The parent in me understands the concerns at play here; that we want to restrict the nature of the media that our children are exposed to. The geek in me understands why this short-term impossible, medium-to-long-term semi-workable on a small-scale, but undesirable for the ISPs, the search engines, and the like.
I don't think that that blacklisting will ever be that effective on a wide scale; even the commercially-supported, subscription-based blacklists inevitably miss some stuff -- really the only purpose it serves is preventing embarrassment when you type "whitehouse.com" instead of "whitehouse.gov" in front of a big audience or something. It's certainly a stupid way to try and restrict the content that your kids are seeing: if they go looking for porn, even on a blacklist-enforcing system, they're going to find it.
Setting aside arguments about technological solutions to social problems, especially parenting problems, what probably would work (at least for very young children) would be creating "kid-friendly" domains within national TLDs. An example might be ".kids.us" or ".G.rated.us" (along with ".PG.rated.us" and the like). Because it's under the national TLD you would have an easier time enforcing compliance legislatively, and it would be a purely opt-in system both for sites and for users. One method might be to require any company wanting to register a domain in the rated zone to post a large bond, which they would forfeit if they put up any material that violated the ratings guideline for that particular zone. You'd have to spell out the requirements quite specifically (none of the MPAA-style "I'll know it when I see it" subjective ratings), but once you did, you could probably get a system set up that was mostly self-policing. (Particularly if you said that half ot 25% of the bond forfeiture went to the person who reported the violation to the agency or registrar in charge.)
I'm not saying that this is a good idea overall, but I think it's a better idea than blacklists, and certainly a better idea than enforcing misguided obscenity laws on speech in general (which I don't think ought to be Constitutional in the first place). I suspect that very few organizations would bother to register for the safe zones, but at least you'd be able to point bitching parents to the fact of their existence when they complain, and then tell them to lobby entertainment companies to set up sites there. I'd rather have the pitchforks-and-torches 'think of the children' crowd out in front of the Disney HQ building than in front of Congress where there's a chance they'll encourage politicians to do something really stupid.
I'd also point out just as a followup to myself, that the assumption "when it was destroyed, pieces flew in all directions" is probably not a good one to make, either.
The way most anti-satellite and anti-ballistic-missile weapons work isn't by blowing up the target, it's basically by just positioning itself in front of the target, and letting physics do the rest. The satellite has a huge velocity in one direction, the missile a huge velocity in the other, they slam into each other -- wham -- target destroyed.
Imagining the satellite just blowing up, with pieces flying everywhere, isn't a good model for the interaction. Although it's not impossible for some pieces to end up with a greater forward velocity than the satellite originally had, conservation of momentum tells us that most of the combined mass is going to end up with a velocity substantially less than what the satellite had to begin with.
(Car analogy: A racecar is going around a track at some incredible speed, say 200MPH. You decide to kill it by taking another car, and driving it in the opposite direction, intercepting the racecar head-on. Without getting too deeply into the mechanics of the collision, the result when the two cars smash into each other is that most of the pieces are probably going to be going less than 200 MPH in the racecar's original direction. Assuming the car's fuel tank doesn't detonate and add a lot of energy to the system.)
So overall, I don't think there's much of a risk with a kinetic ASW that you're going to blast pieces into a substantially higher orbit than where the satellite was originally. If the satellite is already in a high stable orbit, you may have a big cloud of junk in space for a long time though.
I think you're maybe misunderstanding a little of how 'orbit' works. In order to go 'up' or 'down' in orbit, you really need to go faster or slower. That is to say, if you want to get into a higher orbit, you need to accelerate, and start moving faster around the Earth. You don't just push up perpendicular (normal) to the Earth's surface, that doesn't work. (Well, it will work temporarily, but it won't get you into a higher orbit. You'll just fall back down, because you're not escaping gravity. Remember, orbit is all about falling towards the Earth but moving fast enough to miss it, continuously.)
The satellite that was shot down yesterday was very, very close to the Earth's atmosphere. It was only one rotation, maybe less, away from starting to graze it (which means that it would slow down and begin to reenter and burn up). If we assume that when it was destroyed, pieces flew in all directions, some of them would have ended up with a greater net orbital velocity at the end. These pieces aren't the ones that exploded *up* (normal to the surface of the Earth), though, they're the ones that exploded *forward* (in the direction of the satellite's motion). They picked up some velocity and would end up in a slightly higher orbit as a result. I suspect it's not much of a higher orbit, though -- if anything, it probably just means they'll take a little longer to hit the atmosphere than other parts. It's tough to say without doing any calculations, but I doubt you have enough Delta-V to push the pieces into a long-term stable orbit. (Unless maybe the rocket fuel detonated.) The difference in velocities between high, long-term stable orbits and low atmosphere-grazing orbits is pretty substantial.
The pieces that flew off in other directions aren't really a huge concern, because they all end up in the same or lower orbits. Plus because you've blasted the satellite into little pieces and thus increased its surface area tremendously, it'll start slowing down on hitting the atmosphere much more quickly, and the pieces will burn up more completely on their way down.
My understanding is that what the Chinese did was quite different. The satellite they shot at was way out in a stable orbit, and thus the pieces it was reduced to stayed there as well. So now instead of a dead satellite floating around in orbit that's relatively easy to track and avoid, you have a vast cloud of small debris. Not an improvement at all.
Probably could, but the overall lifetime of the device wouldn't be as long. Springs wear out over time, especially under heavy loads. The springs used in garage doors to assist you in pulling the door up (which were more common before everyone started installing power-operated doors) wear out after 10-20 years, for instance. I suspect each one of those springs -- there are typically 2 on a door -- each support 50 pounds or so.
I think part of the beauty of the mechanism is that it's really robust and long-lasting.
Just thinking about how you could build such a thing, I bet you could make a machine that had multiple ways of recharging/resetting it. My thought would be to have a lightweight 'sled' with a heavy removable weight on it. When the heavy weight is removed from the sled, a very small counterweight pulls it back up to the top of its track, so you can place the heavy weight back on. That's one way of resetting it, and the easiest provided you could pick up and lift the weight at once. The alternative would be to put a small crank on the sled's counterweight wire, which would allow you to slowly crank up the sled, with the counterweight on it. You'd end up doing the same amount of work but with a much smaller amount of force, due to the mechanical advantage of the crank.
That arrangement completely avoids using springs (it would only use counterweights) and would probably last a long time. I'm not sure whether it would be long enough to build some sort of 'Clock of the Long Now'-type device, but it would probably last a few human generations.
The GP does have a legitimate point though; defending against MITM attacks isn't trivial, particularly in a poorly-defined network with lots of transient nodes like P2P.
How do you tell if you're connecting to a 'legitimate' torrent node, which is just some Random User's PC somewhere, or to Comcast's DPI system that's purporting to be Random User?
Having everyone generate a self-signed client certificate isn't enough, because Comcast can just generate their own as well and play MITM still. You don't just need client certificates, you need client certificates and a trust infrastructure to tell you which clients are worth talking to and which are Comcast attempting monkey business on your connection. And you need to do this without creating a single point of failure that the authorities can go after, a la Napster.
I don't think that's an unsolvable problem but it's certainly not a trivial one. It's a problem that has been 'solved' with Web of Trust models and Trusted Third Party certificate authorities, but it would definitely make getting up and running on Bittorrent much more complicated than it currently is. (I think if the situation gets that adversarial, then the networks for illicit/copyvio material will become invitation-only darknets, where the only way you'd get access would be by getting your certificate vetted and signed by another member, out-of-band. Put any social network under enough pressure and they will inevitably revert to working based on personal trust.)
But before or at the same time this sort of cryptography comes into play I think you'll see a lot more obfuscation. Preventing MITM attacks is one thing, but a successful BT network also needs to keep Comcast from just shutting down all the connections by injecting RSTs or malformed/mis-signed/MITMed packets into them. You have to not only protect against content compromise, but against DOS as well, and I think that'll be more of a cat-and-mouse game. I still think the advantage is Bittorrent's, and as long as people are transferring large quantities of data (especially encrypted data) for purposes other than Bittorrent, there will be something to hide it in. But it's going to be a war of adaptability -- who can change faster to parry the other.
Comcast has a lot of money, but their resources aren't infinite. If there's anything we've learned from the past 10 years, it's that the amount of free time geeks are willing to spend on hard problems is very, very large. If the Bittorrent client/network developers and users can make the cost of participating in the obfuscation arms race higher than just carrying the traffic as a neutral carrier, I doubt Comcast will burn money simply to prove a point. While they're clearly evil, I don't think they're irrationally evil.
I don't need to spoof, I just need to SEE all the traffic. If I see the RSA exchange, I get the block cipher. This doesn't make sense to me. The whole point of RSA -- or for that matter any other public-key protocol -- is if you're just watching the key exchange you don't gain anything. The key to the block cipher is encrypted using either party's public key, and without the matching private key you're SOL.
If you're injecting traffic, certainly you can conduct a MITM against the key exchange and from there get the block cipher's key, but only if the two parties are being sloppy (for SSL, this would take the form of ignoring a warning about a certificate mismatch). Purely passive monitoring wouldn't get you the block cipher key, though. If it did, there wouldn't be much of a point to the whole PK business.
SSL as it is frequently implemented today (without authenticated client certificates) is definitely over-reliant on good user practice and on not mindlessly clicking "Trust" when a dialog pops up, and thus doesn't offer as much protection against MITM as it should, but it's not trivially breakable via passive interception.
You sound like you know what you're talking about in other posts so I'm assuming you're just misspeaking here, but as written that comment seems incorrect.
The article points out that this is a niche skill, not one that's widely useful.
It was always a niche skill, possessed by only a tiny fraction of the population. There are probably more assembly language programmers today than there were forty years ago. And assembly language is used for the same things today as it was back then. If people want to say that today, programmers use languages like PHP and Java for creating web-applications not Assembly, then that is fine. Assembly never was used for creating web-applications because they didn't exist back then. Assembly has neither diminished in popularity nor entirely been superceded in its area. Shouldn't be on that list. I think this is an excellent point and one that really doesn't get mentioned enough whenever the topic of "dying" technical skills comes up.
Some skills just seem like they're obsolete or dying because the proportion of people within a field that have them is getting smaller -- but they're really stronger than ever when you look at the raw numbers.
I agree with the parent and fully suspect that there are more people who understand x86 assembler today than there were at the perceived 'height' of assembler, back in the early 90s. There are just that many more people in the IT field. Learning assembler, if you happen to be interested, is also a lot easier now than it was then. Today, computers are basically a mainstream subject, plus you have all the information available on the Internet. In 1990, finding a good book on assembler programming would probably have required a trip to a large university's library.
Obviously there are some skills that really are on their way out, or will be when the current crop of people who truly understand them either retire or die. But in many cases I think it's easy to confuse the S/N ratio in a particular sphere with the number of people who actually are familiar with a topic.
It seems like something that OkCupid might be interested in. Compared to (my non-user's perception of) Match.com, eHarmony, and some of the other big players, they (seem to) cater to a younger, slightly geekier clientèle. There's a big emphasis on 'compatibility' matching through online quizzes and the like, and I assume you can set hard-and-fast criteria as well. They also don't use a subscription-based business model, or pay-to-contact.
If Match and Yahoo are making money hand over fist as-is, they really have no reason to do anything, and I suspect any major improvement would be a hard sell. But a site like OkCupid that depends on a constant flow of new members, rather than squeezing membership fees out of existing ones, might be more receptive. Anything that improves 'match quality' and overall user experience is going to help them dramatically.
I'm not sure that a Slashdot FPP was the appropriate venue for this essay, but I think the idea has a certain amount of merit.
The $1201 is $1 more than the next-most-profitable thing the engineer could do with his time as an alternative. That's the only cost that really matters.
If you're talking about a society, all compensation above and beyond that point is waste -- it's not serving any purpose because the task would have gotten done for less anyway. So allowing the engineer to charge everyone $3/yr from now until the end of time is a poor option. It's creating a huge misallocation of resources.
There are two prices in every market: the minimum that the seller is willing to part with the good (in this case, their time/labor) for, and the maximum that the buyer is willing to pay. For reasons that I'm not entirely certain of, somehow the idea has crept into the public consciousness that every seller deserves to receive the latter price, for whatever they're selling. This is crap. In a competitive, ideal market, the prices tend down towards the minimum price, not upwards towards the maximum.
When you start to see prices tending up, and sticking at the maximum that consumers are willing to pay for a good, that's a sign of some sort of market failure (e.g. monopoly). It's not, in general, a desirable thing.
Well currently the state of the art is in favor of encryption, rather than cryptanalysis, so I don't think that the advantage is automatically Comcast's. They could probably do some fairly sophisticated traffic analysis, but at the end of the day, they're not actually going to break the encryption and get at the contents, and they can't block all encrypted traffic because it's too critical for other purposes.
They can force the BitTorrent devs to produce a new version every few months, but in the long run I think they're on the losing end of the war -- if they want to stay in the data-transportation business, and assuming there aren't any major breakthroughs in cryptanalysis that render modern public-key technologies useless.
I think it would be more like taking the engineering plans for a particular car and then reproducing that car endlessly and giving it away for free. In that way, you're depriving the creator of the original work the opportunity to make money from it if everyone just gets your cars for free rather than paying him for his. There's an easy solution to this, if you're the engineer: don't give anybody the plans for less than the cost of your time spent producing it.
In other words, don't depend on a derivative-based business model, because there's no way to make it work when anybody can just make copies for free, down the road.
Instead, just work like any other kind of skilled tradesman or professional. (Or, perhaps a more germane example, like a consultant.) If somebody wants you to design an automobile, bill them for the cost of designing an automobile. Whatever they want to do with the plans once they have them, is their business. They can make copies of them, eat them, use them for expensive designer toilet paper. Doesn't matter -- you've gotten your paycheck and have moved on to the next project.
The whole 'fight' about IP is mostly because people are used to, and have built corporate empires on, the idea of derivatives and annuitized incomes rather than simple payment-for-labor. This annuitization/derivatives model is fairly new (within the last few hundred years), and is certainly not a requirement for civilization, or for that matter the continued production of art, science, or technology.
there is still a nonzero cost to making and distributing copies of information The majority of which is a sunk cost once you have the infrastructure set up to transmit a single piece of information.
The marginal cost is so low it's essentially zero. Not exactly zero, but really, really small.
Anyway, this is sort of a silly argument; it's not that anyone is unwilling to pay for the actual transportation of the bits across the network. What the whole copyright/IP argument revolves around is the ability for an author or creator to sell identical copies of the same work over and over again. It's the work that's at issue, not the cost of delivering it.
To further torture the car analogy, if you could magically turn one car into two cars, the value of the car itself would quickly tend towards zero. However, someone wishing to acquire a car would still have to pay for their free copy-of-a-car to be moved from wherever it was copied to their driveway. The transportation cost and value of the good itself are separate issues.
Look, I use Office, Word particularly, every day. I work in an office where people use it every day. We are, by any definition of the term, "everyday" users. And I have not met anyone in my office who thinks that the ribbons are a step up from menus, or that the auto-hide feature was a Good Thing. (In fact, I discovered that the office secretary swears like a longshoreman; I suppose that's worth something.)
This is, I believe, one of Microsoft's key problems. They design their products around hypothetical users, rather than real ones. If they'd gone out and actually talked to people who use their software, I think they'd have discovered that most people are pretty satisfied with it overall, and although there are perhaps some minor tweaks or additional features that could be added here and there, virtually nobody wants to re-learn their entire fucking word processor. But instead they have some flawed idea of a non-existent 'everyday' user, who's simultaneously dumb as a rock but also totally willing to sit down and relearn a completely new interface just so they can turn on Track Changes or change the inter-paragraph spacing.
It's poor design, it's unnecessary, and it's also arrogant.
Well that's a terrible example. Some people think that doing incredibly stupid things like putting a high-current electric appliance with exposed elements in an appliance filled with electrolytic water (the salts provided by the you) and your naked person should have at least one aggravating step. I think the part where you carry the toaster to your bathroom and plug it in is the "aggravating step"...
immediately load urls I click on them from the address bar, instead of waiting for me to hit return No. That's a terrible idea, and would drive innumerable people (myself included) completely crazy. Text-entry fields shouldn't do anything when you click into them in order to edit. The return key is the proper way to actually cause an action to be taken on the entered text.
That's a user interface paradigm that's decades old now, and just because the bunch of monkeys coding IE think it's fun to throw it out the window doesn't mean it's a good idea. Microsoft has the anti-Midas touch for interfaces these days anyway (cf. Vista generally, that new Office abomination generally, drop-down menus that hide half their contents for no particular reason, etc.). Emulating them would be a terrible idea.
Won't this also make it harder to set up a mail server? I run a mail server at home, and I currently don't control the domain I am in, only my host. Most of the dynamic IP services out there provide support for this. When all the major players start using it, is this going to screw over people who run their own personal mail servers?
Disposable addresses are a system that works completely within the existing standard for e-mail. I use them on my server, with no other filtering mechanism whatsoever, and I almost never get spam or phishing e-mails. I think the response would be that any system which allows a random user to set up their own mailserver on a dynamic IP address also allows spam. Since there are a lot more people annoyed by spam than there are people interested in running a mailserver as a hobby, it's home-mailservers that get the axe.
That said, if you bought your own domain (which would probably only cost you $10 or $15) and had DynDNS.org do the DNS hosting, you could set up all the TXT records you want while still having it pointed to your dynamic IP address. That would let you set up DKIM and SPF, so you'd be just as legitimate as the big guys.
Except, of course, that you'd have an IP in the dynamic range from your ISP, which might cause all of your outgoing email to be marked as spam, just on principle. Time to use a smarthost.
Downloading and installing software can be significantly more intimidating on Linux for the average user, as can getting many peripherals to work. You might have an argument about some peripherals (scanners in particular are a PITA in Linux; I've never gotten one to work under SANE and I don't consider myself exactly clueless), but I think you're wrong about the software. In fact a modern Linux distro is enough to really, really spoil a person.
You want software? Open up Synaptic, scroll through the list, click on what you want, hit Install. Done. No discs, no installers, nothing. Just one place for all your software. Changing repos is even very simple, and done entirely through checkboxes and a GUI. And of course, none of it costs anything and the dependencies are all managed automagically.
Mac OS X's installation / package management is nice (and I would argue nicer than Windows, although it's kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other) but Synaptic/apt-get are head and shoulders above either.
It wouldn't be impossible to create something like the Debian repository for commercial software (really, it's not dissimilar with what most video game systems use for their pay-to-download games), but I don't think that even Microsoft has the clout that would be required to force developers to give up their current distribution networks and switch to one that was managed front-to-back by Microsoft. It's really only something that can work if it's evolved with the OS.
When I've shown people Debian over the years, the software installation procedure is almost always one of its most impressive points. You only need one piece of installation media, ever, and you have access to an entire ecosystem of software, covering almost every conceivable task. That's not an insignificant advantage.
Portability for phone numbers makes sense, because they are just arbitrary numbers and AT&T can give you 12345 just as well as any other provider. They can now. This is a relatively recent development. The old rotary-pulse dial switching system didn't allow for such things, and although numbers might have appeared arbitrary to the customer, they were anything but to the phone company. Individual phone lines (last four digits, in our current numbering scheme) were connected to exchanges (first three digits of the 'phone number,' but in the past these were lettered or had other designations, like city or town), and if you moved from one exchange to another, your number changed. The phone number actually drove the routing equipment -- you couldn't just give someone a random 7 or 10 digit number and make it work. (Similar to how IP routing worked under classful networks.)
Over time, telephone call routing got more flexible. I'm not familiar with exactly how it works today, but there is obviously another layer, probably many layers, beneath the "phone number" you use and remember. That has been abstracted away from the actual 'hardware' and can be assigned arbitrarily.
Email addresses are currently hierarchical, in the same way that phone numbers used to be (under exchanges). If you want to send it to bob@company.com, you first send it to the mailserver for "company.com" and then it sends it on to Bob. But that's sort of an arbitrary design consideration. If you wanted to have a different MX record for "bob@company.com" than "joe@company.com", there's no fundamental reason why you couldn't, provided you were willing to completely trash and rewrite the DNS servers and MTAs.
More usefully, rather than screwing around with DNS, the best way to accomplish email portability would be to build another layer of abstraction on top of email as it currently exists. Instead of remembering people's emails, remember their real names or handles, and then have your email program consult some sort of global distributed database in order to find their email address (which would change whenever they moved ISPs or networks). Then you could change emails whenever you wanted and the people sending you mail would never know; it would all be hidden below the user level. And in fact there are some electronic-mail systems (e.g. Lotus Notes) that don't operate using user and domain names, and have their own systems allowing for more flexibility.
You need to read up on how the internet naming works before you make such ridiculous assertions. In the GP's defense, telephone numbers worked like that at one point, too. It was basically a hierarchical system, where all the numbers beginning with a certain exchange would be physically connected to that CO. It just would not have been possible to take the same number from one part of a city to another, because the infrastructure didn't support it.
Telephone number portability only became possible when the telcos added an additional level of abstraction into the call-routing systems. This wasn't trivial -- the telephone switching system as it exists today looks almost nothing like the system that was around when the telephone numbering system was conceived and evolved. (Mechanical rotary switches that turned in response to the dial on your phone producing pulses; these switches cascaded, one after another, for each digit, routing the call.)
You could probably get 'portable email addresses' with some sort of extension to DNS; basically allow DNS records for individual email addresses instead of just domains. It would be a weird use for DNS, thinking of it as we think of it now, and in fact it might overwhelm the current infrastructure, but it's not impossible. Just probably more trouble than it's worth.
I think it'd be a lot easier to just get a whole bunch of high-capacity memory cards, and then save them up until you get to an Internet cafe with a DVD burner. With the exception of some places around Everest, very few urban areas don't have at least one cafe where you can rent a computer with an optical drive for an hour. Then you can make your backup copies and mail them home -- no need to own an optical drive or carry around a lot of DVDs.
But are a decent percentage of kids (even those over 14 or so, which I don't think of as "kids" in the generally accepted sense) really out there finding people who live right near them and meeting them? I have no idea about any hard numbers, but I suspect it's really not that hard to do with Facebook and other online applications similar to it. You'd just search within the social network of your own school or region, and everyone would be close enough to meet. Even run-of-the-mill UBB forums and discussion sites have places in the 'user profile' for a location or zip code, usually, and some will even print out your closest fellow users.
I think people who've been on the Internet from the beginning (or even more than a few years) find this odd, because it's only recently that there have been a high enough density of users to make geographic searching a desirable feature. People who got on the network as adults, IMO, see it as a way of finding people that they wouldn't meet through regular physical-world interaction. I suspect kids see it as just the opposite.
You couldn't be corrupted if you didn't have a connection. It's entirely possible to have an Internet connection and not be "corrupted" by it, either. Frankly that seems a little laughable. With the possible -- and extremely rare -- exception of truly insane people coming to your house and assaulting you physically (which is far more likely a result of real-life interaction), people on the Internet only have as much power over you as you give them. The real crime to me is parents who don't teach children to compartmentalize the virtual from the real.
The whole premise seems kind of odd. If any children I might have aren't capable of running circles around any protections I might possibly devise by the time they're 11 or 12, I'm going to be sorely disappointed in them.
I would imagine it is much easier to tap an already broken cable without being noticed than to tap a working one. Sure. Particularly if you don't have a submarine for doing it underwater, undetected. The way those cables are spliced when they break (according to Neal Stephenson's article on them) is by hauling them up to the surface and doing the splice there -- slack is left in the cable for this purpose -- and then dropping it back down. But if you have a specially designed sub for doing it underwater, breaking the cable (with the inevitable result that a ship will be sent out, and the cable hauled up) is the last thing you'd want to do.
It's not a bad conspiracy theory if the Men In Black are the Russians or the Egyptians or maybe even the Israelis, pretty much anyone in the world except the U.S.
If you do want to go after the conspiracy-theory angle, who you really want to be looking at are the repair ships. If there was some common thread among all the repair efforts (same contractor doing the work, same organization bankrolling them), then I'd start to come around to the side that something nefarious might be going on. Because that's how I'd imagine someone lower-tech than the U.S. would accomplish a tap.
I think that the problem both in UK and in US is that people don't truest their government. I don't know if this is because of history of wrong doing in part of the government, or because of television and movies people automatically assume that anything new or something that makes governing efficient is an grand scale conspiracy to enslave the nation. My personal feeling is that democracy scales poorly, or at least not very smoothly, particularly in diverse populations. Democracy is predicated on the idea of compromise; of people finding a solution that works for everyone involved. If you have too many groups with radically different ideas of how the government should be run, to the point where a compromise between them can't be found, you start to get disenfranchisement and mistrust when "your" people aren't in power. The U.S. has throughout most of its history stretched the idea of democracy and compromise a long way; in some cases beyond the point where violencehasbeen required to keep it together. Even today, there are not-insignificant voting blocs in the U.S. whose idea of optimal government would look like Iran with crucifixes (and who themselves have their own bugaboos -- "communists," "socialists," "abortionists," &c.); the trust you place in government today could be empowering your oppressors tomorrow.
There isn't enough common ground in the U.S. for everyone, or perhaps even a majority, to trust their government in the way that (based on your comment) people in Finland do. Putting that much trust in a democratic government requires that you put lots of trust into your fellow voters and in the people who run for office, and American voters, by and large, are too distrustful and too cynical to do that.
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I don't think that that blacklisting will ever be that effective on a wide scale; even the commercially-supported, subscription-based blacklists inevitably miss some stuff -- really the only purpose it serves is preventing embarrassment when you type "whitehouse.com" instead of "whitehouse.gov" in front of a big audience or something. It's certainly a stupid way to try and restrict the content that your kids are seeing: if they go looking for porn, even on a blacklist-enforcing system, they're going to find it.
Setting aside arguments about technological solutions to social problems, especially parenting problems, what probably would work (at least for very young children) would be creating "kid-friendly" domains within national TLDs. An example might be ".kids.us" or ".G.rated.us" (along with ".PG.rated.us" and the like). Because it's under the national TLD you would have an easier time enforcing compliance legislatively, and it would be a purely opt-in system both for sites and for users. One method might be to require any company wanting to register a domain in the rated zone to post a large bond, which they would forfeit if they put up any material that violated the ratings guideline for that particular zone. You'd have to spell out the requirements quite specifically (none of the MPAA-style "I'll know it when I see it" subjective ratings), but once you did, you could probably get a system set up that was mostly self-policing. (Particularly if you said that half ot 25% of the bond forfeiture went to the person who reported the violation to the agency or registrar in charge.)
I'm not saying that this is a good idea overall, but I think it's a better idea than blacklists, and certainly a better idea than enforcing misguided obscenity laws on speech in general (which I don't think ought to be Constitutional in the first place). I suspect that very few organizations would bother to register for the safe zones, but at least you'd be able to point bitching parents to the fact of their existence when they complain, and then tell them to lobby entertainment companies to set up sites there. I'd rather have the pitchforks-and-torches 'think of the children' crowd out in front of the Disney HQ building than in front of Congress where there's a chance they'll encourage politicians to do something really stupid.
I'd also point out just as a followup to myself, that the assumption "when it was destroyed, pieces flew in all directions" is probably not a good one to make, either.
The way most anti-satellite and anti-ballistic-missile weapons work isn't by blowing up the target, it's basically by just positioning itself in front of the target, and letting physics do the rest. The satellite has a huge velocity in one direction, the missile a huge velocity in the other, they slam into each other -- wham -- target destroyed.
Imagining the satellite just blowing up, with pieces flying everywhere, isn't a good model for the interaction. Although it's not impossible for some pieces to end up with a greater forward velocity than the satellite originally had, conservation of momentum tells us that most of the combined mass is going to end up with a velocity substantially less than what the satellite had to begin with.
(Car analogy: A racecar is going around a track at some incredible speed, say 200MPH. You decide to kill it by taking another car, and driving it in the opposite direction, intercepting the racecar head-on. Without getting too deeply into the mechanics of the collision, the result when the two cars smash into each other is that most of the pieces are probably going to be going less than 200 MPH in the racecar's original direction. Assuming the car's fuel tank doesn't detonate and add a lot of energy to the system.)
So overall, I don't think there's much of a risk with a kinetic ASW that you're going to blast pieces into a substantially higher orbit than where the satellite was originally. If the satellite is already in a high stable orbit, you may have a big cloud of junk in space for a long time though.
I think you're maybe misunderstanding a little of how 'orbit' works. In order to go 'up' or 'down' in orbit, you really need to go faster or slower. That is to say, if you want to get into a higher orbit, you need to accelerate, and start moving faster around the Earth. You don't just push up perpendicular (normal) to the Earth's surface, that doesn't work. (Well, it will work temporarily, but it won't get you into a higher orbit. You'll just fall back down, because you're not escaping gravity. Remember, orbit is all about falling towards the Earth but moving fast enough to miss it, continuously.)
The satellite that was shot down yesterday was very, very close to the Earth's atmosphere. It was only one rotation, maybe less, away from starting to graze it (which means that it would slow down and begin to reenter and burn up). If we assume that when it was destroyed, pieces flew in all directions, some of them would have ended up with a greater net orbital velocity at the end. These pieces aren't the ones that exploded *up* (normal to the surface of the Earth), though, they're the ones that exploded *forward* (in the direction of the satellite's motion). They picked up some velocity and would end up in a slightly higher orbit as a result. I suspect it's not much of a higher orbit, though -- if anything, it probably just means they'll take a little longer to hit the atmosphere than other parts. It's tough to say without doing any calculations, but I doubt you have enough Delta-V to push the pieces into a long-term stable orbit. (Unless maybe the rocket fuel detonated.) The difference in velocities between high, long-term stable orbits and low atmosphere-grazing orbits is pretty substantial.
The pieces that flew off in other directions aren't really a huge concern, because they all end up in the same or lower orbits. Plus because you've blasted the satellite into little pieces and thus increased its surface area tremendously, it'll start slowing down on hitting the atmosphere much more quickly, and the pieces will burn up more completely on their way down.
My understanding is that what the Chinese did was quite different. The satellite they shot at was way out in a stable orbit, and thus the pieces it was reduced to stayed there as well. So now instead of a dead satellite floating around in orbit that's relatively easy to track and avoid, you have a vast cloud of small debris. Not an improvement at all.
Probably could, but the overall lifetime of the device wouldn't be as long. Springs wear out over time, especially under heavy loads. The springs used in garage doors to assist you in pulling the door up (which were more common before everyone started installing power-operated doors) wear out after 10-20 years, for instance. I suspect each one of those springs -- there are typically 2 on a door -- each support 50 pounds or so.
I think part of the beauty of the mechanism is that it's really robust and long-lasting.
Just thinking about how you could build such a thing, I bet you could make a machine that had multiple ways of recharging/resetting it. My thought would be to have a lightweight 'sled' with a heavy removable weight on it. When the heavy weight is removed from the sled, a very small counterweight pulls it back up to the top of its track, so you can place the heavy weight back on. That's one way of resetting it, and the easiest provided you could pick up and lift the weight at once. The alternative would be to put a small crank on the sled's counterweight wire, which would allow you to slowly crank up the sled, with the counterweight on it. You'd end up doing the same amount of work but with a much smaller amount of force, due to the mechanical advantage of the crank.
That arrangement completely avoids using springs (it would only use counterweights) and would probably last a long time. I'm not sure whether it would be long enough to build some sort of 'Clock of the Long Now'-type device, but it would probably last a few human generations.
The GP does have a legitimate point though; defending against MITM attacks isn't trivial, particularly in a poorly-defined network with lots of transient nodes like P2P.
How do you tell if you're connecting to a 'legitimate' torrent node, which is just some Random User's PC somewhere, or to Comcast's DPI system that's purporting to be Random User?
Having everyone generate a self-signed client certificate isn't enough, because Comcast can just generate their own as well and play MITM still. You don't just need client certificates, you need client certificates and a trust infrastructure to tell you which clients are worth talking to and which are Comcast attempting monkey business on your connection. And you need to do this without creating a single point of failure that the authorities can go after, a la Napster.
I don't think that's an unsolvable problem but it's certainly not a trivial one. It's a problem that has been 'solved' with Web of Trust models and Trusted Third Party certificate authorities, but it would definitely make getting up and running on Bittorrent much more complicated than it currently is. (I think if the situation gets that adversarial, then the networks for illicit/copyvio material will become invitation-only darknets, where the only way you'd get access would be by getting your certificate vetted and signed by another member, out-of-band. Put any social network under enough pressure and they will inevitably revert to working based on personal trust.)
But before or at the same time this sort of cryptography comes into play I think you'll see a lot more obfuscation. Preventing MITM attacks is one thing, but a successful BT network also needs to keep Comcast from just shutting down all the connections by injecting RSTs or malformed/mis-signed/MITMed packets into them. You have to not only protect against content compromise, but against DOS as well, and I think that'll be more of a cat-and-mouse game. I still think the advantage is Bittorrent's, and as long as people are transferring large quantities of data (especially encrypted data) for purposes other than Bittorrent, there will be something to hide it in. But it's going to be a war of adaptability -- who can change faster to parry the other.
Comcast has a lot of money, but their resources aren't infinite. If there's anything we've learned from the past 10 years, it's that the amount of free time geeks are willing to spend on hard problems is very, very large. If the Bittorrent client/network developers and users can make the cost of participating in the obfuscation arms race higher than just carrying the traffic as a neutral carrier, I doubt Comcast will burn money simply to prove a point. While they're clearly evil, I don't think they're irrationally evil.
If you're injecting traffic, certainly you can conduct a MITM against the key exchange and from there get the block cipher's key, but only if the two parties are being sloppy (for SSL, this would take the form of ignoring a warning about a certificate mismatch). Purely passive monitoring wouldn't get you the block cipher key, though. If it did, there wouldn't be much of a point to the whole PK business.
SSL as it is frequently implemented today (without authenticated client certificates) is definitely over-reliant on good user practice and on not mindlessly clicking "Trust" when a dialog pops up, and thus doesn't offer as much protection against MITM as it should, but it's not trivially breakable via passive interception.
You sound like you know what you're talking about in other posts so I'm assuming you're just misspeaking here, but as written that comment seems incorrect.
It was always a niche skill, possessed by only a tiny fraction of the population. There are probably more assembly language programmers today than there were forty years ago. And assembly language is used for the same things today as it was back then. If people want to say that today, programmers use languages like PHP and Java for creating web-applications not Assembly, then that is fine. Assembly never was used for creating web-applications because they didn't exist back then. Assembly has neither diminished in popularity nor entirely been superceded in its area. Shouldn't be on that list. I think this is an excellent point and one that really doesn't get mentioned enough whenever the topic of "dying" technical skills comes up.
Some skills just seem like they're obsolete or dying because the proportion of people within a field that have them is getting smaller -- but they're really stronger than ever when you look at the raw numbers.
I agree with the parent and fully suspect that there are more people who understand x86 assembler today than there were at the perceived 'height' of assembler, back in the early 90s. There are just that many more people in the IT field. Learning assembler, if you happen to be interested, is also a lot easier now than it was then. Today, computers are basically a mainstream subject, plus you have all the information available on the Internet. In 1990, finding a good book on assembler programming would probably have required a trip to a large university's library.
Obviously there are some skills that really are on their way out, or will be when the current crop of people who truly understand them either retire or die. But in many cases I think it's easy to confuse the S/N ratio in a particular sphere with the number of people who actually are familiar with a topic.
It seems like something that OkCupid might be interested in. Compared to (my non-user's perception of) Match.com, eHarmony, and some of the other big players, they (seem to) cater to a younger, slightly geekier clientèle. There's a big emphasis on 'compatibility' matching through online quizzes and the like, and I assume you can set hard-and-fast criteria as well. They also don't use a subscription-based business model, or pay-to-contact.
If Match and Yahoo are making money hand over fist as-is, they really have no reason to do anything, and I suspect any major improvement would be a hard sell. But a site like OkCupid that depends on a constant flow of new members, rather than squeezing membership fees out of existing ones, might be more receptive. Anything that improves 'match quality' and overall user experience is going to help them dramatically.
I'm not sure that a Slashdot FPP was the appropriate venue for this essay, but I think the idea has a certain amount of merit.
The $1201 is $1 more than the next-most-profitable thing the engineer could do with his time as an alternative. That's the only cost that really matters.
If you're talking about a society, all compensation above and beyond that point is waste -- it's not serving any purpose because the task would have gotten done for less anyway. So allowing the engineer to charge everyone $3/yr from now until the end of time is a poor option. It's creating a huge misallocation of resources.
There are two prices in every market: the minimum that the seller is willing to part with the good (in this case, their time/labor) for, and the maximum that the buyer is willing to pay. For reasons that I'm not entirely certain of, somehow the idea has crept into the public consciousness that every seller deserves to receive the latter price, for whatever they're selling. This is crap. In a competitive, ideal market, the prices tend down towards the minimum price, not upwards towards the maximum.
When you start to see prices tending up, and sticking at the maximum that consumers are willing to pay for a good, that's a sign of some sort of market failure (e.g. monopoly). It's not, in general, a desirable thing.
Well currently the state of the art is in favor of encryption, rather than cryptanalysis, so I don't think that the advantage is automatically Comcast's. They could probably do some fairly sophisticated traffic analysis, but at the end of the day, they're not actually going to break the encryption and get at the contents, and they can't block all encrypted traffic because it's too critical for other purposes.
They can force the BitTorrent devs to produce a new version every few months, but in the long run I think they're on the losing end of the war -- if they want to stay in the data-transportation business, and assuming there aren't any major breakthroughs in cryptanalysis that render modern public-key technologies useless.
In other words, don't depend on a derivative-based business model, because there's no way to make it work when anybody can just make copies for free, down the road.
Instead, just work like any other kind of skilled tradesman or professional. (Or, perhaps a more germane example, like a consultant.) If somebody wants you to design an automobile, bill them for the cost of designing an automobile. Whatever they want to do with the plans once they have them, is their business. They can make copies of them, eat them, use them for expensive designer toilet paper. Doesn't matter -- you've gotten your paycheck and have moved on to the next project.
The whole 'fight' about IP is mostly because people are used to, and have built corporate empires on, the idea of derivatives and annuitized incomes rather than simple payment-for-labor. This annuitization/derivatives model is fairly new (within the last few hundred years), and is certainly not a requirement for civilization, or for that matter the continued production of art, science, or technology.
The marginal cost is so low it's essentially zero. Not exactly zero, but really, really small.
Anyway, this is sort of a silly argument; it's not that anyone is unwilling to pay for the actual transportation of the bits across the network. What the whole copyright/IP argument revolves around is the ability for an author or creator to sell identical copies of the same work over and over again. It's the work that's at issue, not the cost of delivering it.
To further torture the car analogy, if you could magically turn one car into two cars, the value of the car itself would quickly tend towards zero. However, someone wishing to acquire a car would still have to pay for their free copy-of-a-car to be moved from wherever it was copied to their driveway. The transportation cost and value of the good itself are separate issues.
Look, I use Office, Word particularly, every day. I work in an office where people use it every day. We are, by any definition of the term, "everyday" users. And I have not met anyone in my office who thinks that the ribbons are a step up from menus, or that the auto-hide feature was a Good Thing. (In fact, I discovered that the office secretary swears like a longshoreman; I suppose that's worth something.)
This is, I believe, one of Microsoft's key problems. They design their products around hypothetical users, rather than real ones. If they'd gone out and actually talked to people who use their software, I think they'd have discovered that most people are pretty satisfied with it overall, and although there are perhaps some minor tweaks or additional features that could be added here and there, virtually nobody wants to re-learn their entire fucking word processor. But instead they have some flawed idea of a non-existent 'everyday' user, who's simultaneously dumb as a rock but also totally willing to sit down and relearn a completely new interface just so they can turn on Track Changes or change the inter-paragraph spacing.
It's poor design, it's unnecessary, and it's also arrogant.
That's a user interface paradigm that's decades old now, and just because the bunch of monkeys coding IE think it's fun to throw it out the window doesn't mean it's a good idea. Microsoft has the anti-Midas touch for interfaces these days anyway (cf. Vista generally, that new Office abomination generally, drop-down menus that hide half their contents for no particular reason, etc.). Emulating them would be a terrible idea.
Disposable addresses are a system that works completely within the existing standard for e-mail. I use them on my server, with no other filtering mechanism whatsoever, and I almost never get spam or phishing e-mails. I think the response would be that any system which allows a random user to set up their own mailserver on a dynamic IP address also allows spam. Since there are a lot more people annoyed by spam than there are people interested in running a mailserver as a hobby, it's home-mailservers that get the axe.
That said, if you bought your own domain (which would probably only cost you $10 or $15) and had DynDNS.org do the DNS hosting, you could set up all the TXT records you want while still having it pointed to your dynamic IP address. That would let you set up DKIM and SPF, so you'd be just as legitimate as the big guys.
Except, of course, that you'd have an IP in the dynamic range from your ISP, which might cause all of your outgoing email to be marked as spam, just on principle. Time to use a smarthost.
You want software? Open up Synaptic, scroll through the list, click on what you want, hit Install. Done. No discs, no installers, nothing. Just one place for all your software. Changing repos is even very simple, and done entirely through checkboxes and a GUI. And of course, none of it costs anything and the dependencies are all managed automagically.
Mac OS X's installation / package management is nice (and I would argue nicer than Windows, although it's kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other) but Synaptic/apt-get are head and shoulders above either.
It wouldn't be impossible to create something like the Debian repository for commercial software (really, it's not dissimilar with what most video game systems use for their pay-to-download games), but I don't think that even Microsoft has the clout that would be required to force developers to give up their current distribution networks and switch to one that was managed front-to-back by Microsoft. It's really only something that can work if it's evolved with the OS.
When I've shown people Debian over the years, the software installation procedure is almost always one of its most impressive points. You only need one piece of installation media, ever, and you have access to an entire ecosystem of software, covering almost every conceivable task. That's not an insignificant advantage.
Over time, telephone call routing got more flexible. I'm not familiar with exactly how it works today, but there is obviously another layer, probably many layers, beneath the "phone number" you use and remember. That has been abstracted away from the actual 'hardware' and can be assigned arbitrarily.
Email addresses are currently hierarchical, in the same way that phone numbers used to be (under exchanges). If you want to send it to bob@company.com, you first send it to the mailserver for "company.com" and then it sends it on to Bob. But that's sort of an arbitrary design consideration. If you wanted to have a different MX record for "bob@company.com" than "joe@company.com", there's no fundamental reason why you couldn't, provided you were willing to completely trash and rewrite the DNS servers and MTAs.
More usefully, rather than screwing around with DNS, the best way to accomplish email portability would be to build another layer of abstraction on top of email as it currently exists. Instead of remembering people's emails, remember their real names or handles, and then have your email program consult some sort of global distributed database in order to find their email address (which would change whenever they moved ISPs or networks). Then you could change emails whenever you wanted and the people sending you mail would never know; it would all be hidden below the user level. And in fact there are some electronic-mail systems (e.g. Lotus Notes) that don't operate using user and domain names, and have their own systems allowing for more flexibility.
Telephone number portability only became possible when the telcos added an additional level of abstraction into the call-routing systems. This wasn't trivial -- the telephone switching system as it exists today looks almost nothing like the system that was around when the telephone numbering system was conceived and evolved. (Mechanical rotary switches that turned in response to the dial on your phone producing pulses; these switches cascaded, one after another, for each digit, routing the call.)
You could probably get 'portable email addresses' with some sort of extension to DNS; basically allow DNS records for individual email addresses instead of just domains. It would be a weird use for DNS, thinking of it as we think of it now, and in fact it might overwhelm the current infrastructure, but it's not impossible. Just probably more trouble than it's worth.
I think it'd be a lot easier to just get a whole bunch of high-capacity memory cards, and then save them up until you get to an Internet cafe with a DVD burner. With the exception of some places around Everest, very few urban areas don't have at least one cafe where you can rent a computer with an optical drive for an hour. Then you can make your backup copies and mail them home -- no need to own an optical drive or carry around a lot of DVDs.
I think people who've been on the Internet from the beginning (or even more than a few years) find this odd, because it's only recently that there have been a high enough density of users to make geographic searching a desirable feature. People who got on the network as adults, IMO, see it as a way of finding people that they wouldn't meet through regular physical-world interaction. I suspect kids see it as just the opposite.
The whole premise seems kind of odd. If any children I might have aren't capable of running circles around any protections I might possibly devise by the time they're 11 or 12, I'm going to be sorely disappointed in them.
It's not a bad conspiracy theory if the Men In Black are the Russians or the Egyptians or maybe even the Israelis, pretty much anyone in the world except the U.S.
If you do want to go after the conspiracy-theory angle, who you really want to be looking at are the repair ships. If there was some common thread among all the repair efforts (same contractor doing the work, same organization bankrolling them), then I'd start to come around to the side that something nefarious might be going on. Because that's how I'd imagine someone lower-tech than the U.S. would accomplish a tap.
There isn't enough common ground in the U.S. for everyone, or perhaps even a majority, to trust their government in the way that (based on your comment) people in Finland do. Putting that much trust in a democratic government requires that you put lots of trust into your fellow voters and in the people who run for office, and American voters, by and large, are too distrustful and too cynical to do that.
And on the whole, I think that's a good thing.