Elecrticity does not explode. Most electronic equipment does not explode. Only electronics that contain chemicals that behave badly when exposed to heat, pressure, etc. Capacitors and batteries both store large amounts of energy in a chemical state, (which can change to gasious) and are the primary "explosives" in electronics. A sufficiently high current in most anything will cause rapid expansion of air however, which can make semiconductors explode, but not on nearly so grand a scale as this. I've seen solid state relays send their tops flying across the room and dent a cabinet when they shorted out. I don't know if I would consider that an "explosion".
The only thing in those cabinets capable of so much as blowing a door off the cabinet (let alone launching it) are the batteries. I was looking through the pictures for something else that I was very surprised I did not see. Most chemical batteries use metal (lead) plates suspended in a medium (hcl) and when a battery goes off, it usually blows the top and sides off, and sends plates (and hcl...) flying in all directions, leaving the base of the battery just sitting there where the battery was. A car battery that blows up standing in the open can send lead plates for 20 feet in every direction and will rain down along with the hcl, not good to be around them when they do that. (and then you are treated to an eerie sizzling sound coming from all directions as the HCL starts to eat into anything it splattered onto, which can include your clothing)
Car batteries tend to explode when their production of hydrogen and oxygen during charge mixes and encounters an ignition source / spark, which may or may not have been what happened in this case, it would depend on what sort of batteries they used. Almost certainly "sealed lead acid gell cells" - that's what's in your UPS, and that's why the cabinet had batteries. A spark is the best bet - altough high heat can also ignite volitile gasses, it requires a great deal of heat that is not likely to be in the cabinet unless there is a serious electrical short.
I didn't see pictures of the surrounding area, nor did I see the bed of the pickup that held all the bits they picked up, I wonder if the photographer just didn't realize the significance of the flotsom scattered around the box?
Fuses won't prevent this problem - they may have stopped the ignition source this time, but if volitile gasses are allowed to accumulate, something is going to set them off eventually, even if by static electricity or the spark in the hinge of the outer case as it's being opened by a tech.
As for the fire, hard to say. Insulated wire tends to burn very well, a bit like a dry brush pile.
your view on this generally depends on which side of the fence you are on. People with good health are sick of subsidizing the medical bills incurred by the unhealthy, and the unhealthy are looking for as much monetary assistance as possible, due to the high cost of medical care.
I fall into the former category, and as such I am (currently) all for the "make the sicklies pay more" concept so my bill goes down. I have been to the doctor five times in my life, for the same issue every time. (I get a sinus infection about every 4 yrs) I have never checked into a hospital for any reason. I wonder how many thousands of dollars me and my employers have pumped into the system to keep YOU healthy?
Now next week I could be diagnosed with cancer, and then I will of course perform a staight 180 on the issue I'm sure. Anyone that denies following this simple common sense explanation of their behavior needs to do some self-examination.
The insurance companies can either flat-rate it, or set their rates according to risk. Risk is common in most other areas of insurance. Your auto insurance rates are closely tied to the statistics of the area in which your vehicle is registered. If I were to move from out here in the sticks into say, Detroit, I would expect to pay more for auto insurance. If I develop diabetes I expect the same thing to happen to my medical insurance. Not saying I would like either of these turn of events, but I do expect it, and it's probably the right thing to be done.
oh we did tell them we were unhappy about the lack of cheese in the crust. They didn't specifically say the pizza we got was "defective", and so I got the impression that what we got was "normal" for them, although definitely not equalling their advertisements. Had we asked for a replacement again and GOT it, I doubt it would have been any different.
I'm sure there's a trick to geting the cheese to stay in that crust, and I can only assume they had not quite learned the trick yet.
A group of us were starving and ordered pizza. It was supposed to have cheese filled crust. When the pizza arrived, we dug in right after he left of course. The crust was quite large in diameter (1.25" or so?) and was totally hollow, with a very thin layer of cheese along the inside walls. We cried fraud and called them back, said we didn't get what we ordered. (in the commercials they show the crust being broken open and there's like a 1" bead of cheese inside the crust, and that's what we were expecting)
They said they'd redeliver, but they didn't say anything about the pizza they'd already delivered. So we waited. And waited. An hour later we said screw it, and ate the pizza.
Over an hour later (2.25 hrs total since first delivery) he arrived with the replacement pizza. (guessing redeliveries are bottom of their list to deliver?) He asked us where the old one was.
"duh? we ate it. we were starving over two hours ago."
He wasn't happy about it but I think it was "justifiable consumption".
OT, but the replacement pizza was identical to the first, with next to no cheese in the crust, but we were not in the mood to dispute it again and I doubt they would have made a third attempt to satisfy us. They have not received our business since then.
Re:You mother fuckers are pissing me off
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
When they say DRM, Digital Rights Management, they are not managing your rights, they are managing the rights of the artists.
Re:You mother fuckers are pissing me off
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 3, Interesting
you're trolling, but with a valid point. The bottom line is that the idea itself is fundamentally flawed. You cannot give the public limited access to information that requires their full access (however carefully managed you make it) without making it vulnerable to defeat. The only true three purposes at this point are (1) to make casual infringement difficult enough to be inconvenient, (2) to prevent use of IP in a way that you really don't feel like letting them use it, and (3) to give them a legal defense. (if you fail to defend your IP you tend to lose it in court)
They know how evolution works. The most draconian systems they come up with today will be childs play eight years from now. So in reality, for as nasty as they look now, they will be almost pointless 10 yrs from now. (look at CSS...) So what they're doing now really this isn't any worse than CSS was when it was made, relatively speaking. Six years from now we will look at this and yawn, as we feed a spindle of old blue rays into a reader (at 25 seconds each) and download our entire collection to our data cube.
There are a lot of fundamental rules in crypto, and one of them is that crypto can only become less secure over time. Time eventually breaks all crypto, and once "the cat's out of the bag" (key compromised etc) it tends to open everything secured with it in the past, assuming you simply kept a copy of it from back when. To lock something from alteration in the future is not a problem that can be solved with crypto. Hardware is about the only way to do it, to write it to a media that cannot be physically altered. I'm sure most of these posts are going to suggest CD-R media, and really that's a good way. Even that fails though, because there is little to prevent someone from reading in the media, altering it, and burning a new copy. Again things like this cannot really be future-proofed.
The only practial approach would be to digitally sign it, and throw away the private key. Keep the public key, and then you can read the data and verify the signature, but you cannot alter the data without resigning it, which is not possible without the private key.
Then how to prevent people from changing the data and changing the public key? The solution to this is to create a chain of keys. Lets say we plan for 20 years of recording. Initially roll up 20 x 12 keys, one for each month from now to then. Use the keys intended for future to sign the keys to be used earlier. This creates a chain of trust rooted in the future. So the key for signing records made in March 2008 are signed with the key made to be used in April 2008. Once signed, lock up the future keys and do not remove them from the vault or whatever until you are ready to use them. Be sure to destroy the private keys after their month of use is over.
In this way, if someone tries to alter a the key for March (which they can do, and just resign everything) then in April when the April key is unlocked, its public key can be used to verify the March key's April signature, which will no longer be correctly signed and you can turn the dogs loose to find out what got altered. Thus the March key cannot be replaced to permit alteration and resigning of older data because it itself cannot be resigned until next month when the key that signed it becomes available.
There would be a period of time in this example, one month, where data could be altered since the public key is still available. This could be mitigated by lowering the interval time to say, one day instead of one month. Then once data becomes a day old, it is very difficult to forge since the older private keys are no longer available and cannot be replaced.
For those of you paying attention, it's possible to get around this by changing all the keys below the current one. This is fixed by signing all older keys with all newer keys, instead of merely signing them with the next newer key. Shouldn't be a problem since signatures are not all that large. As long as you can keep the newer unused keys private, it's impossible to alter the logs without being discovered.
This does not break the rule I started with, the system is still vulnerable to time, but this method allows you to specify the time in the future where it breaks. The last key to be revealed defines the point at which the chain of trust is broken. After that day, ALL prior logs could be altered without detection, since its keys are now exposed. Of course the smart thing would be to never use the last public key, and throw it away the day after it was initially used to sign all the lower keys. Then every 10 years start with a new batch.
I'm no crypto expert but it's an interest of mine. I invite some real crypto experts to critique my idea. (and maybe tell me about how someone has already implemented it?)
hate to reply to my own thread but just realized one other angle. If I buy something and get it home and it's not what I want, I have the right to DISPUTE it. I can take it back to the store. But here's the rub... they don't HAVE TO make it right. They don't have to give me my money back, take the item back, or do ANYTHING. And without litigation, I can't force them to do it.
But here, the banks are just saying oops this isn't what we wanted. *yoink* and out of your account comes the money. THAT I don't think should be legal. They have the right to dispute it, but the money that remains in your account is not their properlty and they do not have the right to dip into it anytime they feel they were cheated. A very similar situation happens with employers and paychecks. If I drop an LCD panel while moving it at work, that was a $2000 unit I just broke. The company does NOT have the right to just lift that amount out of my next paycheck. If they want that $2000 they are going to have to take it out of me some other way. That money in my paycheck is not open for grabs simply because it's still in their hands. (and that is the basis of my argument) I own it, they just haven't handed it over yet, and they have no right to dip into it to cover a debt between us. They are treating my bank account balance like "collateral" and I don't believe they have the legal right to do so.
f my neighbor asked if he could store his car in my garage and I let him, and a day later his wife hits my wife's parked car in the driveway, and they refuse to pay me the $800 to fix my wife's car, I don't have any right to refuse to give his car back. Just because it's in my hands doesn't make it fair game to settle a debt forcibly. The banks are treating your account balance the same way.
Of course all this can go right out the window if there is some signed pre-arranged agreement. I may have signed something at work that gives them permission to garnish my wages if I cause them above some fixed financial loss, and by the same token the bank customers may have signed or somehow surrendered the same rights such that any bank error can be corrected by the bank by debiting your account. But I don't recall signing something like that.
I was getting some minor groceries at the local convenience station, about $7 worth. I handed her a 20. She started handing me my change, starting with two 20's. "You don't want to give me all that money". She looked at me, puzzled, looked down at the money, looked back at me... "you DID just give me a 50?" "noo.... I gave you a 20." She looked down in the drawer where the larger (>20) bills go and there was my 20 on top.
That would have been a nice bonus to take home but still that may have come out of her paycheck at the end of the day, drawer being an even $30 short like that.
As for the topic at hand, I believe this is a risk that the bank has elected to take. If I had kept the change above, and gotten home, and that evening they discovered their drawer was $30 short, and reviewed their security tapes and determined that I handed her a 20, I don't feel they would have any right to come to my house and demand their $30 back. As far as I am concerned, our business deal is complete. Now maybe I'm being a hypocrit here... if I buy something and get it home and open the box and it's not what is supposed to be on the box, then I take it back and I expect them to make it right. I guess it's the difference between who has the choice to complain, the one receiving the goods or the one receiving the money. I guess the way I look at it is, the person that has accepted money for something loses their right to dispute the trade once they have accepted the money.
I suppose if we follow that rule, then the bank has accepted my debt in exchange for paying me money. Clearly then they are the ones receiving the goods and I am the one receiving the money, and therefore they are the ones that have the right to dispute the transaction. My opportunity to dispute a withdrawl at the ATM ends when the deal is initially completed, when I accept the money in exchange for "selling them my debt" for the amount. They have the opportunity to examine their goods received and determine if they received the goods as promised. So if their machine made an error and gave me more money, the end result is they did not receive the debt that they paid for, and they are entitled to dispute it.
So I guess the bank is right for disputing the ATM withdrawl mistake, using that logic. In that case they are the consumer, purchasing a debt from us in exchange for an equal amount of cash. The reason this rule should apply in this direction is that the value of money is arguably easier to quantify since what you exchange it for's value is measured in the unit of money, so the person receiving the cash knows what he got, but the person receiving the goods (or the debt) cannot immediately know if he got what he was supposed to get.
But, and I emphasize the word 'but', simply having these old consumer electronics materials carted off to an smelter in trail is ever so head scratching.
what's truly ever so head-scratching is this author's command of grammar.
I've been waiting for one of the big players to jump on this bandwagon. To be honest, I was hoping Apple would be the first big player. They like to hop on new tech and have a knack for guessing correctly. Even if MS is first, at least this will light the fires at the other shops. As it is now, software updates are fairly fast, but I'm sure that costs them a lot of coin to keep at those levels. This won't necessarily provide faster downloads for you and me, but it will cut their bandwidth costs significantly, and I'm sure that's what it's all about - not better service but instead a slimmer bottom line. In the end that's supposed to make things cheaper for the consumer, but one has to wonder how much that actually works out.
Not that there's anything wrong with it really. The title of this article makes it sound like this is going to cost you and me more. Very vew people pay for their upstream on a metered basis. I sure don't. The only downside to this I foresee is if you have sucky upstream (look at all the 3gbps/(128 or 256)kbps rates on some popular cable lines in the US!) then maybe your download speed for updates and soforth will actually go slower now that the peers don't send you pieces as much because you are not sending fast to them. If this starts happening, MS is bound to try to lock them out of tampering with the fairness settings so that all peers get a "flat rate" and there is no "tit for tat" logic in their protocol, but then you'll get ppl that hack their updater so they get monster downstream and don't have to send any upstream, and then the war begins... This will only work for MS so long as they keep their updater locked up tight. (tho they are known for doing fairly well at that)
RTFA: The unidentified employee, who works for a NASA subcontractor, cut wires inside the computer that is supposed to be delivered to the international space station by Endeavour, officials said.
I'd probably go for that except I paid $150 ea for those two drives. I don't think they'll let me RMA it post-blend.
Though it would almost be worth it to write a letter to them to get the OK to send it in a zip-loc.
I can't tell if it's a head crash or a spindle motor failure. I DO have two identical drives and have the data off the good one, so I suppose I could get dicey and try to swap platters and maybe get real lucky if it's the motor, but I don't know how well that would work out. I'm remodeling my clean room y'know.
Yes they are owned but apparently not yet infected. I've seen it go both ways when one manufacturer bought another. Look at quantum. Quantum Fireballs were another brand that used to be well-respected until they were bought. Sadly, the drive designs were merged and both brands were the worse for it. I lost count of the number of deathstars that died a chirping death. We had a whole box full at work. Finally got some coin from them after a class action but had to sit on them for quite some time for it to happen.
But at this point WD is (sadly) the brand I trust the most. I have had good luck in the past with simply going with high quality drives and keeping a really close eye on them, but this burned me good. Now I will continue with the careful monitoring, and mirror or sync everything. The 1TB maxtors were $330 each here, well worth it I believe. I just think it's sad that one can't even have a reasonable expectation that their information is safe on a HD anymore. Yes backups are a good idea, but shouldn't be getting called on with such frequency, and catastrophic failures should be much less common than soft errors. I can deal with IO errors, that's just a matter of "get a replacement NOW and get the data off before it changes its mind", but when you come home and it sounds like a circular saw is running in the basement, you're SOL. I can understand an io error being a quality or age issue, but when a head crashes or a spindle motor tanks a bearing 2 months out of the box there is a serious quality control problem. That's like your brand new car throwing a rod a week after you drive it off the lot.
Or, it's the difference between "my car won't start" and "my car just blew up". One is acceptable to happen from time to time, the other is not. At least not with a brand new product.
Eight years ago everyone that wanted a quality drive sprung for the extra cash to get a quality drive, a Seagate. If you had a budget, you got a quantum. If it really didn't matter and you had good backups, a Western Digital or Maxtor.
NOW. Good lord what happened? Seagates are now some of the cheapest HDs on the market, both in price and reliability. I have replaced 2x as many failed seagates where I work lately than all other models of HD combined. They just die, suddenly and catastrophically, often times only a couple weeks after being installed. And it's not the sort of thing you can recover, they either head crash or just start chirping. A very expensive vacation to DriveSavers or Total Recall is the only way to save those. We went through four 80gb seagates at work, at roughly two week intervals, until I said ENOUGH and we replaced it with a WD. Sick and tired of doing Seagate RMAs and rebuilding drives.
Western Digital OTOH, seems to be a respectable and reliable brand now. It's like WD and Seagate switched places.
I was on the "teetering edge" on not using seagate anymore three months ago when I needed to expand here. I bougt a pair of seagate sata 500's, copied the data off the collection of smaller drives, and sat on them. I have a cron script that runs weekly doing full surface scans on all my drives, (over a dozen) and so far it has tagged a failing drive every single time while it was minor, and I have never lost a byte, so for this less important data I didn't think a backup was justified. Three weeks ago I judged the migration done and started repurposing the smaller drives.
Naturally, one week later one of the 500's suffered a head crash. I could hear the drive from OUTSIDE MY HOUSE before I put the key in the door I knew something was seriously wrong. Two month old %@# drive. Christ.
So now I have recovered what I can and bought several large cheap 1TB drives to serve as backups. Maxtors I might add. There's another brand that five years ago I would not have touched with a pole. But right now there is no brand I trust less than Seagate.
Now what can I do? Take it back and exchange it for another seagate? Wonderful.... just... wonderful. Anyone want a 500gb seagate? still in the antistatic?
Just wondering: why is it so hard to get Internet access to (central) Africa, but the water-locked continent of Australia is, or seems to be, humming along just fine?
I would imagine laying oceanic cable even all the way to AU would be a heck of a lot easier than trying to trench it through africa, for a variety of reasons.
Anyone care to beat my laziness and dig up some numbers on just how many cables run to AU? I betcha there's a bunch. I have no problem video chatting with several of my friends there, and the speeds, consdidering the distance, are quite good. Can't exactly video chat on 128/32. I bet they love the "PDA/cellphone optimized" variant pages on things like google and reuters. Anyone remember Lynx? I bet they're still using it.
unless of course you install Windows XP Government Edition etc that has the sanctioned back doors covered.
I'm sure there's something like that out there already. And each major OS has a government manual on how to 'secure' it for government use. Even OS X's manual is around 100 pages of changes to make to secure it to their standards. I haven't seen the windows one yet, but I bet it comes in a seven volume set.;)
Probably the most significant event was the lack of a global crisis -- you know, a Slammer- or Blaster-style worm that infects the world in eight minutes. There was no malware with a replication magnitude on the order of Code Red, Slammer, Nimda, or the Iloveyou virus.
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My user number is probably lower than yours.
;)
but my username is probably shorter than yours
Elecrticity does not explode. Most electronic equipment does not explode. Only electronics that contain chemicals that behave badly when exposed to heat, pressure, etc. Capacitors and batteries both store large amounts of energy in a chemical state, (which can change to gasious) and are the primary "explosives" in electronics. A sufficiently high current in most anything will cause rapid expansion of air however, which can make semiconductors explode, but not on nearly so grand a scale as this. I've seen solid state relays send their tops flying across the room and dent a cabinet when they shorted out. I don't know if I would consider that an "explosion".
The only thing in those cabinets capable of so much as blowing a door off the cabinet (let alone launching it) are the batteries. I was looking through the pictures for something else that I was very surprised I did not see. Most chemical batteries use metal (lead) plates suspended in a medium (hcl) and when a battery goes off, it usually blows the top and sides off, and sends plates (and hcl...) flying in all directions, leaving the base of the battery just sitting there where the battery was. A car battery that blows up standing in the open can send lead plates for 20 feet in every direction and will rain down along with the hcl, not good to be around them when they do that. (and then you are treated to an eerie sizzling sound coming from all directions as the HCL starts to eat into anything it splattered onto, which can include your clothing)
Car batteries tend to explode when their production of hydrogen and oxygen during charge mixes and encounters an ignition source / spark, which may or may not have been what happened in this case, it would depend on what sort of batteries they used. Almost certainly "sealed lead acid gell cells" - that's what's in your UPS, and that's why the cabinet had batteries. A spark is the best bet - altough high heat can also ignite volitile gasses, it requires a great deal of heat that is not likely to be in the cabinet unless there is a serious electrical short.
I didn't see pictures of the surrounding area, nor did I see the bed of the pickup that held all the bits they picked up, I wonder if the photographer just didn't realize the significance of the flotsom scattered around the box?
Fuses won't prevent this problem - they may have stopped the ignition source this time, but if volitile gasses are allowed to accumulate, something is going to set them off eventually, even if by static electricity or the spark in the hinge of the outer case as it's being opened by a tech.
As for the fire, hard to say. Insulated wire tends to burn very well, a bit like a dry brush pile.
your view on this generally depends on which side of the fence you are on. People with good health are sick of subsidizing the medical bills incurred by the unhealthy, and the unhealthy are looking for as much monetary assistance as possible, due to the high cost of medical care.
I fall into the former category, and as such I am (currently) all for the "make the sicklies pay more" concept so my bill goes down. I have been to the doctor five times in my life, for the same issue every time. (I get a sinus infection about every 4 yrs) I have never checked into a hospital for any reason. I wonder how many thousands of dollars me and my employers have pumped into the system to keep YOU healthy?
Now next week I could be diagnosed with cancer, and then I will of course perform a staight 180 on the issue I'm sure. Anyone that denies following this simple common sense explanation of their behavior needs to do some self-examination.
The insurance companies can either flat-rate it, or set their rates according to risk. Risk is common in most other areas of insurance. Your auto insurance rates are closely tied to the statistics of the area in which your vehicle is registered. If I were to move from out here in the sticks into say, Detroit, I would expect to pay more for auto insurance. If I develop diabetes I expect the same thing to happen to my medical insurance. Not saying I would like either of these turn of events, but I do expect it, and it's probably the right thing to be done.
oh we did tell them we were unhappy about the lack of cheese in the crust. They didn't specifically say the pizza we got was "defective", and so I got the impression that what we got was "normal" for them, although definitely not equalling their advertisements. Had we asked for a replacement again and GOT it, I doubt it would have been any different.
I'm sure there's a trick to geting the cheese to stay in that crust, and I can only assume they had not quite learned the trick yet.
A group of us were starving and ordered pizza. It was supposed to have cheese filled crust. When the pizza arrived, we dug in right after he left of course. The crust was quite large in diameter (1.25" or so?) and was totally hollow, with a very thin layer of cheese along the inside walls. We cried fraud and called them back, said we didn't get what we ordered. (in the commercials they show the crust being broken open and there's like a 1" bead of cheese inside the crust, and that's what we were expecting)
They said they'd redeliver, but they didn't say anything about the pizza they'd already delivered. So we waited. And waited. An hour later we said screw it, and ate the pizza.
Over an hour later (2.25 hrs total since first delivery) he arrived with the replacement pizza. (guessing redeliveries are bottom of their list to deliver?) He asked us where the old one was.
"duh? we ate it. we were starving over two hours ago."
He wasn't happy about it but I think it was "justifiable consumption".
OT, but the replacement pizza was identical to the first, with next to no cheese in the crust, but we were not in the mood to dispute it again and I doubt they would have made a third attempt to satisfy us. They have not received our business since then.
When they say DRM, Digital Rights Management, they are not managing your rights, they are managing the rights of the artists.
you're trolling, but with a valid point. The bottom line is that the idea itself is fundamentally flawed. You cannot give the public limited access to information that requires their full access (however carefully managed you make it) without making it vulnerable to defeat. The only true three purposes at this point are (1) to make casual infringement difficult enough to be inconvenient, (2) to prevent use of IP in a way that you really don't feel like letting them use it, and (3) to give them a legal defense. (if you fail to defend your IP you tend to lose it in court)
They know how evolution works. The most draconian systems they come up with today will be childs play eight years from now. So in reality, for as nasty as they look now, they will be almost pointless 10 yrs from now. (look at CSS...) So what they're doing now really this isn't any worse than CSS was when it was made, relatively speaking. Six years from now we will look at this and yawn, as we feed a spindle of old blue rays into a reader (at 25 seconds each) and download our entire collection to our data cube.
There are a lot of fundamental rules in crypto, and one of them is that crypto can only become less secure over time. Time eventually breaks all crypto, and once "the cat's out of the bag" (key compromised etc) it tends to open everything secured with it in the past, assuming you simply kept a copy of it from back when. To lock something from alteration in the future is not a problem that can be solved with crypto. Hardware is about the only way to do it, to write it to a media that cannot be physically altered. I'm sure most of these posts are going to suggest CD-R media, and really that's a good way. Even that fails though, because there is little to prevent someone from reading in the media, altering it, and burning a new copy. Again things like this cannot really be future-proofed.
The only practial approach would be to digitally sign it, and throw away the private key. Keep the public key, and then you can read the data and verify the signature, but you cannot alter the data without resigning it, which is not possible without the private key.
Then how to prevent people from changing the data and changing the public key? The solution to this is to create a chain of keys. Lets say we plan for 20 years of recording. Initially roll up 20 x 12 keys, one for each month from now to then. Use the keys intended for future to sign the keys to be used earlier. This creates a chain of trust rooted in the future. So the key for signing records made in March 2008 are signed with the key made to be used in April 2008. Once signed, lock up the future keys and do not remove them from the vault or whatever until you are ready to use them. Be sure to destroy the private keys after their month of use is over.
In this way, if someone tries to alter a the key for March (which they can do, and just resign everything) then in April when the April key is unlocked, its public key can be used to verify the March key's April signature, which will no longer be correctly signed and you can turn the dogs loose to find out what got altered. Thus the March key cannot be replaced to permit alteration and resigning of older data because it itself cannot be resigned until next month when the key that signed it becomes available.
There would be a period of time in this example, one month, where data could be altered since the public key is still available. This could be mitigated by lowering the interval time to say, one day instead of one month. Then once data becomes a day old, it is very difficult to forge since the older private keys are no longer available and cannot be replaced.
For those of you paying attention, it's possible to get around this by changing all the keys below the current one. This is fixed by signing all older keys with all newer keys, instead of merely signing them with the next newer key. Shouldn't be a problem since signatures are not all that large. As long as you can keep the newer unused keys private, it's impossible to alter the logs without being discovered.
This does not break the rule I started with, the system is still vulnerable to time, but this method allows you to specify the time in the future where it breaks. The last key to be revealed defines the point at which the chain of trust is broken. After that day, ALL prior logs could be altered without detection, since its keys are now exposed. Of course the smart thing would be to never use the last public key, and throw it away the day after it was initially used to sign all the lower keys. Then every 10 years start with a new batch.
I'm no crypto expert but it's an interest of mine. I invite some real crypto experts to critique my idea. (and maybe tell me about how someone has already implemented it?)
how about being given something that doesn't belong to you? even BY the person that it belongs to?
swindled or cheated perhaps, but not stolen from
hate to reply to my own thread but just realized one other angle. If I buy something and get it home and it's not what I want, I have the right to DISPUTE it. I can take it back to the store. But here's the rub... they don't HAVE TO make it right. They don't have to give me my money back, take the item back, or do ANYTHING. And without litigation, I can't force them to do it.
But here, the banks are just saying oops this isn't what we wanted. *yoink* and out of your account comes the money. THAT I don't think should be legal. They have the right to dispute it, but the money that remains in your account is not their properlty and they do not have the right to dip into it anytime they feel they were cheated. A very similar situation happens with employers and paychecks. If I drop an LCD panel while moving it at work, that was a $2000 unit I just broke. The company does NOT have the right to just lift that amount out of my next paycheck. If they want that $2000 they are going to have to take it out of me some other way. That money in my paycheck is not open for grabs simply because it's still in their hands. (and that is the basis of my argument) I own it, they just haven't handed it over yet, and they have no right to dip into it to cover a debt between us. They are treating my bank account balance like "collateral" and I don't believe they have the legal right to do so.
f my neighbor asked if he could store his car in my garage and I let him, and a day later his wife hits my wife's parked car in the driveway, and they refuse to pay me the $800 to fix my wife's car, I don't have any right to refuse to give his car back. Just because it's in my hands doesn't make it fair game to settle a debt forcibly. The banks are treating your account balance the same way.
Of course all this can go right out the window if there is some signed pre-arranged agreement. I may have signed something at work that gives them permission to garnish my wages if I cause them above some fixed financial loss, and by the same token the bank customers may have signed or somehow surrendered the same rights such that any bank error can be corrected by the bank by debiting your account. But I don't recall signing something like that.
I was getting some minor groceries at the local convenience station, about $7 worth. I handed her a 20. She started handing me my change, starting with two 20's. "You don't want to give me all that money". She looked at me, puzzled, looked down at the money, looked back at me... "you DID just give me a 50?" "noo.... I gave you a 20." She looked down in the drawer where the larger (>20) bills go and there was my 20 on top.
That would have been a nice bonus to take home but still that may have come out of her paycheck at the end of the day, drawer being an even $30 short like that.
As for the topic at hand, I believe this is a risk that the bank has elected to take. If I had kept the change above, and gotten home, and that evening they discovered their drawer was $30 short, and reviewed their security tapes and determined that I handed her a 20, I don't feel they would have any right to come to my house and demand their $30 back. As far as I am concerned, our business deal is complete. Now maybe I'm being a hypocrit here... if I buy something and get it home and open the box and it's not what is supposed to be on the box, then I take it back and I expect them to make it right. I guess it's the difference between who has the choice to complain, the one receiving the goods or the one receiving the money. I guess the way I look at it is, the person that has accepted money for something loses their right to dispute the trade once they have accepted the money.
I suppose if we follow that rule, then the bank has accepted my debt in exchange for paying me money. Clearly then they are the ones receiving the goods and I am the one receiving the money, and therefore they are the ones that have the right to dispute the transaction. My opportunity to dispute a withdrawl at the ATM ends when the deal is initially completed, when I accept the money in exchange for "selling them my debt" for the amount. They have the opportunity to examine their goods received and determine if they received the goods as promised. So if their machine made an error and gave me more money, the end result is they did not receive the debt that they paid for, and they are entitled to dispute it.
So I guess the bank is right for disputing the ATM withdrawl mistake, using that logic. In that case they are the consumer, purchasing a debt from us in exchange for an equal amount of cash. The reason this rule should apply in this direction is that the value of money is arguably easier to quantify since what you exchange it for's value is measured in the unit of money, so the person receiving the cash knows what he got, but the person receiving the goods (or the debt) cannot immediately know if he got what he was supposed to get.
But, and I emphasize the word 'but', simply having these old consumer electronics materials carted off to an smelter in trail is ever so head scratching.
what's truly ever so head-scratching is this author's command of grammar.
whatever the story, best buy let me return the failed drive today for store credit. At least they didn't force me to take another seagate in exchange.
I've been waiting for one of the big players to jump on this bandwagon. To be honest, I was hoping Apple would be the first big player. They like to hop on new tech and have a knack for guessing correctly. Even if MS is first, at least this will light the fires at the other shops. As it is now, software updates are fairly fast, but I'm sure that costs them a lot of coin to keep at those levels. This won't necessarily provide faster downloads for you and me, but it will cut their bandwidth costs significantly, and I'm sure that's what it's all about - not better service but instead a slimmer bottom line. In the end that's supposed to make things cheaper for the consumer, but one has to wonder how much that actually works out.
Not that there's anything wrong with it really. The title of this article makes it sound like this is going to cost you and me more. Very vew people pay for their upstream on a metered basis. I sure don't. The only downside to this I foresee is if you have sucky upstream (look at all the 3gbps/(128 or 256)kbps rates on some popular cable lines in the US!) then maybe your download speed for updates and soforth will actually go slower now that the peers don't send you pieces as much because you are not sending fast to them. If this starts happening, MS is bound to try to lock them out of tampering with the fairness settings so that all peers get a "flat rate" and there is no "tit for tat" logic in their protocol, but then you'll get ppl that hack their updater so they get monster downstream and don't have to send any upstream, and then the war begins... This will only work for MS so long as they keep their updater locked up tight. (tho they are known for doing fairly well at that)
No, this drive sounds like a power drill from outside the house. Not an interface card problem. ;)
RTFA: The unidentified employee, who works for a NASA subcontractor, cut wires inside the computer that is supposed to be delivered to the international space station by Endeavour, officials said.
I'd probably go for that except I paid $150 ea for those two drives. I don't think they'll let me RMA it post-blend.
Though it would almost be worth it to write a letter to them to get the OK to send it in a zip-loc.
I can't tell if it's a head crash or a spindle motor failure. I DO have two identical drives and have the data off the good one, so I suppose I could get dicey and try to swap platters and maybe get real lucky if it's the motor, but I don't know how well that would work out. I'm remodeling my clean room y'know.
Yes they are owned but apparently not yet infected. I've seen it go both ways when one manufacturer bought another. Look at quantum. Quantum Fireballs were another brand that used to be well-respected until they were bought. Sadly, the drive designs were merged and both brands were the worse for it. I lost count of the number of deathstars that died a chirping death. We had a whole box full at work. Finally got some coin from them after a class action but had to sit on them for quite some time for it to happen.
But at this point WD is (sadly) the brand I trust the most. I have had good luck in the past with simply going with high quality drives and keeping a really close eye on them, but this burned me good. Now I will continue with the careful monitoring, and mirror or sync everything. The 1TB maxtors were $330 each here, well worth it I believe. I just think it's sad that one can't even have a reasonable expectation that their information is safe on a HD anymore. Yes backups are a good idea, but shouldn't be getting called on with such frequency, and catastrophic failures should be much less common than soft errors. I can deal with IO errors, that's just a matter of "get a replacement NOW and get the data off before it changes its mind", but when you come home and it sounds like a circular saw is running in the basement, you're SOL. I can understand an io error being a quality or age issue, but when a head crashes or a spindle motor tanks a bearing 2 months out of the box there is a serious quality control problem. That's like your brand new car throwing a rod a week after you drive it off the lot.
Or, it's the difference between "my car won't start" and "my car just blew up". One is acceptable to happen from time to time, the other is not. At least not with a brand new product.
Eight years ago everyone that wanted a quality drive sprung for the extra cash to get a quality drive, a Seagate. If you had a budget, you got a quantum. If it really didn't matter and you had good backups, a Western Digital or Maxtor.
NOW. Good lord what happened? Seagates are now some of the cheapest HDs on the market, both in price and reliability. I have replaced 2x as many failed seagates where I work lately than all other models of HD combined. They just die, suddenly and catastrophically, often times only a couple weeks after being installed. And it's not the sort of thing you can recover, they either head crash or just start chirping. A very expensive vacation to DriveSavers or Total Recall is the only way to save those. We went through four 80gb seagates at work, at roughly two week intervals, until I said ENOUGH and we replaced it with a WD. Sick and tired of doing Seagate RMAs and rebuilding drives.
Western Digital OTOH, seems to be a respectable and reliable brand now. It's like WD and Seagate switched places.
I was on the "teetering edge" on not using seagate anymore three months ago when I needed to expand here. I bougt a pair of seagate sata 500's, copied the data off the collection of smaller drives, and sat on them. I have a cron script that runs weekly doing full surface scans on all my drives, (over a dozen) and so far it has tagged a failing drive every single time while it was minor, and I have never lost a byte, so for this less important data I didn't think a backup was justified. Three weeks ago I judged the migration done and started repurposing the smaller drives.
Naturally, one week later one of the 500's suffered a head crash. I could hear the drive from OUTSIDE MY HOUSE before I put the key in the door I knew something was seriously wrong. Two month old %@# drive. Christ.
So now I have recovered what I can and bought several large cheap 1TB drives to serve as backups. Maxtors I might add. There's another brand that five years ago I would not have touched with a pole. But right now there is no brand I trust less than Seagate.
Now what can I do? Take it back and exchange it for another seagate? Wonderful.... just... wonderful. Anyone want a 500gb seagate? still in the antistatic?
The top two stories on slashdot are tagged "sanityatlast" and "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense". Is there a comet or something I've missed?
Just wondering: why is it so hard to get Internet access to (central) Africa, but the water-locked continent of Australia is, or seems to be, humming along just fine?
I would imagine laying oceanic cable even all the way to AU would be a heck of a lot easier than trying to trench it through africa, for a variety of reasons.
Anyone care to beat my laziness and dig up some numbers on just how many cables run to AU? I betcha there's a bunch. I have no problem video chatting with several of my friends there, and the speeds, consdidering the distance, are quite good. Can't exactly video chat on 128/32. I bet they love the "PDA/cellphone optimized" variant pages on things like google and reuters. Anyone remember Lynx? I bet they're still using it.
the entire world doesn't use /24 for a subnet mask.
unless of course you install Windows XP Government Edition etc that has the sanctioned back doors covered.
;)
I'm sure there's something like that out there already. And each major OS has a government manual on how to 'secure' it for government use. Even OS X's manual is around 100 pages of changes to make to secure it to their standards. I haven't seen the windows one yet, but I bet it comes in a seven volume set.
Probably the most significant event was the lack of a global crisis -- you know, a Slammer- or Blaster-style worm that infects the world in eight minutes. There was no malware with a replication magnitude on the order of Code Red, Slammer, Nimda, or the Iloveyou virus.
a dvise_1.html?9809798
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/12/30/01OPsec
you should read more.
you must have missed the word "six"
thanks for playing, please try again