IANAL, but if I understand patent law, part of what you get for the goverment enforcing your monolopy to practice a patent is that they can arbitrarily use it and ignore your complaints...
In other words, the goverment can simply ignore them (and it will be legal too). Of course every other site on the planet is in trouble.
Windows XP from a legitimet source (say Toshiba, as I've seen that mentioned in a couple of posts) and you fail to authenticate, call their support. If they don't solve the problem double quick, write your eterny general. They lied when they sold you the laptop. THEY need to fix it (not you).
If this is a common problem, a class action suit will be created and the manufacurer will have to answer for it. If the manufacturer feels it was actually MS that caused the problem, then they will file suit against them.
Well, the analog signal I was refering to was the signal that drives my monitor at 1600x1200, it is for all intents and purposes as good as digital.
It is improtant to note the degration you are talking about occurs no matter what signal type is used. Binary, analog, DNA. There is always a statistical chance what you write down will be different from the original.
Different technologies simply provide better or worse chances of that happening with few or no errors.
And, give the level of analog technologies at the frequensies we are talking about (slow) I'd say you will probably be able to get very good copies (.00000001% chance of error per bit or something like that). Over the course of a movie there might be a few pixels off...
Of course, just like "digital" you could repeat the process several times to get a "perfect" copy - or rather a copy that is perfect except for a vanishingly small chance of a repeated bit error.
I think the point is that making sure the monitor is "trusted" means you don't simply have a video caputure device plugged in.
Of course, you might have your "trusted" monitor plugged in and simply sniff the signal (via a little box between the monitor and the computer that only "listens" to the outgoing analog signals).
This is not a "real" solution, but yet another clue barrier... So now, if you want to build a VGA video capture device, you need to make it just a pass through that passivly observers and does not participlate as if it was a monitor... Simple.
Remember, most of the world is socialist/communist (whether they admit it or not). They want to make everyone (accept those making the rules) equally poor and miserable.
On another note, ICANN has its faults (need stronger rules to govern bad registrars and legal recourse for domain "owners" for one), but I can only remember 2 times in the last 12 years when I could resolve a DNS name because the TLD domain servers were off line. BOTH of those were during massive DDOS attacks that saturated the backbones in the world. That is a pretty good technical track record.
I doubt a UN govered body (or any orginizations) would do as well. Despite its faults, the US commerse driven model has forced reliability to be put into the system.
And the RIAA only needs to watch. They have the right to their music so they could even share to gain more trust. They could easly get enough good "karma" to get all the info they need.
In the end, any such system would probably fall apart as most people would incorrectly use the rating as a "how much stuff does this person share" rating.
In the end, sharing music is like having sex. You'd better trust the person your doing it with. If your wrong about them (or don't know them at all) there is a chance of something going very wrong.
Encryption only stops anonymous 3rd parties from overhearing the connections. It doesn't stop someone inside the network (i.e. with a valid account) from accessing someting that the system is designed to let them access.
There is NOTHING that prevents anyone from paying someone with an account to "look into" something for them. Even if the universities gave *AA the finger, there is 100% chance of finding some college kids willing to use their access to help the *AA for some $$$$.
Since they have valid access (i.e. the ability to dl the music, no matter how encrypted it is in transit) the game is over.
Encryption only works when you carefully grant access to a group and preclude everyone else. It is next to useless on a large file shareing system because they grant access to EVERYONE.
No, the key is making sure your group is small and known and does not include a trader. That is difficult if you want to share with 3rd parties.
There is nothing that would stop 5 or 6 friends from setting up a "server" with ssh on it and a common directory full of meida.
They all just access it via scp/sftp. It would be very secure UNTIL people started added their friends... Next thing you know, you've added MPAA Special Agent Nelson to the server and granted him permission to download everything you have.
The problem is not the "encryption" in route so much as letting "good" people in and keeping "bad" people out. This is a common problem in any large distributed system.
Yah, I'm a pretty non-serious guy, if that's what you mean. Using gentoo wipes that serious scowl right off your face and replaces it with a pleasant smile...
Security is a balance between making a computer immune to attacks and providing capabilities.
I run a several labs at a university. I don't even bother to lock the linux side of the machines down much past base install. My users have never tried to cause problems. I don't even use quota.
If someone ever does cause a problem, I'll take the lab down (cause a pretty good backlash from their fellow grad students) and fix it.
In the mean time, I like the fact that when someone ask me "how much of X can I use" I say, as much as you need so long as it doesn't cause a problem. I'm never going to get mad if they run a large job, etc that slows the machine down. I can always kill it, and ask them to run it on one of the dedicated computers.
Point is, why limit something that is only an issue if you are working against your users, instead of for them? In 99% of the installs that is the way it is (or should be).
Unless you use genkernel, there is NO default kerenel configuration, verions or anything else. No serious admin uses genkerenel as anything other than a starting point - PERIOD.
Choose your kernel version, patch set, etc. No defaults. I guess he has never actually installed gentoo himself. The author should get a clue about the distro's he's talking about before making clames about their security.
The H2Audio underwater mp3 system as been out for scuba diving for a while (a year?) and uses a hydrophone I beleive. They sit on the outside of the ear (you can't put anything in the ear as changing pressure might force it into the ear).
in the long term. This is a hack that takes advantage of undocumented features and quirks in browsers. Quirks and features change.
I don't think they can even use the DMCA to pretect it either. If a browser changes the way it renders a page for printing in general, that isn't circumvention. Because they arn't using a actual DRM technology, but bugs and quirks in implementations of standards, at some point, it will become printable.
Now, if they were to create a plugin viewer, and licence the viewer, then it would be defendable. We all know how popular plugins are thought...
I work on cars as a hobby. You might ask what that has to do with outsourcing...
I buy tools. Common wisdom holds that chineses tools are always "cheaper" and I niavely went with that. However, tools are the life blood of my hobby, so I decided to buy a "good" set of tools from Sears (craftsman). The quality is day and night. The craftsman are 1000x better than the "harbour fright" variety. The tolerances are tighter and the materials are better too.
As it turned out, the craftsman tools arn't really any more expensive to purchase... In a real $$$ since. The price tag on most items are within 10 to 20% (and sometime lower). This doesn't even take into account value (what you get for your money).
So the question I would ask is: Is it really cheaper or is that just a widely held misconception? If it is cheaper, how much and does is justify the reduction in quality?
In the case of hand tools, both answers are generally no. I suspect the same to be true of most software outsourcing with the exception of a few special cases.
About The Davinci' Code. It read well until the last 1/4. He just can't finish a book strong. The first was great, but given the ending, I won't spend any time reading his other novels...
I interviewed with the NSA. Government jobs have their advantages... In any case, as someone who wanted to get a Ph.D. and be a scientist (an now I'm about 3/4 of the way there), I decided against it because anything I ever wanted to publish after the fact would be subject to government sensors due to the clearance you must have to work for the NSA. I declined the initial offer they made (the one before they do the expensive background investigation) so I didn't go through any of the harder core testing or background checks.
When I interviewed (~1999, pre 9/11) it was pretty relaxed. None of the cloak and dagger, don't admit your are interviewing with the NSA stuff.... I pretty much called and explained I needed a flight for an NSA interview, a hotel for the interview, etc. No one ever told me not to talk about it, or keep it secret.
I did, however, sign a non-disclosure agreement that said I wouldn't talk about what I saw inside their facility (and thus I'm not), but that makes perfect sense.
Fortunatly for the rest of us, there is not possible answer to 2. If EVERYONE hates you (except of course M$) you are going to get trounsed out of existance sooner or later by one of them. Even if you win one fight, statistics are against you.
Why not just "buy" it from him. Give him ~$10K for the rights, plus make him lead on it. He gets paid to work on something he was doing for fun. They could avoid the bad PR. Surely, even ~$50K isn't much for a peice of code like this that will help sell the OS.
Stupid move. If you piss off the people that work for you, it DOES affect your bottom line.
I maintain several labs. We currently use Partimage off a gentoo live cd. This works great for
windows 2000 machines in our labs. Previously I used ghost with no
problems on windows NT, but 2000 might be different. I always used it
from a "boot" disk not from a running system.
Your cost per Byte just doubled... You need twice the hard drives for mirroring (not to mention twice the controlers). RAID5 has less waiste, but isn't as good for data security.
Of course, non of this protects you if your building burns down, sysadmin goes nuts, etc. That is what off site backups are for.
I salvaged a derilict dual P3x450, dug up enough 256meg sticks to give it a gig a ram and a salvaged video card.
For drives, I watch and wait until I need more space, then I add a drive, ussually whatever Fry's has on cheap. I use LVM to add it to my partitions. Of course, I can only add a total of 4 drives this way before I'm forced to by a off board controler (I'm at that point now).
The other downside is that there is no redundancy, but oh well. Redundancy is expensive.
Performance stinks as I violate the rules about one device per controler. Of course, I don't care because I'm accessing it over a 10mbit network (via the phone lines in my appartment). It is sufficient to stream video to 2 or more machines so no worries.
Total cost ~$500 worth of hard drives. Everything else was "free".
All he said was that they received some G5s. I would hope that a software and OS company like MS has 1000s of compeditors or target os machines. They do write apps for the MAc and they do compete with it in the OS space. "Do I buy a MAC(OSX from the consumer point of view) or a PC(Windows from the consumer point of view)."
I assume they have lots of these things. I would assume their GUI teams have OSX, Gnome, KDE, Win 31, and every other GUI out there running somewhere to study.
So, since it is obvious that the post doesn't give any new information away, why is MS upset enough to fire him?
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but if I understand patent law, part of what you get for the goverment enforcing your monolopy to practice a patent is that they can arbitrarily use it and ignore your complaints...
In other words, the goverment can simply ignore them (and it will be legal too). Of course every other site on the planet is in trouble.
IANAL
Windows XP from a legitimet source (say Toshiba, as I've seen that mentioned in a couple of posts) and you fail to authenticate, call their support. If they don't solve the problem double quick, write your eterny general. They lied when they sold you the laptop. THEY need to fix it (not you).
If this is a common problem, a class action suit will be created and the manufacurer will have to answer for it. If the manufacturer feels it was actually MS that caused the problem, then they will file suit against them.
All this is academic. I use linux...
Well, the analog signal I was refering to was the signal that drives my monitor at 1600x1200, it is for all intents and purposes as good as digital.
It is improtant to note the degration you are talking about occurs no matter what signal type is used. Binary, analog, DNA. There is always a statistical chance what you write down will be different from the original.
Different technologies simply provide better or worse chances of that happening with few or no errors.
And, give the level of analog technologies at the frequensies we are talking about (slow) I'd say you will probably be able to get very good copies (.00000001% chance of error per bit or something like that). Over the course of a movie there might be a few pixels off...
Of course, just like "digital" you could repeat the process several times to get a "perfect" copy - or rather a copy that is perfect except for a vanishingly small chance of a repeated bit error.
I think the point is that making sure the monitor is "trusted" means you don't simply have a video caputure device plugged in.
Of course, you might have your "trusted" monitor plugged in and simply sniff the signal (via a little box between the monitor and the computer that only "listens" to the outgoing analog signals).
This is not a "real" solution, but yet another clue barrier... So now, if you want to build a VGA video capture device, you need to make it just a pass through that passivly observers and does not participlate as if it was a monitor... Simple.
Remember, most of the world is socialist/communist (whether they admit it or not). They want to make everyone (accept those making the rules) equally poor and miserable.
On another note, ICANN has its faults (need stronger rules to govern bad registrars and legal recourse for domain "owners" for one), but I can only remember 2 times in the last 12 years when I could resolve a DNS name because the TLD domain servers were off line. BOTH of those were during massive DDOS attacks that saturated the backbones in the world. That is a pretty good technical track record.
I doubt a UN govered body (or any orginizations) would do as well. Despite its faults, the US commerse driven model has forced reliability to be put into the system.
Sun sold laptops in the late 90s at least. I know. I had one. Couldn't tell you the model or name, but it was a sun and ran Solaris.
Not sure what crack the people who wrote this were smoking, but good for them.
And the RIAA only needs to watch. They have the right to their music so they could even share to gain more trust. They could easly get enough good "karma" to get all the info they need.
In the end, any such system would probably fall apart as most people would incorrectly use the rating as a "how much stuff does this person share" rating.
In the end, sharing music is like having sex. You'd better trust the person your doing it with. If your wrong about them (or don't know them at all) there is a chance of something going very wrong.
Encryption only stops anonymous 3rd parties from overhearing the connections. It doesn't stop someone inside the network (i.e. with a valid account) from accessing someting that the system is designed to let them access.
There is NOTHING that prevents anyone from paying someone with an account to "look into" something for them. Even if the universities gave *AA the finger, there is 100% chance of finding some college kids willing to use their access to help the *AA for some $$$$.
Since they have valid access (i.e. the ability to dl the music, no matter how encrypted it is in transit) the game is over.
Encryption only works when you carefully grant access to a group and preclude everyone else. It is next to useless on a large file shareing system because they grant access to EVERYONE.
No, the key is making sure your group is small and known and does not include a trader. That is difficult if you want to share with 3rd parties.
There is nothing that would stop 5 or 6 friends from setting up a "server" with ssh on it and a common directory full of meida.
They all just access it via scp/sftp. It would be very secure UNTIL people started added their friends... Next thing you know, you've added MPAA Special Agent Nelson to the server and granted him permission to download everything you have.
The problem is not the "encryption" in route so much as letting "good" people in and keeping "bad" people out. This is a common problem in any large distributed system.
Yah, I'm a pretty non-serious guy, if that's what you mean. Using gentoo wipes that serious scowl right off your face and replaces it with a pleasant smile...
Security is a balance between making a computer immune to attacks and providing capabilities.
I run a several labs at a university. I don't even bother to lock the linux side of the machines down much past base install. My users have never tried to cause problems. I don't even use quota.
If someone ever does cause a problem, I'll take the lab down (cause a pretty good backlash from their fellow grad students) and fix it.
In the mean time, I like the fact that when someone ask me "how much of X can I use" I say, as much as you need so long as it doesn't cause a problem. I'm never going to get mad if they run a large job, etc that slows the machine down. I can always kill it, and ask them to run it on one of the dedicated computers.
Point is, why limit something that is only an issue if you are working against your users, instead of for them? In 99% of the installs that is the way it is (or should be).
Unless you use genkernel, there is NO default kerenel configuration, verions or anything else. No serious admin uses genkerenel as anything other than a starting point - PERIOD.
Choose your kernel version, patch set, etc. No defaults. I guess he has never actually installed gentoo himself. The author should get a clue about the distro's he's talking about before making clames about their security.
The H2Audio underwater mp3 system as been out for scuba diving for a while (a year?) and uses a hydrophone I beleive. They sit on the outside of the ear (you can't put anything in the ear as changing pressure might force it into the ear).
Oceanic Scuba Equipment
in the long term. This is a hack that takes advantage of undocumented features and quirks in browsers. Quirks and features change.
I don't think they can even use the DMCA to pretect it either. If a browser changes the way it renders a page for printing in general, that isn't circumvention. Because they arn't using a actual DRM technology, but bugs and quirks in implementations of standards, at some point, it will become printable.
Now, if they were to create a plugin viewer, and licence the viewer, then it would be defendable. We all know how popular plugins are thought...
Lets you open a set of terminals and input the same to all in an interactive manner. Extremly handy on farms, clusters and labs.
Cluster SSH
Run all the servers (or lab gentoo boxes) at once. Great for mass updates,testing, etc.
Source Forge Page
I work on cars as a hobby. You might ask what that has to do with outsourcing...
I buy tools. Common wisdom holds that chineses tools are always "cheaper" and I niavely went with that. However, tools are the life blood of my hobby, so I decided to buy a "good" set of tools from Sears (craftsman). The quality is day and night. The craftsman are 1000x better than the "harbour fright" variety. The tolerances are tighter and the materials are better too.
As it turned out, the craftsman tools arn't really any more expensive to purchase... In a real $$$ since. The price tag on most items are within 10 to 20% (and sometime lower). This doesn't even take into account value (what you get for your money).
So the question I would ask is: Is it really cheaper or is that just a widely held misconception? If it is cheaper, how much and does is justify the reduction in quality?
In the case of hand tools, both answers are generally no. I suspect the same to be true of most software outsourcing with the exception of a few special cases.
About The Davinci' Code. It read well until the last 1/4. He just can't finish a book strong. The first was great, but given the ending, I won't spend any time reading his other novels...
Andrew
I interviewed with the NSA. Government jobs have their advantages... In any case, as someone who wanted to get a Ph.D. and be a scientist (an now I'm about 3/4 of the way there), I decided against it because anything I ever wanted to publish after the fact would be subject to government sensors due to the clearance you must have to work for the NSA. I declined the initial offer they made (the one before they do the expensive background investigation) so I didn't go through any of the harder core testing or background checks.
When I interviewed (~1999, pre 9/11) it was pretty relaxed. None of the cloak and dagger, don't admit your are interviewing with the NSA stuff.... I pretty much called and explained I needed a flight for an NSA interview, a hotel for the interview, etc. No one ever told me not to talk about it, or keep it secret.
I did, however, sign a non-disclosure agreement that said I wouldn't talk about what I saw inside their facility (and thus I'm not), but that makes perfect sense.
1) Pick a fight with everyone.
2) ???
3) Profit.
Fortunatly for the rest of us, there is not possible answer to 2. If EVERYONE hates you (except of course M$) you are going to get trounsed out of existance sooner or later by one of them. Even if you win one fight, statistics are against you.
Why not just "buy" it from him. Give him ~$10K for the rights, plus make him lead on it. He gets paid to work on something he was doing for fun. They could avoid the bad PR. Surely, even ~$50K isn't much for a peice of code like this that will help sell the OS.
Stupid move. If you piss off the people that work for you, it DOES affect your bottom line.
Andrew
I maintain several labs. We currently use Partimage off a gentoo live cd. This works great for windows 2000 machines in our labs. Previously I used ghost with no problems on windows NT, but 2000 might be different. I always used it from a "boot" disk not from a running system.
Andrew
Your cost per Byte just doubled... You need twice the hard drives for mirroring (not to mention twice the controlers). RAID5 has less waiste, but isn't as good for data security.
Of course, non of this protects you if your building burns down, sysadmin goes nuts, etc. That is what off site backups are for.
Andrew
I salvaged a derilict dual P3x450, dug up enough 256meg sticks to give it a gig a ram and a salvaged video card.
For drives, I watch and wait until I need more space, then I add a drive, ussually whatever Fry's has on cheap. I use LVM to add it to my partitions. Of course, I can only add a total of 4 drives this way before I'm forced to by a off board controler (I'm at that point now).
The other downside is that there is no redundancy, but oh well. Redundancy is expensive.
Performance stinks as I violate the rules about one device per controler. Of course, I don't care because I'm accessing it over a 10mbit network (via the phone lines in my appartment). It is sufficient to stream video to 2 or more machines so no worries.
Total cost ~$500 worth of hard drives. Everything else was "free".
Andrew
All he said was that they received some G5s. I would hope that a software and OS company like MS has 1000s of compeditors or target os machines. They do write apps for the MAc and they do compete with it in the OS space. "Do I buy a MAC(OSX from the consumer point of view) or a PC(Windows from the consumer point of view)."
I assume they have lots of these things. I would assume their GUI teams have OSX, Gnome, KDE, Win 31, and every other GUI out there running somewhere to study.
So, since it is obvious that the post doesn't give any new information away, why is MS upset enough to fire him?