Your idea does hold merit though and we at Hallmark cards will be looking into it aggressively;-p
No skin off my patent portfolio. It's already been done decades back - and I'm not going to bother with trying to claim just combining it with electronic paper.
Don't blame windows for "targeted military espionage". Any operating system can be rooted, and you would not believe how sophisticated certain governments and NGOs are getting at remotely 0wning boxes.
But why make it so easy that script kiddies can download a tool and build a phishing-spear capable of cracking the government's systems?
(Or so easy that "asymmetric warriors" can learn the techniques without taking appreciable time out from their other pursuits.)
Because Windows is a plague pit. Its broad deployment and fundamental insecurity has spawned two multi-billion-dollar industries:
1) Exploiting its bugs (initially for fun, then profit, as a criminal enterprise.)
2) Patching its bugs (inadequately - both because it's an impossible job and, if it WERE possible, so the customers must keep paying fees and coming back).
Windows security problems (and their inadequate active-immunity workarounds) have resulted in:
- Viruses that spread broadly and destroy data, including:
- TARGETED viruses that attack particular products or institutions.
- Spyware, that:
- profiles users' activity
- steals their personal information and
- cracks their financial accounts, enabling massive theft-by-fraud and "identity theft"
- TARGETED spyware (not widely deployed and thus not caught by reactive defense tools), used for:
- corporate espionage
- governmental espionage
- political espionage
- MILITARY espionage
- "Botnets" of compromised computers, that:
- Conceal their operators, insulating them from traceback and aprehension
- Amplify activities, enabling:
- DDOS attacks - for fun, for extortion, and now for war
- An indunation of Spam email that has practically destroyed email as a communication medium and placed a further strain on the network infrastructure.
- Massive initial releases of revised malware to bypass reactive anti-malware measures.
But worse, it has created the perception that this sort of computer misbehavior is normal, acceptable, and perhaps inevitable.
(Which it may have become. Now that the malware infrastructure is so well developed and the business models are in place, much of it can be ported to other systems. Thanks, Microsoft.)
This is not just a matter of the trillions of dollars Microsoft's bugs have already cost. It's become a tool of politics, espionage, and war. Microsoft's products are pervasive in industry and government - the complete infrastructure that supports and defends our lives.
It's not enough to secure the weapons systems themselves. Come wartime virtually any information leak can expose troop locations and movements. (The quantity of toilet paper shipped to a port, for instance. A classic example was the time an officer training academy's war games were swung because one color-army located, attacked, and captured the other's field headquarters. They had used a scanner to find where a local service had delivered a porta-potty to serve the fastidious commanding officer of their opponent.) Even a tiny disruption of the supply chain can lead to an event-cascade that can swing an entire war. (This has been known for centuries. "For want of a nail a horseshoe was lost...")
How much of the current problems in politics, war, and the economy are the result of exploitation of Microsoft's bugs?
Until it can be rendered sufficiently secure (if that's even possible), Windows, Explorer, Office, and a host of other Microsoft tools (and the expectation of flakeyness they create) need to be displaced. In government, industry, and homes. In health care, device automation, inventory control, banking,...
The replacement doesn't HAVE to be Linux. But it DOES have to be MUCH harder to exploit.
I've read late Industrial Revolution writers who have claimed that until the advent of percussion-cap-based muskets, a talented person with a crossbow or a longbow was still far more effective as a soldier than a person with a matchlock/flintlock, as regards accuracy, deadliness, and rate-of-fire. The problem was just that nobody had the time to spend getting good enough with the older weapons, while you could hand a rifle to a raw recruit and with a week's training you'd have a soldier.
The Longbow required lots of practice to achieve accuracy, and a lot of strength to operate as well.
The Crossbow required little practice to achieve accuracy - but required both time and strength to reload (though a crank-type could trade additional time to reload for a reduction in required strength). This reduced the rate of fire. So crossbows were used by lower-skilled soldiers, especially from fortified positions where they could reload behind a wall or some other barrier. Its stock (the basis of the accuracy) served as the model for those of longguns.
Early longguns had the low-training-for-accuracy, long-reload, characteristics of crossbows. But they didn't require great strength to reload. Their ammunition was also lighter to carry (though consumable rather than recoverable). A 98-pound weakling, or a soldier bone-tired after a long march, could be relied on to fire more than one shot. This was the improvement that caused them to displace crossbows even though they were not yet up to the same absolute accuracy or firing rate.
Slashdot Mirror
Your idea does hold merit though and we at Hallmark cards will be looking into it aggressively ;-p
No skin off my patent portfolio. It's already been done decades back - and I'm not going to bother with trying to claim just combining it with electronic paper.
Don't blame windows for "targeted military espionage". Any operating system can be rooted, and you would not believe how sophisticated certain governments and NGOs are getting at remotely 0wning boxes.
But why make it so easy that script kiddies can download a tool and build a phishing-spear capable of cracking the government's systems?
(Or so easy that "asymmetric warriors" can learn the techniques without taking appreciable time out from their other pursuits.)
why do we have to push Linux on people?
...")
...
Because Windows is a plague pit. Its broad deployment and fundamental insecurity has spawned two multi-billion-dollar industries:
1) Exploiting its bugs (initially for fun, then profit, as a criminal enterprise.)
2) Patching its bugs (inadequately - both because it's an impossible job and, if it WERE possible, so the customers must keep paying fees and coming back).
Windows security problems (and their inadequate active-immunity workarounds) have resulted in:
- Viruses that spread broadly and destroy data, including:
- TARGETED viruses that attack particular products or institutions.
- Spyware, that:
- profiles users' activity
- steals their personal information and
- cracks their financial accounts, enabling massive theft-by-fraud and "identity theft"
- TARGETED spyware (not widely deployed and thus not caught by reactive defense tools), used for:
- corporate espionage
- governmental espionage
- political espionage
- MILITARY espionage
- "Botnets" of compromised computers, that:
- Conceal their operators, insulating them from traceback and aprehension
- Amplify activities, enabling:
- DDOS attacks - for fun, for extortion, and now for war
- An indunation of Spam email that has practically destroyed email as a communication medium and placed a further strain on the network infrastructure.
- Massive initial releases of revised malware to bypass reactive anti-malware measures.
But worse, it has created the perception that this sort of computer misbehavior is normal, acceptable, and perhaps inevitable.
(Which it may have become. Now that the malware infrastructure is so well developed and the business models are in place, much of it can be ported to other systems. Thanks, Microsoft.)
This is not just a matter of the trillions of dollars Microsoft's bugs have already cost. It's become a tool of politics, espionage, and war. Microsoft's products are pervasive in industry and government - the complete infrastructure that supports and defends our lives.
It's not enough to secure the weapons systems themselves. Come wartime virtually any information leak can expose troop locations and movements. (The quantity of toilet paper shipped to a port, for instance. A classic example was the time an officer training academy's war games were swung because one color-army located, attacked, and captured the other's field headquarters. They had used a scanner to find where a local service had delivered a porta-potty to serve the fastidious commanding officer of their opponent.) Even a tiny disruption of the supply chain can lead to an event-cascade that can swing an entire war. (This has been known for centuries. "For want of a nail a horseshoe was lost
How much of the current problems in politics, war, and the economy are the result of exploitation of Microsoft's bugs?
Until it can be rendered sufficiently secure (if that's even possible), Windows, Explorer, Office, and a host of other Microsoft tools (and the expectation of flakeyness they create) need to be displaced. In government, industry, and homes. In health care, device automation, inventory control, banking,
The replacement doesn't HAVE to be Linux. But it DOES have to be MUCH harder to exploit.
I've read late Industrial Revolution writers who have claimed that until the advent of percussion-cap-based muskets, a talented person with a crossbow or a longbow was still far more effective as a soldier than a person with a matchlock/flintlock, as regards accuracy, deadliness, and rate-of-fire. The problem was just that nobody had the time to spend getting good enough with the older weapons, while you could hand a rifle to a raw recruit and with a week's training you'd have a soldier.
The Longbow required lots of practice to achieve accuracy, and a lot of strength to operate as well.
The Crossbow required little practice to achieve accuracy - but required both time and strength to reload (though a crank-type could trade additional time to reload for a reduction in required strength). This reduced the rate of fire. So crossbows were used by lower-skilled soldiers, especially from fortified positions where they could reload behind a wall or some other barrier. Its stock (the basis of the accuracy) served as the model for those of longguns.
Early longguns had the low-training-for-accuracy, long-reload, characteristics of crossbows. But they didn't require great strength to reload. Their ammunition was also lighter to carry (though consumable rather than recoverable). A 98-pound weakling, or a soldier bone-tired after a long march, could be relied on to fire more than one shot. This was the improvement that caused them to displace crossbows even though they were not yet up to the same absolute accuracy or firing rate.