Sure. This meant at that time getting my ass from the chair, going to a local Russian post office and trying to figure how to send Certified Mail to U.S. (Guess: I'd wait half an hour in a line and get a blank stare.)
I did email the filler. It was not my invention, after all. I just run into the patent app accidentally in the course of research. Why should I go out of my way to rectify it?
The point is, UPSTO does not make it easy to casually report prior publications in order to, supposedly, help the patent examiner. I think, they don't enlist public help efficiently.
I once encountered a U.S. patent application filled in 2005 whose idea was described in a research article published in 2001. I tried to report it to the patent examiner.
First, I looked around for a "report prior art" button on the application page. None.
Second, I looked for USPTO's email. I don't remember if I found one, it was years ago, but I do remember that an attempt at reporting prior art via email was not successful. Probably I got a reply saying they don't take tips via email, I don't recall clearly.
Third, I took the trouble of calling USPTO (international call, not cheap), waiting in the queue a quarter hour, and inquiring where do I send a copy of that research article. It turned out, I have to snail mail it and clearly identify the sender on the mail. At this point a question arose if the submission would be anonymous. I knew one of the patent fillers and did not want to worsen relations with him. If I sent a letter with a faked sender from my current city and country and he saw it, he could still identify me. To ensure anonymity, I'd have to mail it to another country and ask someone to re-mail it to the USPTO for me. At this point, I gave up.
Beancounters may disagree, but I feel space tourism, even when run by whatever single nation, is a long-term overally good thing for every nation participating in space exploration.
Slash-separated date formats are ambiguous, varying between countries. If you want to avoid confusion, use the ISO date format: YYYY-MM-DD. E.g., 2009-03-14.
Seriously, I don't think there is any. If there were, I'd have my CC and passwords stolen long ago, would see extra traffic on the net connection, processes running, registry keys added, etc. There is none.
It's pretty crazy to be running keygens on your system. Every time I do it, I think to myself "what are these guys getting for all their hard work?" The same thing with cracked software - you run an installer yourself how could the cracker pass up that type opportunity? I just assume most of them infect your computer with some spyware and trojans.
I rely on feedback from other downloaders on TPB. If the installer or keygen do bad things, many people will scream in comments. For popular torrents that are more than a month old, that catches malware pretty well. So far, I've no visible problem on my machine with this approach.
Interesting reading. Probably beyond average slashdotter's patience, hence so few comments to the story. I've found the history of TEMPEST being the most fascinating... discovered, forgotten, rediscovered, never fully eliminated but considered adequately handled given the threat level assessment. It left me wondering what the status of TEMPEST is with current electronic computing devices?
According to the book itself (see p. 128 bottom), this disclosure should not even come close to define the lower bound of NSA's today's capabilities. Umm, impressive then.
proposing refundable microcharge for sending email (which is NOT fully refunded ONLY when the recipient subsequently marks incoming email as spam). Obviously my idea might be flawed, but those who have critiqued it never formulated why. At the present conversion rates, a refundable cent per email will do wonders. Possibly it will kill spam, or at least change its quality and quantity very considerably.
Schneier's article appears to be a reaction to the recent quantum network demo set up in the city of Vienna and surroundings. For those who missed it, here is some information.
I have been there, and can give my impresson. I think, this is a big milestone for quantum cryptography. This has been the most massive and convincing demonstration of the technology up to the date, nothing like any before. Yet, it seems to have received relatively little press attention.
The demonstration was a conclusion of an European project in which several tens of research groups collaborated. The main thing it produced are network protocols for a quantum cryptography network. Several months ago, the plan for this demo was four quantum cryptographic links. However, it was easy to plug any quantum crypto link into the network, so six research groups and one commercial company ended up bringing their systems to Vienna (the latter, idQuantique, actually contributed three links to the network).
Out of these nine systems, seven performed flawlessly for several days, one worked for half an hour and then died (the secure key produced in the first half an hour was still used by the network; the failure was blamed on a software problem in that system), and one prototype did not quite survive the flight to Vienna (hard disk was trashed by baggage handlers). Given that most of the systems were research prototypes, the statistics actually looks good to me.
Since the network topology allowed for redundant paths between most of the nodes, the actual failure of one link and simulated failure of another did not prevent the network from operating. (The network topology on the picture as not quite complete: at the last moment, eighth link and one more node were added off the topmost node.) During the demo, there were shown securely encrypted video links between the nodes, and telephone calls. The video links were encrypted with AES with session keys provided by the network. The telephone calls were encrypted with one-time-pad provided by the network. Resiliency to failures was demonstrated: one link was broken on purpose (eavesdropping was simulated by inserting a polarizer, I think), and a key store in another was exhausted during one of the one-time-pad encrypted telephone calls. In both cases, the key distribution was automatically re-routed through other paths and nodes.
The network software implemented so far requires all nodes be trusted and secure. However, I know that algorithms are under development that would allow secure key distribution in a bigger network where up to a certain percentage of nodes might have been compromised.
The demo was on the first day of the meeting. The other two days were just a very good research conference, with no press attending. (I apologize if I got some details above not fully correct.)
Regarding Schenier's position, I respect it but it might be too short-sighted and grounded. And pessimistic. Remember the famous sayings how many computers the world has maybe a market for (five), 640 kB should be enough for everybody, and so on. Classical cryptography has a nasty property to be retroactively crackable. One can record the encrypted classical communication now, wait until it is broken, decipher. Puff, your old secret is suddenly public. For some types of secrets, this is just not an option. Also, Schenier conveniently misses the fact that one can use one-time-pad with quantum key, the combination IS unbreakable, and quantum key distribution speeds steadily improve.
A final remark, there appear to be three commercial companies actually selling quantum key distribution equipment:
can I get this software on The Pirate Bay? It's not like breaking into neighbour's network to use it for free is going to be worth an EUR 600 investment.
I have been there, and can give my impresson. I think, this is a big milestone for quantum cryptography. This has been the most massive and convincing demonstration of the technology up to the date, nothing like any before. Yet, it seems to have received relatively little press attention.
The demonstration was a conclusion of an European project in which several tens of research groups collaborated. The main thing it produced are network protocols for a quantum cryptography network. Several months ago, the plan for this demo was four quantum cryptographic links. However, it was easy to plug any quantum crypto link into the network, so six research groups and one commercial company ended up bringing their systems to Vienna (the latter, idQuantique, actually contributed three links to the network).
Out of these nine systems, seven performed flawlessly for several days, one worked for half an hour and then died (the secure key produced in the first half an hour was still used by the network; the failure was blamed on a software problem in that system), and one prototype did not quite survive the flight to Vienna (hard disk was trashed by baggage handlers). Given that most of the systems were research prototypes, the statistics actually looks good to me.
Since the network topology allowed for redundant paths between most of the nodes, the actual failure of one link and simulated failure of another did not prevent the network from operating. (The network topology on the picture as not quite complete: at the last moment, eighth link and one more node were added off the topmost node.) During the demo, there were shown securely encrypted video links between the nodes, and telephone calls. The video links were encrypted with AES with session keys provided by the network. The telephone calls were encrypted with one-time-pad provided by the network. Resiliency to failures was demonstrated: one link was broken on purpose (eavesdropping was simulated by inserting a polarizer), and a key store in another was exhausted during one of the one-time-pad encrypted calls. In both cases, the key distribution was automatically re-routed through other paths and nodes.
The network software implemented so far requires all nodes be trusted and secure. However, I know that algorithms are under development that would allow secure key distribution in a bigger network where up to a certain percentage of nodes might have been compromised.
The demo was on the first day of the meeting. The other two days were just a very good research conference, with no press attending. I apologize if I got some details above not fully correct.
Let me put it this way: Russia does not want this arms race. Building an asymmetric response, which would be for example ICBMs that can evade American interceptors, is useless expense... because they are not going to be used for any gain for Russia, just sink money.
How about getting a hosting provider that does backup? I've been using pair.com for my sites for several years. They have about daily or twice-daily recent snapshots on the same server (that you can access yourself if you need to), then on-site backup, then off-site backup. As far as I know they don't ship those to customers, but this doesn't look to me like a very big risk. I haven't had to use any of the backups, and I think they haven't had any (big) loss of data since they went online more than ten years ago, as far as I can infer from reading the user groups. Of course you are at the mercy of the provider should a disaster happen, but is this really that much risk if they manage it properly?
1. A button to set view and template for all folders in all dialogs (explore, open, save, etc.) to ONE custom setting, ignorable of folder content. I am still searching how to do that in Vista, set all to Document template, Details view.
2. No programs or whatnot grabbing focus, ever. It's OK to make this a custom setting.
Distance improves steadily. The current record for a point-to-point link is over 200 km in fiber (albeit not installed but spools in a lab) and 144 km of free space (between two mountains on islands in the Pacific). Never mind that the 144 km experiment uses passively-quenched single-photon detectors which I think I have successfully broken. Also, I think at least one group is seriously working on a link with some sort of quantum repeaters in middle nodes.
Actually, bittorrent is not yet a mainstream, but it will be. An average of 8.2 million downloaders at any one time may seem a lot until you consider that there are nearly 350 million broadband subscribers worldwide (wikkepedia). So only 2.4 percent are downloading at any one time.
I get nearly all movies I watch via BitTorrent. At any one time, the probability that my client is running and downloading something is maybe 1/5, no more... consider that once you get for example the BBC Horizon Collection (takes a couple days to download on a good connection), you are pretty much occupied for a few months. Thhe ratio is still on the same side for most movies: the interval between watching them is much bigger than the time it takes to download. And, I mean, this is true for hi-def stuff. Looking at the popularity stats for differently sized torrents, I can conclude that the overwhelming majority of users are downloading (over)compressed movies under 2 MB in size. It takes a couple hours to get one, and how often you watch movies?
Bottom line: multiply the reported number of users by 10.
The difference between RIAA and scientific journals is the the latter will not battle alternative models of publishing. In fact, arXiv is widely accepted by the scientific publishing community. If something better comes along, it will only be applauded. I think everyone in this business understands its only purpose is to help disseminate quality scientific results.
Maybe the crucial difference between the RIAA and scientific journals is that research is not funded by the journals (in fact quite the opposite, journals are ultimately funded by research money), while music creation is often funded by the labels.
Live in Sweden is not that much different from Norway. Surely if you compare closely, Norway seems to be slightly more expensive and slightly better paid. But, in fact, given a choice which country of these two to live in, I would decide solely on other factors, like what sort of job I'd be getting.
Yet, very remarkably, Sweden has exactly zero hydrocarbon deposits (look it up in CIA world handbook if you don't believe). So, how much difference oil makes and how much traditions, education, press freedom, democracy, and, as the result, well run country makes? Oil is just an icing on the cake, and not that much icing for the fact.
Have you actually eaten Korean food more than once? There is a big variety of side dishes, and many of them are not spicy. Only Kimchi exists in dozens of very different types. I have eaten maybe five of them (if we don't count different flavors of the same type). If anything, Korean everyday food is one of the most diverse in the world. Even the meals you eat it in a dirt-cheap university cafeteria. You either have not seen Korean food, or are a troll.
This sounds like a bad idea for me. First, the student would have to choose the employer five years earlier. How many of the students would make a solid decision, and be still satisfied with the choice by the time of graduation? I am afraid, the overwhelming majority wouldn't be, even if the companies and the market had remained completely unchanged during these years (they very drasticall won't).
The second problem is that some of the brighter students decide to stay in academia in the year or two preceding their graduation. As you propose, they would be very dismotivated to stay in the academia. In the end, education (and research) will suffer.
A third problem is that established companies may get an additional advantage over startups.
I've stayed in Korea for nine months by now. The first three months, I hated kimchi. After that, I have been in love with it.
I am definitely looking forward to shipping-ready kimchi, provided it is not made too mild in taste, for the time when I have to leave Korea.
Maybe, my eventual love for kimchi has had something to do with Russian fermented cabbage (kvashenaya kapusta). After all, I am Russian.
By the way, the more spicy sauce kimchi is moisetened with and the stronger smell it gives off, the better. The man who serves kimchi to his western friends with a dish of water: I think, you are missing the point!
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. This meant at that time getting my ass from the chair, going to a local Russian post office and trying to figure how to send Certified Mail to U.S. (Guess: I'd wait half an hour in a line and get a blank stare.) I did email the filler. It was not my invention, after all. I just run into the patent app accidentally in the course of research. Why should I go out of my way to rectify it? The point is, UPSTO does not make it easy to casually report prior publications in order to, supposedly, help the patent examiner. I think, they don't enlist public help efficiently.
I once encountered a U.S. patent application filled in 2005 whose idea was described in a research article published in 2001. I tried to report it to the patent examiner.
First, I looked around for a "report prior art" button on the application page. None.
Second, I looked for USPTO's email. I don't remember if I found one, it was years ago, but I do remember that an attempt at reporting prior art via email was not successful. Probably I got a reply saying they don't take tips via email, I don't recall clearly.
Third, I took the trouble of calling USPTO (international call, not cheap), waiting in the queue a quarter hour, and inquiring where do I send a copy of that research article. It turned out, I have to snail mail it and clearly identify the sender on the mail. At this point a question arose if the submission would be anonymous. I knew one of the patent fillers and did not want to worsen relations with him. If I sent a letter with a faked sender from my current city and country and he saw it, he could still identify me. To ensure anonymity, I'd have to mail it to another country and ask someone to re-mail it to the USPTO for me. At this point, I gave up.
Beancounters may disagree, but I feel space tourism, even when run by whatever single nation, is a long-term overally good thing for every nation participating in space exploration.
Here: http://media.vad1.com/temporary_url_20070929kldcg/v-anthem-sovietunion-1977-acapella-the_hunt_for_red_october_1990.mpg
Slash-separated date formats are ambiguous, varying between countries. If you want to avoid confusion, use the ISO date format: YYYY-MM-DD. E.g., 2009-03-14.
Seriously, I don't think there is any. If there were, I'd have my CC and passwords stolen long ago, would see extra traffic on the net connection, processes running, registry keys added, etc. There is none.
It's pretty crazy to be running keygens on your system. Every time I do it, I think to myself "what are these guys getting for all their hard work?" The same thing with cracked software - you run an installer yourself how could the cracker pass up that type opportunity? I just assume most of them infect your computer with some spyware and trojans.
I rely on feedback from other downloaders on TPB. If the installer or keygen do bad things, many people will scream in comments. For popular torrents that are more than a month old, that catches malware pretty well. So far, I've no visible problem on my machine with this approach.
Interesting reading. Probably beyond average slashdotter's patience, hence so few comments to the story. I've found the history of TEMPEST being the most fascinating... discovered, forgotten, rediscovered, never fully eliminated but considered adequately handled given the threat level assessment. It left me wondering what the status of TEMPEST is with current electronic computing devices?
According to the book itself (see p. 128 bottom), this disclosure should not even come close to define the lower bound of NSA's today's capabilities. Umm, impressive then.
proposing refundable microcharge for sending email (which is NOT fully refunded ONLY when the recipient subsequently marks incoming email as spam). Obviously my idea might be flawed, but those who have critiqued it never formulated why. At the present conversion rates, a refundable cent per email will do wonders. Possibly it will kill spam, or at least change its quality and quantity very considerably.
I have been there, and can give my impresson. I think, this is a big milestone for quantum cryptography. This has been the most massive and convincing demonstration of the technology up to the date, nothing like any before. Yet, it seems to have received relatively little press attention.
The demonstration was a conclusion of an European project in which several tens of research groups collaborated. The main thing it produced are network protocols for a quantum cryptography network. Several months ago, the plan for this demo was four quantum cryptographic links. However, it was easy to plug any quantum crypto link into the network, so six research groups and one commercial company ended up bringing their systems to Vienna (the latter, idQuantique, actually contributed three links to the network).
Out of these nine systems, seven performed flawlessly for several days, one worked for half an hour and then died (the secure key produced in the first half an hour was still used by the network; the failure was blamed on a software problem in that system), and one prototype did not quite survive the flight to Vienna (hard disk was trashed by baggage handlers). Given that most of the systems were research prototypes, the statistics actually looks good to me.
Since the network topology allowed for redundant paths between most of the nodes, the actual failure of one link and simulated failure of another did not prevent the network from operating. (The network topology on the picture as not quite complete: at the last moment, eighth link and one more node were added off the topmost node.) During the demo, there were shown securely encrypted video links between the nodes, and telephone calls. The video links were encrypted with AES with session keys provided by the network. The telephone calls were encrypted with one-time-pad provided by the network. Resiliency to failures was demonstrated: one link was broken on purpose (eavesdropping was simulated by inserting a polarizer, I think), and a key store in another was exhausted during one of the one-time-pad encrypted telephone calls. In both cases, the key distribution was automatically re-routed through other paths and nodes.
The network software implemented so far requires all nodes be trusted and secure. However, I know that algorithms are under development that would allow secure key distribution in a bigger network where up to a certain percentage of nodes might have been compromised.
The demo was on the first day of the meeting. The other two days were just a very good research conference, with no press attending. (I apologize if I got some details above not fully correct.)
Regarding Schenier's position, I respect it but it might be too short-sighted and grounded. And pessimistic. Remember the famous sayings how many computers the world has maybe a market for (five), 640 kB should be enough for everybody, and so on. Classical cryptography has a nasty property to be retroactively crackable. One can record the encrypted classical communication now, wait until it is broken, decipher. Puff, your old secret is suddenly public. For some types of secrets, this is just not an option. Also, Schenier conveniently misses the fact that one can use one-time-pad with quantum key, the combination IS unbreakable, and quantum key distribution speeds steadily improve.
A final remark, there appear to be three commercial companies actually selling quantum key distribution equipment:
can I get this software on The Pirate Bay? It's not like breaking into neighbour's network to use it for free is going to be worth an EUR 600 investment.
I have been there, and can give my impresson. I think, this is a big milestone for quantum cryptography. This has been the most massive and convincing demonstration of the technology up to the date, nothing like any before. Yet, it seems to have received relatively little press attention.
The demonstration was a conclusion of an European project in which several tens of research groups collaborated. The main thing it produced are network protocols for a quantum cryptography network. Several months ago, the plan for this demo was four quantum cryptographic links. However, it was easy to plug any quantum crypto link into the network, so six research groups and one commercial company ended up bringing their systems to Vienna (the latter, idQuantique, actually contributed three links to the network).
Out of these nine systems, seven performed flawlessly for several days, one worked for half an hour and then died (the secure key produced in the first half an hour was still used by the network; the failure was blamed on a software problem in that system), and one prototype did not quite survive the flight to Vienna (hard disk was trashed by baggage handlers). Given that most of the systems were research prototypes, the statistics actually looks good to me.
Since the network topology allowed for redundant paths between most of the nodes, the actual failure of one link and simulated failure of another did not prevent the network from operating. (The network topology on the picture as not quite complete: at the last moment, eighth link and one more node were added off the topmost node.) During the demo, there were shown securely encrypted video links between the nodes, and telephone calls. The video links were encrypted with AES with session keys provided by the network. The telephone calls were encrypted with one-time-pad provided by the network. Resiliency to failures was demonstrated: one link was broken on purpose (eavesdropping was simulated by inserting a polarizer), and a key store in another was exhausted during one of the one-time-pad encrypted calls. In both cases, the key distribution was automatically re-routed through other paths and nodes.
The network software implemented so far requires all nodes be trusted and secure. However, I know that algorithms are under development that would allow secure key distribution in a bigger network where up to a certain percentage of nodes might have been compromised.
The demo was on the first day of the meeting. The other two days were just a very good research conference, with no press attending. I apologize if I got some details above not fully correct.
I won't believe that, sorry
Let me put it this way: Russia does not want this arms race. Building an asymmetric response, which would be for example ICBMs that can evade American interceptors, is useless expense... because they are not going to be used for any gain for Russia, just sink money.
If it were a simple question of power balance, they could just build their own shield.
1. Exactly where close to the U.S. border can Russia build one? On Greenland? In Canada?
2. Believe it or not, Russia does not want another arms race.
How about getting a hosting provider that does backup? I've been using pair.com for my sites for several years. They have about daily or twice-daily recent snapshots on the same server (that you can access yourself if you need to), then on-site backup, then off-site backup. As far as I know they don't ship those to customers, but this doesn't look to me like a very big risk. I haven't had to use any of the backups, and I think they haven't had any (big) loss of data since they went online more than ten years ago, as far as I can infer from reading the user groups. Of course you are at the mercy of the provider should a disaster happen, but is this really that much risk if they manage it properly?
:) http://promote.pair.com/direct.pl?vad1.com+63035
Shameless $0.2 plug: if you get an account at pair, sign up through this affiliate link
2. No programs or whatnot grabbing focus, ever. It's OK to make this a custom setting.
Distance improves steadily. The current record for a point-to-point link is over 200 km in fiber (albeit not installed but spools in a lab) and 144 km of free space (between two mountains on islands in the Pacific). Never mind that the 144 km experiment uses passively-quenched single-photon detectors which I think I have successfully broken. Also, I think at least one group is seriously working on a link with some sort of quantum repeaters in middle nodes.
I assume you mean 2GB/movie?
:)
Yes, I stand corrected. I never download overcompressed movies, so 2 MB or 2 GB there doesn't make a big difference for me
Actually, bittorrent is not yet a mainstream, but it will be. An average of 8.2 million downloaders at any one time may seem a lot until you consider that there are nearly 350 million broadband subscribers worldwide (wikkepedia). So only 2.4 percent are downloading at any one time.
I get nearly all movies I watch via BitTorrent. At any one time, the probability that my client is running and downloading something is maybe 1/5, no more... consider that once you get for example the BBC Horizon Collection (takes a couple days to download on a good connection), you are pretty much occupied for a few months. Thhe ratio is still on the same side for most movies: the interval between watching them is much bigger than the time it takes to download. And, I mean, this is true for hi-def stuff. Looking at the popularity stats for differently sized torrents, I can conclude that the overwhelming majority of users are downloading (over)compressed movies under 2 MB in size. It takes a couple hours to get one, and how often you watch movies?
Bottom line: multiply the reported number of users by 10.
Here is the original publication. I can view fulltext from my computer on campus, but it could be a subscription-only.
The difference between RIAA and scientific journals is the the latter will not battle alternative models of publishing. In fact, arXiv is widely accepted by the scientific publishing community. If something better comes along, it will only be applauded. I think everyone in this business understands its only purpose is to help disseminate quality scientific results.
Maybe the crucial difference between the RIAA and scientific journals is that research is not funded by the journals (in fact quite the opposite, journals are ultimately funded by research money), while music creation is often funded by the labels.
Live in Sweden is not that much different from Norway. Surely if you compare closely, Norway seems to be slightly more expensive and slightly better paid. But, in fact, given a choice which country of these two to live in, I would decide solely on other factors, like what sort of job I'd be getting.
Yet, very remarkably, Sweden has exactly zero hydrocarbon deposits (look it up in CIA world handbook if you don't believe). So, how much difference oil makes and how much traditions, education, press freedom, democracy, and, as the result, well run country makes? Oil is just an icing on the cake, and not that much icing for the fact.
everything covered in the same red chili paste
Have you actually eaten Korean food more than once? There is a big variety of side dishes, and many of them are not spicy. Only Kimchi exists in dozens of very different types. I have eaten maybe five of them (if we don't count different flavors of the same type). If anything, Korean everyday food is one of the most diverse in the world. Even the meals you eat it in a dirt-cheap university cafeteria. You either have not seen Korean food, or are a troll.
This sounds like a bad idea for me. First, the student would have to choose the employer five years earlier. How many of the students would make a solid decision, and be still satisfied with the choice by the time of graduation? I am afraid, the overwhelming majority wouldn't be, even if the companies and the market had remained completely unchanged during these years (they very drasticall won't).
The second problem is that some of the brighter students decide to stay in academia in the year or two preceding their graduation. As you propose, they would be very dismotivated to stay in the academia. In the end, education (and research) will suffer.
A third problem is that established companies may get an additional advantage over startups.
Kimchi takes time to get used to.
I've stayed in Korea for nine months by now. The first three months, I hated kimchi. After that, I have been in love with it.
I am definitely looking forward to shipping-ready kimchi, provided it is not made too mild in taste, for the time when I have to leave Korea.
Maybe, my eventual love for kimchi has had something to do with Russian fermented cabbage (kvashenaya kapusta). After all, I am Russian.
By the way, the more spicy sauce kimchi is moisetened with and the stronger smell it gives off, the better. The man who serves kimchi to his western friends with a dish of water: I think, you are missing the point!