Do we even know enough about numbers stations to know if they're sending something (like properly-implemented OTP) theoretically impossible to crack? I mean, some of them could just be sending numbers for a codebook or a simple cypher or something...
Re:One good computer application - learning to typ
on
The Flickering Mind
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· Score: 1
The high school I attended in the late '90s had a pretty good supply of newish macs (mostly used for lunchtime gaming), but the typing class was on a farm of Apple IIs, using a word-processor instead of a typing program, and books that were designed for typewriters--and half the class was spent on typewriter-specific tasks, like how to center text, configure tab stops to make tables, and anticipating line-endings and hypenation rules.
It was quaint even then, lessons on how to churn butter or use a straight-razor would have been more useful and relevant.
So, shall we vote whether to consider this poor shmuck the first casualty in Ashcroft's "War on pr0n?"
I'd have to say "no", since this whole thing happened more than a year before Aschroft started making noises about porn and was presumably done by local law enforcement, not the the Federal Justice Department. Also, this is about child porn which is a seperate from "obscenity" (the regular porn Aschroft wants to go after)
Does anyone know the technical details behind it, like the network topology or the basics of the protocol or what method it uses to (supposedly) keep its users anonymous?
I can't seem to find any details at all in English-language sources.
a progressive hash works just as well on the audio-only bytes of an MP3 as it does on a whole file or any other data. The only hard part is that the various hashing apps need to be able to crack open an mp3.
A clever file-sharing app would 'canonicalize' the data it gets by seperating out volatile metadata like id3 tags and compressors/archivers (.zip,.tar.gz, etc) and have one hash for the meat of the file and one hash for the file and its metadata together. This would reduce meaningless duplicates like the guy that's in love with lame formats like RAR or who always changes his ID3 tags, but not let garbage data in.
The number of vulnerable machines strongly affects the time it takes for a worm to spread.
Consider the extreme cases:
If there are two vulnerable machines, and the first one is infected by hand, it will take on average 2^32/2 or about 2 billion tries to find the other one.
If every IP address has a different infectable machine behind it, the work gets parallelized and a sufficently smart worm could infect every machine in the time it takes to do 32 infections. Even a less clever worm that probes randomly (thus duplicating a lot of effort) would infect nearly every machine after a few hundred infection-cycles.
Um, you could do it that way, or the human-level intelligences that programmed the game in the first place could develop it to output varying levels of violence/language/etc. as dictated by the setting of the parental-control thingy.
Since games are software, instead of a fixed product like movie, why are the games themselves given ratings instead of just having a global 'parental control' setting on game equipment? Lots of games have a content-level control already, and setting a limit at the OS/console hardware level would let retailers not worry about who they're selling to--and let game companies not worry about toning down their games to make a T rating.
(massive generalizations from minimal personal experience follows)
From what I understand of European politics--which is not a terrible lot--Americans draw the border of acceptable politcal positions much more narrowly. Americans recognise burning the flag as a political statement, too, but it's part of a set of politics that are themselves sacred. Aside from cluless rebellious kids, people who don't want to be part of that are not welcome in our community.
That's at least for Americans who burn the flag. When someone outside the US burns the flag, it's viewed less as "I strongly disagree with US policy", as "If I were brave and/or powerful enough, I would physically attack you".
It strikes me that self-imposed preemptive censorship (the MPAA's rating system, ESRB, the Hays Commission, the Comics Code Authority, Professor Felten, Cable TV standards & practices...) in America is reliably more draconian than any successful government censorship regime.
Perhaps the mainstream media outlets need to take a hint from the porn industry, tell the govenrment to screw off, and accept the occaisional raid+fine (if it even goes that far) as an advertising expense? "You heard about it on 20/20, now play it! the disgusting new action game BANNED in MICHIGAN!"
I recently used a php library that keeps track of objects by appending them to an (global)array, and passing the array index around to various functions that need to access the data. This array never emptied or deleted from until the end of the php session, so it basically creates its own gc-defeating memory space, with a giant memory leak.
I love how we seem to have the need to hypothesise about the "inevitable" future advancements of our species that will supposedly change our way of life... but you look at how far we come and we still see people in hospitals being mended like garments, and cut open like cattle.
[...]
Maybe it is because people who run our civilization really aren't interested in technological advance. They are interested in money, power, shareholders. The best AI your going to see is to make money on quake 4.
If by "technological advance", you mean gee-whiz futurism stuff like flying cars and butler-robots, yeah that's not going anywhere, it's mostly silly and impractical. But that doesn't mean peoples lives haven't changed meaningfully and for the better, or won't continue to do so.
As someone with a right forearm patched together with steel plates and phillips screws, I might not be the best example, but your example--medicine--has had some of the most world-changing advancements; we've gone from non-antiseptic, non-anaesthetized butchery to outpatient laparoscopy and wonder drugs in about 160 years. I suppose they could use cutting lasers to open people up instead of sharp blades, and maybe install a few blinking subcutaneous LEDs, but I'm not sure what the benefit would be, aside from looking cool and letting everyone know they live in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Do we even know enough about numbers stations to know if they're sending something (like properly-implemented OTP) theoretically impossible to crack? I mean, some of them could just be sending numbers for a codebook or a simple cypher or something...
The high school I attended in the late '90s had a pretty good supply of newish macs (mostly used for lunchtime gaming), but the typing class was on a farm of Apple IIs, using a word-processor instead of a typing program, and books that were designed for typewriters--and half the class was spent on typewriter-specific tasks, like how to center text, configure tab stops to make tables, and anticipating line-endings and hypenation rules.
It was quaint even then, lessons on how to churn butter or use a straight-razor would have been more useful and relevant.
if it breaks, you'll have two tiny near-microscopic pieces of glass embedded in your flesh.
Nope, just a normal folder (well, several normal folders) and some index files.
Does anyone know the technical details behind it, like the network topology or the basics of the protocol or what method it uses to (supposedly) keep its users anonymous?
I can't seem to find any details at all in English-language sources.
a progressive hash works just as well on the audio-only bytes of an MP3 as it does on a whole file or any other data. The only hard part is that the various hashing apps need to be able to crack open an mp3.
.tar.gz, etc) and have one hash for the meat of the file and one hash for the file and its metadata together. This would reduce meaningless duplicates like the guy that's in love with lame formats like RAR or who always changes his ID3 tags, but not let garbage data in.
A clever file-sharing app would 'canonicalize' the data it gets by seperating out volatile metadata like id3 tags and compressors/archivers (.zip,
1. Invent product
2. Deploy into market
3. Product becomes obsolete
4. Patent awarded
Yes, but if we go down that path, we'll create a golf ball so big could destroy a planet...
The number of vulnerable machines strongly affects the time it takes for a worm to spread.
Consider the extreme cases:
If there are two vulnerable machines, and the first one is infected by hand, it will take on average 2^32/2 or about 2 billion tries to find the other one.
If every IP address has a different infectable machine behind it, the work gets parallelized and a sufficently smart worm could infect every machine in the time it takes to do 32 infections. Even a less clever worm that probes randomly (thus duplicating a lot of effort) would infect nearly every machine after a few hundred infection-cycles.
Thinks they're worth a penny a share
(look at the bottom of the 'bid orders' section)
I think you've got it backwards, worms propogate without assistance, viruses require user action.
Wasn't Quad sound (for music) tried in the 70s and a total flop?
It's not entirely impossible to develop a watermark that survives reasonable-quality analog copying.
This ADA-compliant stadium provides extra audio cues for 'the Wave' for our vision-impaired fans.
Please stand up and raise your hands over your head when you hear the tone.
Does it do 255-way joint encoding? (like this does for 4-way)
Obviously it's trivial to add extra parallel streams to a recording, it's the compression that's the hard part.
Um, you could do it that way, or the human-level intelligences that programmed the game in the first place could develop it to output varying levels of violence/language/etc. as dictated by the setting of the parental-control thingy.
Since games are software, instead of a fixed product like movie, why are the games themselves given ratings instead of just having a global 'parental control' setting on game equipment? Lots of games have a content-level control already, and setting a limit at the OS/console hardware level would let retailers not worry about who they're selling to--and let game companies not worry about toning down their games to make a T rating.
I've never played it, but I know a Conservative WASP who loves that series of games.
(massive generalizations from minimal personal experience follows)
From what I understand of European politics--which is not a terrible lot--Americans draw the border of acceptable politcal positions much more narrowly. Americans recognise burning the flag as a political statement, too, but it's part of a set of politics that are themselves sacred. Aside from cluless rebellious kids, people who don't want to be part of that are not welcome in our community.
That's at least for Americans who burn the flag. When someone outside the US burns the flag, it's viewed less as "I strongly disagree with US policy", as "If I were brave and/or powerful enough, I would physically attack you".
It strikes me that self-imposed preemptive censorship (the MPAA's rating system, ESRB, the Hays Commission, the Comics Code Authority, Professor Felten, Cable TV standards & practices...) in America is reliably more draconian than any successful government censorship regime.
Perhaps the mainstream media outlets need to take a hint from the porn industry, tell the govenrment to screw off, and accept the occaisional raid+fine (if it even goes that far) as an advertising expense? "You heard about it on 20/20, now play it! the disgusting new action game BANNED in MICHIGAN!"
I recently used a php library that keeps track of objects by appending them to an (global)array, and passing the array index around to various functions that need to access the data. This array never emptied or deleted from until the end of the php session, so it basically creates its own gc-defeating memory space, with a giant memory leak.
I love how we seem to have the need to hypothesise about the "inevitable" future advancements of our species that will supposedly change our way of life... but you look at how far we come and we still see people in hospitals being mended like garments, and cut open like cattle.
[...]
Maybe it is because people who run our civilization really aren't interested in technological advance. They are interested in money, power, shareholders. The best AI your going to see is to make money on quake 4.
If by "technological advance", you mean gee-whiz futurism stuff like flying cars and butler-robots, yeah that's not going anywhere, it's mostly silly and impractical. But that doesn't mean peoples lives haven't changed meaningfully and for the better, or won't continue to do so.
As someone with a right forearm patched together with steel plates and phillips screws, I might not be the best example, but your example--medicine--has had some of the most world-changing advancements; we've gone from non-antiseptic, non-anaesthetized butchery to outpatient laparoscopy and wonder drugs in about 160 years. I suppose they could use cutting lasers to open people up instead of sharp blades, and maybe install a few blinking subcutaneous LEDs, but I'm not sure what the benefit would be, aside from looking cool and letting everyone know they live in the future.