The USA counterespionage group was happy to decode just a small percentage of soviet OTP transmissions in project venona. The fact that the source of your OTP is public is a huge hole in the presumption of the OTP system actually being secure. Even if your enemy can only intercept 1% of your quasar transmissions, you could be in trouble -- especially if you presume that the OTP is secure enough to tell your other half the time and location of the quasar to listen to for the next pad... At that point your system is seriously broken.
Granted, it's novel and interesting, but this is far from the kind of theoretical security that One Time Pads are supposed to provide.
... got a denial from an executive at Microsoft's PR firm, who says he's not aware of any Xbox programmers working on Windows.'"
I mean, like somebody's gonna randomly tell this PR Geek about technical matters? The obvious person to (not) ask (depending on whether or not you want a meaningfull answer) would be an executive in Microsoft's OS development group.
eg:
The fact that I've never personally seen George Bush snorting coke or had him tell me about it doesn't tell you much about whether he has or not (given that I've never met the man). Getting that denial from his best friend would mean a little bit more.
OK: So, big oops on the 'preliminary' part, -- and thanks for the links that should have been in the original article -- but it still stands that the judge/jury is essentially barred from a serious look into whether the patent is bogus and should never have been issued. They have to start with a presumption of validity, which makes "oops -- stupid patent" findings an extreme rarity -- not because bogus patents are a rarity, but because that's essentially not a role that the courts are seriously allowed to step into.
Smart talented people with people-sense know that sometimes how you look can make or break a deal.
Now, if you don't mind losing the occasional deal to the fact that the person you're talking can't get past your grooming, then no biggie, but if you're a CEO, and that 'occasional deal' can be worth millions of dollars, then (if you're worth your salt), you're gonna make sure that you're dressed to whatever your client is expecting.
This one time I had two job interviews the same afternoon. One at a university lab, and the other at a downtown regional office of a large company.
At the university I wore a nice clean casual shirt and crisp pants. In the car going downtown, I was frantically switching to a suit and tie.
I got offered both jobs (at about the same pay). I chose the University.
I'd say that this is actually a counter-example. Would you trust a plumber who shows up at your door wearing cologne, a 3-piece suit, a tie and carrying his 'tools' in one of those 6" thick briefcases that you sometimes see lawyers carrying around??
"Let him in, I'm expecting him", your partner yells to you from the bathroom as you're heading out the door....
I . . . learned all about how hydro is safe and clean and provides a large recreational grounds after the water has accumulated behind the dam.
Try and explain that to the kid whose favorite playground (not to mention his hometown) is now under 150' of water.
There have been a number of cases over history where the residents of an area have been 'escorted' off of their ancestral homes to make way for the 'bright future' of hydroelectric power. Hydro may have some advantages, but it is definitely not consequence free.
. . . ..and the entire eBay legal team to fail to show/rule that the patent is invalid.
Er, No. If this is the patent that I think it is, it's still in the preliminary stages. On an application for a preliminary injunction, the trial judge looked at things and said "All this company wants is money, the patent looks a bit shaky, the defendant is quite capable of paying any award and issuing an injunction would be quite disruptive, so I'm not going to issue an injunction.
The appeals court fired back that -- despite legislative language that simply allows the judge to issue an injunction, precedent says that the judge must issue an injunction unless there's a really good reason why an injunction shouldn't issue, and concluding that you've got a patent troll with a questionable patent isn't a good enough reason to not issue a patent.
This really is a stupid situation.
I'm thinking that the SCOTUS is suddenly taking on these cases because of the RIM/NTP dispute. Most of them probably have blackberries, and they looked at this case, and saw that they were being threatened with the loss of a highly valuable service because a patent troll was moving getting greedy with a patent that was about to be declared invalid.
The thing is that -- as stupid as it may seem -- the judge that threatened to shut down the blackberry service was probably right on target with how he was reading the common law in the case. The jury really couldn't question the validity of the patent... They had to presume that it was valid, and could really only overturn it if it was obviously bogus. Similarly, the judge had to accept the jury's 'determination' that the patent wasn't (blatently) bogus, and had no choice about issuing an injunction. The fact that the patent was most of the way to being declared invalid was little more than administrivia.
The patent system in the courts is pretty much set to run on rails. It's not too bad for physical patents where the cost of development is often orders of magnitude larger than the cost of court and time to market is similarly longer than time in court.
In the software universe, patents just result in obscenities.
The patent process also developed in a time where the number of patents issued per year were in the hundreds., and getting a patent really did mean that you probably had something "innovative and non-obvious". Now, the PTO is little more than a diploma mill, and a letter of patent means little more than that you jumped through all of the hoops.
"Software companies complain they can be held for ransom by owners of questionable patents while drugmakers oppose any weakening of patent rights, which they say would chill their investment in new medicines."
This is because patents work for drugs, but not for software.
For a Drug manufacturer who spends 5 years and $10Million to bring a single drug to market (not to mention the millions more spent on dead ends), spending 250K on a patent dispute is just an annoying part of business... And by the time the patent dispute winds it's way through court, you're only gonna be halfway through the regulatory process.
With software where time to market can sometimes be measured in weeks, and development costs can be as little as free beer and pizza, spending $50K just to say "Hey! This Patent Sucks -- not to mention the cost of a full defense, and spending 2 years with a preliminary injunction before the court is finally convinced that the patent should never have been issued is enough to trash many small companies.
Bullies (and patent trolls) like small, easy victims... The cost of 'developing' a software patent is mostly in the filing. The cost of defending against a software patent is often orders of magnitude larger than the cost of the filing, so the opportunity to profit from a bogus patent is really high if you can force your victims to settle.
Patent trolls aren't much of an issue for drug companies because the cost of developing something nominally patentable is so high, and a drug company will have enough time and money invested in a drug that the probability of them fighting a bogus patent is really high. This seriously cuts into the viability of a troll business in that sector.
The rule that is being questioned here) -- that a court must issue an injunction in a patent dispute (despite legislative language that seems to say otherwise) -- simply exacerbates the problems for software companies because, essentially, the fact that the patent is bogus doesn't count as a defense until years later when you finally get to court and (hopefully) prove, to a jury, that the patent really is bogus. By that time, the opportunity to go to market with your idea is long dead.
General: Be careful.. Half of these things have gotten away on us. Lieutenant: Don't worry. It was Firtz that missed those other two. I got the beagle. I'll get this one too.
GPG stands for Gnu Privacy Guard. It's the Free(tm) replacement for PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) which was originally developed by RSA. Between them, they are one of the standards for encryption and verification of sensitive data (including email).
As opposed to X509/SSL which seems to be designed for centralized trusted certificate issuers, GPG/PGP depend on a (decentralized) web of trust -- You decide which signatures you wish to trust, and then those signatures can be used to signify who they trust... If you have enough trust in the signature web for a public key you have for someone, then it is presumed that the key is trustable.
GPG seems to be supported by people who include some serious heavyweights in the encryption community.
IANASE (I am not a security expert), so any corrections to this explanation would be much appreciated)
no flaw in encoding or decoding..
The problem is in display.
It displays the unencoded preamble and postscript inline with the (properly) verified parts of the email. You then, essentially, have to guess which is which.
I think that the more accurate statement is that doubling nuclear power would generate as much energy as 8% of the current carbon emitting power sources do.
Unfortunately, as they point out, instead of resulting in a decrease in carbon use, what it might do is simply give people the ability to blithely continue the current climb in power usage (i.e. no real decrease in carbon emissions). Worse yet: knowing that an increase in power capacity, people might just continue increasing their power usage, rather than holding back in the knowledge that a wall was up ahead (i.e. the result would be (at least in the short term) an increase in carbon emissions.
And, on top of that, a massive increase in nuclear power would have notable structural and political downsides.
It's nice when the answers in life are simple, but it's rare.
Sign up for The Landmark Forum. If you get value out of that (almost certain, in my experience) sign up for their 'Advanced Course'. The courses are designed to help you let go of what you're stuck in and think around the corner a bit. You'll get other stuff out of the courses than just figuring out what job would really work for you and I seriously doubt you'll regret it. The two courses would set you back a total of about $1200
Personally, I see this as something of a continuing pattern for the Bush Republicans. Attacking those who disagree with them (whether it be in the Middle East or NASA) is more important than learning the truth (whether it be WMDs or general science.
And let's just call this what it is. The Republicans are engaging in religious censorship -- not just in one of the heartlands of science but just about anywhere in society that they can get their fingers.
The answer to bad speech is more speech. The answer to truth is suppression.
The situation in Canada is rather like the Palestinian elections where Hamas got the extra votes more because Fatah was so horribly corrupt rather than for their political intentions Re Israel.
It's kinda a lesser-of-two-evils thing. You can hope that you can moderate Hamas's radical policies, or you can put up with the endemic corruption in the PLO.
The level of corruption in Canada was probably a lot less than in Palestine, but a lot of Canadian's kinda held their nose and voted Conservative to teach the Liberals a lesson.
Let's hope that Canada survives the experiment in good shape.
If someone like Sarah McLauglan gets up on the stand and says "File sharing actually helps my sales,"
it will also blow a big hole in the RIAA's legal case. Even if Nettwork only send the signal implicitly by helping to pay the legal fees and filing an amicus curae brief with the court, it'll help.
Of course, the implicit threat that they could do it a second (and third and....) time will also put a big crimp in the RIAA's style.
Slashdot Mirror
(Times like this I'm glad that I use linux ... Until, of course, the next zero-day firefox hole, at which point I'll switch to konqueror or..).
Granted, it's novel and interesting, but this is far from the kind of theoretical security that One Time Pads are supposed to provide.
I mean, like somebody's gonna randomly tell this PR Geek about technical matters? The obvious person to (not) ask (depending on whether or not you want a meaningfull answer) would be an executive in Microsoft's OS development group.
eg: The fact that I've never personally seen George Bush snorting coke or had him tell me about it doesn't tell you much about whether he has or not (given that I've never met the man). Getting that denial from his best friend would mean a little bit more.
OK: So, big oops on the 'preliminary' part, -- and thanks for the links that should have been in the original article -- but it still stands that the judge/jury is essentially barred from a serious look into whether the patent is bogus and should never have been issued. They have to start with a presumption of validity, which makes "oops -- stupid patent" findings an extreme rarity -- not because bogus patents are a rarity, but because that's essentially not a role that the courts are seriously allowed to step into.
Now, if you don't mind losing the occasional deal to the fact that the person you're talking can't get past your grooming, then no biggie, but if you're a CEO, and that 'occasional deal' can be worth millions of dollars, then (if you're worth your salt), you're gonna make sure that you're dressed to whatever your client is expecting.
This one time I had two job interviews the same afternoon. One at a university lab, and the other at a downtown regional office of a large company.
At the university I wore a nice clean casual shirt and crisp pants. In the car going downtown, I was frantically switching to a suit and tie.
I got offered both jobs (at about the same pay). I chose the University.
"Let him in, I'm expecting him", your partner yells to you from the bathroom as you're heading out the door....
Try and explain that to the kid whose favorite playground (not to mention his hometown) is now under 150' of water.
There have been a number of cases over history where the residents of an area have been 'escorted' off of their ancestral homes to make way for the 'bright future' of hydroelectric power. Hydro may have some advantages, but it is definitely not consequence free.
Er, No. If this is the patent that I think it is, it's still in the preliminary stages. On an application for a preliminary injunction, the trial judge looked at things and said "All this company wants is money, the patent looks a bit shaky, the defendant is quite capable of paying any award and issuing an injunction would be quite disruptive, so I'm not going to issue an injunction.
The appeals court fired back that -- despite legislative language that simply allows the judge to issue an injunction, precedent says that the judge must issue an injunction unless there's a really good reason why an injunction shouldn't issue, and concluding that you've got a patent troll with a questionable patent isn't a good enough reason to not issue a patent.
This really is a stupid situation.
I'm thinking that the SCOTUS is suddenly taking on these cases because of the RIM/NTP dispute. Most of them probably have blackberries, and they looked at this case, and saw that they were being threatened with the loss of a highly valuable service because a patent troll was moving getting greedy with a patent that was about to be declared invalid.
The thing is that -- as stupid as it may seem -- the judge that threatened to shut down the blackberry service was probably right on target with how he was reading the common law in the case. The jury really couldn't question the validity of the patent... They had to presume that it was valid, and could really only overturn it if it was obviously bogus. Similarly, the judge had to accept the jury's 'determination' that the patent wasn't (blatently) bogus, and had no choice about issuing an injunction. The fact that the patent was most of the way to being declared invalid was little more than administrivia.
The patent system in the courts is pretty much set to run on rails. It's not too bad for physical patents where the cost of development is often orders of magnitude larger than the cost of court and time to market is similarly longer than time in court.
In the software universe, patents just result in obscenities.
The patent process also developed in a time where the number of patents issued per year were in the hundreds., and getting a patent really did mean that you probably had something "innovative and non-obvious". Now, the PTO is little more than a diploma mill, and a letter of patent means little more than that you jumped through all of the hoops.
This is because patents work for drugs, but not for software.
For a Drug manufacturer who spends 5 years and $10Million to bring a single drug to market (not to mention the millions more spent on dead ends), spending 250K on a patent dispute is just an annoying part of business... And by the time the patent dispute winds it's way through court, you're only gonna be halfway through the regulatory process.
With software where time to market can sometimes be measured in weeks, and development costs can be as little as free beer and pizza, spending $50K just to say "Hey! This Patent Sucks -- not to mention the cost of a full defense, and spending 2 years with a preliminary injunction before the court is finally convinced that the patent should never have been issued is enough to trash many small companies.
Bullies (and patent trolls) like small, easy victims... The cost of 'developing' a software patent is mostly in the filing. The cost of defending against a software patent is often orders of magnitude larger than the cost of the filing, so the opportunity to profit from a bogus patent is really high if you can force your victims to settle.
Patent trolls aren't much of an issue for drug companies because the cost of developing something nominally patentable is so high, and a drug company will have enough time and money invested in a drug that the probability of them fighting a bogus patent is really high. This seriously cuts into the viability of a troll business in that sector.
The rule that is being questioned here) -- that a court must issue an injunction in a patent dispute (despite legislative language that seems to say otherwise) -- simply exacerbates the problems for software companies because, essentially, the fact that the patent is bogus doesn't count as a defense until years later when you finally get to court and (hopefully) prove, to a jury, that the patent really is bogus. By that time, the opportunity to go to market with your idea is long dead.
Martian1: It broke it's leg. I say we shoot it and put it out of it's misery.
Martian2: nah. It seems to have such a drive for life.
Obviously there are a lot more crackhead sons out there with their finger on the button than you're willing to admit.
"OK, Kahn. Here it comes....."
I'd tell it to you but then I'd end up in jail.
General: Be careful.. Half of these things have gotten away on us.
Lieutenant: Don't worry. It was Firtz that missed those other two. I got the beagle. I'll get this one too.
GPG stands for Gnu Privacy Guard. It's the Free(tm) replacement for PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) which was originally developed by RSA. Between them, they are one of the standards for encryption and verification of sensitive data (including email).
As opposed to X509/SSL which seems to be designed for centralized trusted certificate issuers, GPG/PGP depend on a (decentralized) web of trust -- You decide which signatures you wish to trust, and then those signatures can be used to signify who they trust... If you have enough trust in the signature web for a public key you have for someone, then it is presumed that the key is trustable.
GPG seems to be supported by people who include some serious heavyweights in the encryption community.
IANASE (I am not a security expert), so any corrections to this explanation would be much appreciated)
no flaw in encoding or decoding..
The problem is in display. It displays the unencoded preamble and postscript inline with the (properly) verified parts of the email. You then, essentially, have to guess which is which.
For people who want Novell, you can sell them "Novell Directory Server on SuSe Enterprise", or whatever.
I think that they'll really get the best of both worlds with the new setup.
Unfortunately, as they point out, instead of resulting in a decrease in carbon use, what it might do is simply give people the ability to blithely continue the current climb in power usage (i.e. no real decrease in carbon emissions). Worse yet: knowing that an increase in power capacity, people might just continue increasing their power usage, rather than holding back in the knowledge that a wall was up ahead (i.e. the result would be (at least in the short term) an increase in carbon emissions.
And, on top of that, a massive increase in nuclear power would have notable structural and political downsides.
It's nice when the answers in life are simple, but it's rare.
I say we nuke the b*st*rds.
Sign up for The Landmark Forum. If you get value out of that (almost certain, in my experience) sign up for their 'Advanced Course'. The courses are designed to help you let go of what you're stuck in and think around the corner a bit. You'll get other stuff out of the courses than just figuring out what job would really work for you and I seriously doubt you'll regret it. The two courses would set you back a total of about $1200
And let's just call this what it is. The Republicans are engaging in religious censorship -- not just in one of the heartlands of science but just about anywhere in society that they can get their fingers.
The answer to bad speech is more speech. The answer to truth is suppression.
It's kinda a lesser-of-two-evils thing. You can hope that you can moderate Hamas's radical policies, or you can put up with the endemic corruption in the PLO.
The level of corruption in Canada was probably a lot less than in Palestine, but a lot of Canadian's kinda held their nose and voted Conservative to teach the Liberals a lesson. Let's hope that Canada survives the experiment in good shape.
If someone like Sarah McLauglan gets up on the stand and says "File sharing actually helps my sales," it will also blow a big hole in the RIAA's legal case. Even if Nettwork only send the signal implicitly by helping to pay the legal fees and filing an amicus curae brief with the court, it'll help.
Of course, the implicit threat that they could do it a second (and third and....) time will also put a big crimp in the RIAA's style.
.... but my camera's still on order.