Contests are a terrible way to demonstrate security. A product/system/protocol/algorithm that has survived a contest unbroken is not obviously more trustworthy than one that has not been the subject of a contest. The best products/systems/protocols/algorithms available today have not been the subjects of any contests, and probably never will be. Contests generally don't produce useful data. There are three basic reasons why this is so. [see link for explanations]
I believe the pipes don't freeze because the water is warm. And the ice is a big insulating layer between that and the deep-below-freezing Alaskan air. There's a moist cavity at the top where the stuff sprays out.
. . . moist cavity. They could've used another phrase, but no.
I was just saying that if you think something like this is cool, you should just wander the halls of a lot of campuses and you'll see work done on doors and hallways that's as impressive. I guess that's not a very productive comment. And the more I reflect, maybe it's not even true.
(note: Oh, wow, my first negative moderation in something like four years on slashdot.
Granted, it's also the first time I've made a "this is a pointless story" comment, so I guess it's fair. But I've never been quite clear what the "redundant" moderation means.)
He's trying to get funding to do exactly what you're talking about
Keep modding parent up. Annoying how/. can post an article in a language most don't know and summarize it incorrectly to provoke angry response among people who will have difficulty reading the original article, meaning very few helpful "RTFA" ("TTFA?") posts.
What's really needed now is a one-hand glove for interacting inside the physics engine. With physics only slightly better than HL2, the mouse-only interface becomes pretty cumbersome. The big revolutions in the near future should be in physics engines, and we're gonna need better interaction.
It's difficult for ad-blocking technology to kill something unless an actual majority of users figure out how to do it. It's easy for/.ers to forget that the HUGE majority of users can't get around their own default browser, let alone block an ad that their ISP is trying hard to put there.
It seems pretty clear that wireless access will only increase, until we no longer worry about our physical connection to the internet; it will simply be everywhere. The question is, with people moving around cities and such, what payment model will survive? I suspect it will be something along the lines of companies sharing the actual infrastructure but selling ACCESS to it individually, much like long-distance carriers do with the current phone system.
But I think an ad-based system for basic access is just not a great general solution. Maybe there's some small group that wants it, but that probably won't justify the large cost of installing equipment at first. I predict this will go under for the same reasons the old free internet providers did.
DNA, discussing casting of the characters, said [paraphrased] "Arthur Dent should be British. All the other characters can be whatever, but Arthur should be British."
We think it's so easy to change a culture just by handing them the tools to do it. Sure, something will happen, and it might even be roughly what we expect, but I submit that the majority of people here sitting at their computers cheerful advocating the overturning of an entire governmental system and associated culture have . . . really no clue what they're dealing with.
I truly believe that education is the silver bullet, that information and communication are what will lift the human race to heights undreamed of. I just think there's something a little deserving of pause about saying "culture of compliance, family, and subservience? Pssh, here, let's give them SSH and proxies and do our best to overturn all controls and make their internet develop like ours, and with a mouse-click, throw down a government we think isn't handling stuff right. It's not that we shouldn't change things we feel are wrong, it's that we should be aware we're dealing with a whole different culture than what most of us are used to, and that culture isn't necessarially just going to morph into the 'standard' one if handed the tools.
I'm not an expert on China; I don't even have a strong opinion on what anyone should do about this kind of thing. I just think it's good to pause now and then and think about what we're doing.
Have you forgotten the mass genocide Saddam has commit, even to his own people? If you look at history, I think this would be topped only by Hitler.
There are maybe a dozen leaders in recent times who definitely killed more civilians in more brutal manners than Saddam. Obvious examples include Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Brezhnev, Tojo, and a handful of dictators in Africa.
Saddam was a bad guy, but let's try to keep the facts reasonably straight.
Regarding whether people would fast-forward ads on digital media:
There is NO way to know if sombody is actually watching an ad or taking a wiz or staring off into space.
This is true of nielson ratings and bittorrent file downloads.
This is the kind of argument you see made on/. a lot, the "in theory they can't prove something therefore they don't know it." (it comes from the computer mindset that you need to prove crypto systems insecure without ever successfully decoding any messages)
The fact is, they know that most people watch the ads, and if their ads got no results, advertisers wouldn't run them. If people DO have an easy way to fast-forward, I think they probably will, and this is a debatable point. If I'm right, the ads won't make money and won't be run.
But you can't argue that there is no way to know whether people actually watch current TV ads. On the whole, they obviously do. Using "You can't prove that a given person didn't avoid the ad somehow" as an argument for the idea that giving them the option to skip ads more easily won't change anything is fairly silly.
People constantly respond to "[supposed bad person] gives lots of money to charity" with "Yeah, but there's a huge tax incentive for that."
It's like saying "He's only buying food for starving children because the food is on sale; he's not doing it to help them." He's putting money to a worthy cause, and the system is set up so that money is used more efficiently. But in the end he has paid some amount money that would otherwise be his to a charity, and he has less money. That is good.
(The way I understand it, say you have a million dollars, you might pay half a million in taxes. If you give that million dollars to charity, you pay no tax on it. So by not donating, you're out half a million. By donating, you're out a million. So you could say that he's not paying a million dollars, only $500,000. But he is still losing money on the deal.
If I'm missing anything, please correct me. Why might a totally selfish person give to charity, aside from the roundabout social benefits of being seen as nice, which apply whether the money is taxed or not?)
Oh man, I had totally forgotten that game. One of the few that my whole family chipped in together to register. Long before we got hooked on Escape Velocity, we were flying around in rubber ducks and fruit bats, hearing the delightful noises of DLLs shattering like glass. Same interface/gameplay as the wildly popular EV and Continuim. And you get to see your programs floating around in (a wildly abstracted version of) the inside of your computer!
. . . we didn't have porn back then. I wonder what would have happened if we had been flying around and saw "Randall's Hardcore XXX Whatever" floating around . ..
On the other hand, maybe the reason we don't have a Fantastic Four yet is that cosmic rays aren't intense enough. This could be the solution to the crime problem!
I can corroberate. Saw this a lonnnng, said "hey cool", installed, it runs like shit.
And it's a terrible UI.
And I'm easily impressed by bells and whistles. I could get nothing done using it. It vanished from my computer roughly 5 minutes after I installed it.
And this is ME. I would've been one of the ones insisting that we should just give Microsoft Bob a little time to flesh itself out.
Slashdot Mirror
The Fallacy of Cracking Contests (Bruce Schneier)
Contests are a terrible way to demonstrate security. A product/system/protocol/algorithm that has survived a contest unbroken is not obviously more trustworthy than one that has not been the subject of a contest. The best products/systems/protocols/algorithms available today have not been the subjects of any contests, and probably never will be. Contests generally don't produce useful data. There are three basic
reasons why this is so. [see link for explanations]
Use the credit card numbers hidden on the box to buy absolutely anything you want.
If you think The Gates are giant, pointless art, then you . . . uhh . . .
. . . well, you're right. That's pretty giant and pointless. I'm gonna have to think a while to top it.
I believe the pipes don't freeze because the water is warm. And the ice is a big insulating layer between that and the deep-below-freezing Alaskan air. There's a moist cavity at the top where the stuff sprays out.
. . . moist cavity. They could've used another phrase, but no.
I was just saying that if you think something like this is cool, you should just wander the halls of a lot of campuses and you'll see work done on doors and hallways that's as impressive. I guess that's not a very productive comment. And the more I reflect, maybe it's not even true.
(note: Oh, wow, my first negative moderation in something like four years on slashdot.
Granted, it's also the first time I've made a "this is a pointless story" comment, so I guess it's fair. But I've never been quite clear what the "redundant" moderation means.)
If you think that's a cool giant pointless art project, then you haven't seen the Ice Tower (see the later pages, it only gets better).
Time to change my thresholds, I guess. Category: games, Submitter: CmdrTaco.
That was the whole dang point of his remarks
/. can post an article in a language most don't know and summarize it incorrectly to provoke angry response among people who will have difficulty reading the original article, meaning very few helpful "RTFA" ("TTFA?") posts.
He's trying to get funding to do exactly what you're talking about
Keep modding parent up. Annoying how
Hey! I was being serious! Stop modding me funny!
What's really needed now is a one-hand glove for interacting inside the physics engine. With physics only slightly better than HL2, the mouse-only interface becomes pretty cumbersome. The big revolutions in the near future should be in physics engines, and we're gonna need better interaction.
So what's the smallest pattern of bits that Microsoft can fairly claim to hold a patent on?
It's difficult for ad-blocking technology to kill something unless an actual majority of users figure out how to do it. It's easy for /.ers to forget that the HUGE majority of users can't get around their own default browser, let alone block an ad that their ISP is trying hard to put there.
It seems pretty clear that wireless access will only increase, until we no longer worry about our physical connection to the internet; it will simply be everywhere. The question is, with people moving around cities and such, what payment model will survive? I suspect it will be something along the lines of companies sharing the actual infrastructure but selling ACCESS to it individually, much like long-distance carriers do with the current phone system.
But I think an ad-based system for basic access is just not a great general solution. Maybe there's some small group that wants it, but that probably won't justify the large cost of installing equipment at first. I predict this will go under for the same reasons the old free internet providers did.
He was joking; it's a slashdot cliche to say what you just said about Go when someone posts about chess.
And it's 900km BY 800km, not BETWEEN the two, as another poster said.
And it's not actually near the Martian equator, but in Canada.
DNA, discussing casting of the characters, said [paraphrased] "Arthur Dent should be British. All the other characters can be whatever, but Arthur should be British."
. . . that's what GP was implying.
We think it's so easy to change a culture just by handing them the tools to do it. Sure, something will happen, and it might even be roughly what we expect, but I submit that the majority of people here sitting at their computers cheerful advocating the overturning of an entire governmental system and associated culture have . . . really no clue what they're dealing with.
I truly believe that education is the silver bullet, that information and communication are what will lift the human race to heights undreamed of. I just think there's something a little deserving of pause about saying "culture of compliance, family, and subservience? Pssh, here, let's give them SSH and proxies and do our best to overturn all controls and make their internet develop like ours, and with a mouse-click, throw down a government we think isn't handling stuff right. It's not that we shouldn't change things we feel are wrong, it's that we should be aware we're dealing with a whole different culture than what most of us are used to, and that culture isn't necessarially just going to morph into the 'standard' one if handed the tools.
I'm not an expert on China; I don't even have a strong opinion on what anyone should do about this kind of thing. I just think it's good to pause now and then and think about what we're doing.
I was only pointing out the factual inaccuracy.
Have you forgotten the mass genocide Saddam has commit, even to his own people? If you look at history, I think this would be topped only by Hitler.
There are maybe a dozen leaders in recent times who definitely killed more civilians in more brutal manners than Saddam. Obvious examples include Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Brezhnev, Tojo, and a handful of dictators in Africa.
Saddam was a bad guy, but let's try to keep the facts reasonably straight.
Regarding whether people would fast-forward ads on digital media:
/. a lot, the "in theory they can't prove something therefore they don't know it." (it comes from the computer mindset that you need to prove crypto systems insecure without ever successfully decoding any messages)
There is NO way to know if sombody is actually watching an ad or taking a wiz or staring off into space.
This is true of nielson ratings and bittorrent file downloads.
This is the kind of argument you see made on
The fact is, they know that most people watch the ads, and if their ads got no results, advertisers wouldn't run them. If people DO have an easy way to fast-forward, I think they probably will, and this is a debatable point. If I'm right, the ads won't make money and won't be run.
But you can't argue that there is no way to know whether people actually watch current TV ads. On the whole, they obviously do. Using "You can't prove that a given person didn't avoid the ad somehow" as an argument for the idea that giving them the option to skip ads more easily won't change anything is fairly silly.
People constantly respond to "[supposed bad person] gives lots of money to charity" with "Yeah, but there's a huge tax incentive for that."
It's like saying "He's only buying food for starving children because the food is on sale; he's not doing it to help them." He's putting money to a worthy cause, and the system is set up so that money is used more efficiently. But in the end he has paid some amount money that would otherwise be his to a charity, and he has less money. That is good.
(The way I understand it, say you have a million dollars, you might pay half a million in taxes. If you give that million dollars to charity, you pay no tax on it. So by not donating, you're out half a million. By donating, you're out a million. So you could say that he's not paying a million dollars, only $500,000. But he is still losing money on the deal.
If I'm missing anything, please correct me. Why might a totally selfish person give to charity, aside from the roundabout social benefits of being seen as nice, which apply whether the money is taxed or not?)
Oh man, I had totally forgotten that game. One of the few that my whole family chipped in together to register. Long before we got hooked on Escape Velocity, we were flying around in rubber ducks and fruit bats, hearing the delightful noises of DLLs shattering like glass. Same interface/gameplay as the wildly popular EV and Continuim. And you get to see your programs floating around in (a wildly abstracted version of) the inside of your computer!
.
. . . we didn't have porn back then. I wonder what would have happened if we had been flying around and saw "Randall's Hardcore XXX Whatever" floating around . .
This game is recommended.
So the Earth is the back of the microwave, and the sail is the microwave door. The astronauts are in between. Disaster!
This could be almost as dangerous as all that carbon monoxide they'll be breathing as it streams off the sail!
On the other hand, maybe the reason we don't have a Fantastic Four yet is that cosmic rays aren't intense enough. This could be the solution to the crime problem!
I can corroberate. Saw this a lonnnng, said "hey cool", installed, it runs like shit.
And it's a terrible UI.
And I'm easily impressed by bells and whistles. I could get nothing done using it. It vanished from my computer roughly 5 minutes after I installed it.
And this is ME. I would've been one of the ones insisting that we should just give Microsoft Bob a little time to flesh itself out.