For example I've got a shortcut to a file on C:\, which is 391 bytes actual size, 4096 bytes on the disk.
I think that sorta proves his point, though. With today's filesystems and other equipment, even a 391 byte file ends up taking over 4k bytes on disk, and nobody really seems to care. At least when you're talking about storage, virtually nothing is that small in terms of actual space-on-disk on a modern system.
Yeah I was wondering if someone creative out there would think of some sort of mnemonic, song, epic poem, etc. that would allow people to easily memorize it. I think that would really be the best method... unless they decide to go at your brain with a soldering iron through your ear. I wouldn't put it completely past them.
Why in the name of anything holy would you ever phase out Firefox, on any platform, for IE, of any version?
Talk about two steps forward and three back -- I'm still trying to get the last of the IE-only websites put down, and it's a giant pain in the ass. I can't believe anyone seriously wants to go back to that shit.
(We're pushing people to FF on Windows; MacBooks would be just a bit too ritzy for here, and I'm admittedly fond of the Thinkpads anyway, if not the OS they run.)
This is true -- I was writing only about "sudo" specifically which is a one-shot, logged, superuser escalation.
You are correct that "su" is much older, according to the (BSD) manpage, "A su command appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX." According to Wikipedia, V7 came out in 1979.
As referenced in the manpage; available online here
A Brief history of sudo(8):
Sudo was first conceived and implemented by Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer around 1980 at the Department of Computer Science at SUNY/Buffalo. It ran on a VAX-11/750 running 4.1BSD. An updated version, credited to Phil Betchel, Cliff Spencer, Gretchen Phillips, John LoVerso and Don Gworek, was posted to the net.sources newsgroup in December of 1985.
In the Summer of 1986, Garth Snyder released an enhanced version of sudo. For the next 5 years, sudo was fed and watered by a handful of folks at CU-Boulder, including Bob Coggeshall, Bob Manchek, and Trent Hein.
In 1991, Dave Hieb and Jeff Nieusma wrote a new version of sudo with an enhanced sudoers format under contract to a consulting firm called "The Root Group". This version was later released under the GNU public license....
The original post to Usenet is available in Google's archive here, although I don't know if that URL is stable or not. But the whole thing is there, including the source, all in plaintext, dated Dec 15, 1985. From reading the discussion it looks as if some other people had similar programs earlier, though, including one called "asroot" which seems a lot less robust.
You keep on saying the word pc laptop as if all makes were of the same quality. It's true you have to put in more work to find a good manufacturer and a good product line for them (like going with compaq's business line of products vs. their dreadful presario line a few years back) but for a lot of people a little research on quality reviews is worth the few hundred they can potentially save.
Or, you could just buy an iBook/Macbook, and save a whole lot of time that you would have spent reading reviews. To a lot of people, that time savings is worth quite a lot.
Sometimes, the PC "ecosystem" is nice, like when you want something really unique or strange, or when you need an extra part. But there's an advantage, too, in having a certain minimum guarantee of quality that comes from a single-manufacturer system. You know what you're getting into.
I'm not going to download one to find out, but how the heck do you pronounce "we7"?
Is that "wee-seven"? Or do they try to amalgamate the words into "weven" or something?
Who here thinks that having a short URL was a key part of their plan to get venture capital...? (Raises hand) Who thinks this will save them...? Anybody?... Bueller?
We implemented a special switch which allows these functions. It's located inside the computer's power supply, near the big thing marked "1000uF 250V".
In order for the setting to take effect, you have to make sure to press the switch while the computer is running. We've found that using a steel coat-hanger wire (be sure to sand the paint off, first, you don't want it getting into your computer!) passed in through the vent holes in back works well.
In the limit, consider that any software program is just one enormous number, then any other program is simply that number plus or minus another number. Therefore all software programs are trivial enhancements of pre-existing programs and should not be patentable.
Well, I think that's getting close to reductio ad absurdum: I mean, in the limit, all machines are just scrap metal in certain arbitrary configurations. What's the difference between a slug of aluminum and a soda can? Not much; it's the same atoms either way, just reconfigured. Likewise, a blank hard drive and a hard drive with some files on it is the same materials, but the latter has had a few atoms reconfigured in a certain way that's meaningful and useful, and which some people might pay money for.
I'm not really sure there's a good argument there. (In fact, there are some physicists who really buy into the whole metaphysical-implications-of-information-theory who would probably argue that there is no difference between matter and energy at very fundamental levels, or at least that it's the information which allows matter to become organized into anything useful.)
To be honest, although I'd like software patents to go away, because I think as implemented right now they're perfectly hideous and doing horrible damage to the U.S. economy and to the development of IT in general, damage that we will probably never quantify properly, I find the "software exceptionalism" argument uncompelling.
Software is just numbers, sure, but it's trivial to turn every letter in the English alphabet into a number, so you can encode anything that's written numerically -- thus anything that can be written is nothing but a big number (and even without encoding it into standard base-10 digits, it's still a "number" in the theoretical sense, just with some large base; probably base-127 if you include all ASCII as 'digits'). That doesn't mean that ideas which can be written are inherently inferior to ideas which must be represented graphically, or orally. You never hear anyone claiming that, because there are no "linguistic exceptionalists" -- language and writing aren't recent technologies, and so they don't seem particularly new or different.
What we need to do is make sure that as many people as possible really understand software and programming, so that we can apply the same standards to software patents as we apply to ideas in other media; then once the playing field is level (or at the same time), we need to reconsider exactly how helpful patents are, and how we want to configure the system to maximize its utility to the public.
Just as an example, consider the concept or idea of mathematical integration. I could express this idea to you in a lot of ways. I could say "it's the area under a the curve," and maybe draw a diagram, or I could use mathematical notation, or I could build a physical device consisting of an arrangement of gears, such that the output shaft was equal to the integral of the movements of the input, or an analog electronic circuit, or I could write some computer code in some language that would do it. In all cases, I'm accomplishing much the same thing, and it would be ludicrous to allow me to patent or otherwise monopolize the entire concept of integration. However, there's no reason why my mechanical planetary-gear arrangement which performs integration, or my analog circuit, should be patentable, while the code that does the exact same thing on a microcontroller shouldn't. This isn't to say that I should be able to patent all or any implementation of integration, written as computer code, just the one I wrote, in the same way I can only patent one arrangement of planetary gears. And it might also be fair to make the patent on the software-based implementation last shorter than the hardware method, because the development and prototyping costs are assumedly lower. But there's no fundamental difference that I can see between them.
The fact that you have a computer and can string words together in a sentence immediately puts you far above the level of the folks I encountered at Target that day. Give yourself an extra point if you're not obviously on drugs.
I don't know if I was just there on a bad day or something (free heroin at the pharmacy counter?) but I really thought I'd stumbled into a casting call for a zombie movie. Add that to the completely un-noteworthy fist and knife fight in the parking lot, and what I'm pretty sure was sodomy going on in the bathroom (I turned around pretty quickly when I saw the number of feet in that stall, plus all the groaning)... if that's the "common folk" these days, we need a good pandemic.
Now, maybe it was the time of day or something, because I usually only go to supercenter stores in the middle of the night, and hopefully it was just the area, because I really don't want to believe that's typical. But at any rate, there's no way I'm going to go back in there again for a trivial entertainment purchase.
I think the answer might lie not in more fields, but in repeatable fields. I'm drawing on my experience as a library cataloger here. The record format that we use most commonly in my field is called MARC (for MAchine Readable Cataloging... or "Cataloguing" if you are in an English-speaking country other than the US), and, instead of having a field for every possible role a person or corporate body (not as in a corporation in the business sense of the word, but in the literal sense, so "The Beatles", "The Berlin Philharmonic" or "Blue Note Records" would all be considered corporate bodies), there are fields for names which can be repeated for every name you want to add to a record and a subfield can be applied to each entry, identifying the role the person or corporate body plays in the production of the work.
Very interesting. Although in retrospect your explanation makes sense, I didn't quite understand what you meant about MARC until I did a little reading. Anyone else who is interested might want to have a look at this LoC publication. I agree that the way they do things is pretty nice (although, being an old format, they're really niggardly about bits in the headers). I think if you were good about establishing conventions, it would even be possible to hammer such a system into a schema that only provided for arbitrary Key=Value pairs (no explicit 'subfields').
Artist0 = "Beethoven, Ludwig van" Artist0-type = Composer Artist1 = "Klemperer, Otto" Artist1-type = Conductor... etc.
The real problem, given that AAC files do have the capability of arbitrary Key=Value pairs, is really the interface; what iTunes really needs is a metadata browser that's more like Aperture's (which is excellent); allowing you to define 'views' for commonly used metadata but also view and edit the pairs associated with a file directly if you wish.
If your site isn't coming up in google the keywords you want and it's losing you $500,000 then you should probably buy some ads from google to get yourself back in there. It's sort of an obvious solution.
Agreed. Perhaps more to the point, maybe they shouldn't have been depending on the free advertising provided by Google in the search results as their primary source of customers.
Seems that the real lesson here is that you shouldn't build a business on shaky marketing, and search results -- which are basically the internet equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising -- are pretty shaky. It might get you started and off the ground, but you shoudn't depend on them always being there, and you need to have a plan for staying in business if they suddenly go away. Otherwise, you probably don't deserve to be in business, and they'll be plenty of other sites to take up the customer eyeballs.
Does this also mean that you can "game" the sites of your competitors to get them into Google hell?
Exactly -- I'm surprised this hasn't come up more.
It seems that if I want to deep-six your site, which might mean your entire business and/or livelihood, all I need to do is find the most inept link spammer I can, and pay him a pittance to whore your site's URL all over the place, on tons of spamblogs and Viagra pages. All of a sudden, Google will notice, can your page off of the search results, and you're hosed.
I've got to imagine that this has already happened; heck it seems like a fairly good extortion scheme: pay us or we'll linkfarm you until Google notices and your competition slaughters you. It's like SEO, only in reverse.
Just because they are a huge, near-monopolistic entity doesn't mean they would be inept at choosing security.
While there may not be a provable causative link, I think that the past few decades have demonstrated empirically that huge corporations seem to do crummily at the whole security thing.
I never said that businesses could afford to ignore Google. Restaurants here in NYC can't afford to ignore what the Zagat says about them.
What I'm saying is that this should not open Google (or Zagat) to any requirement for editorial transparency. If people trust information source A, and information source A doesn't recommend you, well, that may suck, but you should not have any recourse to demand an explanation - because your *potential customers* have the right to go to any source of information they want for advice, and your *potential customers* are not forced to use google.
This may in turn force businesses to do all sorts of things, but that's capitalism for you - your business does not have a right to succeed.
Outstandingly well put. It's a shame that more people seem to fail to grasp this, particularly the last point -- that freedom to succeed also implies freedom to fail; and that nobody has a right to any measure of success, only the attempt at it.
When businesses whine about Google, who they're really whining about is their customers, because their customers are the ones deciding to go to Google (or Zagat, or the New York Times theater reviews, or whatever) and use that as part of their decision-making.
Well, I'm in the market for a new machine. I was thinking I'd just go to Retrobox and pick up another HP or IBM P4 workstation, but to be honest I wouldn't mind a new Dell unit, if the price was reasonable.
I can't swear I'll buy until I see the pricing, but I'm definitely interested.
Some of their more compact PCs wouldn't make bad MythTV frontends; something MicroATX and smaller than a VCR.
The attacker compromises both the initial key exchange and all subsequent communications. They swap each party's public keys during the initial exchange for their own, and then transparently decrypt (snoop), and re-encrypt the traffic during the communication.
It's certainly possible, I've seen demos of it with SSH. The only defense you have against it is key fingerprinting, where you are very religious about checking the key fingerprint that's reported at your end, against the other guy's system when it reports his own key's fingerprint. If they don't match, stop talking.
The only way that I know of to stop these attacks is to have a *trusted* public key of everyone that you want to phone. The only way to get that trust is to verify somehow (perhaps by meeting up with them) that the key you have listed for them is in fact their key.
Actually, for telephone conversations it would even be possible to speak a few digits of the key and see if the person on the other end agrees. You couldn't do this for a text protocol, because it would be trivial for the man-in-the-middle to substitute a different set of digits (ie. the ones that it knows are correct). But in a real-time telephone conversation, it would be pretty hard to substitute (but not impossible!).
Agreed -- and I'm pretty sure this is how Zimmerman's ZPhone works; it doesn't use CA's or a centralized authentication scheme, and instead just lets you verify your key fingerprint against the one reported by the other party's software. If they don't match, then presumably you know there is something fishy going on (although, I would bet that most technically un-savvy people would probably not be smart enough to terminate the conversation because of a few numbers not matching up...but that's hardly a fault of the system).
Centralized CAs are unnecessary, and introduce single points of failure or compromise in a system; I could see how a government or other attacker would want them (can you say key escrow?) but that doesn't mean that they would be good for users.
What's unfortunate, at least last time I checked, is that they really haven't figured out a good way of cramming all the different pieces of metadata that are critical to classical music, into the fields designed for pop.
On a typical pop song, you're generally only interested in the name of the band, the name of the song, and maybe some basic genre info; a better system would also get the year, BPM, and maybe the artists' real names.
But for classical music, at minimum you need to know the name of the composer ("Beethoven, Ludwig van"), the piece ("Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92"), the section ("Third Movement - Presto"), the orchestra ("London Philharmonic"), the conductor ("Karajan, Herbert von"), and the year (because the same conductor might have done multiple recordings of that piece with that orchestra at different times); really you should also have the names of the soloists, if any, broken out independently, too.
As far as I can tell, everyone seems to have their own little system for cramming all that data into the few fields that are available. It's certainly not as bad now as it was back in the early MP3 days -- at least there's a "Composer" field now -- but it's still pretty bad otherwise.
It's not like pop music wouldn't benefit from a lot more fields, too -- it would be cool if stuff like the production staff were listed in their own fields, since with a lot of pop music, the real talent isn't in front of the microphone, it's in the editing afterwards -- so it wouldn't be just for classical music buffs.
It's honestly not that much less convenient to rip a CD and store it.
True, I'll definitely grant that with a modern computer and CD drive, ripping an album is really not that much harder or time consuming than downloading it. (However, as others have pointed out, downloading scales better than ripping in terms of working without user intervention -- you can "fire and forget" a few thousand MP3s but you'll have to babysit a terminal all week to rip an equivalent number of CDs, and human time is expensive compared to pure machine time.)
The downside of CDs is that they generally require you to go into a store, which requires substantial human (again, as opposed to machine) time. If you're not impatient, you can just buy them via mail-order, though, and not deal with most of the acquisition downsides.
Personally I buy almost all of my music in the form of Red Book audio CDs, used, from sites like Half.com; to me they're the best of everything -- no waiting in line or dealing with the general obnoxiousness of big-box stores, DRM-free format, a read-only backup, and sometimes some interesting goodies or extras -- generally for less than $5 per disc. However, given how impatient people have become, I think online music is here to stay, if only for the immediate gratification it offers.
I'm guessing that it's cluelessness on the part of Google management, but I hope someone there gives some thought to what will happen to their "do no evil" public image when the body count from their negligence first crests over three digits.
Who says it hasn't already? It's not like the Chinese government is exactly open about how many people it "re-educates," and you really have no idea what level of cooperation their mainland subsidiary has with the government. Even if they're not in triple-digits yet, give them time -- a few hundred Chinese dissidents is nothing compared to all that advertising they'll rake in.
As an American I think it's a pretty preposterous system, but then again I think it's ridiculous here in the States that works produced by contractors, being paid by the USG, aren't automatically in the public domain, and they aren't. So it's not even like things are peachy here with respect to government products.
Without a patent, inventors wouldn't be inventors. And for the last time, no a patent is not the right to something, it recognizes the right, the moral right, and not the legal one, to intellectual property.
If that's your opinion, and your belief, well, that's fine -- more power to you. But it's certainly not a widely-held one, and I think you'll find any sort of evidence for or substantiation of it, in law or philosophy, surprisingly sparse.
I can't think of any basis for a natural right to "intellectual property;" it's a fairly modern invention, and one that is quite detached from the concept of freedom in thought or speech.
It seems as though you are edging very close on creating a natural right where it ought to exist only as a manufactured one: that is to say, we as a society might decide that it is beneficial to create the concept of "intellectual property," but that is wholly different from saying that there is a natural or "moral" right to it, somehow arising out of essential human nature and free will. Intellectual property is a wholly utilitarian concept, the development of which you can track quite easily over the past few centuries in response to economic and technological pressures.
Of course, in the most basic sense, the difference between "natural" rights and "derived" or "manmade" rights is arbitrary (unless, like Aquinas or the Framers of the Constitution, you invoke God, or like Kant, you perform a rigid derivation of rights from a first principle), so what I'm really saying is this: if you want to persist in believing that there is a natural right to intellectual property, fine, but be aware that you are taking a fringe position which isn't exactly popular or widely held. Very few people are going to be willing to swallow that on premise, as you seem to want them to.
[And I'm not even going to get into your comment about inventors only being inventors because of patents, because that doesn't make a damn bit of sense to me.]
Slashdot Mirror
For example I've got a shortcut to a file on C:\, which is 391 bytes actual size, 4096 bytes on the disk.
I think that sorta proves his point, though. With today's filesystems and other equipment, even a 391 byte file ends up taking over 4k bytes on disk, and nobody really seems to care. At least when you're talking about storage, virtually nothing is that small in terms of actual space-on-disk on a modern system.
They did it with Scientology and, come to cases, they'll do it here.
Did they actually delete posts, or whole stories, or what? I must have been on hiatus when that happened.
Yeah I was wondering if someone creative out there would think of some sort of mnemonic, song, epic poem, etc. that would allow people to easily memorize it. I think that would really be the best method ... unless they decide to go at your brain with a soldering iron through your ear. I wouldn't put it completely past them.
Firefox for Mac and go with Office 2003/IE6
Why in the name of anything holy would you ever phase out Firefox, on any platform, for IE, of any version?
Talk about two steps forward and three back -- I'm still trying to get the last of the IE-only websites put down, and it's a giant pain in the ass. I can't believe anyone seriously wants to go back to that shit.
(We're pushing people to FF on Windows; MacBooks would be just a bit too ritzy for here, and I'm admittedly fond of the Thinkpads anyway, if not the OS they run.)
This is true -- I was writing only about "sudo" specifically which is a one-shot, logged, superuser escalation.
You are correct that "su" is much older, according to the (BSD) manpage, "A su command appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX." According to Wikipedia, V7 came out in 1979.
You keep on saying the word pc laptop as if all makes were of the same quality. It's true you have to put in more work to find a good manufacturer and a good product line for them (like going with compaq's business line of products vs. their dreadful presario line a few years back) but for a lot of people a little research on quality reviews is worth the few hundred they can potentially save.
Or, you could just buy an iBook/Macbook, and save a whole lot of time that you would have spent reading reviews. To a lot of people, that time savings is worth quite a lot.
Sometimes, the PC "ecosystem" is nice, like when you want something really unique or strange, or when you need an extra part. But there's an advantage, too, in having a certain minimum guarantee of quality that comes from a single-manufacturer system. You know what you're getting into.
I'm not going to download one to find out, but how the heck do you pronounce "we7"?
... Bueller?
Is that "wee-seven"? Or do they try to amalgamate the words into "weven" or something?
Who here thinks that having a short URL was a key part of their plan to get venture capital...? (Raises hand) Who thinks this will save them...? Anybody?
We implemented a special switch which allows these functions. It's located inside the computer's power supply, near the big thing marked "1000uF 250V".
In order for the setting to take effect, you have to make sure to press the switch while the computer is running. We've found that using a steel coat-hanger wire (be sure to sand the paint off, first, you don't want it getting into your computer!) passed in through the vent holes in back works well.
In the limit, consider that any software program is just one enormous number, then any other program is simply that number plus or minus another number. Therefore all software programs are trivial enhancements of pre-existing programs and should not be patentable.
Well, I think that's getting close to reductio ad absurdum: I mean, in the limit, all machines are just scrap metal in certain arbitrary configurations. What's the difference between a slug of aluminum and a soda can? Not much; it's the same atoms either way, just reconfigured. Likewise, a blank hard drive and a hard drive with some files on it is the same materials, but the latter has had a few atoms reconfigured in a certain way that's meaningful and useful, and which some people might pay money for.
I'm not really sure there's a good argument there. (In fact, there are some physicists who really buy into the whole metaphysical-implications-of-information-theory who would probably argue that there is no difference between matter and energy at very fundamental levels, or at least that it's the information which allows matter to become organized into anything useful.)
To be honest, although I'd like software patents to go away, because I think as implemented right now they're perfectly hideous and doing horrible damage to the U.S. economy and to the development of IT in general, damage that we will probably never quantify properly, I find the "software exceptionalism" argument uncompelling.
Software is just numbers, sure, but it's trivial to turn every letter in the English alphabet into a number, so you can encode anything that's written numerically -- thus anything that can be written is nothing but a big number (and even without encoding it into standard base-10 digits, it's still a "number" in the theoretical sense, just with some large base; probably base-127 if you include all ASCII as 'digits'). That doesn't mean that ideas which can be written are inherently inferior to ideas which must be represented graphically, or orally. You never hear anyone claiming that, because there are no "linguistic exceptionalists" -- language and writing aren't recent technologies, and so they don't seem particularly new or different.
What we need to do is make sure that as many people as possible really understand software and programming, so that we can apply the same standards to software patents as we apply to ideas in other media; then once the playing field is level (or at the same time), we need to reconsider exactly how helpful patents are, and how we want to configure the system to maximize its utility to the public.
Just as an example, consider the concept or idea of mathematical integration. I could express this idea to you in a lot of ways. I could say "it's the area under a the curve," and maybe draw a diagram, or I could use mathematical notation, or I could build a physical device consisting of an arrangement of gears, such that the output shaft was equal to the integral of the movements of the input, or an analog electronic circuit, or I could write some computer code in some language that would do it. In all cases, I'm accomplishing much the same thing, and it would be ludicrous to allow me to patent or otherwise monopolize the entire concept of integration. However, there's no reason why my mechanical planetary-gear arrangement which performs integration, or my analog circuit, should be patentable, while the code that does the exact same thing on a microcontroller shouldn't. This isn't to say that I should be able to patent all or any implementation of integration, written as computer code, just the one I wrote, in the same way I can only patent one arrangement of planetary gears. And it might also be fair to make the patent on the software-based implementation last shorter than the hardware method, because the development and prototyping costs are assumedly lower. But there's no fundamental difference that I can see between them.
The fact that you have a computer and can string words together in a sentence immediately puts you far above the level of the folks I encountered at Target that day. Give yourself an extra point if you're not obviously on drugs.
... if that's the "common folk" these days, we need a good pandemic.
I don't know if I was just there on a bad day or something (free heroin at the pharmacy counter?) but I really thought I'd stumbled into a casting call for a zombie movie. Add that to the completely un-noteworthy fist and knife fight in the parking lot, and what I'm pretty sure was sodomy going on in the bathroom (I turned around pretty quickly when I saw the number of feet in that stall, plus all the groaning)
Now, maybe it was the time of day or something, because I usually only go to supercenter stores in the middle of the night, and hopefully it was just the area, because I really don't want to believe that's typical. But at any rate, there's no way I'm going to go back in there again for a trivial entertainment purchase.
I think the answer might lie not in more fields, but in repeatable fields. I'm drawing on my experience as a library cataloger here. The record format that we use most commonly in my field is called MARC (for MAchine Readable Cataloging... or "Cataloguing" if you are in an English-speaking country other than the US), and, instead of having a field for every possible role a person or corporate body (not as in a corporation in the business sense of the word, but in the literal sense, so "The Beatles", "The Berlin Philharmonic" or "Blue Note Records" would all be considered corporate bodies), there are fields for names which can be repeated for every name you want to add to a record and a subfield can be applied to each entry, identifying the role the person or corporate body plays in the production of the work.
... etc.
Very interesting. Although in retrospect your explanation makes sense, I didn't quite understand what you meant about MARC until I did a little reading. Anyone else who is interested might want to have a look at this LoC publication. I agree that the way they do things is pretty nice (although, being an old format, they're really niggardly about bits in the headers). I think if you were good about establishing conventions, it would even be possible to hammer such a system into a schema that only provided for arbitrary Key=Value pairs (no explicit 'subfields').
Artist0 = "Beethoven, Ludwig van"
Artist0-type = Composer
Artist1 = "Klemperer, Otto"
Artist1-type = Conductor
The real problem, given that AAC files do have the capability of arbitrary Key=Value pairs, is really the interface; what iTunes really needs is a metadata browser that's more like Aperture's (which is excellent); allowing you to define 'views' for commonly used metadata but also view and edit the pairs associated with a file directly if you wish.
If your site isn't coming up in google the keywords you want and it's losing you $500,000 then you should probably buy some ads from google to get yourself back in there.
It's sort of an obvious solution.
Agreed. Perhaps more to the point, maybe they shouldn't have been depending on the free advertising provided by Google in the search results as their primary source of customers.
Seems that the real lesson here is that you shouldn't build a business on shaky marketing, and search results -- which are basically the internet equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising -- are pretty shaky. It might get you started and off the ground, but you shoudn't depend on them always being there, and you need to have a plan for staying in business if they suddenly go away. Otherwise, you probably don't deserve to be in business, and they'll be plenty of other sites to take up the customer eyeballs.
Does this also mean that you can "game" the sites of your competitors to get them into Google hell?
Exactly -- I'm surprised this hasn't come up more.
It seems that if I want to deep-six your site, which might mean your entire business and/or livelihood, all I need to do is find the most inept link spammer I can, and pay him a pittance to whore your site's URL all over the place, on tons of spamblogs and Viagra pages. All of a sudden, Google will notice, can your page off of the search results, and you're hosed.
I've got to imagine that this has already happened; heck it seems like a fairly good extortion scheme: pay us or we'll linkfarm you until Google notices and your competition slaughters you. It's like SEO, only in reverse.
Just because they are a huge, near-monopolistic entity doesn't mean they would be inept at choosing security.
While there may not be a provable causative link, I think that the past few decades have demonstrated empirically that huge corporations seem to do crummily at the whole security thing.
When businesses whine about Google, who they're really whining about is their customers, because their customers are the ones deciding to go to Google (or Zagat, or the New York Times theater reviews, or whatever) and use that as part of their decision-making.
Well, I'm in the market for a new machine. I was thinking I'd just go to Retrobox and pick up another HP or IBM P4 workstation, but to be honest I wouldn't mind a new Dell unit, if the price was reasonable.
I can't swear I'll buy until I see the pricing, but I'm definitely interested.
Some of their more compact PCs wouldn't make bad MythTV frontends; something MicroATX and smaller than a VCR.
No; you seem to be misunderstanding the attack.
The attacker compromises both the initial key exchange and all subsequent communications. They swap each party's public keys during the initial exchange for their own, and then transparently decrypt (snoop), and re-encrypt the traffic during the communication.
It's certainly possible, I've seen demos of it with SSH. The only defense you have against it is key fingerprinting, where you are very religious about checking the key fingerprint that's reported at your end, against the other guy's system when it reports his own key's fingerprint. If they don't match, stop talking.
The only way that I know of to stop these attacks is to have a *trusted* public key of everyone that you want to phone. The only way to get that trust is to verify somehow (perhaps by meeting up with them) that the key you have listed for them is in fact their key.
Actually, for telephone conversations it would even be possible to speak a few digits of the key and see if the person on the other end agrees. You couldn't do this for a text protocol, because it would be trivial for the man-in-the-middle to substitute a different set of digits (ie. the ones that it knows are correct). But in a real-time telephone conversation, it would be pretty hard to substitute (but not impossible!).
Agreed -- and I'm pretty sure this is how Zimmerman's ZPhone works; it doesn't use CA's or a centralized authentication scheme, and instead just lets you verify your key fingerprint against the one reported by the other party's software. If they don't match, then presumably you know there is something fishy going on (although, I would bet that most technically un-savvy people would probably not be smart enough to terminate the conversation because of a few numbers not matching up...but that's hardly a fault of the system).
Centralized CAs are unnecessary, and introduce single points of failure or compromise in a system; I could see how a government or other attacker would want them (can you say key escrow?) but that doesn't mean that they would be good for users.
If they were to do this, it would be detected quickly, and their reputation as a trusted CA would suffer.
Why do you assume that it would be detected quickly?
If it was issued in secret, say via a NSL, and the people running the MITM were competent, it might take a very long time to discover.
...symphonic...
What's unfortunate, at least last time I checked, is that they really haven't figured out a good way of cramming all the different pieces of metadata that are critical to classical music, into the fields designed for pop.
On a typical pop song, you're generally only interested in the name of the band, the name of the song, and maybe some basic genre info; a better system would also get the year, BPM, and maybe the artists' real names.
But for classical music, at minimum you need to know the name of the composer ("Beethoven, Ludwig van"), the piece ("Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92"), the section ("Third Movement - Presto"), the orchestra ("London Philharmonic"), the conductor ("Karajan, Herbert von"), and the year (because the same conductor might have done multiple recordings of that piece with that orchestra at different times); really you should also have the names of the soloists, if any, broken out independently, too.
As far as I can tell, everyone seems to have their own little system for cramming all that data into the few fields that are available. It's certainly not as bad now as it was back in the early MP3 days -- at least there's a "Composer" field now -- but it's still pretty bad otherwise.
It's not like pop music wouldn't benefit from a lot more fields, too -- it would be cool if stuff like the production staff were listed in their own fields, since with a lot of pop music, the real talent isn't in front of the microphone, it's in the editing afterwards -- so it wouldn't be just for classical music buffs.
It's honestly not that much less convenient to rip a CD and store it.
True, I'll definitely grant that with a modern computer and CD drive, ripping an album is really not that much harder or time consuming than downloading it. (However, as others have pointed out, downloading scales better than ripping in terms of working without user intervention -- you can "fire and forget" a few thousand MP3s but you'll have to babysit a terminal all week to rip an equivalent number of CDs, and human time is expensive compared to pure machine time.)
The downside of CDs is that they generally require you to go into a store, which requires substantial human (again, as opposed to machine) time. If you're not impatient, you can just buy them via mail-order, though, and not deal with most of the acquisition downsides.
Personally I buy almost all of my music in the form of Red Book audio CDs, used, from sites like Half.com; to me they're the best of everything -- no waiting in line or dealing with the general obnoxiousness of big-box stores, DRM-free format, a read-only backup, and sometimes some interesting goodies or extras -- generally for less than $5 per disc. However, given how impatient people have become, I think online music is here to stay, if only for the immediate gratification it offers.
I'm guessing that it's cluelessness on the part of Google management, but I hope someone there gives some thought to what will happen to their "do no evil" public image when the body count from their negligence first crests over three digits.
... you meant over 100 Americans. Sorry.
Who says it hasn't already? It's not like the Chinese government is exactly open about how many people it "re-educates," and you really have no idea what level of cooperation their mainland subsidiary has with the government. Even if they're not in triple-digits yet, give them time -- a few hundred Chinese dissidents is nothing compared to all that advertising they'll rake in.
Oh
Everywhere else has the sense to recognise that works produced by the government are automatically in the public domain.
... I'm about 95% certain this isn't true -- most of the other Commonwealth countries are in the same boat.
Uh
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright
As an American I think it's a pretty preposterous system, but then again I think it's ridiculous here in the States that works produced by contractors, being paid by the USG, aren't automatically in the public domain, and they aren't. So it's not even like things are peachy here with respect to government products.
Without a patent, inventors wouldn't be inventors. And for the last time, no a patent is not the right to something, it recognizes the right, the moral right, and not the legal one, to intellectual property.
If that's your opinion, and your belief, well, that's fine -- more power to you. But it's certainly not a widely-held one, and I think you'll find any sort of evidence for or substantiation of it, in law or philosophy, surprisingly sparse.
I can't think of any basis for a natural right to "intellectual property;" it's a fairly modern invention, and one that is quite detached from the concept of freedom in thought or speech.
It seems as though you are edging very close on creating a natural right where it ought to exist only as a manufactured one: that is to say, we as a society might decide that it is beneficial to create the concept of "intellectual property," but that is wholly different from saying that there is a natural or "moral" right to it, somehow arising out of essential human nature and free will. Intellectual property is a wholly utilitarian concept, the development of which you can track quite easily over the past few centuries in response to economic and technological pressures.
Of course, in the most basic sense, the difference between "natural" rights and "derived" or "manmade" rights is arbitrary (unless, like Aquinas or the Framers of the Constitution, you invoke God, or like Kant, you perform a rigid derivation of rights from a first principle), so what I'm really saying is this: if you want to persist in believing that there is a natural right to intellectual property, fine, but be aware that you are taking a fringe position which isn't exactly popular or widely held. Very few people are going to be willing to swallow that on premise, as you seem to want them to.
[And I'm not even going to get into your comment about inventors only being inventors because of patents, because that doesn't make a damn bit of sense to me.]