This is just a wild guess, but maybe they don't allocate the whole 1TB of disk space to each user when they sign up, but only allocate on demand.
And as many posters have pointed out, most people are unlikely to use anywhere near 1GB let alone 1Tb. Especially with the 10MB attachment limit it will take 10^5 bloated e-mails to reach capacity.
On the other hand I like the idea of using an account as an offsite incremental backup. My daily incrementals are generally less than 10MB, it would be a very convenient method of storage. Until they claim that they have rights to any intellectual property stored on their servers. But they wouldn't do that because Google Are Nice People (TM).
I know exactly where the respective countries are, because I am from Europe where our geography lessons extend outside the borders of our own country. I've also been to both, skiing in one and diving in the other.
I was just throwing in a dumb&dumber reference that always springs to mind when someone mentions Austria.
A classic example of google karma whoring - but you have in fact been suckered. Verity Stob is used as a byline in The Register for various tongue-in-cheek articles. The link you cited refers to "Mr Rock McDosh, Softwron's CEO". They are pulling your plonker mate.
I also remember serious talk of a number being patented, I think a large composite number that was partiularly useful in speeding up a particular compression/encryption/encoding algorithm. But I cant find it at the moment.
When will we see the first virus with a clickable EULA? A dialog box that pops with only an OK button and states that by clicking OK or closing the dialog that you accept the terms of the EULA.
Or even better the shrinkwrap virus EULA with embedded licence text
"By allowing this code to be executed on your machine you indemnify the creators of this virus from all liability etc."
A genetic algorithm is also something different to what YOU think. What qqqqarl is suggesting is actually quite possible and intriguing.
The very existence of multiple instances of the code, with the ability to mutate by altering parameters or even parts of the worms algorithm automatically leads to the conditions for evolution of an improved worm. The very survival of the worm long enough to transmit itself to produce duplicate or mutated instances _is_ the selection process and a measure of its 'fitness'. 'Natural' selection at work. How effective this is is dependent on a number of things, particularly whether the infection of a host will block future infection by another instance of the worm, and how the worm affects the host. The parallel with natural viruses comes to mind, a virus has no purpose other than to reproduce. It does this by subverting a host. If it is too effective and kills the host rapidly, then its virulence is limited if it relies on the hosts continual operation to be transmitted. Hence Ebola is far less widespread than AIDS because the former zaps the host too fast, whereas the latter gives the host plenty of time to spread it around.
Evolution without sex appears to be less effective (and less fun) but is still a valid method of a searching a parameter space for local and global optima. I also recall doing some experiments that seemed to indicate that certain problems are easier to solve without introducing cross-over through mating of selected pairs, but just relying on parameter mutation. Something to do with the particular fitness function over the parameter space selecting against large jumps.
Dont forget that your predecessors had to do without sex but still managed to get along and produce you in the end.
The idea is interesting and one could imagine extending it to include sex by allowing worms to meet up and share some of their parameters in order to produce offspring. The chances of them finding each other on compromised machines would be improved using irc, and maybe even turning every N'th machine into a 'worm' speed dating platform. The possibilities are endless.
Wouldn't it be fun if it was actually something that wasn't destructive. I wonder if there is actually a 'good' application for this type of evolving distributed algorithm? What ever happened to the idea of Intelligent Agents that was all the rage a few years ago? Using the parallel with nature, I can't think of any symbiotic viruses, but there are many instances of symbiotic relationships between hosts and bacteria. Are we going to see a white hat virus one day(other than simple patching viruses that naturally die out), or is any foriegn code naturally excised out of principle? Probably.
Yet another virus is causing problems with Internet Explorer. "Sasser, unlike a virus which travels through e-mails and attachments, spreads directly from the internet."A removal tool can be found here."
So (1), I think the grand parent is correct, the poster is refering to Sasser as a virus, but not one that travels through e-mail and attachments.
And (2) The story poster is talking absolute bollocks, doesn't seem to have actually RTFA'd anything before posting the story. In particular Internet Explorer plays absolutely no part what so ever.
And (3) It's you who is posting flamebait and who should read the post properly.
You are absolutely right. The conspiracy nuts are too ready to believe in omnipotent surveillance by MI5/special branch. When in practice we now that the average government department is totally incompetant and can hardly find its arse with both hands.
I think most be in the UK don't look at these town centre and housing estate cams as intrusion of privacy, but rather as a additional protection from mugging and street violence. And I am pretty sure thats how the cams are used. It is quite awesome to watch an operator in a control room track criminals right accross a town by switching between overlapping cameras.
The two fingered salute, 'flicking the Vees' is the traditional British symbol for f*ck off.
I think the single middle-finger gesture is something that has been picked up from the US. For some reason the single finger salute always strikes me as far more medical. I think it recalls images of the mad doctor in the Cannonball run (or was it the Gum-ball rally?)
I know that the British government is pretty sleazy, but I don't think even Blair would stoop to allowing Holywood to manipulate government reasearch for promotional purposes.
I forgot to add: I wonder if it would be possible to create a tar-pit/honey pot consisting of lots of virtual peers with infinite collections of garbage. Particularly if the garbage was spoofed to look like it was pirated material.
If you had sufficient network control you could create virtual swathes of ip space (cos I imagine these campuses will have private IP addresses with lots of space) with whole herds of imaginary file swappers. That should keep the buggers busy.
I would assume that the monitoring software searches all available peers, and then does one or more of the following
a) Catalogs available file names and compares with list of copyrighted works
b) Downloads part or all of a file and identifies using known file fingerprint or hash
c) Searches files for embedded copyright information or digital watermarks
If it only does (a), then it is relatively easy to defeat and once people are wise to it they wont get caught. If it does (b), then it is nescessary to apply some sort of obfuscation to the file that the automated engine cannot easily undo. The same applies for (c).
The question is, how difficult is it to obfuscate files so that this program cannot identify them.
Secondly, if this approach is not sufficient, how easy would it be to overwhelm the system with false positives, and how could you create them?
Re:Aren't we still in an Ice Age?
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If we were totally unable to predict the result of any action that we take then you are correct, maintaining the status quo is the only viable option.
However in this particular problem there are a number of actions "X" that we can take which reduce mankinds impact on the earth. These are not drastic actions, and if the hypothesis that we in fact have negligible effect on the planet is correct, then any further actions of similar magnitude will have a similarly negligible impact. Hence I do not think that your assertion that any action X is equally likely to cause catastrophic damage.
Interestingly many of the problems that we may be causing are due to inefficient use of resources. If energy is cheap then we squander it. If water is cheap then we squander it. One of the reasons for the different stances taken by the US and EU on CO2 emmissions stems from the oil crisis of the 1970's where it became apparent that EEC countries were much more vulnerable than the US to fuel supply problems. This lead to a greater focus in the EU on using fuel efficiently, and in applying alternatively (and perhaps coincidentaly greener) energy sources. Whereas domestic oil availability in the US has ensured that these issues have never come to the fore, and hence there has never been the same motivation to think about efficient use of resources. It was relatively easy therefore in Europe to make the leap from an economic to an environmental basis for efficiency.
I think that this is important because the changes that we need to make are not revolutionary, they are mainly based on the sensible idea of making an effort to use our resources more carefully, and to make more effort to ensure that this has less impact on the environment. This is being achieved far more in Europe than most places, mainly because of legislation, because not many people are tree huggers at heart.
Hence I think that your assertion that any change is is wrong. Prevarication IS wrong.
If mankind has impact X on the world, then if we improve our efficiency so that we only have (1/2)X impact, then it will take longer for us to totally screw up our own nest. And I am sure we will.
Regardless of the reality of global warming I think we have an obligation to improve our use of resources. The statistics for first world consumption of water, power, paper, plastics etc. are obscene. One day all of the developing countries are going to want to be first world consumers, and there aren't going to be the resources. Cue resource based conflict.
The problem of course is that it takes more of an effort to be more parsimonious. And effort means money. It wont be done voluntarily so the only way is to legislate, in the long term interest of mankind as a whole rather than in the short term interest of a countries individuals and corporations. In corporate driven first world countries there are sufficiently powerfully corporate entieties capable of preventing this happening. So we have a problem that is not going to be resolved anytime soon.
A few years ago people used think that mankind was so stupid that it was inevitably we would destroy ourselves in nuclear armageddon. Sadly I think we are destined to have a for more ignominious downfall, drowning in our own detritus.
Re:Aren't we still in an Ice Age?
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 1
Will you consider it sufficient evidence when you have to buy a boat in order to get to work? And wear factor 50 and breathing apparatus whenever you are outside?
With the majority having the above parent posts attitude, we are effectively fucked because no one will believe any predictions until it is too late.
I accept that there is not at present any conclusive proof that catastrophic global changes are inevitable. Mainly because we don't have good enough simulations, and obviously cant do any large scale experiments.
However, if such events have even an above negligible probability of occuring I think we must take steps in order to avoid them. Therefore the onus on proof should be with the naysayers, proove that there is no possible chance of us screwing up the whole world, once that is done we can all sit back and enjoy our mass consumerism to the limit. Otherwise, lets try and shut the stable door before the bleeding horse has a chance to bolt.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just a wild guess, but maybe they don't allocate the whole 1TB of disk space to each user when they sign up, but only allocate on demand.
And as many posters have pointed out, most people are unlikely to use anywhere near 1GB let alone 1Tb. Especially with the 10MB attachment limit it will take 10^5 bloated e-mails to reach capacity.
On the other hand I like the idea of using an account as an offsite incremental backup. My daily incrementals are generally less than 10MB, it would be a very convenient method of storage. Until they claim that they have rights to any intellectual property stored on their servers. But they wouldn't do that because Google Are Nice People (TM).
I know exactly where the respective countries are, because I am from Europe where our geography lessons extend outside the borders of our own country. I've also been to both, skiing in one and diving in the other.
I was just throwing in a dumb&dumber reference that always springs to mind when someone mentions Austria.
A classic example of google karma whoring - but you have in fact been suckered. Verity Stob is used as a byline in The Register for various tongue-in-cheek articles. The link you cited refers to "Mr Rock McDosh, Softwron's CEO". They are pulling your plonker mate.
I also remember serious talk of a number being patented, I think a large composite number that was partiularly useful in speeding up a particular compression/encryption/encoding algorithm. But I cant find it at the moment.
I didn't know they had snow in Austria. Wouldn't all of the kangaroos slip over? G'day mate ;-)
It is very clever automation.
They have several back-end databases containing tons of eigentits, eigenbums, eigenarses etc. generated through hours of dedicated pron surfing.
If the uploaded image matches too closely to any of these then it is rejected.
And..
[5] Being buggered by a hairy Naval rating.
A fine old Royal Navy tradition.
Wow! I never even considered searching it, I was just trying to be funny.
Gobsmacked I am.
When will we see the first virus with a clickable EULA? A dialog box that pops with only an OK button and states that by clicking OK or closing the dialog that you accept the terms of the EULA.
Or even better the shrinkwrap virus EULA with embedded licence text
"By allowing this code to be executed on your machine you indemnify the creators of this virus from all liability etc."
IANAL either. Thank God.
A genetic algorithm is also something different to what YOU think. What qqqqarl is suggesting is actually quite possible and intriguing.
The very existence of multiple instances of the code, with the ability to mutate by altering parameters or even parts of the worms algorithm automatically leads to the conditions for evolution of an improved worm. The very survival of the worm long enough to transmit itself to produce duplicate or mutated instances _is_ the selection process and a measure of its 'fitness'. 'Natural' selection at work. How effective this is is dependent on a number of things, particularly whether the infection of a host will block future infection by another instance of the worm, and how the worm affects the host. The parallel with natural viruses comes to mind, a virus has no purpose other than to reproduce. It does this by subverting a host. If it is too effective and kills the host rapidly, then its virulence is limited if it relies on the hosts continual operation to be transmitted. Hence Ebola is far less widespread than AIDS because the former zaps the host too fast, whereas the latter gives the host plenty of time to spread it around.
Evolution without sex appears to be less effective (and less fun) but is still a valid method of a searching a parameter space for local and global optima. I also recall doing some experiments that seemed to indicate that certain problems are easier to solve without introducing cross-over through mating of selected pairs, but just relying on parameter mutation. Something to do with the particular fitness function over the parameter space selecting against large jumps.
Dont forget that your predecessors had to do without sex but still managed to get along and produce you in the end.
The idea is interesting and one could imagine extending it to include sex by allowing worms to meet up and share some of their parameters in order to produce offspring. The chances of them finding each other on compromised machines would be improved using irc, and maybe even turning every N'th machine into a 'worm' speed dating platform. The possibilities are endless.
Wouldn't it be fun if it was actually something that wasn't destructive. I wonder if there is actually a 'good' application for this type of evolving distributed algorithm? What ever happened to the idea of Intelligent Agents that was all the rage a few years ago? Using the parallel with nature, I can't think of any symbiotic viruses, but there are many instances of symbiotic relationships between hosts and bacteria. Are we going to see a white hat virus one day(other than simple patching viruses that naturally die out), or is any foriegn code naturally excised out of principle? Probably.
Yet another virus is causing problems with Internet Explorer. "Sasser, unlike a virus which travels through e-mails and attachments, spreads directly from the internet."A removal tool can be found here."
So (1), I think the grand parent is correct, the poster is refering to Sasser as a virus, but not one that travels through e-mail and attachments. And (2) The story poster is talking absolute bollocks, doesn't seem to have actually RTFA'd anything before posting the story. In particular Internet Explorer plays absolutely no part what so ever.
And (3) It's you who is posting flamebait and who should read the post properly.
And reading /. instead of answering it?
Doh. Must proof read, must proog read, muff prood reak.
The second para should read "I think most people in the UK..."
You are absolutely right. The conspiracy nuts are too ready to believe in omnipotent surveillance by MI5/special branch. When in practice we now that the average government department is totally incompetant and can hardly find its arse with both hands.
I think most be in the UK don't look at these town centre and housing estate cams as intrusion of privacy, but rather as a additional protection from mugging and street violence. And I am pretty sure thats how the cams are used. It is quite awesome to watch an operator in a control room track criminals right accross a town by switching between overlapping cameras.
The two fingered salute, 'flicking the Vees' is the traditional British symbol for f*ck off.
I think the single middle-finger gesture is something that has been picked up from the US. For some reason the single finger salute always strikes me as far more medical. I think it recalls images of the mad doctor in the Cannonball run (or was it the Gum-ball rally?)
Now I want you it post it Slashdot 100 times, and if its not done by sunrise I'll cut your balls off.
Other famous mistakes made by the Divine...
"640 billion neurons should be enough for anybody"
Yep, I reckon you were the only one.
I know that the British government is pretty sleazy, but I don't think even Blair would stoop to allowing Holywood to manipulate government reasearch for promotional purposes.
But I may be wrong.
Wow, a photon attractor in a box. What did you use? A mini-black hole?
What a great idea. Just put out your boxes in the morning, let them attract light all day and then collect all your harvested light in the evening.
Woops, I gave away my password and I didn't even get a lousy bar of chocolate.
Gosh you are so 133t.
1 11
Thats nothing compared to my 50 character alphanumeric password
a1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
Replying to own post.
I forgot to add: I wonder if it would be possible to create a tar-pit/honey pot consisting of lots of virtual peers with infinite collections of garbage. Particularly if the garbage was spoofed to look like it was pirated material.
If you had sufficient network control you could create virtual swathes of ip space (cos I imagine these campuses will have private IP addresses with lots of space) with whole herds of imaginary file swappers. That should keep the buggers busy.
I would assume that the monitoring software searches all available peers, and then does one or more of the following
a) Catalogs available file names and compares with list of copyrighted works
b) Downloads part or all of a file and identifies using known file fingerprint or hash
c) Searches files for embedded copyright information or digital watermarks
If it only does (a), then it is relatively easy to defeat and once people are wise to it they wont get caught. If it does (b), then it is nescessary to apply some sort of obfuscation to the file that the automated engine cannot easily undo. The same applies for (c).
The question is, how difficult is it to obfuscate files so that this program cannot identify them.
Secondly, if this approach is not sufficient, how easy would it be to overwhelm the system with false positives, and how could you create them?
If we were totally unable to predict the result of any action that we take then you are correct, maintaining the status quo is the only viable option.
However in this particular problem there are a number of actions "X" that we can take which reduce mankinds impact on the earth. These are not drastic actions, and if the hypothesis that we in fact have negligible effect on the planet is correct, then any further actions of similar magnitude will have a similarly negligible impact. Hence I do not think that your assertion that any action X is equally likely to cause catastrophic damage.
Interestingly many of the problems that we may be causing are due to inefficient use of resources. If energy is cheap then we squander it. If water is cheap then we squander it. One of the reasons for the different stances taken by the US and EU on CO2 emmissions stems from the oil crisis of the 1970's where it became apparent that EEC countries were much more vulnerable than the US to fuel supply problems. This lead to a greater focus in the EU on using fuel efficiently, and in applying alternatively (and perhaps coincidentaly greener) energy sources. Whereas domestic oil availability in the US has ensured that these issues have never come to the fore, and hence there has never been the same motivation to think about efficient use of resources. It was relatively easy therefore in Europe to make the leap from an economic to an environmental basis for efficiency.
I think that this is important because the changes that we need to make are not revolutionary, they are mainly based on the sensible idea of making an effort to use our resources more carefully, and to make more effort to ensure that this has less impact on the environment. This is being achieved far more in Europe than most places, mainly because of legislation, because not many people are tree huggers at heart.
Hence I think that your assertion that any change is is wrong. Prevarication IS wrong.
If mankind has impact X on the world, then if we improve our efficiency so that we only have (1/2)X impact, then it will take longer for us to totally screw up our own nest. And I am sure we will.
Regardless of the reality of global warming I think we have an obligation to improve our use of resources. The statistics for first world consumption of water, power, paper, plastics etc. are obscene. One day all of the developing countries are going to want to be first world consumers, and there aren't going to be the resources. Cue resource based conflict.
The problem of course is that it takes more of an effort to be more parsimonious. And effort means money. It wont be done voluntarily so the only way is to legislate, in the long term interest of mankind as a whole rather than in the short term interest of a countries individuals and corporations. In corporate driven first world countries there are sufficiently powerfully corporate entieties capable of preventing this happening. So we have a problem that is not going to be resolved anytime soon.
A few years ago people used think that mankind was so stupid that it was inevitably we would destroy ourselves in nuclear armageddon. Sadly I think we are destined to have a for more ignominious downfall, drowning in our own detritus.
Will you consider it sufficient evidence when you have to buy a boat in order to get to work? And wear factor 50 and breathing apparatus whenever you are outside?
With the majority having the above parent posts attitude, we are effectively fucked because no one will believe any predictions until it is too late.
I accept that there is not at present any conclusive proof that catastrophic global changes are inevitable. Mainly because we don't have good enough simulations, and obviously cant do any large scale experiments.
However, if such events have even an above negligible probability of occuring I think we must take steps in order to avoid them. Therefore the onus on proof should be with the naysayers, proove that there is no possible chance of us screwing up the whole world, once that is done we can all sit back and enjoy our mass consumerism to the limit. Otherwise, lets try and shut the stable door before the bleeding horse has a chance to bolt.