Intel released their machine-code-level spec a couple months ago. I'm not sure AMD has released theirs yet. But yeah, they just do a couple minimal changes. I haven't seen a good technical review of it yet. I understand the document generally, but I don't know if all the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed.
Something like a soccer player "looks normal" and thus does not get scruitinized.
Well, vandalism starts to look very much alike after a while. Story about one kid and his backyard and his ambitions in life; delete, autobiography. Story about a company you've never heard of that reads like ad copy; delete, advert. Story about a band you've never heard of; delete, autobiography. Story about a soccer player with lots of specific dates and awards that make them sound notable; don't bother googling (I guess, I don't know).
They wouldn't include some of the most boring and mundane topics and then try to exclude other topics that are obviously more noteworthy.
While I hold Wikipedia in somewhat high regard for their noble efforts, I dont think we need new encylopedias. In reality, the information is already out there.
Yeah, I agree the huge bulk of information on Wikipedia comes from either Googling various stuff online, or sometimes from more or less credible experts who are bored or distracted enough to type stuff in. But I still think it's useful to pull all the stuff that's scattered across www/usenet/etc into one (semi-)cohesive whole, so that people don't have spend 45 minutes googling stuff to answer one little question. (on the other hand, Wikipedia is clearly not trustworthy enough to simply spend 2 minutes answering a question by only reading wikipedia)
Read up on the my.mp3.com case comparisons here. I really think they're similar. Especially in the judge's ruling, when they talk about the number of CD's copied onto their computers, not the number of copies that were sent out to users.
There are a couple of differences between television programs. 1) timeshifting usually does not involve creating a new copy. 2) creating a new copy of a show and giving it to a friend is sometimes considered to be within fair use. However, US fair use law calls out four specific criteria, the first of which is whether the "use is of a commercial nature". In Google's case, the answer is clearly yes (see the judge's opinion in my.mp3.com). As far as I can tell, the four factors come out to be exactly the same for Google as they do for my.mp3.com. (internally, not externally)
Yes, having multiple computers hold multiple copies of the books, with potentially zero actual humans reading any of the copies, that's pretty complicated. I don't know if that directly ties in to my.mp3.com or not. I don't know. I bet it's too complicated for the court to tackle though, and they'll just punt on that.
Doing above is much easier then you think as I have done similiar data mining on computer log files to filter out machine users from human users to detect when a human was wrongly using a machine account.
But also, that's an arms-race that (I think) hasn't begun yet, while the current.dll-scanning arms race is already somewhat matured, and we know where it works and where it doesn't. You can say that it's easy to write a bot-fingerprint-detector, but you don't necessarily know how easy it is for bots to counter your detector.
and can tell you that there is a whole hey of a lot more than meets the eye with all of this
Um, yeah, you can say that again.
I don't quite understand how the new chips significantly reduce the complexity of vmware-style programs. I guess they don't have to dynamically rewrite the code and constantly keep adding breakpoints, does the removal of that make the VMM significantly easier to code? I guess so.
Also, any idea whether the new hardware chips will make x86 virtualization provably secure? I'd heard that the VMware method of virtualization was at least theoretically exploitable, allowing malicious code in one VM to break out and run code in a separate VM.
IANAL but AFAIK, the technical (non-political) part of it is about legal copyright issues. Google isn't allowed to internally copy any book onto many different computers.
For example, let's take the company I work at. If we have 5 different employees that want an O'Reilly book, the company is required to purchase 5 different copies of the book. If my company were to buy one book, scan it, and put the digital data on 5 computers, that would be blatant copyright infringement.
This is MILES away from the Sony rootkit. The Sony rootkit causes prolonged irreversible damage (eg. constantly takes up 2% of your processor, always runs even when you're not playing the CD, opens up the possibility for new security holes, isn't removable by mere mortals).
Blizzard's code doesn't cause any damage. Other companies have shown that this is needed, and is not malicious. Yes, they should have disclosed it, but that's their only failure.
Even the techie guys on the podcasts are getting ruffled over this, but I don't know why. It's not really a black mark against Blizzard.
There's no reason the problems they create can't be solved.
And there is absolutely a solid need for anti-hack programs like this. When you can hook into the DirectX.dll's to provide easy wall-hacking to games, that's a problem. When you can otherwise get in between.dll's or execute code in the game's process, then that causes Counterstrike to become a huge haven for script kiddies. Yes, you own your computer, and we don't Microsoft's Next-Generation Secure Computing Base to lock you of your own computer. But most of us also want reasonably playable multiplayer games where 99+% of people aren't able to cheat.
I really fail to see how this is any different from what other companies have done before. Half Life's Valve Anti-Cheat system scanned the whole system. Punkbuster, etc. also scanned the system (but were third-party add-ons). The only difference here is that Blizzard didn't disclose that they would be probing further, but I don't see further probing as evidence that Blizzard is doing anything wrong.
The proof isn't in the bag quite yet, but there's quite a bit there to say that Xen will be really important in the near future.
Re:True, but not a big deal
on
Printing Wikipedia
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I never said otherwise. The problem is a double standard - some things don't get throughly scrutinized right away while others do because of how people precieve certian topics or issues.
No, things just aren't uniformly scrutinized. Period. Some vandalism sits around for a year or two before it's noticed. Some things get AfD'd two minutes after they're created. It's random and doens't have anything to do with topic.
but if Wikipedia is going to call this non-notable, then I can cite plenty of articles regarding things that are unquestionably obscure and barely known at all on Wikipedia.
One of my problems with "notability" is that it's really very much in the eye of the beholder. If someone says "that's not notable", it can simply mean that they don't know very much about the topic, and maybe there are some obscure 13th century specialist academics who think it is very much notable.
I could care less whether or not Wikipedia wants to accept my article. What makes me miffed is the hypocrisy, bias, and double standards that exist (and this isn't the only example, just one).
A lot of the gray-area votes are arbitrary.
I wouldn't say double standards, it's just different editors have different standards because there's no single policy that specifies what's notable and what's not.
I don't think the goals of having a database of human knowledge requires the structure that Wikipedia has.
Well, there are some procedural things about wikipedia that unnerves me. I would like to see a competing project give a serious go at an alternative structure, to see if things can be done better.
Dude, do what I'm doing, and wait for the new CPUs from Intel or AMD. Xen WILL run Windows unmodified on these new chips once they're available, AND will execute slightly faster than VMware currently does (eg. like 95% of normal speed). See here for the Intel/AMD info. Or buy one of the Intel Macs once they're available, they're rumored to also use the Intel VT chips.
Re:True, but not a big deal
on
Printing Wikipedia
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· Score: 4, Informative
This is rediculous because, as you state, a non-existant soccer player gets ZERO questions
Actually, the non-existant soccer player got unanimously deleted as soon as it was discovered. I simply saved a copy because it was one of the more unique examples of vandalism I'd seen (most are almost exactly the same).
VfD's can be stressful, especially for new editors. It's hard to not take it as a personal afront.
What's the BBS, by the way?
Yes, there are a lot of gray areas in terms of what should be included in Wikipedia. Notability is especially contentious.
Then you have to also note the number of other articles that are totally pointless in terms of cultural relevance to anything - less than the BBS in question was.
Well, the most extreme examples don't count. AfD/VfD is sometimes a bit of a random process, and you never know if something will be kept or not. So sometimes things aren't deleted, or aren't deleted right away, or, better yet, aren't merged yet, and current editors often disagree with previous precedent.
Wikipedia is the perfect example of pitifully poor organizational structure marred by populist tendencies and groupthink.
Wikipedia is also different from things like Slashdot and such because the goal is to have one big, cohesive database of human knowledge. On Slashdot, comments are only read for a couple days. On Wikipedia, I might think something should be phrased a certain way, but someone else might think it would be better phrased another way, and we have to actually settle those disagreements.
The fact that everyone has to cooperate on Wikipedia a lot more means that things won't always go my way. And that's not something that will ever change.
The reported number-of-viewers might be a scam game, but every company's individual analysis of "if I pay $X for advertising, I expect to get $X + $Y in sales profit" can't possibly be a scam.
Outright vandalism still occurs, but is reverted, and presumably the version of each article that's printed would be checked for recent vandalism before printing.
In terms of imprecision/sloppyness, well, I don't know if that will be fixed any time soon.
On the other hand, all the text and images are available for free (as in beer), so Wikipedia's content is one more legal alternative to those with fewer means. Given that the field exists of only older encyclopedias (eg. 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica), Wikipedia definitely has some value, though print/DVD Wikipedia is probably most valuable to users when compared/contrasted with Encyclopædia Britannica.
Re:Sometimes I feel wikipedia can't be fixed
on
Printing Wikipedia
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't think vadanlism is so much of a problem, because that can be more or less easily removed by many different people. I think it's more of a problem that poor editing can bring down the content of Wikipedia overall. Someone who is both an expert in their field and also a great writer can post some brilliant prose, with subtle and precise meanings throughout, that accurately expresses the current consensus of experts in their field. And then someone else can come along and blow away all the subtle distinctions without knowing better. And it's somewhat difficult to remove the less experienced person's edits, because reverting well-intentioned edits can be very contentious unless you can clearly state why the new edits should be removed (which requires still more brilliant writing).
Re:True, but not a big deal
on
Printing Wikipedia
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· Score: 4, Informative
That was the RC patrol at work there (RC = recent changes). There is some percentage of vandalism that stays around for a while though, so yes, it's doubly important to triple check facts. (for instance, somebody completely made up a soccer player, and the page ended up sticking around for several months before someone did a little more googling than normal, and found out that the player clearly didn't exist).
Considering that the english version of Wikipedia is adding over 1 new page every minute, there's no way that a small cabal of editors could properly filter everything.
There is a small-ish group of editors who have been voted on, and confirmed to be mature editors with a sizable edit history. And there are protected pages which can only be edited by people in that group. However, page protection is intended to only be used sparingly.
Wikipedia has stated that no article will be locked down for reasons of maturity. Wikipedia is considering causing edits to be delayed, so that vandalism has a chance to be checked and removed before it's visible to everyone, but articles on Wikipedia will never be considered to be "finished".
People who really need to refer to a solidifed version of a page can include the time of access in the reference (just as you'd do when using any webpage as a proper reference), or using a URL that points to a specific historic version (example).
Re:What's the point again?
on
Printing Wikipedia
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· Score: 4, Informative
Wikipedia audiobooks are being made available, and are also static. The goal is to make Wikipedia content available in other forms when those media will be more convenient (eg. when offline, when in your car).
Also, only a subset of wikipedia will be available offline. Wikipedia's featured articles for the most part don't suffer from Wikipedia's usual disadvantages as they are more thoroughly reviewed than most articles.
Well, Xen is free, and Intel/AMD hardware solutions are comming soon, which will allow Xen to run Windows unmodified. So, once everyone is upgraded to the new CPU's, virtualization will become a basic standard feature for everyone. MS can compete by giving their solution away for free, but either way, it doesn't get better than free for the consumer.
Yeah, certainly "waa, he made me do it" isn't a reasonable legal defense. But it takes a somewhat large grain of salt to think that Sony intentionally included a rootkit on one of their CD's. Other posters are right though, any of the other scenarios are somewhat implausible as well.
there's a strong implication that this is a purchased commercial rootkit. Sony very deliberately licensed and distributed it.
It's obvious that a rootkit exists on the CD. It's quite likely that Sony purchased the DRM from First4Internet. It's not obvious that Sony asked First4Internet to include a rootkit in the product that was delivered to Sony.
Slashdot Mirror
Intel released their machine-code-level spec a couple months ago. I'm not sure AMD has released theirs yet. But yeah, they just do a couple minimal changes. I haven't seen a good technical review of it yet. I understand the document generally, but I don't know if all the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed.
Yeah, I agree the huge bulk of information on Wikipedia comes from either Googling various stuff online, or sometimes from more or less credible experts who are bored or distracted enough to type stuff in. But I still think it's useful to pull all the stuff that's scattered across www/usenet/etc into one (semi-)cohesive whole, so that people don't have spend 45 minutes googling stuff to answer one little question. (on the other hand, Wikipedia is clearly not trustworthy enough to simply spend 2 minutes answering a question by only reading wikipedia)
Oh, and that's such a vital distinction. I now weep with anger towards Blizzard now that you've shown me the truth.
There are a couple of differences between television programs. 1) timeshifting usually does not involve creating a new copy. 2) creating a new copy of a show and giving it to a friend is sometimes considered to be within fair use. However, US fair use law calls out four specific criteria, the first of which is whether the "use is of a commercial nature". In Google's case, the answer is clearly yes (see the judge's opinion in my.mp3.com). As far as I can tell, the four factors come out to be exactly the same for Google as they do for my.mp3.com. (internally, not externally)
Yes, having multiple computers hold multiple copies of the books, with potentially zero actual humans reading any of the copies, that's pretty complicated. I don't know if that directly ties in to my.mp3.com or not. I don't know. I bet it's too complicated for the court to tackle though, and they'll just punt on that.
It's kind of weird how this grass-roots stuff can turn so ugly sometimes, in somewhat illogical ways.
I don't quite understand how the new chips significantly reduce the complexity of vmware-style programs. I guess they don't have to dynamically rewrite the code and constantly keep adding breakpoints, does the removal of that make the VMM significantly easier to code? I guess so.
Also, any idea whether the new hardware chips will make x86 virtualization provably secure? I'd heard that the VMware method of virtualization was at least theoretically exploitable, allowing malicious code in one VM to break out and run code in a separate VM.
For example, let's take the company I work at. If we have 5 different employees that want an O'Reilly book, the company is required to purchase 5 different copies of the book. If my company were to buy one book, scan it, and put the digital data on 5 computers, that would be blatant copyright infringement.
Blizzard's code doesn't cause any damage. Other companies have shown that this is needed, and is not malicious. Yes, they should have disclosed it, but that's their only failure.
Even the techie guys on the podcasts are getting ruffled over this, but I don't know why. It's not really a black mark against Blizzard.
And there is absolutely a solid need for anti-hack programs like this. When you can hook into the DirectX .dll's to provide easy wall-hacking to games, that's a problem. When you can otherwise get in between .dll's or execute code in the game's process, then that causes Counterstrike to become a huge haven for script kiddies. Yes, you own your computer, and we don't Microsoft's Next-Generation Secure Computing Base to lock you of your own computer. But most of us also want reasonably playable multiplayer games where 99+% of people aren't able to cheat.
I really fail to see how this is any different from what other companies have done before. Half Life's Valve Anti-Cheat system scanned the whole system. Punkbuster, etc. also scanned the system (but were third-party add-ons). The only difference here is that Blizzard didn't disclose that they would be probing further, but I don't see further probing as evidence that Blizzard is doing anything wrong.
- Xensource gets $6,000,000 in funding
- AMD is actively working with Xensource to support their new chips
Also, not directly tied to running non-modified OS's:- IBM contributes to Xen
The proof isn't in the bag quite yet, but there's quite a bit there to say that Xen will be really important in the near future.One of my problems with "notability" is that it's really very much in the eye of the beholder. If someone says "that's not notable", it can simply mean that they don't know very much about the topic, and maybe there are some obscure 13th century specialist academics who think it is very much notable.
A lot of the gray-area votes are arbitrary.I wouldn't say double standards, it's just different editors have different standards because there's no single policy that specifies what's notable and what's not.
Well, there are some procedural things about wikipedia that unnerves me. I would like to see a competing project give a serious go at an alternative structure, to see if things can be done better.
Dude, do what I'm doing, and wait for the new CPUs from Intel or AMD. Xen WILL run Windows unmodified on these new chips once they're available, AND will execute slightly faster than VMware currently does (eg. like 95% of normal speed). See here for the Intel/AMD info. Or buy one of the Intel Macs once they're available, they're rumored to also use the Intel VT chips.
Actually, the non-existant soccer player got unanimously deleted as soon as it was discovered. I simply saved a copy because it was one of the more unique examples of vandalism I'd seen (most are almost exactly the same).
VfD's can be stressful, especially for new editors. It's hard to not take it as a personal afront.
What's the BBS, by the way?
Yes, there are a lot of gray areas in terms of what should be included in Wikipedia. Notability is especially contentious.
Well, the most extreme examples don't count. AfD/VfD is sometimes a bit of a random process, and you never know if something will be kept or not. So sometimes things aren't deleted, or aren't deleted right away, or, better yet, aren't merged yet, and current editors often disagree with previous precedent.Wikipedia is also different from things like Slashdot and such because the goal is to have one big, cohesive database of human knowledge. On Slashdot, comments are only read for a couple days. On Wikipedia, I might think something should be phrased a certain way, but someone else might think it would be better phrased another way, and we have to actually settle those disagreements.
The fact that everyone has to cooperate on Wikipedia a lot more means that things won't always go my way. And that's not something that will ever change.
The reported number-of-viewers might be a scam game, but every company's individual analysis of "if I pay $X for advertising, I expect to get $X + $Y in sales profit" can't possibly be a scam.
In terms of imprecision/sloppyness, well, I don't know if that will be fixed any time soon.
On the other hand, all the text and images are available for free (as in beer), so Wikipedia's content is one more legal alternative to those with fewer means. Given that the field exists of only older encyclopedias (eg. 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica), Wikipedia definitely has some value, though print/DVD Wikipedia is probably most valuable to users when compared/contrasted with Encyclopædia Britannica.
I don't think vadanlism is so much of a problem, because that can be more or less easily removed by many different people. I think it's more of a problem that poor editing can bring down the content of Wikipedia overall. Someone who is both an expert in their field and also a great writer can post some brilliant prose, with subtle and precise meanings throughout, that accurately expresses the current consensus of experts in their field. And then someone else can come along and blow away all the subtle distinctions without knowing better. And it's somewhat difficult to remove the less experienced person's edits, because reverting well-intentioned edits can be very contentious unless you can clearly state why the new edits should be removed (which requires still more brilliant writing).
That was the RC patrol at work there (RC = recent changes). There is some percentage of vandalism that stays around for a while though, so yes, it's doubly important to triple check facts. (for instance, somebody completely made up a soccer player, and the page ended up sticking around for several months before someone did a little more googling than normal, and found out that the player clearly didn't exist).
There is a small-ish group of editors who have been voted on, and confirmed to be mature editors with a sizable edit history. And there are protected pages which can only be edited by people in that group. However, page protection is intended to only be used sparingly.
People who really need to refer to a solidifed version of a page can include the time of access in the reference (just as you'd do when using any webpage as a proper reference), or using a URL that points to a specific historic version (example).
Also, only a subset of wikipedia will be available offline. Wikipedia's featured articles for the most part don't suffer from Wikipedia's usual disadvantages as they are more thoroughly reviewed than most articles.
Well, Xen is free, and Intel/AMD hardware solutions are comming soon, which will allow Xen to run Windows unmodified. So, once everyone is upgraded to the new CPU's, virtualization will become a basic standard feature for everyone. MS can compete by giving their solution away for free, but either way, it doesn't get better than free for the consumer.
Yeah, certainly "waa, he made me do it" isn't a reasonable legal defense. But it takes a somewhat large grain of salt to think that Sony intentionally included a rootkit on one of their CD's. Other posters are right though, any of the other scenarios are somewhat implausible as well.
It's obvious that a rootkit exists on the CD. It's quite likely that Sony purchased the DRM from First4Internet. It's not obvious that Sony asked First4Internet to include a rootkit in the product that was delivered to Sony.