo does, and the RPC based utilities that I can think of don't fit this exact pattern.
In cryptography, steganography has a particular meaning. In the same way that the goal of encryption is to prevent the message from being read, the goal of steganography is to prevent the message from being detected. A successful steganographic embedding is one in which a third party would not be able to find out if it is there. If you gave him two files, one with an embedded message and the other unprocessed, he should not be able to tell them apart.
For a method to truly be steganography, it's not enough just to embed some data into another. That's possible any time there's redundancy. The requirement is to make it so clever and/or subtle that there is no way to distinguish a processed file from an unprocessed one.
I doubt that this new method passes the test. Generally, while there are many synonyms possible in code, both in single instructions and in short sequences of instructions, the statistics of how these are distributed in unprocessed files are probably not random. Chances are that one synonym is used more than another. If you embed random data in a straightforward way, you will then have equal usages of both alternatives. This is a highly unusual condition, and to someone in the know, files like these will be easily distinguished.
Only if they have found a kind of synonym which already has purely random statistics, or where they are careful to precisely mimic the statistics of the original file as they add their data, can this truly be considered a form of steganography.
No offense, but bombing Canada's "Parliament Hill" would not have 1/100 the impact of destroying the Statue of Liberty! There is no comparison between the two.
The fact that he just published the public but not private parts of the key suggests that Apple's product merely wants to see its input data encrypted with this key. I.e. anything encrypted with this key, it will play.
Normally a public key is just that, public, and available to anyone. It sounds like in this case Apple kept the key somewhat secret, and used knowledge of that public key as a form of authorization. Only Apple products knew the public key, so it would only play music from those products.
Now that the public key is published, anyone could encrypt data using it and get Apple's device to play the music.
Jon hasn't broken any encryption here. He has merely learned how to encrypt just like Apple does. It looks to me like the DMCA does not apply to this case.
Today's status quo is not good for consumers. Copyright terms are far too long.
The problem with this reasoning is that almost all copyrighted goods get the vast majority of their sales within a relatively short time. There is actually very little demand for 50 year old information goods, compared to the demand for new and modern content.
So even if you shortened copyright from 100 to 50 years, it would not add much value to consumers. The vast majority of what people consume is much newer than that. Being able to freely read 50 year old books and watch 50 year old movies is not of much interest to most people.
Of course there are exceptions; some people are interested in history and the classics and they'd get a thrill out of being able to see all that old stuff for free. But for "consumers" in general, the value of shortening copyright terms would be minimal. Most people just don't care that much about ancient history.
It seems clear that personal backups are for purposes of protection in case the disk breaks, not for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. None of those provisions would protect personal backups as fair use. The law goes on to say:
On point 1, personal backups are not for nonprofit educational purposes, but rather to save money in case the disk breaks, which counts as a commercial use. On point 2, the works are typically creative, original commercial works which have the full protection of the copyright laws. On point 3, it is the entirety of the work which is copied, not just an excerpt. And on point 4, the existence of free backups would reduce re-sales of replacement disks, not to mention that it might cut into new sales if the "backups" are illicitly shared.
Based on the text of the statute, personal backups fail every test that would make them fair use. Anyone disagree?
As I understand it, there is no legal right to make backups of movies, in the U.S. There is a right to make backups of computer software, but that provision is explicit and does not apply to other forms of content.
Some have argued that fair use would allow making backups of general content, but since such usage is not educational or for research purposes, and would have commercial impact, it seems like a weak argument to me. In any case, it has never been confirmed in the courts.
Everyone is asking the same question, over and over again: I want to send mail via host 1, and have it claim to be from host 2. Host 1 is my ISP, and host 2 is my university account. Or, host 2 is my home system, and host 1 is where I am travelling that day. And they all want to know, will this stop me from doing that?
The answer is no, not right now, and maybe not ever. The only checks initially will be for those hosts who do use SPF to limit who can send mail claiming to be from them.
But the point is, surely you can see that by enabling the behavior you want, it will also be possible for any spammer anywhere to send mail claiming to be from you! If you want the power to be able to send mail from anywhere claiming to be you, without any authentication or checking other than your say-so, then you have automatically granted that power to the entire world. Anyone can claim to be you, and their claims will look just as valid as yours.
You might say, this is not my problem, it's the recipient's problem, who is getting fooled by a fake From address. But it is your problem, because it's everyone's problem. It's one of the most annoying properties of spam and viruses, that they pretend to be from people you know and trust.
This From-line munging is obviously an untenable approach in the long run. People who are doing this need to start thinking about other ways to manage their email. Otherwise it's going to get to the point where the From line of a message is meaningless.
This has been (very!) widely discussed for the past few weeks. Here's the previous slashdot discussion. Also see the many pointers on Copyfight and Ernie Miller's blog. They've been posting on INDUCE almost daily. Good sources of information.
I'm very much looking forward to the new novel.
And by the way for those interested in security issues in sensor networks, see the work by Adrian Perrig, he's got a book and a number of papers on the topic.
There are NO RESTRICTIONS ON ANALOG OUTPUT in the broadcast flag ruling. There are restrictions on digital outputs only. You will still be able to use your analog outputs to record signals at the full resolution possible.
I will quote from page 41 of the FCC Broadcast Flag ruling straight from the EFF site:
In other words, you can't pass Marked Content (ie. content marked with the Broadcast Flag) to anything except analog output (and some other things). That is, analog output is perfectly permissible for flagged content.
The part about downrating the video quality only applies to digital outputs, and is discussed later on that page:
That's a little complicated but it amounts to saying that they have to downgrade the resolution if they produce unencrypted digital output in DVI format.
As you can see, the EFF has misrepresented this part of the Broadcast Flag requirement in order to make it seem worse than it is. They make it sound like there is no way to record flagged HDTV content without DRM restrictions. But actually, analog recording will still be possible, just as it is today, under the currently proposed regulations.
The Broadcast Flag is bad law, but we should be honest in our claims about what it does and doesn't do. Exaggerating it to make it seem worse than it is does a disservce to everyone who relies on the EFF as a source of honest and unbiased information.
I am always allowed to make one archival copy of any copyrighted object that I purchase
Where exactly does it say that in the law? I ask because I've never been able to find any references which say that. There is a law that says you can make copies of computer programs (but not "any copyrighted object"), and there is a fair use exemption, which probably doesn't cover archival copies, because they are not for criticism or commentary, and their existence impacts the marketplace.
What do you know that I don't?