Right... and as evidence you link to an Anthro course at Wesleyan University. Anthropology is one of the most left-leaning departments at every university I've ever heard about (particularly the "social anthropology" side), and Wesleyan in particular has a reputation for being extremely liberally biased itself. (Ever seen "PCU"? It was primarily based on Wesleyan.) That course is going to be about as 'fair and balanced' as the Rush Limbaugh Show.
You might as well link directly to PETA. I'm not saying that the point is totally devoid of merit, but if those are the only people discussing it... excuse me if I fail to take it seriously.
The Japanese auto industry is superior to the American one, for a variety of reasons most of which are not really germane to this discussion (I blame a lot of it on the trade unions in the US not allowing the sort of cost-cutting and automated production lines that are common in Japan and in the Japanese-owned US factories, but that's for another time). But the point is that in terms of passenger car sales, the Japanese auto industry is bigger than the US industry. Yes, the American companies are still bigger (last time I checked anyway) than most of the Japanese companies, but a lot of their revenue comes from trucks, and the development work there isn't necessarily applicable to passenger cars. The Japanese companies pour far more engineering resources and talent into the design of their cars than the American companies do, thus they deliver a superior product. It's not a case of "Japanese engineers are better than American engineers."
The converse ("American aeronautical engineers are superior to Japanese engineers") is also untrue. The US arguably produces better aircraft and air-weapons systems than anyone else because it spends an obscene amount of money on the field. Far in excess of what any other country spends, either in terms of GDP percentage or absolute value. This means that the number of people working in the field is much greater than anyplace else. (You could probably argue that for the money spent, the US isn't nearly as superior as it ought to be, which might be indicative of a lack of innovation stemming from the lack of competition in the field, and I'd probably agree with you.)
So really, to correct your analogy, the US military-aeronautical industry is more akin to the Japanese car manufacturers than it is to the American ones.
Could some other country or group of countries produce a superior fighter aircraft? Most definitely -- but I'm not sure that there is anyone, perhaps save China or India, that really has the motivation to. It's a question of resource allotment; in the US, almost all of the R&D money in aeronautics goes to military research, while in Europe I bet a higher percentage of the available aeronautical engineers are working on civilian aircraft. Thus it's not really surprising to me that Airbus passenger jets are outselling Boeings; Airbus isn't taking all of its best people and having them work on classified military projects, Boeing probably is.
It would also be easy enough to take a second credit card reader, velcro it to the side of the monitor, and then swipe every credit card through that a few times. All you'd have to do is put on a frustrated face when it didn't work, and then swipe it through the real credit-card acceptor that was actually connected to the machine. I bet most people wouldn't ever even notice, I've seen lots of POS systems that have multiple scanners attached to them (e.g., one built into the keyboard, one up on the monitor).
Heck you can make people do it themselves -- put the fake one on the counter and when people go to pay with a credit card point to it, people will swipe... let them do it a few times, then when it doesn't work, offer to scan it on the one attached to the register. This has happened to me many times at the grocery store, it would never be questioned.
People are very cavalier about swiping their credit/debit/ATM cards -- a few years I saw a TV station in a major city (I think it was NYC) put up a kiosk on the street near an ATM with a reader on it and a sign that said "Clean your credit card's magnetic strip here!" People ran their cards through without even thinking twice about it. (Heck, you could write "Credit Card Degausser" on the front and I bet some idiots would use it.)
Agreed. I wish there was a way to do the opposite, block out corporate PR fluff pieces and press release junk. I guess it all depends on what sort of stuff you're looking for; one man's "clutter" is another man's "content."
I've always thought that it would be nice if there was a button next to each result on a search engine's results page that would block that domain from future searches. Or maybe not domain-level blocking, but perhaps to block that page, and everything that links to it, or that's linked to from it. Or perhaps just downgrade that page in the search results, and downgrade each page that's linked to or from it by a certain amount, depending on how many "hops" out from the original page it is. (So if you click the "This is stupid" button, it gets a -10 rating, pages that link to it get -5, pages that are connected to those pages get -3, etc.) With a few clicks you'd be able to start knocking out big sections of the web that are tightly linked together from your results.
Over time, if the search engine tracked your preferences, the version of the internet that you would see in your results might be totally different from what someone with different preferences would see. And really, that seems to be what people are asking for -- not everyone wants to see the same Internet.
I don't think it's a straw man at all. When you scan your credit card into the gas pump, the number still goes out on a network somewhere. In fact it probably goes over the Internet at some point, probably using much the same strength of encryption that you'd use if you typed it into a web form at Amazon.com.
By not using the Internet the only security you're really gaining is an invunerability to phishing schemes that occur over email, since you're not using email and the Web. It doesn't give you the opportunity to compromise your own security, but there are still plenty of ways for other people to do it.
Just because you don't have a computer at home doesn't mean your data isn't going over the Internet, and doesn't make you invunerable to identity theft, especially mass theft, like the "disappearance" of backup tape sets which can potentially contain tens of thousands of customer records.
The data on your disk is encrypted, plus files are broken between multiple machines. This keeps your data secure when it's been stored on others' computers, and also gives you plausible deniability as to what you're holding. It's similar to the way FreeNet works.
DIBS uses GPG for encryption, and I'm not sure what cipher it uses, or whether you can choose one, but most of the commonly-used GPG settings ought to be good at least for a few years. It's not perfect forward secrecy or anything, since I suppose someone could retain your DIBS data and then decrypt it at some point when breaking 128-bit AES is child's play, but it's not trivial.
I think though that the problem you bring up as a social issue is quite significant though. How do you keep such a system from being flooded with loads of porn and MP3s that people just don't want to keep on their own machines? I don't know what sort of verification DIBS uses to make sure that you're hosting as much space as you're taking from the community, but it seems like there's a risk that risk that somebody will make a hacked client and try to "leech" space from other systems.
Actually on a Mac what you can do is make a free-floating encrypted Sparse image. It's the same way that the OS handles FileVault encrypted home folders. It's superior to just making an encrypted DMG, because it's readable and writable like a regular filesystem, plus it can expand and contract depending on what's stored in it.
It doesn't have the steganographic or deniability benefits of Truecrypt, but it's good encrypted storage. (Plus if you're ultra-paranoid you can put it inside your FileVault encrypted home folder, so that the data on disk is encrypted twice.) Plus I don't think you need to be an Administrator to do it, so it could be useful if you only have a user account on a system and don't trust the person with the master password.
The only "trick" is that Disk Copy will not make one, you need to do it from the Terminal with hdiutil.
Where "SecureImage" is the name of the file you want to create and 5GB is the maximum size (which is not necessarily the space it will take on disk).
There are a few caveats though. You can't share it with someone who doesn't have a Mac, hdiutil is not open source and there is not to my knowledge a Linux version, and I'm not sure what happens if you try to copy it to a FAT filesystem and back. I've copied one to a Linux fileserver (EXT2) and back and it seemed to survive okay, but I have always been told to use caution when moving sparse files around.
(I originally learned about this procedure from this page, so all credit to them.)
I wonder if you could produce a product that, out of the box, would only transcode DVDs that didn't have CSS applied (home movies on DVD-R, etc.) but was built using a system-on-a-chip that stored its programming in a way that would let it be re-flashed. So you could download a new image ("for use in Sweden only") and re-flash it so that it would do the De-CSSing in software. It seems like this would be at least technically feasible, especially if you used ASICs for MPEG-2 decoding and MPEG-4 encoding, both of which I'm pretty sure exist right now, the MPEG-2 decoders are in every DVD player around, and the MPEG-4 encoders are in lots of flash-based camcorders. That way the SoC would only have to do control functions, and DeCSS.
I suppose a company would have to really have balls of steel (and an army of lawyers) to bring something like that out on the U.S. market. I bet it would be popular in Asia, though, and the Chinese don't have a whole lot of copyright laws last time I checked.
It's going to be a sad day when Americans are smuggling technology out of China and into the US in order to use their own electronic devices, but I could definitely see it happening in the near future. Maybe we can set up a US/China technology exchange program -- 'I'll trade you one uncensored Wikipedia snapshot for an un-crippled DVD ripper.'
If you look at the box an iPod comes in, or at any of Apple's ads for the iPod, they have a definite trademarked logo. It's the word "iPod" written in a particular sans-serif font.
And at least on my 3G unit, it's printed on the back of the device itself, right under the Apple logo. Maybe they've stopped doing this on the newer ones.
And printed down at the bottom of the back side, near the FCC ID, it reads "Copyright 2003 Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved." (Actually it uses the Copyright symbol but I think Slashdot will eat that.)
So yeah I'm pretty sure they're going to have to change that part of the iUpload's logo. Although Apple does have a licensing program that lets you use various trademarks, I very much doubt that they would let someone incorporate an Apple trademark into the name of a third-party device. It might make people think it was actually an Apple product by mistake.
I see your point, and I think the GM's original action was understandable, I just think that Blizzard's attitude after the fact (not really giving him the time of day, just writing back in form letters) was inappropriate. If using a programmable keyboard in this way is botting, then they should come out and clearly say that, and preferably make a clarification to their TOS or in the official forums.
I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for this guy, but on the other hand I think Blizzard could have dealt with it a lot better and in a much more transparent way also.
I think the physical detachment from the combat zone makes a robot operator a lot more likely to be selective about the decision to open fire than someone who's actually there, getting shot at.
Imagine a situation where you're actually a soldier on the ground, and you suddenly start taking fire from a building. You get pinned down or cut off from obvious avenues of retreat. What do you do? I think the obvious reaction is to light the building up; try to achieve fire suppression, get yourself room to maneuver and destroy the target or move away, maybe call in artillery or air support if it's available. A whole lot of training time and discipline goes into making that decision, and even then it's a place where mistakes (understandably) can be made.
A machine operator who is physically distant from the situation has the opportunity to make a less emotional decision. They don't have to deal with bullets flying over their head; they may even have, because of the physical robustness of the machine, time to sit around and think about what course of action to take. You can be a lot more mission-focused than all but the most suicidal of soldiers when you don't have to worry about your own safety.
You see the detachment from the action as a bad thing, I see it as an advantage. Emotions: fear, panic, anger, lead to mistakes and poor judgement, poor judgment gets friendlies killed. Certainly there are some decisions that can be best made by a person with actual 'boots on the ground,' but there is a lot to be said for insulating decisionmakers from physical danger.
Also, I'm willing to bet that there will be more documentation of robot kills than when a human soldier makes a kill.
Having a remote-controlled robot implies some sort of vision system (e.g. a video feed), which is pretty easy to record. Even if you don't record the video feed all the time (which given the military's thirst for data I think is actually pretty likely), it's easy to have a continuous buffer of 5 - 10 minutes that would get saved when a command to fire a weapon was given. There's precident for this -- think of the gun cameras on WWII fighter aircraft.
That way the robot operator always has something to CYA with, and you have a lot of good material to use in training and during the AAR/hotwash. You don't have fuzzy situations where five different guys remember five different things, and it's nearly impossible to tell whether the ROE were followed.
No the problem is with the programmable keyboard and macros he was using, not that he was running WINE.
In fact, as far as I know, I don't think that they can tell whether you're using WINE or a legitimate Windows version, it ought to look exactly the same to them from the server-side.
Before I got a Mac that could handle the requirements, I used to play WoW using Cedega, and once I tweaked it enough to get it working, never experienced any problems. But then again by WoW standards I'm a very "casual player."
There is a link in TFA, allegedly to a post on the European forums where a Blizzard rep (I think) says explicitly that programmable keyboards are allowed.
This is the link, however it's giving me a "service unavailable" message. I'm not sure if that's because I'm not authorized, or because I'm in the US and trying to get to the European forums, or what. If anyone can access it and quote their answer, I'd be very interested.
Besides, Blizzard employees have stated in a blue post on the EU forums:
"We have looked into this matter and haven't found reasonable cause to disallow usage of its functions for use in world of Warcraft. We do, however, reserve the right to come back to this statement at a later point, at which we will inform our players."
It seems like it was definitely the programmable keyboard and not WINE that set off their bot detectors.
Apparently the macros on the keyboard were making him do repeated actions, and somehow this was interpreted by Blizzard as "unattended" operation. (Why they think it was unattended I don't know, TFA doesn't say exactly... why didn't they just message him when they saw the odd behavior? Or do something else to verify it's a human on the other end?)
Anyway, a quote from TFA: "So it seems that if I use a programmable keyboard I am botting. However I suspect their 3rd party detection software saw a very strange enviroinment in which WoW was running; that combined with the repetitive task of healing myself, switching weapons, and casting Hex of Weakness programmed in my keyboard, I am viewed as a bot."
So it seems other people using WoW under WINE are safe, you'd just better not get too trigger-happy with the keyboard macros.
What's really the problem here is that there seems to be a huge disconnect between official Blizzard policy (programmable keyboards are okay, this has been explicitly said by one of their reps in the forums, according to the article) and what the GMs did. And after the guy got banned, they seem to just be just stonewalling him and hoping he'll go away, giving him a lot of "the matter is closed" crap. I have to salute his perserverence, though, in spite of this.
It's a good concept -- everyone gives some space on their local drive, and in exchange gets to break up their files and store them across others' systems, in encrypted form.
It seems like another one of those projects where the most difficult part is going to be boot-strapping the userbase and community necessary to create the pool of always-available hardware resources so the thing will function. I haven't looked into it too much, maybe it's already there.
Plus the message on the blog when the guy shut it down was obviously intended to cause a reader to draw the conclusion that it had been shut down by the government.
It's kind of like faking being hit by a car and then when people run out to help you, jumping up and screaming "fooled you!" Okay, so nice job, you fooled us, but only because we gave you more credit for not being a dumbass than we probably should have.
He's proved nothing except to do damage to the free speech movement in China.
What makes you think that wasn't his goal from the very beginning?
The only effect of this -- if it actually has any real effect, which I doubt -- would be to make Western reporters couch their statements with more uncertainties. So instead of "the Chinese government shut down xyz blog and dragged his family off to a re-education center," they'll say "xyz blog has been shut down, possibly by the Chinese government, and the author and his family are now missing, presumed to be in a re-education center." The latter is better journalism anyway, but to most readers it will convey exactly the same point.
It just makes Chinese people seem like less reliable witnesses, and really there's only one entity that I think would want that, and that's the PRC government.
Actually despite the large amounts of effort that Communist governments spend on propaganda, they don't seem to do a terribly good job. Although most of the Cold War occured without me paying a whole lot of attention, I recall my parents making much mirth of the various Soviet "Five-Year Plans," which seemed to always come out 3 or 4 years after the last one had. The perception wasn't of a well-oiled machine, but of chaos and disorganization.
In any case, the point is that these "vast Communist propaganda machines," though they may employ a lot of people, aren't nearly the Orwellian mind-control enterprises that they're sometimes made out to be. At least to people living on the outside and looking in, they frequently seem inept and/or comical.
Of course to someone who can get no other information except what is filtered through said propaganda machine, it might be a lot less amusing.
It's so much more worse than drugs, from an enforcement perspective. Drugs are at the end of the day a physical commodity. If you have a bag of weed, you can't give me that bag of weed and still smoke it yourself. With data, you can. You can share it with as many friends as you want, and not change what you have yourself.
The analogy of the war on drugs is one we ought to keep in mind, because it puts in perspective exactly how ridiculous stopping the flow of information is.
No, these guys are more like the stores that sell the little razorblade devices that shoplifters use to slash the shrinkwrap on CDs at the record store very quickly, and pocket the disc. (They were a whole lot more common before a lot of stores went to using those hard shells that have to be broken open by the cashier.) Or the head shop that sells crack pipes "for tobacco use only."
They're not actually doing the stealing/drugs for you, but they're clearly facilitating it.
That said, I don't really give a damn. I can't work up much moral outrage for some kid who rips off Vivendi or Universal, whether its using bittorrent or a tiny sliver of metal. Leech it on your parents' cable modem, or stuff it in your pants, the only question I have is whether by pirating their media, are you still indirectly supporting their grip on content creation and distribution, by giving them free advertising and mindshare. I think the jury's still out on that.
But I save my outrage for crimes that have actual victims, of which there are far too many anyway.
You're not the only one who was given pause by that.
Why do I suspect that a search engine backed by the Chinese government might not give you the helpful "Links have been removed by order of some guy with a gun" messages at the bottom of censored results?
Actually I've been surprised for a while that the PRC didn't just start it's own search engine and blocking everything else. (Although I guess why bother, when you can get U.S. companies to bid against each other to do your censorship.)
However, they do seem to return Wikipedia links without problems (in fact, the Wikipedia article on "Tiananmen Square" is the #1 result when you search for that term, or several common misspellings) and the Wikipedia article is included in the "Acoona Answers" result on the term.
Slashdot Mirror
Right ... and as evidence you link to an Anthro course at Wesleyan University. Anthropology is one of the most left-leaning departments at every university I've ever heard about (particularly the "social anthropology" side), and Wesleyan in particular has a reputation for being extremely liberally biased itself. (Ever seen "PCU"? It was primarily based on Wesleyan.) That course is going to be about as 'fair and balanced' as the Rush Limbaugh Show.
... excuse me if I fail to take it seriously.
You might as well link directly to PETA. I'm not saying that the point is totally devoid of merit, but if those are the only people discussing it
Your analogy is all wrong.
The Japanese auto industry is superior to the American one, for a variety of reasons most of which are not really germane to this discussion (I blame a lot of it on the trade unions in the US not allowing the sort of cost-cutting and automated production lines that are common in Japan and in the Japanese-owned US factories, but that's for another time). But the point is that in terms of passenger car sales, the Japanese auto industry is bigger than the US industry. Yes, the American companies are still bigger (last time I checked anyway) than most of the Japanese companies, but a lot of their revenue comes from trucks, and the development work there isn't necessarily applicable to passenger cars. The Japanese companies pour far more engineering resources and talent into the design of their cars than the American companies do, thus they deliver a superior product. It's not a case of "Japanese engineers are better than American engineers."
The converse ("American aeronautical engineers are superior to Japanese engineers") is also untrue. The US arguably produces better aircraft and air-weapons systems than anyone else because it spends an obscene amount of money on the field. Far in excess of what any other country spends, either in terms of GDP percentage or absolute value. This means that the number of people working in the field is much greater than anyplace else. (You could probably argue that for the money spent, the US isn't nearly as superior as it ought to be, which might be indicative of a lack of innovation stemming from the lack of competition in the field, and I'd probably agree with you.)
So really, to correct your analogy, the US military-aeronautical industry is more akin to the Japanese car manufacturers than it is to the American ones.
Could some other country or group of countries produce a superior fighter aircraft? Most definitely -- but I'm not sure that there is anyone, perhaps save China or India, that really has the motivation to. It's a question of resource allotment; in the US, almost all of the R&D money in aeronautics goes to military research, while in Europe I bet a higher percentage of the available aeronautical engineers are working on civilian aircraft. Thus it's not really surprising to me that Airbus passenger jets are outselling Boeings; Airbus isn't taking all of its best people and having them work on classified military projects, Boeing probably is.
It would also be easy enough to take a second credit card reader, velcro it to the side of the monitor, and then swipe every credit card through that a few times. All you'd have to do is put on a frustrated face when it didn't work, and then swipe it through the real credit-card acceptor that was actually connected to the machine. I bet most people wouldn't ever even notice, I've seen lots of POS systems that have multiple scanners attached to them (e.g., one built into the keyboard, one up on the monitor).
... let them do it a few times, then when it doesn't work, offer to scan it on the one attached to the register. This has happened to me many times at the grocery store, it would never be questioned.
Heck you can make people do it themselves -- put the fake one on the counter and when people go to pay with a credit card point to it, people will swipe
People are very cavalier about swiping their credit/debit/ATM cards -- a few years I saw a TV station in a major city (I think it was NYC) put up a kiosk on the street near an ATM with a reader on it and a sign that said "Clean your credit card's magnetic strip here!" People ran their cards through without even thinking twice about it. (Heck, you could write "Credit Card Degausser" on the front and I bet some idiots would use it.)
Agreed. I wish there was a way to do the opposite, block out corporate PR fluff pieces and press release junk. I guess it all depends on what sort of stuff you're looking for; one man's "clutter" is another man's "content."
I've always thought that it would be nice if there was a button next to each result on a search engine's results page that would block that domain from future searches. Or maybe not domain-level blocking, but perhaps to block that page, and everything that links to it, or that's linked to from it. Or perhaps just downgrade that page in the search results, and downgrade each page that's linked to or from it by a certain amount, depending on how many "hops" out from the original page it is. (So if you click the "This is stupid" button, it gets a -10 rating, pages that link to it get -5, pages that are connected to those pages get -3, etc.) With a few clicks you'd be able to start knocking out big sections of the web that are tightly linked together from your results.
Over time, if the search engine tracked your preferences, the version of the internet that you would see in your results might be totally different from what someone with different preferences would see. And really, that seems to be what people are asking for -- not everyone wants to see the same Internet.
I don't think it's a straw man at all. When you scan your credit card into the gas pump, the number still goes out on a network somewhere. In fact it probably goes over the Internet at some point, probably using much the same strength of encryption that you'd use if you typed it into a web form at Amazon.com.
By not using the Internet the only security you're really gaining is an invunerability to phishing schemes that occur over email, since you're not using email and the Web. It doesn't give you the opportunity to compromise your own security, but there are still plenty of ways for other people to do it.
Just because you don't have a computer at home doesn't mean your data isn't going over the Internet, and doesn't make you invunerable to identity theft, especially mass theft, like the "disappearance" of backup tape sets which can potentially contain tens of thousands of customer records.
The data on your disk is encrypted, plus files are broken between multiple machines. This keeps your data secure when it's been stored on others' computers, and also gives you plausible deniability as to what you're holding. It's similar to the way FreeNet works.
DIBS uses GPG for encryption, and I'm not sure what cipher it uses, or whether you can choose one, but most of the commonly-used GPG settings ought to be good at least for a few years. It's not perfect forward secrecy or anything, since I suppose someone could retain your DIBS data and then decrypt it at some point when breaking 128-bit AES is child's play, but it's not trivial.
I think though that the problem you bring up as a social issue is quite significant though. How do you keep such a system from being flooded with loads of porn and MP3s that people just don't want to keep on their own machines? I don't know what sort of verification DIBS uses to make sure that you're hosting as much space as you're taking from the community, but it seems like there's a risk that risk that somebody will make a hacked client and try to "leech" space from other systems.
This is true.
Actually on a Mac what you can do is make a free-floating encrypted Sparse image. It's the same way that the OS handles FileVault encrypted home folders. It's superior to just making an encrypted DMG, because it's readable and writable like a regular filesystem, plus it can expand and contract depending on what's stored in it.
It doesn't have the steganographic or deniability benefits of Truecrypt, but it's good encrypted storage. (Plus if you're ultra-paranoid you can put it inside your FileVault encrypted home folder, so that the data on disk is encrypted twice.) Plus I don't think you need to be an Administrator to do it, so it could be useful if you only have a user account on a system and don't trust the person with the master password.
The only "trick" is that Disk Copy will not make one, you need to do it from the Terminal with hdiutil.
% hdiutil create SecureSparse -size 5g -encryption -type SPARSE -fs HFS+ -volname SecureImage
Where "SecureImage" is the name of the file you want to create and 5GB is the maximum size (which is not necessarily the space it will take on disk).
There are a few caveats though. You can't share it with someone who doesn't have a Mac, hdiutil is not open source and there is not to my knowledge a Linux version, and I'm not sure what happens if you try to copy it to a FAT filesystem and back. I've copied one to a Linux fileserver (EXT2) and back and it seemed to survive okay, but I have always been told to use caution when moving sparse files around.
(I originally learned about this procedure from this page, so all credit to them.)
I wonder if you could produce a product that, out of the box, would only transcode DVDs that didn't have CSS applied (home movies on DVD-R, etc.) but was built using a system-on-a-chip that stored its programming in a way that would let it be re-flashed. So you could download a new image ("for use in Sweden only") and re-flash it so that it would do the De-CSSing in software. It seems like this would be at least technically feasible, especially if you used ASICs for MPEG-2 decoding and MPEG-4 encoding, both of which I'm pretty sure exist right now, the MPEG-2 decoders are in every DVD player around, and the MPEG-4 encoders are in lots of flash-based camcorders. That way the SoC would only have to do control functions, and DeCSS.
I suppose a company would have to really have balls of steel (and an army of lawyers) to bring something like that out on the U.S. market. I bet it would be popular in Asia, though, and the Chinese don't have a whole lot of copyright laws last time I checked.
It's going to be a sad day when Americans are smuggling technology out of China and into the US in order to use their own electronic devices, but I could definitely see it happening in the near future. Maybe we can set up a US/China technology exchange program -- 'I'll trade you one uncensored Wikipedia snapshot for an un-crippled DVD ripper.'
If you look at the box an iPod comes in, or at any of Apple's ads for the iPod, they have a definite trademarked logo. It's the word "iPod" written in a particular sans-serif font.
And at least on my 3G unit, it's printed on the back of the device itself, right under the Apple logo. Maybe they've stopped doing this on the newer ones.
And printed down at the bottom of the back side, near the FCC ID, it reads "Copyright 2003 Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved." (Actually it uses the Copyright symbol but I think Slashdot will eat that.)
So yeah I'm pretty sure they're going to have to change that part of the iUpload's logo. Although Apple does have a licensing program that lets you use various trademarks, I very much doubt that they would let someone incorporate an Apple trademark into the name of a third-party device. It might make people think it was actually an Apple product by mistake.
I see your point, and I think the GM's original action was understandable, I just think that Blizzard's attitude after the fact (not really giving him the time of day, just writing back in form letters) was inappropriate. If using a programmable keyboard in this way is botting, then they should come out and clearly say that, and preferably make a clarification to their TOS or in the official forums.
I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for this guy, but on the other hand I think Blizzard could have dealt with it a lot better and in a much more transparent way also.
I think the physical detachment from the combat zone makes a robot operator a lot more likely to be selective about the decision to open fire than someone who's actually there, getting shot at.
Imagine a situation where you're actually a soldier on the ground, and you suddenly start taking fire from a building. You get pinned down or cut off from obvious avenues of retreat. What do you do? I think the obvious reaction is to light the building up; try to achieve fire suppression, get yourself room to maneuver and destroy the target or move away, maybe call in artillery or air support if it's available. A whole lot of training time and discipline goes into making that decision, and even then it's a place where mistakes (understandably) can be made.
A machine operator who is physically distant from the situation has the opportunity to make a less emotional decision. They don't have to deal with bullets flying over their head; they may even have, because of the physical robustness of the machine, time to sit around and think about what course of action to take. You can be a lot more mission-focused than all but the most suicidal of soldiers when you don't have to worry about your own safety.
You see the detachment from the action as a bad thing, I see it as an advantage. Emotions: fear, panic, anger, lead to mistakes and poor judgement, poor judgment gets friendlies killed. Certainly there are some decisions that can be best made by a person with actual 'boots on the ground,' but there is a lot to be said for insulating decisionmakers from physical danger.
Also, I'm willing to bet that there will be more documentation of robot kills than when a human soldier makes a kill.
Having a remote-controlled robot implies some sort of vision system (e.g. a video feed), which is pretty easy to record. Even if you don't record the video feed all the time (which given the military's thirst for data I think is actually pretty likely), it's easy to have a continuous buffer of 5 - 10 minutes that would get saved when a command to fire a weapon was given. There's precident for this -- think of the gun cameras on WWII fighter aircraft.
That way the robot operator always has something to CYA with, and you have a lot of good material to use in training and during the AAR/hotwash. You don't have fuzzy situations where five different guys remember five different things, and it's nearly impossible to tell whether the ROE were followed.
How about mediocre?
(Unless, of course, it was programmed to say "Hasta la vista, baby.")
No the problem is with the programmable keyboard and macros he was using, not that he was running WINE.
In fact, as far as I know, I don't think that they can tell whether you're using WINE or a legitimate Windows version, it ought to look exactly the same to them from the server-side.
Before I got a Mac that could handle the requirements, I used to play WoW using Cedega, and once I tweaked it enough to get it working, never experienced any problems. But then again by WoW standards I'm a very "casual player."
This is the link, however it's giving me a "service unavailable" message. I'm not sure if that's because I'm not authorized, or because I'm in the US and trying to get to the European forums, or what. If anyone can access it and quote their answer, I'd be very interested.
It seems like it was definitely the programmable keyboard and not WINE that set off their bot detectors.
... why didn't they just message him when they saw the odd behavior? Or do something else to verify it's a human on the other end?)
Apparently the macros on the keyboard were making him do repeated actions, and somehow this was interpreted by Blizzard as "unattended" operation. (Why they think it was unattended I don't know, TFA doesn't say exactly
Anyway, a quote from TFA:
"So it seems that if I use a programmable keyboard I am botting. However I suspect their 3rd party detection software saw a very strange enviroinment in which WoW was running; that combined with the repetitive task of healing myself, switching weapons, and casting Hex of Weakness programmed in my keyboard, I am viewed as a bot."
So it seems other people using WoW under WINE are safe, you'd just better not get too trigger-happy with the keyboard macros.
What's really the problem here is that there seems to be a huge disconnect between official Blizzard policy (programmable keyboards are okay, this has been explicitly said by one of their reps in the forums, according to the article) and what the GMs did. And after the guy got banned, they seem to just be just stonewalling him and hoping he'll go away, giving him a lot of "the matter is closed" crap. I have to salute his perserverence, though, in spite of this.
Rather a disappointing showing from Blizzard.
I just looked at DIBS ... I'm very impressed.
It's a good concept -- everyone gives some space on their local drive, and in exchange gets to break up their files and store them across others' systems, in encrypted form.
It seems like another one of those projects where the most difficult part is going to be boot-strapping the userbase and community necessary to create the pool of always-available hardware resources so the thing will function. I haven't looked into it too much, maybe it's already there.
If by "cross platform," you mean "Windows XP/2000/2003 and Linux."
Call me back when it runs on OS X.
Quantum cryptography is neat, to be sure, but what happens if the cat dies?
I'm not sure.
Plus the message on the blog when the guy shut it down was obviously intended to cause a reader to draw the conclusion that it had been shut down by the government.
It's kind of like faking being hit by a car and then when people run out to help you, jumping up and screaming "fooled you!" Okay, so nice job, you fooled us, but only because we gave you more credit for not being a dumbass than we probably should have.
He's proved nothing except to do damage to the free speech movement in China.
What makes you think that wasn't his goal from the very beginning?
The only effect of this -- if it actually has any real effect, which I doubt -- would be to make Western reporters couch their statements with more uncertainties. So instead of "the Chinese government shut down xyz blog and dragged his family off to a re-education center," they'll say "xyz blog has been shut down, possibly by the Chinese government, and the author and his family are now missing, presumed to be in a re-education center." The latter is better journalism anyway, but to most readers it will convey exactly the same point.
It just makes Chinese people seem like less reliable witnesses, and really there's only one entity that I think would want that, and that's the PRC government.
Actually despite the large amounts of effort that Communist governments spend on propaganda, they don't seem to do a terribly good job. Although most of the Cold War occured without me paying a whole lot of attention, I recall my parents making much mirth of the various Soviet "Five-Year Plans," which seemed to always come out 3 or 4 years after the last one had. The perception wasn't of a well-oiled machine, but of chaos and disorganization.
In any case, the point is that these "vast Communist propaganda machines," though they may employ a lot of people, aren't nearly the Orwellian mind-control enterprises that they're sometimes made out to be. At least to people living on the outside and looking in, they frequently seem inept and/or comical.
Of course to someone who can get no other information except what is filtered through said propaganda machine, it might be a lot less amusing.
It's so much more worse than drugs, from an enforcement perspective. Drugs are at the end of the day a physical commodity. If you have a bag of weed, you can't give me that bag of weed and still smoke it yourself. With data, you can. You can share it with as many friends as you want, and not change what you have yourself.
The analogy of the war on drugs is one we ought to keep in mind, because it puts in perspective exactly how ridiculous stopping the flow of information is.
No, these guys are more like the stores that sell the little razorblade devices that shoplifters use to slash the shrinkwrap on CDs at the record store very quickly, and pocket the disc. (They were a whole lot more common before a lot of stores went to using those hard shells that have to be broken open by the cashier.) Or the head shop that sells crack pipes "for tobacco use only."
They're not actually doing the stealing/drugs for you, but they're clearly facilitating it.
That said, I don't really give a damn. I can't work up much moral outrage for some kid who rips off Vivendi or Universal, whether its using bittorrent or a tiny sliver of metal. Leech it on your parents' cable modem, or stuff it in your pants, the only question I have is whether by pirating their media, are you still indirectly supporting their grip on content creation and distribution, by giving them free advertising and mindshare. I think the jury's still out on that.
But I save my outrage for crimes that have actual victims, of which there are far too many anyway.
You're not the only one who was given pause by that.
Why do I suspect that a search engine backed by the Chinese government might not give you the helpful "Links have been removed by order of some guy with a gun" messages at the bottom of censored results?
Actually I've been surprised for a while that the PRC didn't just start it's own search engine and blocking everything else. (Although I guess why bother, when you can get U.S. companies to bid against each other to do your censorship.)
However, they do seem to return Wikipedia links without problems (in fact, the Wikipedia article on "Tiananmen Square" is the #1 result when you search for that term, or several common misspellings) and the Wikipedia article is included in the "Acoona Answers" result on the term.
See:
http://accoona.answers.com/Tiananmen%20Square