I really hate the way the term Luddite is used -- people should read a bit of history (here for a start). The real Luddites were not anti-technology. They were highly skilled workers rebelling against the creation of textile sweatshops. It's a pity their rebellion was put down so violently -- we have a need for more Luddites in today's economy where our iPhones are produced by people who are effectively living in slavery.
Okay, this is perhaps stating the obvious, but recently, facebook seems to be making such a bewildering set of changes which trample your privacy, that it's impossible to keep track of what's going on. Take FB messages -- without any notification that I was aware of, it started telling people whether I'd read their messages or not. Then it stopped doing this (as far as I can tell), but kept doing it for group messages. Then it started telling me where people were located when they were messaging me. Incredible!
And the link between the murder, and bath-salts is....
The hysteria in the U.S. over recreational drug use is amazing. For example, all the news stories about Johnny Lewis mentioned police speculation that he was on the drug "smiles" when he went berserk, despite there being no evidence whatseover of this. e.g.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/actor-johnny-lewis-suspected-taking-drug-smiles-killings/story?id=17346564
Time and time again, these speculative drug links make a big splash in the media, and then by the time they prove false, no one cares.
I would have thought Slashdot was a bit more into looking at the evidence before making wild speculation, but apparently not.
At the same time as the arrest in this case, there is a trial going on against a guy for receiving a photo of consentual fisting:
http://obscenitylawyer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/porn-trial-this-time-its-extreme.html
And we also had the trial against Paul Chambers for tweeting a bomb joke (he was found not guilty thankfully). The crown prosecution service are a joke.
What this means is that the drugs which are legal, are potentially more dangerous than the ones which are banned. Marijuana, mushrooms, LSD have been around long enough that they've been well studied, and we know the risks are minimal. But the latest synthesised version of them has not been studied, and might be dangerous. When will we learn that the war on drugs is just making things worse?
Well, is the data that sensitive? Here is one they released:
http://pdfcast.org/pdf/nato-1
Old and dull.
And Sabu yesterday claimed they were about to release a bunch of Sun emails. Now they say they won't. There's a bit more smoke than fire.
In reports of this size, there will always be small errors. The problem is that right wing bloggers trumpet these up to raise doubts about the basic science, and then fox news et. al. broadcast this even further. The result is a complete disaster: people will not make the sacrifices needed to stop climate change if they have doubts about whether it is happening. A great example is leakegate, where the Sunday Telegraph used a tiny citation error to suggest a conspiracy of scientists to falsify evidence of global warming (the UN report cited another report which contained the peer reviewed work, rather than directly citing the peer reviewed work). Eventually, the Telegraph retracted their article, but not before the damage was done.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/06/leakegate-a-retraction/
As Mark Twain said, lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on...
We need more than just the ones on the list. All minutes of all government meetings (including cabinet meetings) should be published except parts which have security implications. Just like opensource code allows for scrutiny, opening up government will make representatives think twice before screwing us over...
Propublica is pretty awesome, and their recent piece about Magnetar, and the market crash is a great example of that. http://www.propublica.org/feature/the-magnetar-trade-how-one-hedge-fund-helped-keep-the-housing-bubble-going
And with the recent videos released by wikileaks of the US military mowing down civilians, it seems more and more, it is alternative media which is doing real journalism.
Newspapers claim they are loosing money because of internet news and thus can't afford to do investigative reporting. Propublica and wikileaks are the other side of that coin.
Yeah, I think it better to read the original sources rather than the shit journalism on this. There's a non-technical section of the report and to my mind, it is saying the opposite of the headline:
"Stop emitting CO2 or geoengineering could be our only hope
The future of the Earth could rest on potentially dangerous and unproven geoengineering technologies unless emissions of carbon dioxide can be greatly reduced, the latest Royal Society report has found.
I also love the variation of headlines for this story. Slashdot and the BBC report it as
"UK Royal Society Claims Geo-engineering Feasible," while the Financial Times reports it as
"Hopes dashed for geo-engineering solutions". The Nature blog has an interesting entry about the variation in headlines.
I love how the Pentagon are hailing this as a success
even though the part that they were supposedly trying to test, (i.e. whether the system can be fooled by a balloon), completely failed to deploy.
By all accounts, these tests are completely rigged, and the system can be fooled by the simplest of tactics. The only way to really test it, is to set up a game, where you allow a completely independent team to try to fool the system and another team to try to shoot it down.
It is really dangerous to kick off another cold war in order to deploy a system which is a complete fraud. This is yet another way to funnel money to defense contractors...
It seems to me that it would be impossible to extrapolate this VR study to real life. I mean, you strap on virtual reality goggles, and are presented with a scene from riding the tube (subway). It's like a video game, so of course you think the characters in it are about to pull out an AK47 and start shooting at you. Plus you are doing it as part of some experiment. What are you told before you strap on the goggles?
But in a an actual ride on the tube, you would be thinking about something else -- you wouldn't be watching all the people, trying to figure out what is going on, as you would during some VR lab test...
I use pine and I love it -- it's far faster than webmail or thunderbird. But the list you mention contain items which make me sometimes want to switch to another client.
Take attachments. I'm running pine over ssh, and almost all the time, I can't just view the attachment by clicking on it. I have to save it, then scp it over, then open it. A pain in the ass.
Then there is the lack of search functionality. This is a bit of a killer. Sure I can run some script to search the files, but it is not very convenient. And finally, I would like to be able to tag an email in multiple ways, rather than just save it into a particular file.
Perhaps there is a way to do these things, in which case, please let me know, but otherwise, I will always use pine with a bit of gmail-envy.
Too true. I think SETI is really a waste for a completely different reason. And it's basically this: what should we do if we actually did find life out there? And the sensible answer is: hide. Seriously, the chance that contact with space aliens will bring us benifits is tiny. If they have the ability to visit us, then the far more likely scenario is that they will exploit/conquer us. You just have to look at our own history of contact between various cultures to figure that out. And in this case, it would be far worse, because the difference in technology, culture would be far greater than that between say, Europeans and indigenous people in North America/Australia.
So, is it sensible to spend money looking for creatures which if we find them, we should ignore? Better to spend the money figuring out how to hide!
Yeah, I agree. Even a singleeconomy ticket on a transatlantic flight uses about a ton of CO2, which is far far more than you should be using all year for all your needs. Once the effects of high altitute emmission of the CO2 is taken into effect, the airline industry contributes 13% of our emmissions here in the U.K. and it is the fastest growing source of emmissions, effectively cancelling out all our other efforts.
What is more, the airline industry is heavily subsidised, and jet fuel is not taxed. Emmissions from airlines are not even included in our EU limits here. We just had a Camp for Climate Action here at Heathrow protesting the expansion of the airport. Private jet flyers and short haul flights should just be stopped completely, there is absolutely no reason for them, and it will kill people, plain and simple.
In India, there are actually services which print out email and deliver it. The infrastructure is a wonderful blend of electrons and meat-based delivery systems. Even the state postal service prints out email and delivers it.
Canada has faced active terrorist cells in their own country.
Well, just to put this in context...
The Mounties, scared the hell out of Canadians by announcing that these people acquired three tons of ammonium nitrate, and were quoted in their press conference as saying "To put this in context, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people took one ton of ammonium nitrate."
Only later did it come out that it was undercover Mounties who sold them fake ammonium nitrate, and even encouraged them to buy the stuff.
Mmmh, if this is true, maybe it counts as prior art in his patent dispute with the makers of Kleenex. They were using Penrose tiles because the quasi-periodic structure makes it less likely that the overlapping of the pattern will cause ridges to form. Math patents!!
The funny thing about that search, is that if you google santorum, then the description of the website that google posts is not taken from the website at all, but actually says it is a satirical site:
Santorum Satirical attempt to name the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex after Senator Rick Santorum.
Anyone know what that is about? Did Senator Santorum pressure google to make this change, or is there some less evil explaination?
I've recently visited to the UK, and was completely shocked at the Daily Mail and the general level of the tabloids. Google daily mail and Hitler, if you want to get a sense of how it is and was. They even serialised The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Sure, everywhere, there are plenty of crap media outlets. But I have never seen such a vicious level of lies and right-wing campaigning. You can't believe a word they say -- no need to ever pick them up. This is not just true of the Daily Mail, the general level of the tabloids is uniformly pitiful. They makes Fox news look fair and balanced in comparison. For example the level of anger that the UK tabloids deliberately generates against immigrants, gypsys, etc. through lies and smear campaigns is staggering. And I have seen the most outrageous lies leveled against people without the slightest restraint. You really have to read them to believe them. They aren't there to be a news source. They are there to entertain and scare the masses. You may discount them as being just fluff and lady-Di stories, but most people read them and they are hugely influencial.
So, I'd get one if it had linux support for the tablet functions. It seems like right now, if you really want to explore the full functionality of tablets, you have to be running a non-free operating system. One would think that IBM, with all its talk, would help in this regard. Anyone have positive experiences getting full tablet functionality under linux? Including word recognition...
I had mod points, but what the hell, this is an important point....
You are correct in pointing out (as most responsible qcrypto people do), that qcrypto needs authentication.
However, your argument doesn't follow
So even if you use QC, you still need to rely on all the classical crypto to make it work. So it is just as good as classical crypto, without routing.
The reason is that:
1) The authentication only needs to be secure for a second or two. I just use it foil a man-in-the-middle-attack or authenticate part of the protocol. So, if I use public key authentication, and the public key is then cracked, no problem, I've already used it to authenticate. The cracked key is now useless to the attacker. So, my attacker may even have a quantum computer, but she would still need more than a few seconds to crack the classical crypto.
2) Authenticating a message uses a very small amount of key (logarithmic), so if I start off with a small key from magicQ, then I can expand it, thus generating an arbitrary large amount of secret key from a tiny "seed". Thus sometimes, qcrypto is called "key expansion".
So, if you want to protect your data against future attacks (who knows how good algorithms and computers will get), or when we start needing to worry about quantum computers, then we will have to switch to quantum crypto-- it is just a matter of time.
As an aside, no responsible qcrypto person would suggest monitoring the fibre as a solution.
No. True, the system doesn't allow people to sell their vote, but it doesn't allow people to actually verify their vote either. As I mentioned in a previous post:
Basically, the method you describe only lets me verify that the ballot was thrown into some machine with the left side marked or the right side marked. It then counts the vote as being for Al Gore or George Bush based on some machine which matches my ballot (left or right side), with the machine's knowledge of whether left or right means Al Gore or George Bush. But how do I know that the cheating doesn't happen at this stage? It would be very easy for the machine to count all votes as being for George Bush regardless of what the bottom half of the ballot says (because the bottom half of the ballot has been destroyed).
This is just a more complicated voting system with the same problems (lack of verifyability).
It claims to get around this by some auditing process. But we can already have auditing (probably the simplest being hand count the paper ballots and allow the candidates to have people look over their shoulders). Or use open source voting machines. So this process is silly -- the actual verification happens at the auditing stage done by the candidates which is already possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I really hate the way the term Luddite is used -- people should read a bit of history (here for a start). The real Luddites were not anti-technology. They were highly skilled workers rebelling against the creation of textile sweatshops. It's a pity their rebellion was put down so violently -- we have a need for more Luddites in today's economy where our iPhones are produced by people who are effectively living in slavery.
Okay, this is perhaps stating the obvious, but recently, facebook seems to be making such a bewildering set of changes which trample your privacy, that it's impossible to keep track of what's going on. Take FB messages -- without any notification that I was aware of, it started telling people whether I'd read their messages or not. Then it stopped doing this (as far as I can tell), but kept doing it for group messages. Then it started telling me where people were located when they were messaging me. Incredible!
And the link between the murder, and bath-salts is.... The hysteria in the U.S. over recreational drug use is amazing. For example, all the news stories about Johnny Lewis mentioned police speculation that he was on the drug "smiles" when he went berserk, despite there being no evidence whatseover of this. e.g. http://abcnews.go.com/US/actor-johnny-lewis-suspected-taking-drug-smiles-killings/story?id=17346564 Time and time again, these speculative drug links make a big splash in the media, and then by the time they prove false, no one cares. I would have thought Slashdot was a bit more into looking at the evidence before making wild speculation, but apparently not.
At the same time as the arrest in this case, there is a trial going on against a guy for receiving a photo of consentual fisting: http://obscenitylawyer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/porn-trial-this-time-its-extreme.html And we also had the trial against Paul Chambers for tweeting a bomb joke (he was found not guilty thankfully). The crown prosecution service are a joke.
What this means is that the drugs which are legal, are potentially more dangerous than the ones which are banned. Marijuana, mushrooms, LSD have been around long enough that they've been well studied, and we know the risks are minimal. But the latest synthesised version of them has not been studied, and might be dangerous. When will we learn that the war on drugs is just making things worse?
Well, is the data that sensitive? Here is one they released: http://pdfcast.org/pdf/nato-1 Old and dull. And Sabu yesterday claimed they were about to release a bunch of Sun emails. Now they say they won't. There's a bit more smoke than fire.
Nice thread title. Racist much?
In reports of this size, there will always be small errors. The problem is that right wing bloggers trumpet these up to raise doubts about the basic science, and then fox news et. al. broadcast this even further. The result is a complete disaster: people will not make the sacrifices needed to stop climate change if they have doubts about whether it is happening. A great example is leakegate, where the Sunday Telegraph used a tiny citation error to suggest a conspiracy of scientists to falsify evidence of global warming (the UN report cited another report which contained the peer reviewed work, rather than directly citing the peer reviewed work). Eventually, the Telegraph retracted their article, but not before the damage was done. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/06/leakegate-a-retraction/ As Mark Twain said, lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on...
We need more than just the ones on the list. All minutes of all government meetings (including cabinet meetings) should be published except parts which have security implications. Just like opensource code allows for scrutiny, opening up government will make representatives think twice before screwing us over...
Propublica is pretty awesome, and their recent piece about Magnetar, and the market crash is a great example of that. http://www.propublica.org/feature/the-magnetar-trade-how-one-hedge-fund-helped-keep-the-housing-bubble-going And with the recent videos released by wikileaks of the US military mowing down civilians, it seems more and more, it is alternative media which is doing real journalism. Newspapers claim they are loosing money because of internet news and thus can't afford to do investigative reporting. Propublica and wikileaks are the other side of that coin.
I also love the variation of headlines for this story. Slashdot and the BBC report it as "UK Royal Society Claims Geo-engineering Feasible," while the Financial Times reports it as "Hopes dashed for geo-engineering solutions". The Nature blog has an interesting entry about the variation in headlines.
By all accounts, these tests are completely rigged, and the system can be fooled by the simplest of tactics. The only way to really test it, is to set up a game, where you allow a completely independent team to try to fool the system and another team to try to shoot it down. It is really dangerous to kick off another cold war in order to deploy a system which is a complete fraud. This is yet another way to funnel money to defense contractors...
You can get it to work: just use VLC media player
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
and open the video stream:
File->Open Network Stream
check HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/MSS and put in the url http://www.cnn.com/video/live/cnnlive_1.asx
then watch and try not to vomit!
It seems to me that it would be impossible to extrapolate this VR study to real life. I mean, you strap on virtual reality goggles, and are presented with a scene from riding the tube (subway). It's like a video game, so of course you think the characters in it are about to pull out an AK47 and start shooting at you. Plus you are doing it as part of some experiment. What are you told before you strap on the goggles?
But in a an actual ride on the tube, you would be thinking about something else -- you wouldn't be watching all the people, trying to figure out what is going on, as you would during some VR lab test...
I use pine and I love it -- it's far faster than webmail or thunderbird. But the list you mention contain items which make me sometimes want to switch to another client.
Take attachments. I'm running pine over ssh, and almost all the time, I can't just view the attachment by clicking on it. I have to save it, then scp it over, then open it. A pain in the ass.
Then there is the lack of search functionality. This is a bit of a killer. Sure I can run some script to search the files, but it is not very convenient. And finally, I would like to be able to tag an email in multiple ways, rather than just save it into a particular file.
Perhaps there is a way to do these things, in which case, please let me know, but otherwise, I will always use pine with a bit of gmail-envy.
Too true.
I think SETI is really a waste for a completely different reason. And it's basically this: what should we do if we actually did find life out there? And the sensible answer is: hide. Seriously, the chance that contact with space aliens will bring us benifits is tiny. If they have the ability to visit us, then the far more likely scenario is that they will exploit/conquer us. You just have to look at our own history of contact between various cultures to figure that out. And in this case, it would be far worse, because the difference in technology, culture would be far greater than that between say, Europeans and indigenous people in North America/Australia.
So, is it sensible to spend money looking for creatures which if we find them, we should ignore? Better to spend the money figuring out how to hide!
Yeah, I agree. Even a singleeconomy ticket on a transatlantic flight uses about a ton of CO2, which is far far more than you should be using all year for all your needs. Once the effects of high altitute emmission of the CO2 is taken into effect, the airline industry contributes 13% of our emmissions here in the U.K. and it is the fastest growing source of emmissions, effectively cancelling out all our other efforts. What is more, the airline industry is heavily subsidised, and jet fuel is not taxed. Emmissions from airlines are not even included in our EU limits here. We just had a Camp for Climate Action here at Heathrow protesting the expansion of the airport. Private jet flyers and short haul flights should just be stopped completely, there is absolutely no reason for them, and it will kill people, plain and simple.
In India, there are actually services which print out email and deliver it. The infrastructure is a wonderful blend of electrons and meat-based delivery systems. Even the state postal service prints out email and delivers it.
Canada has faced active terrorist cells in their own country.
Well, just to put this in context...
The Mounties, scared the hell out of Canadians by announcing that these people acquired three tons of ammonium nitrate, and were quoted in their press conference as saying "To put this in context, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people took one ton of ammonium nitrate."
Only later did it come out that it was undercover Mounties who sold them fake ammonium nitrate, and even encouraged them to buy the stuff.
Mmmh, if this is true, maybe it counts as prior art in his patent dispute with the makers of Kleenex. They were using Penrose tiles because the quasi-periodic structure makes it less likely that the overlapping of the pattern will cause ridges to form. Math patents!!
The funny thing about that search, is that if you google santorum, then the description of the website that google posts is not taken from the website at all, but actually says it is a satirical site:
Santorum
Satirical attempt to name the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex after Senator Rick Santorum.
Anyone know what that is about? Did Senator Santorum pressure google to make this change, or is there some less evil explaination?
I've recently visited to the UK, and was completely shocked at the Daily Mail and the general level of the tabloids. Google daily mail and Hitler, if you want to get a sense of how it is and was. They even serialised The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Sure, everywhere, there are plenty of crap media outlets. But I have never seen such a vicious level of lies and right-wing campaigning. You can't believe a word they say -- no need to ever pick them up. This is not just true of the Daily Mail, the general level of the tabloids is uniformly pitiful. They makes Fox news look fair and balanced in comparison. For example the level of anger that the UK tabloids deliberately generates against immigrants, gypsys, etc. through lies and smear campaigns is staggering. And I have seen the most outrageous lies leveled against people without the slightest restraint. You really have to read them to believe them. They aren't there to be a news source. They are there to entertain and scare the masses. You may discount them as being just fluff and lady-Di stories, but most people read them and they are hugely influencial.
So, I'd get one if it had linux support for the tablet functions. It seems like right now, if you really want to explore the full functionality of tablets, you have to be running a non-free operating system. One would think that IBM, with all its talk, would help in this regard. Anyone have positive experiences getting full tablet functionality under linux? Including word recognition...
I had mod points, but what the hell, this is an important point....
You are correct in pointing out (as most responsible qcrypto people do), that qcrypto needs authentication.
However, your argument doesn't follow
So even if you use QC, you still need to rely on all the classical crypto to make it work. So it is just as good as classical crypto, without routing.
The reason is that:
1) The authentication only needs to be secure for a second or two. I just use it foil a man-in-the-middle-attack or authenticate part of the protocol. So, if I use public key authentication, and the public key is then cracked, no problem, I've already used it to authenticate. The cracked key is now useless to the attacker. So, my attacker may even have a quantum computer, but she would still need more than a few seconds to crack the classical crypto.
2) Authenticating a message uses a very small amount of key (logarithmic), so if I start off with a small key from magicQ, then I can expand it, thus generating an arbitrary large amount of secret key from a tiny "seed". Thus sometimes, qcrypto is called "key expansion".
So, if you want to protect your data against future attacks (who knows how good algorithms and computers will get), or when we start needing to worry about quantum computers, then we will have to switch to quantum crypto-- it is just a matter of time.
As an aside, no responsible qcrypto person would suggest monitoring the fibre as a solution.
No.
True, the system doesn't allow people to sell their vote, but it doesn't allow people to actually verify their vote either. As I mentioned in a previous post:
Basically, the method you describe only lets me verify that the ballot was thrown into some machine with the left side marked or the right side marked. It then counts the vote as being for Al Gore or George Bush based on some machine which matches my ballot (left or right side), with the machine's knowledge of whether left or right means Al Gore or George Bush. But how do I know that the cheating doesn't happen at this stage? It would be very easy for the machine to count all votes as being for George Bush regardless of what the bottom half of the ballot says (because the bottom half of the ballot has been destroyed).
This is just a more complicated voting system with the same problems (lack of verifyability).
It claims to get around this by some auditing process. But we can already have auditing (probably the simplest being hand count the paper ballots and allow the candidates to have people look over their shoulders). Or use open source voting machines. So this process is silly -- the actual verification happens at the auditing stage done by the candidates which is already possible.