From an old slashdot comment by ShadyG (written before this patent was submitted btw) http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11208&cid= 350375 : "The example of one-click shopping is even more illustrative. Something that is obvious will have no prior art, for the very reason that it's not worth publishing. What am I going to do, publish a solution for a doubly-linked list just to prevent a patent from getting issued on it? "
Indeed, I guess you should have:) Those of you with a cynical nerve will probably claim that we will soon see a patent that deals with NUL termination of a string of characters...
But using a parse tree comparison would be interesting anyway. Especially if it could be compared with object code for which the source code is not available.
AMD64 already has non-executable pages.
on
AMD64 Preview
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· Score: 4, Informative
Quoting the AMD64 Architecture Programmer's Manual Volume 2: System Programming:
"The NX bit in the page-translation tables specifies whether instructions can be executed from the page."
So non-executable pages are already present in AMD64.
What about companies developing drugs? The development costs are usually very large. But the final product is easy to reproduce. I have no good idea of how to encourage companies to develop this unless they get an assurance of profit in the form of a patent.
How do you propose to deal with that without patents? I would be surprised indeed if an open drugs community would be able to surpass large corporations in this matter. Upgrading a kernel is one thing, alpha-testing a drug is not quite the same thing...:)
But I agree with you in the case of software patents for example.
That was quite impressive. Most students don't do such impressive projects though. I do hope that most students find the course to be educational though.
You were the ones who implemented all kinds of videogames on your CPU, right?
It is very hard to make a lossless codec for this kind of signal. The least significant bits look more or less like noise if you have 16 bit samples, and the entropy of noise is quite high. I would be surprised if there are any significant breakthroughs in lossless compression of arbitrary audio streams.
Re:Two words... Funny story related to this
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AMD: No Grease For You!
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· Score: 1, Interesting
For a more illuminating look at how bad thermal grease really is with regards to heat transfer I recommend a look at http://www.dansdata.com/goop.htm
Toothpaste was actually better at transferring the heat than arctic silver. (Not that toothpaste would be a good solution in the long run:))
Re:I wonder if they really can make this 'invisibl
on
Foiling Cinema Pirates
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Personally, I think that a movie seen at a theatre flickers quite badly even today.
If you are bothered by a 60Hz monitor with a white background you are probably going to be bothered by a white scene in a cinema as well. I hope that this technology will not worsen the effect too much.
I'm not sure exactly what kind of waste they are going to bury at this site, but there are more to it than just used fuel. IIRC, the report stated that there would be contaminated machine parts and such stuff buried at WIPP, for example.
While these points are true (AFAIK), they still does not say anything on how to deal with the location and local concentration of radioactive wastes.
Furthermore, the waste products of nuclear technology does not occur naturally since they have a very short halflife when compared to naturally occuring isotopes. Dealing with this highly radioactive material is the real problem.
The idea is to create an international standard for marking this kind of site. They would use the six official UN languages. There would be room for a local language as well. Since English is the standard language in the US, they are thinking about selecting Najavo as the local languages. (Although they did claim that they were going to investigate if the native americans felt comfortable about using their language on a stockpile of nuclear waste.)
Although the biggest problem written about in the report is drilling. So they need to be able to stop people from drilling before they have made a conduit for the waste to travel through to water reservoirs for example.
Actually, if you would read the report, or at least parts of it, you would see that security through obscurity is not the goal of the design.
One idea is to have underground vaults that contain detailed information about the site, with enough of redundant information that it should be possible to decode its meaning. For example, a map of the world with similar sites marked out. A periodic table (with samples of the elements, where possible). A map of the facility. Texts in several languages detailing the site, what it contains.
The report in question _does not_ contain any details on how the repository is supposed to be protected from natural decay, erosion, earth quakes, etc. It does not contain thoughts on how to protect it from intrusion by humans.
The task of the team writing this report was only to investigate on how to _inform_ future societies about the dangers of the site.
Exactly where each process was within the kernel is pretty ambigious. On the other hand you
might be able to use the kernel profiling support for this.
No difference.
It isn't that hard to edit a binary to include a trojan as well.
For example, you could find the part of/bin/login that calls crypt() and add a call to your own function before calling crypt(). (Patching crypt() is a long honored tradition, used for example in the old telnetd LD_PRELOAD bug.)
If you doubt this I encourage you to take a look at for example fravia's site. (Use google.)
I'd say that it has a keyboard pass through adapter.
(Not that anyone seems to be able to get this to work reliable. The PC keyboard protocol is a bitch.)
For what it is worth, the code wasn't included in their binary only object file, but in nv.c which is some sort of glue logic between the binary only module and the rest of the kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
From an old slashdot comment by ShadyG (written before this patent was submitted btw) http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11208&cid= 350375 :
:)
"The example of one-click shopping is even more illustrative. Something that is obvious will have no prior art, for the very reason that it's not worth publishing. What am I going to do, publish a solution for a doubly-linked list just to prevent a patent from getting issued on it? "
Indeed, I guess you should have
Those of you with a cynical nerve will probably claim that we will soon see a patent that deals with NUL termination of a string of characters...
The tool have an option to remove whitespace.
But using a parse tree comparison would be interesting anyway. Especially if it could be compared with object code for which the source code is not available.
Quoting the AMD64 Architecture Programmer's Manual Volume 2: System Programming:
"The NX bit in the page-translation tables specifies whether instructions can be executed from the page."
So non-executable pages are already present in AMD64.
What about companies developing drugs? The development costs are usually very large. But the final product is easy to reproduce. I have no good idea of how to encourage companies to develop this unless they get an assurance of profit in the form of a patent.
:)
How do you propose to deal with that without patents? I would be surprised indeed if an open drugs community would be able to surpass large corporations in this matter. Upgrading a kernel is one thing, alpha-testing a drug is not quite the same thing...
But I agree with you in the case of software patents for example.
That was quite impressive. Most students don't do such impressive projects though. I do hope that most students find the course to be educational though.
You were the ones who implemented all kinds of videogames on your CPU, right?
It is very hard to make a lossless codec for this kind of signal. The least significant bits look more or less like noise if you have 16 bit samples, and the entropy of noise is quite high. I would be surprised if there are any significant breakthroughs in lossless compression of arbitrary audio streams.
Toothpaste was actually better at transferring the heat than arctic silver. (Not that toothpaste would be a good solution in the long run :))
Personally, I think that a movie seen at a theatre flickers quite badly even today.
If you are bothered by a 60Hz monitor with a white background you are probably going to be bothered by a white scene in a cinema as well. I hope that this technology will not worsen the effect too much.
It is not so well known that the russians have a system similar to GPS. More information at http://www.rssi.ru/SFCSIC/english.html
You could use some sort of one way hash function to get around the need to keep unencrypted passwords in memory.
But what would you do when the user wants to change the password?
I'm not sure exactly what kind of waste they are going to bury at this site, but there are more to it than just used fuel. IIRC, the report stated that there would be contaminated machine parts and such stuff buried at WIPP, for example.
While these points are true (AFAIK), they still does not say anything on how to deal with the location and local concentration of radioactive wastes.
Furthermore, the waste products of nuclear technology does not occur naturally since they have a very short halflife when compared to naturally occuring isotopes. Dealing with this highly radioactive material is the real problem.
The idea is to create an international standard for marking this kind of site. They would use the six official UN languages. There would be room for a local language as well. Since English is the standard language in the US, they are thinking about selecting Najavo as the local languages. (Although they did claim that they were going to investigate if the native americans felt comfortable about using their language on a stockpile of nuclear waste.)
True.
Although the biggest problem written about in the report is drilling. So they need to be able to stop people from drilling before they have made a conduit for the waste to travel through to water reservoirs for example.
Actually, if you would read the report, or at least parts of it, you would see that security through obscurity is not the goal of the design.
One idea is to have underground vaults that contain detailed information about the site, with enough of redundant information that it should be possible to decode its meaning. For example, a map of the world with similar sites marked out. A periodic table (with samples of the elements, where possible). A map of the facility. Texts in several languages detailing the site, what it contains.
The report in question _does not_ contain any details on how the repository is supposed to be protected from natural decay, erosion, earth quakes, etc. It does not contain thoughts on how to protect it from intrusion by humans.
The task of the team writing this report was only to investigate on how to _inform_ future societies about the dangers of the site.
Exactly where each process was within the kernel is pretty ambigious. On the other hand you
might be able to use the kernel profiling support for this.
No difference. /bin/login that calls crypt() and add a call to your own function before calling crypt(). (Patching crypt() is a long honored tradition, used for example in the old telnetd LD_PRELOAD bug.)
It isn't that hard to edit a binary to include a trojan as well.
For example, you could find the part of
If you doubt this I encourage you to take a look at for example fravia's site. (Use google.)
Actually there is a one pixel wide frame around every page, so it would not be very difficult to discover it.
And wouldn't _that_ be an interesting message to get as a reply from an alien civilisation :)
5,010,240,000 Hz
l
As detailed in page 21 of the message: http://pages.infinit.net/lachapel/seti/page21.htm
I'd say that it has a keyboard pass through adapter.
(Not that anyone seems to be able to get this to work reliable. The PC keyboard protocol is a bitch.)
Nope. Might be possible using the XTest extension though.
But your main problem is going to be stupid keyboards that aren't designed for pressing more than perhaps 2 or 3 buttons simoultaneously.
I really envy you if you have a keyboard that can handle lots of button pressed on the same row..
You just have to be really _REALLY_ sure you can turn the damn thing off after it has won...
I bought Unreal Tournament only because there was a linux port of it.
I will certainly not buy Unreal 2 unless there is a Linux port of it. And a server only port is not enough for me.
For what it is worth, the code wasn't included in their binary only object file, but in nv.c which is some sort of glue logic between the binary only module and the rest of the kernel.