Yes, but, if I understand WPA correctly, you can only intercept the user's PTK if you already know the pre-shared key. While that does not make the handshake secure, it significantly reduces the attack vector to include only those people who already have access to the system. So you can spy on coworkers but not total strangers.
WRONG. WPA uses a four-way handshake to establish a per-user key called the Pairwise Transient Key. The PTK is guaranteed (well, not really guaranteed, but very, very, very likely) to be unique on a per-user basis, and that PTK is used to encrypt the communication. So no, two parties on the same AP using WPA cannot decipher each other's traffic.
Whether statistical models are good predictors of future outcomes should be a topic near and dear to every slashdotter. Bringing this up in the context of a midterm election is not "wishful thinking"-- it's an interesting problem.
The difference between your anecdotal story and the one in the article is that the effect the author is talking about is a statistical one, and he cites evidence to support his position. Regardless if the outcome of the current election cycle, if real, this is an effect that polling organizations will have to account for.
I keep hearing the word "suffer" around here, but we're not talking about someone pulling out your toenails-- we're talking about mathematics.
People's experiences are shaped at least as much by their teachers as they are by the subject itself, and on that point, I think that most elementary school mathematics teachers are mindless automatons, teaching mathematics by rote. Yeah, that's dull. But let's put this in perspective: mathematics is the most powerful invention in the history of mankind. It is what allows us to understand our world, enables almost every facet of our modern lifestyle, and it will continue to be the thing that gives us control over our futures.
If you can't make that exciting, well, I think you suffer from a lack of imagination. The mathematics is not the problem.
I am in my first year of my doctoral studies in computer science. The joke around here is that I'm "a minority", namely an American. 5% of my program is American. Now, there are two things to say about this. One is that our graduate schools and research institutions are extremely competitive, world-class places. That's a good thing. The other thing is that we Americans are benefiting from them, but by and large, not participating in them. I think this is extremely bad in the long run. What is very clear to me, though, by comparing the graduate population, which is largely international, with the ungraduate population, which is largely American, is that international students are far better prepared for their graduate studies.
I don't think we're incapable of doing science, but the sad fact is: you have to grind away for a LONG TIME before you get to the fun bits. And in a field like computer science, those fun and interesting bits don't really start to reveal themselves until you're comfortable with some advanced concepts. The field I am in now resembles very little of what thought it was before I started. The thing that kept me going was simply that I was curious. How most people would even get hooked into a field like mine without prior exposure to math or programming... I have no idea.
We don't make large public policy decisions for the benefit of the individual. We do it for society. Or, that's the way it's supposed to work, anyway.
wouldn't it be better to teach proper programming technique in the first place?
The thing is, people have been saying that for years. Every iteration of the programming system, whether it be automatic program correction, garbage collection, references-that-are-not-pointers, object-orientation, modularity, high-level programming, type systems, virtual memory, or whatever other language abstraction designers have come up with, there's always been some crusty old programmer in the back of the room shouting about how "kids these days should just learn how to program."
And maybe if everyone needed to actually be a competent programmer in order to program, we wouldn't have this problem (I dispute this claim, BTW; I think good programming is simply the outcome of good design, but that good design is EXTREMELY difficult). But the barriers to entry in programming are fairly low. I would conservatively guess that most programmers are of the copy-and-paste from Google search results variety, and their code runs most of the time. The downside to this is obviously that most programs out there are shit. On the other hand, there are a lot of programs out there, and given the complexity of modern computers (do you really want the guy who's writing your medical records system to know about optimal register allocation-- REALLY?!), I think this is pretty astonishing. So safe programming systems are a huge benefit to everybody.
To answer your question in perhaps a more terse way: nobody really knows what "proper programming technique" is. I'm not talking about the Joel Spolskys of the world who *think* they know (and certainly, they have many real insights). I mean that we don't have any idea what constitutes a "good" program, except maybe some heuristics (hang around with Ruby people for awhile... you'll hear words like "beautiful" and "DRY"... but when pressed for technical definitions will get rather wishy-washy). This is a very active field in computer science, and the researchers we're talking about here run the gamut from language designers to educational researchers to CS theoreticians. Definitely an open question.
Except that I can say without a doubt (as a doctoral compsci student) that computers raise more questions than they answer. Compared to humans, computers are severely limited as to what they can do; investigating their limits is fascinating and strange, and those insights feed back into human knowledge in unexpected ways. Cryptography, for instance, played (some would say) a deciding role in the last world war, and compared to today, that field was in its infancy. The outcome of that early research is what allows modern commerce to happen.
I think extraordinary people can say dumb things, just like the rest of us. I think it's still a dumb comment, unless you mean to say that it's somehow a self-referentially terse, subtle and clever about how stupid people can be. In which case, wow.
I was a big Opera Mobile fan, as I was longtime Blackberry user. Opera gets UIs on constrained devices. That said, my wife recently bought me an iPhone, and the usability of Safari is unquestionably better than Opera. This is probably largely due to the iPhone's better hardware. Anyway, I'm posting from my iPhone, something I could never do reliably from my Blackberry.
This is a very clever use of an iPhone. I would love to see this one used as a yearlong high school science project. The ROI on materials is incredible here.
I am a university researcher doing iPhone development as a part of our project. We use UDIDs to allow our users to control information exchange between themselves and other iPhone users. We could probably use a hash of UDIDs (really, you'd probably want a hash of a UDID and a salt if you're hashing) or maybe even some other identifier, but I'm not really sure what additional privacy that gains iPhone users. From our perspective, we track them either way. Is the concern that someone else gets our users' UDIDs and combines that information with other UDID information? We were thinking that UDIDs were a step up from username + password, since this allows participation with a minimal amount of information being collected.
As someone who used to run an IMAP server for a few hundred users (dovecot on OpenBSD, Maildirs totaling several TB in size), I can say this is not true. How well IMAP performs on large mailbox is largely a function of how braindead your IMAP client is. Certain versions of Outlook are pretty slow, but things work rather well with Outlook 2010. Thunderbird is insanely fast, UNLESS you turn on the offline indexing features. I haven't used the latest Apple Mail, but it also had a tendency to spawn so many threads that the imapd on the other end would start closing them. You can configure how many concurrent connections to use somewhere in the prefs. My iPhone works wonderfully with IMAP. Back in the day, I used Sylpheed, and it too was quite fast.
I think it is rather remarkable that the United States and much of Canada share mostly-comprehensible dialects of the same language. If you look at the same land area anywhere else in the world, you don't have as much homogeneity as we have here. Even China has two main dialects (although their written language has the curious property of being readable by everyone).
But it's not surprising to me that dialects develop. I think, after the black-white school-integration era, people realized that there was more to "assimilation" than simply mixing people together. When you take a group of people who had been culturally isolated so long, through slavery, you're going to get a different set of shared values, even when you make efforts to put them on a level playing field (legally speaking, anyway).
Whether black people and white people in this country are growing more or less isolated, I don't know. I don't think it "says" anything in particular about our society. Cultures form and disappear. It would be nice if everyone could be friends, or at least civil, but that's not the way people work.
That's the whole point about programs for the greater good, though-- it need not turn a profit because it's FOR THE GREATER GOOD. Yeah, sometimes small businesses get wiped out. If that's your most important criteria, you will never make a change for the better, because it will always have some bad.
People complain all the time that Amtrak doesn't make a profit, but... nobody seems to notice or care that our roads don't either.
I think Kurzweil is largely a nutjob, but I disagree with your assessment in the value of simulating the brain. Nearly anyone involved in understanding the brain, from chemistry, to biology, to psychiatry would benefit from having an accurate brain simulator. It will absolutely be time-consuming. It will absolutely be expensive. It will probably not happen within the lifetimes of us or our children or our grandchilden. But scientists build models and validate them; that's simulation. If the brain really does fit within our model of the universe, we should be able to simulate it, and we should be able to validate it against the real thing. Science itself will always drive us toward simulating it, as a method of understanding it. Maybe AI and brain research become the same thing at some point in the future?
As for the "Singularity"... I don't know, and, unless you write sci-fi, I don't really care, because it's a distant possibility.
You're being conveniently trite here, though. That's not a good counter-argument. This particular biologist seems to have a pretty good grasp on the fundamental problem with Kurzweil's argument, and that problem is: Kurzweil confuses the purpose of the genome. It is not "the program"! Myers contends that, really, it's more like data. To me, this sounds like a classic Von Neumann architecture: it's bit of both, depending on your context. In any case, Kurzweil completely misses out on the fact (and he would know this if he had followed *anything* in genomics over the last 15 years) that the genome, as encoded in DNA, is only a small part of what makes a cell express and function in a particular way. A nice introduction to the epigenome was in this NOVA documentary.
In fact, it was this one feature that made me realy, really like.NET. I know that.NET is anathema around here, but I think most of that ire comes from people who have never tried it. I'm a longtime UNIX developer, and after I took the time to learn.NET, I was pretty much floored. A lot of thought went into the language, the runtime environment, and even the IDE-- and I generally hate IDEs. The fact that I could run C#.NET on Linux (Windows Forms included-- there's even a GTK# interface!) was just icing on the cake. What I used to be able to do in a week takes about a day in C#.
Microsoft constantly does this: make something incredibly cool and then fuck said product over. Despite being the most schizophrenic corporation out there, they still make money hand over fist. Baffling...
When specific data becomes available to investors they generally act on it pretty fast, unless it goes against the wisdom of the crowd in which case it gets ignored until the evidence becomes overwhelming. So - we have a very motivated form of crowd sourcing at the moment that isn't doing the job.
Yes, but the exact problems we had in the latest financial collapse were all well-known to people in the know. The problem was that the people giving the money and the people choosing the investments were completely decoupled. Since the market continued to say "this looks good", even though there were clear signs of trouble in say, the housing market, or say, Madoff's funds, investors continued to use those same financial instruments. There was no incentive not to, because as long as everyone pretended that there wasn't a problem, the money kept flowing in.
The problem with the "wisdom of the crowd" is that it is, economically-speaking, completely irrational. Compound that with fraudulent information or simply information asymmetry, and you have real trouble. So the market may "police itself" in some sense, but by then, it's too late. It's like this: yeah, overpopulation will solve itself-- lots of people will die, no more overpopulation. But is that really better than "heavy handed" population controls? I tend to think not.
I disagree. Your CEO is also your chief spokesperson. When you look at what a CEO does, the vast majority of that work is talking. A great deal of that talking is done to people outside of your organization. Image is very important. People outside the United States may see a CEO's private life and a CEO's public life as two separate things (I doubt it, though), but that is not the case here, and the be honest with you, I'm not sure that it should be. I tend to believe that if it's a private life you want, then very public jobs (like being a CEO) should not be on your agenda.
Of course, but on some level, your CEO represents your company. If Mattel hired an ex-convict serial rapist to run their Barbie division, there would be immediate financial consequences to that decision, regardless of what a shrewd businessman that guy is.
Because it can be extremely damaging to a company, both financially and in public perception (which ends up being a financial problem further down the road). The public tolerates many kinds of wrongdoing, but sexual wrongdoing tends not to be one of those.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but, if I understand WPA correctly, you can only intercept the user's PTK if you already know the pre-shared key. While that does not make the handshake secure, it significantly reduces the attack vector to include only those people who already have access to the system. So you can spy on coworkers but not total strangers.
WRONG. WPA uses a four-way handshake to establish a per-user key called the Pairwise Transient Key. The PTK is guaranteed (well, not really guaranteed, but very, very, very likely) to be unique on a per-user basis, and that PTK is used to encrypt the communication. So no, two parties on the same AP using WPA cannot decipher each other's traffic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11i-2004
-1 Idiocy
Whether statistical models are good predictors of future outcomes should be a topic near and dear to every slashdotter. Bringing this up in the context of a midterm election is not "wishful thinking"-- it's an interesting problem.
The difference between your anecdotal story and the one in the article is that the effect the author is talking about is a statistical one, and he cites evidence to support his position. Regardless if the outcome of the current election cycle, if real, this is an effect that polling organizations will have to account for.
I keep hearing the word "suffer" around here, but we're not talking about someone pulling out your toenails-- we're talking about mathematics.
People's experiences are shaped at least as much by their teachers as they are by the subject itself, and on that point, I think that most elementary school mathematics teachers are mindless automatons, teaching mathematics by rote. Yeah, that's dull. But let's put this in perspective: mathematics is the most powerful invention in the history of mankind. It is what allows us to understand our world, enables almost every facet of our modern lifestyle, and it will continue to be the thing that gives us control over our futures.
If you can't make that exciting, well, I think you suffer from a lack of imagination. The mathematics is not the problem.
Teach it to them when they do need it.
The problem is, by then, it's too late.
I am in my first year of my doctoral studies in computer science. The joke around here is that I'm "a minority", namely an American. 5% of my program is American. Now, there are two things to say about this. One is that our graduate schools and research institutions are extremely competitive, world-class places. That's a good thing. The other thing is that we Americans are benefiting from them, but by and large, not participating in them. I think this is extremely bad in the long run. What is very clear to me, though, by comparing the graduate population, which is largely international, with the ungraduate population, which is largely American, is that international students are far better prepared for their graduate studies.
I don't think we're incapable of doing science, but the sad fact is: you have to grind away for a LONG TIME before you get to the fun bits. And in a field like computer science, those fun and interesting bits don't really start to reveal themselves until you're comfortable with some advanced concepts. The field I am in now resembles very little of what thought it was before I started. The thing that kept me going was simply that I was curious. How most people would even get hooked into a field like mine without prior exposure to math or programming... I have no idea.
We don't make large public policy decisions for the benefit of the individual. We do it for society. Or, that's the way it's supposed to work, anyway.
wouldn't it be better to teach proper programming technique in the first place?
The thing is, people have been saying that for years. Every iteration of the programming system, whether it be automatic program correction, garbage collection, references-that-are-not-pointers, object-orientation, modularity, high-level programming, type systems, virtual memory, or whatever other language abstraction designers have come up with, there's always been some crusty old programmer in the back of the room shouting about how "kids these days should just learn how to program."
And maybe if everyone needed to actually be a competent programmer in order to program, we wouldn't have this problem (I dispute this claim, BTW; I think good programming is simply the outcome of good design, but that good design is EXTREMELY difficult). But the barriers to entry in programming are fairly low. I would conservatively guess that most programmers are of the copy-and-paste from Google search results variety, and their code runs most of the time. The downside to this is obviously that most programs out there are shit. On the other hand, there are a lot of programs out there, and given the complexity of modern computers (do you really want the guy who's writing your medical records system to know about optimal register allocation-- REALLY?!), I think this is pretty astonishing. So safe programming systems are a huge benefit to everybody.
To answer your question in perhaps a more terse way: nobody really knows what "proper programming technique" is. I'm not talking about the Joel Spolskys of the world who *think* they know (and certainly, they have many real insights). I mean that we don't have any idea what constitutes a "good" program, except maybe some heuristics (hang around with Ruby people for awhile... you'll hear words like "beautiful" and "DRY"... but when pressed for technical definitions will get rather wishy-washy). This is a very active field in computer science, and the researchers we're talking about here run the gamut from language designers to educational researchers to CS theoreticians. Definitely an open question.
Except that I can say without a doubt (as a doctoral compsci student) that computers raise more questions than they answer. Compared to humans, computers are severely limited as to what they can do; investigating their limits is fascinating and strange, and those insights feed back into human knowledge in unexpected ways. Cryptography, for instance, played (some would say) a deciding role in the last world war, and compared to today, that field was in its infancy. The outcome of that early research is what allows modern commerce to happen.
I think extraordinary people can say dumb things, just like the rest of us. I think it's still a dumb comment, unless you mean to say that it's somehow a self-referentially terse, subtle and clever about how stupid people can be. In which case, wow.
I was a big Opera Mobile fan, as I was longtime Blackberry user. Opera gets UIs on constrained devices. That said, my wife recently bought me an iPhone, and the usability of Safari is unquestionably better than Opera. This is probably largely due to the iPhone's better hardware. Anyway, I'm posting from my iPhone, something I could never do reliably from my Blackberry.
This is a very clever use of an iPhone. I would love to see this one used as a yearlong high school science project. The ROI on materials is incredible here.
I thought it was the Electric Frobulation Foundation.
I am a university researcher doing iPhone development as a part of our project. We use UDIDs to allow our users to control information exchange between themselves and other iPhone users. We could probably use a hash of UDIDs (really, you'd probably want a hash of a UDID and a salt if you're hashing) or maybe even some other identifier, but I'm not really sure what additional privacy that gains iPhone users. From our perspective, we track them either way. Is the concern that someone else gets our users' UDIDs and combines that information with other UDID information? We were thinking that UDIDs were a step up from username + password, since this allows participation with a minimal amount of information being collected.
I look forward to your many in-depth reviews of games you don't like to play.
The content of this website is provided for free by enthusiasts. A little self-selection in certain topics is inevitable.
As someone who used to run an IMAP server for a few hundred users (dovecot on OpenBSD, Maildirs totaling several TB in size), I can say this is not true. How well IMAP performs on large mailbox is largely a function of how braindead your IMAP client is. Certain versions of Outlook are pretty slow, but things work rather well with Outlook 2010. Thunderbird is insanely fast, UNLESS you turn on the offline indexing features. I haven't used the latest Apple Mail, but it also had a tendency to spawn so many threads that the imapd on the other end would start closing them. You can configure how many concurrent connections to use somewhere in the prefs. My iPhone works wonderfully with IMAP. Back in the day, I used Sylpheed, and it too was quite fast.
I think it is rather remarkable that the United States and much of Canada share mostly-comprehensible dialects of the same language. If you look at the same land area anywhere else in the world, you don't have as much homogeneity as we have here. Even China has two main dialects (although their written language has the curious property of being readable by everyone).
But it's not surprising to me that dialects develop. I think, after the black-white school-integration era, people realized that there was more to "assimilation" than simply mixing people together. When you take a group of people who had been culturally isolated so long, through slavery, you're going to get a different set of shared values, even when you make efforts to put them on a level playing field (legally speaking, anyway).
Whether black people and white people in this country are growing more or less isolated, I don't know. I don't think it "says" anything in particular about our society. Cultures form and disappear. It would be nice if everyone could be friends, or at least civil, but that's not the way people work.
That's the whole point about programs for the greater good, though-- it need not turn a profit because it's FOR THE GREATER GOOD. Yeah, sometimes small businesses get wiped out. If that's your most important criteria, you will never make a change for the better, because it will always have some bad.
People complain all the time that Amtrak doesn't make a profit, but... nobody seems to notice or care that our roads don't either.
I think I speak for the rest of /. when I say that we wish masturbating to porn were akin to fornication. If only it were so easy!
I think Kurzweil is largely a nutjob, but I disagree with your assessment in the value of simulating the brain. Nearly anyone involved in understanding the brain, from chemistry, to biology, to psychiatry would benefit from having an accurate brain simulator. It will absolutely be time-consuming. It will absolutely be expensive. It will probably not happen within the lifetimes of us or our children or our grandchilden. But scientists build models and validate them; that's simulation. If the brain really does fit within our model of the universe, we should be able to simulate it, and we should be able to validate it against the real thing. Science itself will always drive us toward simulating it, as a method of understanding it. Maybe AI and brain research become the same thing at some point in the future?
As for the "Singularity"... I don't know, and, unless you write sci-fi, I don't really care, because it's a distant possibility.
You're being conveniently trite here, though. That's not a good counter-argument. This particular biologist seems to have a pretty good grasp on the fundamental problem with Kurzweil's argument, and that problem is: Kurzweil confuses the purpose of the genome. It is not "the program"! Myers contends that, really, it's more like data. To me, this sounds like a classic Von Neumann architecture: it's bit of both, depending on your context. In any case, Kurzweil completely misses out on the fact (and he would know this if he had followed *anything* in genomics over the last 15 years) that the genome, as encoded in DNA, is only a small part of what makes a cell express and function in a particular way. A nice introduction to the epigenome was in this NOVA documentary.
In fact, it was this one feature that made me realy, really like .NET. I know that .NET is anathema around here, but I think most of that ire comes from people who have never tried it. I'm a longtime UNIX developer, and after I took the time to learn .NET, I was pretty much floored. A lot of thought went into the language, the runtime environment, and even the IDE-- and I generally hate IDEs. The fact that I could run C#.NET on Linux (Windows Forms included-- there's even a GTK# interface!) was just icing on the cake. What I used to be able to do in a week takes about a day in C#.
Microsoft constantly does this: make something incredibly cool and then fuck said product over. Despite being the most schizophrenic corporation out there, they still make money hand over fist. Baffling...
The next time your girlfriend/wife/significant other says "pee in me", they might mean something else.
When specific data becomes available to investors they generally act on it pretty fast, unless it goes against the wisdom of the crowd in which case it gets ignored until the evidence becomes overwhelming. So - we have a very motivated form of crowd sourcing at the moment that isn't doing the job.
Yes, but the exact problems we had in the latest financial collapse were all well-known to people in the know. The problem was that the people giving the money and the people choosing the investments were completely decoupled. Since the market continued to say "this looks good", even though there were clear signs of trouble in say, the housing market, or say, Madoff's funds, investors continued to use those same financial instruments. There was no incentive not to, because as long as everyone pretended that there wasn't a problem, the money kept flowing in.
The problem with the "wisdom of the crowd" is that it is, economically-speaking, completely irrational. Compound that with fraudulent information or simply information asymmetry, and you have real trouble. So the market may "police itself" in some sense, but by then, it's too late. It's like this: yeah, overpopulation will solve itself-- lots of people will die, no more overpopulation. But is that really better than "heavy handed" population controls? I tend to think not.
I disagree. Your CEO is also your chief spokesperson. When you look at what a CEO does, the vast majority of that work is talking. A great deal of that talking is done to people outside of your organization. Image is very important. People outside the United States may see a CEO's private life and a CEO's public life as two separate things (I doubt it, though), but that is not the case here, and the be honest with you, I'm not sure that it should be. I tend to believe that if it's a private life you want, then very public jobs (like being a CEO) should not be on your agenda.
Maybe. Better than the current system, at least, considering that this guy was sounding alarms about Bernie Madoff more than 10 years ago.
Of course, but on some level, your CEO represents your company. If Mattel hired an ex-convict serial rapist to run their Barbie division, there would be immediate financial consequences to that decision, regardless of what a shrewd businessman that guy is.
Because it can be extremely damaging to a company, both financially and in public perception (which ends up being a financial problem further down the road). The public tolerates many kinds of wrongdoing, but sexual wrongdoing tends not to be one of those.