Nothing in my experience comes close to the iPic. I suppose if they started weaving webservers into currency, that would be even more impressive (and quite a bit scarier). Still, the matchhead-sized server is quite cool.
It's interesting to see Dr. Stephen R. Quake's name cropping up again in one of these stories. His group is working on some amazing stuff, mostly working with one molecule at a time—although, admittedly, they're moby molecules.
What we need is some kind of clearing house of opt-out info, a la SpamCop, that would allow us to look up all the companies that we do business with and see what their real policies are. A nice feature would be the ability to generate legally binding letters of notification that we could send to those companies, preemptively opting out of all possible dissemination of our data.
Maybe some slashdotters will use this, but really, will anyone else?
Depends on how badly Microsoft and other major players fumble the ball, and forget who's actually buying their software. If they keep going in the current direction, I can see Ogg Vorbis becoming a standard almost overnight.
A few months ago a friend of mine, a staunch Microsoft supporter, converted his entire collection of MP3's (about 150 CD's—he'd ripped his whole library) to WMA format. The quality was fine, the files were smaller, and off he toddled. A few weeks later he upgraded his operating system, and WMA's Rights Management kicked in and told him he couldn't play any of those files anymore. Ouch! Weeks later, he'd re-ripped his collection to MP3—and ripped a friend's as well. Needless to say, he's not as staunch a supporter as he once was.
If WMA continues apace, and MP3 becomes co-opted, Ogg Vorbis may well step in. The name is odd, but who cares? The MP in MP3 stands for "Motion Picture" after all! I can see it getting abbreviated to "OVA" for "Ogg Vorbis Audio" and spawning a multitude of egg-shaped players. I can even see the slogans:
Finally, it's safe to put all your eggs in one basket. OVA.
In the interim, and in the grand tradition of hacker jargon, I'd like to propose the following terms:
Ovum: (Ogg Vorbis Unit of Media) An Ogg Vorbis audio file. "I have an ovum of the EFF speech that I can send you."
Ova: (Ogg Vorbis Audio) Any number of Ogg Vorbis audio files, or a quantity of Ogg Vorbis audio. "Do you have any classical ova with you?"
Oval: Of or relating to the Ogg Vorbis format. "Does your oval player have a spectrum analyzer?"
Ovulation: The process of converting audio to Ogg Vorbis format. "Just a few more minutes of ovulation, and I'll be MP3-free!"
Ovangelism: The process of converting audiophiles to Ogg Vorbis format. "I let him borrow my oval Walkman and a couple gigs of jazz ova, and he traded in his Rio the next day. Big ovangelism win!"
I'm not very clever at 5AM (or at noon, for that matter), so I hope this makes some sense.
Aren't there open-source apps that can read Word documents and PDF files (Ghostscript and StarOffice)?
And more to the point, why should we expect someone presenting an open-source alternative to a predominantly Windows-based audience to present it in non-Windows formats? Are we really that zealous, that we expect organizations to convert completely to open-source alternatives before they can even mention Linux on their website? And didn't we just cover this subject?
I grew up in the rural
South, and I remember folk who considered it acceptable to use racial slurs when in a whites-only group, because it was safe to assume that most everyone would agree, and those that didn't would remain silent. Thankfully, times have changed—now I have to read Slashdot to find that kind of intolerance.
If we're going to act like a bunch of militant fundamentalists, I think I might just sit this year out. Please wake me when the zealots stop screaming in the hallway.
...was that OS X can handle filesizes up to eight exabytes—sorry, I forgot—that's eight exbibytes. More than a gigabyte for every man, woman & child on earth.
Okay, I'm satisfied. Now let's see some ATA10000 drives with that capacity, and I'll finally be able to reload all my MP3's.
There is, of course, more than one side to this issue.
On one hand, American cultural mores dictate at least an appearance of privacy and security in one's person and one's papers. In many ways, Americans define themselves by the degree of privacy that they have been able to acquire.
On the other hand, we expect our government to protect us from attack and wrongful injury. We expect it to be proactive in discovering and analyzing any threats to its citizens, and become irate when it is unable to predict such a threat, even when such a prediction would have required violations of privacy.
On the gripping hand, though, analyses that would bear useful results in most times might not do so now. We are in the cusp of a sea change from a peacetime to a wartime footing. We look at war-based policy changes through a peace-shaped perspective.
There are a couple of old definitions that come to mind:
Conservative: A liberal who has been mugged.
Liberal: A conservative who has been arrested.
How would we now define a Post-9/11 American? How will our existing knowledge that we can be die anytime, anywhere—coupled with the new awareness that a small but significant fraction of the world's population is willing (and increasingly able) to do make that happen—affect our perception of civil rights issues? I would predict that a shift of equilibrium is occurring, and it'll take another couple of years before the new balance point is reached. It will be interesting then to look back on Your Rights Online posts from this period and see how drastically our own positions have been altered by time and events.
Of course, some believe that the government sees the situation as simply an opportunity to curb civil rights (some even think they orchestrated the whole thing). Personally, I think most people just want as much information as they can get, that can possibly let them achieve their goals more effectively. That goes for everyone from DIRNSA to my network administrator. Heck, even the Slashdot editors can read the IP's of anonymous posters.
My theory is this:
Privacy will continue to erode.
The more we grouse about privacy, the more secretive the 'eroders' will be.
The best we can hope for is a future where monitoring is directly observable, so surveillance will come at some cost to the perpetrator.
This must be a hot topic, as it's the second time today that I've commented on it, and I don't have that much free time today.
...I'm planning a marathon viewing of the classic "Dark Screen."
Leave the TV off for a day! How's that for a resolution? (And no, don't replace it with 24 hours of Slashdot.)
Start a journal! Read a book! Volunteer! Pray for peace! Do something that you can feel good about. Trust me, a full day of Gilligan's Island won't do it.
What you WOULDN'T like to see...
on
Google Recaps 2001
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...is a list of everything you searched for all year, available to anyone (spouse, employer, neighbors...). So you'd have to make sure that Google kept your information absolutely secure. Good thing Internet sites have such a stellar reputation for that.
"In other news, Joe Blow of 327 Maple Street was charged with last year's rape and murder of Jane Doe of Alta Vista. Officials said that the big break in the case came when a subpoena of Google search records for area residents turned up evidence that the terms "rape", "weapons", and "attack" had been used in searches from Blow's home computer. Mr. Blow is being held without bond while police search for additional damning evidence against this psychopathic killer..."
"Update: Jailed rapist and killer Joe Blow appears to have escaped conviction for his 2000 rape and murder of Alta Vista resident Jane Doe, as after three months of searching, officials have failed to uncover additional evidence from his well-covered trail. The DA's office has sworn that this vicious criminal will not go unpunished, however, since they'e sure they can find something in his Google search records that will indicate some felony involvement in something or other."
This was posted a bit before 5AM local time, and I'm seldom awake, rarely accurate, and neverinsightful at that hour. This post should have remained hidden forever with a score of 1, but apparently was modded up in order to draw attention to my lack of lucidity in the wee hours. I'll accept half the blame, if the moderators will accept the other half.
I have a CD with the only truly unbreakable copy protection I've yet tested. The publisher accomplished it by omitting the CD's the metal layer and, apparently, the dye layer as well. The result is a disc which is almost completely transparent. Sadly, the disc is unplayable on any of my equipment, DVD-ROM drive included. Perhaps the publisher anticipated that problem, and that's why he published it without a label, and distributed it for free with spindles of CD-R's.
All kidding aside— here is a formula that might be useful to publishers of digital data:
Rc = ( Cm + Ce + ( Ca * Pa ) - Cp ) * Vd
where
Rc = Risk of the data being illegally copied Cm = Cost of recordable media Ce = Cost of effort needed for duplication Ca = Cost of being apprehended Pa = Probability of apprehension Cp = Cost of purchasing data Vd = Value of the data
If L > 0, the data will be copied.
A publisher can control the level of his data's protection only to the degree that he can control these variables.
Cm cannot be kept artificially high, due to market forces to the contrary;
Ce continues to drop, as coding ingenuity continues to outstrip copy prevention standards almost as quickly as they are developed;
Ca is relatively low for the end user, since it usually only involves paying for software you had anyway; and
Pa is low because the crime is widespread and social costs are low, so enforcement at the end user level is minimal.
This leaves a publisher of digital data with two variables he can control: the data's cost and its value. This provides two options for perfect copy protection:
make the product free, or
make the product worthless.
Since neither option would be attractive to most publishers, it would appear that widespread copyright violations (and violators) will be with us for a long, long time.
...doesn't that mean only one person can watch it at a time? Hopefully, he'll put it on FidoNet so more people can see it.
You know, we all tend to look back fondly on those days, but even through the haze of nostalgia, I remember that little timer in the command prompt, counting down the minutes until I got kicked off. I surely don't miss that!
It will be interesting to see whether this experiment gets the results everyone seems to be anticipating, or mirrors the 'success' of the Michelson-Morley experiment.
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'" — Isaac Asimov
I directly accessed The Register using their IP address (213.40.196.64) and found that the server was still up, but that the home page carries a last update timestamp of 24 December at 15:29 GMT—over a day and a half ago.
So not only has the domain name been detagged, it appears that the site itself has gone into hibernation as well. Does anyone have any other information about what's going on over there?
EXTRA: I found this excellent post on Usenet, and append it here for your edification:
From: Anthony Edwards (anthony@catfish.nildram.co.uk)
Subject: Re: some one does not like THEREGISTER.CO.UK
Newsgroups: uk.net
Date: 2001-12-25 14:04:27 PST
On Tue, 25 Dec 2001 20:09:06 +0000, in uk.net Rob Harvey <nospam@ukservers.net> wrote:
>
>What's also interesting is that the whois doesn't show a "Registered on" date
>which I believe means the name itself is pre-nominet and didn't have an expiry
>date.
>
The Register's first issue was Number 1, 25 July 1994 (Nominet began
in 1996 I believe). In those days it was an email newsletter, the
first issue can be viewed at:
http://194.159.40.109/reg1.txt
In fact, issues 1-37 can be viewed at the above site, simply by
placing the relevant issue number in "reg*.txt".
However it appears that, at least up until 8 November 1996 (issue 37),
the domain name theregister.co.uk was not in use. Indeed, the site
was at http://www.hubcom.com/register/ , although it seems that John
Lettice and Mike Magee also at that point owned the domain
theregister.com (albeit they don't now).
One wonders what has happened to theregister.co.uk to cause the domain
to become detagged. It is hard to believe that it is a simple
financial matter, given the relatively small sums involved. I notice
that the identity of the person who apparently requested the detagging
(presumably via the Nominet Automaton) is an employee of uk.psi.com.
Since all such detagging requests (from Nominet members to Nominet)
have to be PGP signed, one imagines that request at least was genuine
(but see below).
Up until around September 2001, The Register's hardware was co-located
at one of Level 3's UK facilities. Following a variety of technical
problems relating to Cisco load balancing equipment, the site was
moved I believe, although I am unable to remember who the new hosting
centre is. I have a sneaking suspicion that it *is* now PSI, in which
case I imagine there will be much embarrassment all round.
On the other hand, there may be a little more to it. The Register
have roundly slated the bulk email operation behind the recent
Sainsbury's and Virgin Wines spam incidents, pointing out in no
uncertain terms (and to Sainsbury's and Virgin Wines too, one
imagines) that the email addresses used were definitely culled from
Usenet.
However, consider this:
>Received: by jupiter (mbox topflite)
> (with Cubic Circle's cucipop (v1.31 1998/05/13) Sun Dec 16 13:34:37 2001)
>X-From_: root@peel.net Sun Dec 16 13:24:33 2001
>Return-Path: <root@peel.net>
>Received: from blaster1.peel.com ([216.52.138.23])
> by jupiter.nildram.co.uk (8.10.0-mysql/8.10.0) with ESMTP id fBGDOWC28607
> for <posthamster@catfish.nildram.co.uk>; Sun, 16 Dec 2001 13:24:32 GMT
>Delivered-To: <posthamster@catfish.nildram.co.uk>
>Received: by blaster1.peel.com (Postfix, from userid 0)
> id 6D65261DC; Sun, 16 Dec 2001 06:24:28 -0600 (CST)
>To: posthamster@catfish.nildram.co.uk
>From: "Virgin Wines" <virginwines1979@peel.net>
>Reply-To: notify@peel.net
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/plain
>Subject: Great Christmas wine at a bargain price
>Message-Id: <20011216122428.6D65261DC@blaster1.peel.com>
>Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 06:24:28 -0600 (CST)
mail from: root@peel.net in the SMTP envelope, and a Reply-To address
of notify@peel.net. However:
Dig peel.net@NS1.PEEL.COM (216.52.138.3)...
Authoritative Answer
Recursive queries supported by this server
Query for peel.net type=255 class=1
peel.net MX (Mail Exchanger) Priority: 10 returns.peel.net
peel.net A (Address) 216.52.138.9
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns1.peel.com
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns2.chi.pnap.net
peel.net SOA (Zone of Authority)
Primary NS: ns1.peel.com
Responsible person: root@peel.com
serial:2001092202
refresh:10800s (3 hours)
retry:3600s (60 minutes)
expire:604800s (7 days)
minimum-ttl:86400s (24 hours)
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns1.peel.com
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns2.chi.pnap.net
returns.peel.net A (Address) 216.52.138.24
ns1.peel.com A (Address) 216.52.138.3
ns2.chi.pnap.net A (Address) 216.52.129.33
One MX record, and when one tries to connect to it:
Other Usenet posters have reported a similar inability to connect to
returns.peel.net (and the name of the MX itself is indicative of a
rather interesting sense of humour):
So, the owners and operators of peel.net have cunningly managed, it
would appear, to not only convince two of the UK's largest and more
respected companies to use their service for what Sainsbury's and
Virgin Wines apparently genuinely believed was a true, genuine, opt-in
email marketing operation, they have also managed (by technical means)
to ensure that their own bandwidth will not be wasted by such trivial
communications as "message undeliverable" bounce messages either.
One wonders if an alleged spam operation with such a fascinating
mindset might attempt a little social engineering hack, against a news
site which exposed their antics so comprehensively. On 24 December, I
doubt whether many of PSINet's key UK staff were operating. A
telephone call to support, followed by a fax request to "detag our
domain as we won't be using it any more" might produce an interesting
result, might it not? Especially since one imagines PSINet UK have a
handy internal Web front end tool for support staff to use to
register/modify/detag domains, and that support staff on 24 December
might have had other things on their mind, and when one considers how
easy faxes are to fake (which makes it hard to understand why so many
UK ISPs insist on them for such requests, rather than an email
originating from the customer concerned's netblock, or a PGP signed
email from the admin contact of the domain concerned).
WHOIS database last updated at 21:19:01 25-Dec-2001
The NIC.UK Registration Host contains ONLY information for domains
within co.uk, org.uk, net.uk, ltd.uk and plc.uk. Please use the whois
server at rs.internic.net for Internet Information or the whois server
at nic.ddn.mil for MILNET Information.
Is it only coincidence that this falls on the second anniversary of the Hotmail/Passport outage that gave Michael Chaney his fifteen minutes of Slashdot fame?
I have trouble with the 'software piracy' term as well. For me, it evokes the image of a pirate brigatine closing on a cargo ship in the dead of night, the murderous crew silently boarding their victim, copying all their maps, and leaving without a trace of their horrific deed.
You're right, the analogy doesn't hold up.
Sure, stealing is wrong, but might the term 'piracy' applied here be so over-the-top that young people simply can't take it seriously? What are our other options?
Intellectual theft (too vague)
technovampirism (too bloody)
software parasitism (too icky)
Hey, wait? Why don't we just call it "copyright violation?" That's accurate, after all. Doesn't sound scary enough? Maybe because it isn't all that scary.
We aren't talking about truckloads of baby food being waylaid by highwaymen; everyone who pays for the software still get their goods, after all. Is it really justified to fight a war on copyright violation the same way you'd fight a war on drugs or terrorism? Does anyone really think every KaZaa user represents a lost sale of Office XP Professional?
Again, I'm not saying it isn't wrong. But so is speeding, and that could be brought under control by mandatory cell-linked speed monitors in vehicles. It would save lives, after all, so why don't we do it? It would appear that no one wants to push the personal privacy issue unless there's considerable money (not lives) at stake.
Perhaps the industry and society as a whole would benefit if we shifted to a more palatable equilibrium point, and treated copyright violations at the user level as they've been treated since the advent of photocopiers and audiotape: frowned upon, but tolerated.
The Times of India story lists several of these hotbutton words—Kashmir, Lashkar, Pakistan, Musharraf, Jaish, attack, kill, rocket— along with an assurance that those who send email using these keywords will be put under surveillance.
Then they put a link at the bottom to email the story to your friends!!!
I can barely catch my breath, I'm laughing so hard!
Could be done, especially if good NLP is used
on
Carnivore Comes To India
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Natural language processing has come a long way in just the last couple of years. Astonishingly effective applications such as Sinope Summarizer are freely available; I can only imagine what an organization with the motivation and resources of the IB, NSA, FBI or CIA might have. I'd feel somewhat disappointed if their software weren't vastly superior to anything I've seen.
I'd imagine it might be based on Cyc or a similar dark project, and might achieve a 97% or better success rate at identifying questionable messages, with very few false negatives.
Assuming a billion emails a day, and five million of them being questionable, I'd suspect such a system could cull that number down to a few thousand—if the target messages were truly that few in number. As a matter of fact, I'd suggest that if sufficient computing power were available, to skip the keyword-scanning filter entirely, since such communications might be carried on with an alternate vocabulary substituted for hotbutton terms. Finding those messages requires more language processing intelligence than Carnivore would seem to have currently.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing in my experience comes close to the iPic. I suppose if they started weaving webservers into currency, that would be even more impressive (and quite a bit scarier). Still, the matchhead-sized server is quite cool.
It's interesting to see Dr. Stephen R. Quake's name cropping up again in one of these stories. His group is working on some amazing stuff, mostly working with one molecule at a time—although, admittedly, they're moby molecules.
No, I wasn't going to comment on his framerate.
What we need is some kind of clearing house of opt-out info, a la SpamCop, that would allow us to look up all the companies that we do business with and see what their real policies are. A nice feature would be the ability to generate legally binding letters of notification that we could send to those companies, preemptively opting out of all possible dissemination of our data.
Is this already available, or is someone working on it? If not, I'll get busy. Comments and suggestions welcome!
Depends on how badly Microsoft and other major players fumble the ball, and forget who's actually buying their software. If they keep going in the current direction, I can see Ogg Vorbis becoming a standard almost overnight.
A few months ago a friend of mine, a staunch Microsoft supporter, converted his entire collection of MP3's (about 150 CD's—he'd ripped his whole library) to WMA format. The quality was fine, the files were smaller, and off he toddled. A few weeks later he upgraded his operating system, and WMA's Rights Management kicked in and told him he couldn't play any of those files anymore. Ouch! Weeks later, he'd re-ripped his collection to MP3—and ripped a friend's as well. Needless to say, he's not as staunch a supporter as he once was.
If WMA continues apace, and MP3 becomes co-opted, Ogg Vorbis may well step in. The name is odd, but who cares? The MP in MP3 stands for "Motion Picture" after all! I can see it getting abbreviated to "OVA" for "Ogg Vorbis Audio" and spawning a multitude of egg-shaped players. I can even see the slogans:In the interim, and in the grand tradition of hacker jargon, I'd like to propose the following terms:
- Ovum: (Ogg Vorbis Unit of Media) An Ogg Vorbis audio file. "I have an ovum of the EFF speech that I can send you."
- Ova: (Ogg Vorbis Audio) Any number of Ogg Vorbis audio files, or a quantity of Ogg Vorbis audio. "Do you have any classical ova with you?"
- Oval: Of or relating to the Ogg Vorbis format. "Does your oval player have a spectrum analyzer?"
- Ovulation: The process of converting audio to Ogg Vorbis format. "Just a few more minutes of ovulation, and I'll be MP3-free!"
- Ovangelism: The process of converting audiophiles to Ogg Vorbis format. "I let him borrow my oval Walkman and a couple gigs of jazz ova, and he traded in his Rio the next day. Big ovangelism win!"
I'm not very clever at 5AM (or at noon, for that matter), so I hope this makes some sense.They even use PNG-format images, instead of the notoriously closed GIF format so often seen on our own beloved Slashdot.
I only hope that Ogg Vorbis will work on my CPRM-enabled ATA drive...
Aren't there open-source apps that can read Word documents and PDF files (Ghostscript and StarOffice)?
And more to the point, why should we expect someone presenting an open-source alternative to a predominantly Windows-based audience to present it in non-Windows formats? Are we really that zealous, that we expect organizations to convert completely to open-source alternatives before they can even mention Linux on their website? And didn't we just cover this subject?
I grew up in the rural South, and I remember folk who considered it acceptable to use racial slurs when in a whites-only group, because it was safe to assume that most everyone would agree, and those that didn't would remain silent. Thankfully, times have changed—now I have to read Slashdot to find that kind of intolerance.
If we're going to act like a bunch of militant fundamentalists, I think I might just sit this year out. Please wake me when the zealots stop screaming in the hallway.
...was that OS X can handle filesizes up to eight exabytes—sorry, I forgot—that's eight exbibytes . More than a gigabyte for every man, woman & child on earth.
Okay, I'm satisfied. Now let's see some ATA10000 drives with that capacity, and I'll finally be able to reload all my MP3's.
On one hand, American cultural mores dictate at least an appearance of privacy and security in one's person and one's papers. In many ways, Americans define themselves by the degree of privacy that they have been able to acquire.
On the other hand, we expect our government to protect us from attack and wrongful injury. We expect it to be proactive in discovering and analyzing any threats to its citizens, and become irate when it is unable to predict such a threat, even when such a prediction would have required violations of privacy.
On the gripping hand, though, analyses that would bear useful results in most times might not do so now. We are in the cusp of a sea change from a peacetime to a wartime footing. We look at war-based policy changes through a peace-shaped perspective.
There are a couple of old definitions that come to mind:
- Conservative: A liberal who has been mugged.
- Liberal: A conservative who has been arrested.
How would we now define a Post-9/11 American? How will our existing knowledge that we can be die anytime, anywhere—coupled with the new awareness that a small but significant fraction of the world's population is willing (and increasingly able) to do make that happen—affect our perception of civil rights issues? I would predict that a shift of equilibrium is occurring, and it'll take another couple of years before the new balance point is reached. It will be interesting then to look back on Your Rights Online posts from this period and see how drastically our own positions have been altered by time and events.Of course, some believe that the government sees the situation as simply an opportunity to curb civil rights (some even think they orchestrated the whole thing). Personally, I think most people just want as much information as they can get, that can possibly let them achieve their goals more effectively. That goes for everyone from DIRNSA to my network administrator. Heck, even the Slashdot editors can read the IP's of anonymous posters.
My theory is this:
- Privacy will continue to erode.
- The more we grouse about privacy, the more secretive the 'eroders' will be.
- The best we can hope for is a future where monitoring is directly observable, so surveillance will come at some cost to the perpetrator.
This must be a hot topic, as it's the second time today that I've commented on it, and I don't have that much free time today....on a Beowulf cluster of these!
Though not an impressively large cluster...
Oops, Blue Visual Field of Death again.
...I'm planning a marathon viewing of the classic "Dark Screen."
Leave the TV off for a day! How's that for a resolution? (And no, don't replace it with 24 hours of Slashdot.)
Start a journal! Read a book! Volunteer! Pray for peace! Do something that you can feel good about. Trust me, a full day of Gilligan's Island won't do it.
...is a list of everything you searched for all year, available to anyone (spouse, employer, neighbors...). So you'd have to make sure that Google kept your information absolutely secure. Good thing Internet sites have such a stellar reputation for that.
"In other news, Joe Blow of 327 Maple Street was charged with last year's rape and murder of Jane Doe of Alta Vista. Officials said that the big break in the case came when a subpoena of Google search records for area residents turned up evidence that the terms "rape", "weapons", and "attack" had been used in searches from Blow's home computer. Mr. Blow is being held without bond while police search for additional damning evidence against this psychopathic killer..."
"Update: Jailed rapist and killer Joe Blow appears to have escaped conviction for his 2000 rape and murder of Alta Vista resident Jane Doe, as after three months of searching, officials have failed to uncover additional evidence from his well-covered trail. The DA's office has sworn that this vicious criminal will not go unpunished, however, since they'e sure they can find something in his Google search records that will indicate some felony involvement in something or other."
I am shocked, shocked, so see that /. wasn't voted Favorite Time-Waster.
TANJ!
This was posted a bit before 5AM local time, and I'm seldom awake, rarely accurate, and never insightful at that hour. This post should have remained hidden forever with a score of 1, but apparently was modded up in order to draw attention to my lack of lucidity in the wee hours. I'll accept half the blame, if the moderators will accept the other half.
Have you considered a career as an economist?
No, though I sometimes moonlight as an insomniac.
All kidding aside— here is a formula that might be useful to publishers of digital data:where If L > 0, the data will be copied.
A publisher can control the level of his data's protection only to the degree that he can control these variables.
- Cm cannot be kept artificially high, due to market forces to the contrary;
- Ce continues to drop, as coding ingenuity continues to outstrip copy prevention standards almost as quickly as they are developed;
- Ca is relatively low for the end user, since it usually only involves paying for software you had anyway; and
- Pa is low because the crime is widespread and social costs are low, so enforcement at the end user level is minimal.
This leaves a publisher of digital data with two variables he can control: the data's cost and its value. This provides two options for perfect copy protection:- make the product free, or
- make the product worthless.
Since neither option would be attractive to most publishers, it would appear that widespread copyright violations (and violators) will be with us for a long, long time....doesn't that mean only one person can watch it at a time? Hopefully, he'll put it on FidoNet so more people can see it.
You know, we all tend to look back fondly on those days, but even through the haze of nostalgia, I remember that little timer in the command prompt, counting down the minutes until I got kicked off. I surely don't miss that!
A Beowulf cluster of those!
All kidding aside, if you were to microwave RFID'ed Euros, would they become worthless, or just unmarked, as it were?
...when The Register goes offline.
Still, it's interesting to see the humble beginnings from whence TV sci-fi came. Just think, it only took 52 years to get from Captain Video to Battlefield Earth: The Animated Series.
I'm going back to bed now. Wake me if it starts getting clever.
My theory is, as global population increases, total intelligence remains constant.
...a single-CPU version of this!
It will be interesting to see whether this experiment gets the results everyone seems to be anticipating, or mirrors the 'success' of the Michelson-Morley experiment.
...'" — Isaac Asimov
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) (launching in 2009) should return significantly better data, but it'll be nice to get a sneak preview from Cassini.
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny
I directly accessed The Register using their IP address (213.40.196.64) and found that the server was still up, but that the home page carries a last update timestamp of 24 December at 15:29 GMT—over a day and a half ago.
...
% 241%40FreeBSD.csie.NCTU.edu.tw&output=gplain
So not only has the domain name been detagged, it appears that the site itself has gone into hibernation as well. Does anyone have any other information about what's going on over there?
EXTRA: I found this excellent post on Usenet, and append it here for your edification:
From: Anthony Edwards (anthony@catfish.nildram.co.uk)
Subject: Re: some one does not like THEREGISTER.CO.UK
Newsgroups: uk.net
Date: 2001-12-25 14:04:27 PST
On Tue, 25 Dec 2001 20:09:06 +0000, in uk.net Rob Harvey <nospam@ukservers.net> wrote:
>
>What's also interesting is that the whois doesn't show a "Registered on" date
>which I believe means the name itself is pre-nominet and didn't have an expiry
>date.
>
The Register's first issue was Number 1, 25 July 1994 (Nominet began in 1996 I believe). In those days it was an email newsletter, the first issue can be viewed at:
http://194.159.40.109/reg1.txt
In fact, issues 1-37 can be viewed at the above site, simply by placing the relevant issue number in "reg*.txt".
However it appears that, at least up until 8 November 1996 (issue 37), the domain name theregister.co.uk was not in use. Indeed, the site was at http://www.hubcom.com/register/ , although it seems that John Lettice and Mike Magee also at that point owned the domain theregister.com (albeit they don't now).
One wonders what has happened to theregister.co.uk to cause the domain to become detagged. It is hard to believe that it is a simple financial matter, given the relatively small sums involved. I notice that the identity of the person who apparently requested the detagging (presumably via the Nominet Automaton) is an employee of uk.psi.com. Since all such detagging requests (from Nominet members to Nominet) have to be PGP signed, one imagines that request at least was genuine (but see below).
Up until around September 2001, The Register's hardware was co-located at one of Level 3's UK facilities. Following a variety of technical problems relating to Cisco load balancing equipment, the site was moved I believe, although I am unable to remember who the new hosting centre is. I have a sneaking suspicion that it *is* now PSI, in which case I imagine there will be much embarrassment all round.
On the other hand, there may be a little more to it. The Register have roundly slated the bulk email operation behind the recent Sainsbury's and Virgin Wines spam incidents, pointing out in no uncertain terms (and to Sainsbury's and Virgin Wines too, one imagines) that the email addresses used were definitely culled from Usenet.
However, consider this:
>Received: by jupiter (mbox topflite)
> (with Cubic Circle's cucipop (v1.31 1998/05/13) Sun Dec 16 13:34:37 2001)
>X-From_: root@peel.net Sun Dec 16 13:24:33 2001
>Return-Path: <root@peel.net>
>Received: from blaster1.peel.com ([216.52.138.23])
> by jupiter.nildram.co.uk (8.10.0-mysql/8.10.0) with ESMTP id fBGDOWC28607
> for <posthamster@catfish.nildram.co.uk>; Sun, 16 Dec 2001 13:24:32 GMT
>Delivered-To: <posthamster@catfish.nildram.co.uk>
>Received: by blaster1.peel.com (Postfix, from userid 0)
> id 6D65261DC; Sun, 16 Dec 2001 06:24:28 -0600 (CST)
>To: posthamster@catfish.nildram.co.uk
>From: "Virgin Wines" <virginwines1979@peel.net>
>Reply-To: notify@peel.net
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/plain
>Subject: Great Christmas wine at a bargain price
>Message-Id: <20011216122428.6D65261DC@blaster1.peel.com>
>Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 06:24:28 -0600 (CST)
mail from: root@peel.net in the SMTP envelope, and a Reply-To address
of notify@peel.net. However:
Dig peel.net@NS1.PEEL.COM (216.52.138.3)
Authoritative Answer
Recursive queries supported by this server
Query for peel.net type=255 class=1
peel.net MX (Mail Exchanger) Priority: 10 returns.peel.net
peel.net A (Address) 216.52.138.9
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns1.peel.com
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns2.chi.pnap.net
peel.net SOA (Zone of Authority)
Primary NS: ns1.peel.com
Responsible person: root@peel.com
serial:2001092202
refresh:10800s (3 hours)
retry:3600s (60 minutes)
expire:604800s (7 days)
minimum-ttl:86400s (24 hours)
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns1.peel.com
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns2.chi.pnap.net
returns.peel.net A (Address) 216.52.138.24
ns1.peel.com A (Address) 216.52.138.3
ns2.chi.pnap.net A (Address) 216.52.129.33
One MX record, and when one tries to connect to it:
----begin telnet capture----
$ telnet returns.peel.net 25
Trying 216.52.138.24...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
----end telnet capture----
Other Usenet posters have reported a similar inability to connect to returns.peel.net (and the name of the MX itself is indicative of a rather interesting sense of humour):
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9njtk0%24aa2
So, the owners and operators of peel.net have cunningly managed, it would appear, to not only convince two of the UK's largest and more respected companies to use their service for what Sainsbury's and Virgin Wines apparently genuinely believed was a true, genuine, opt-in email marketing operation, they have also managed (by technical means) to ensure that their own bandwidth will not be wasted by such trivial communications as "message undeliverable" bounce messages either.
One wonders if an alleged spam operation with such a fascinating mindset might attempt a little social engineering hack, against a news site which exposed their antics so comprehensively. On 24 December, I doubt whether many of PSINet's key UK staff were operating. A telephone call to support, followed by a fax request to "detag our domain as we won't be using it any more" might produce an interesting result, might it not? Especially since one imagines PSINet UK have a handy internal Web front end tool for support staff to use to register/modify/detag domains, and that support staff on 24 December might have had other things on their mind, and when one considers how easy faxes are to fake (which makes it hard to understand why so many UK ISPs insist on them for such requests, rather than an email originating from the customer concerned's netblock, or a PGP signed email from the admin contact of the domain concerned).
--
Anthony Edwards
anthony@catfish.nildram.co.uk
Though I'm sure hackers work on holidays too, and I wouldn't dream of intentionally insulting either group!
WHOIS query result:
________________________________________ The NIC.UK Registration Host contains ONLY information for domains
within co.uk, org.uk, net.uk, ltd.uk and plc.uk. Please use the whois
server at rs.internic.net for Internet Information or the whois server
at nic.ddn.mil for MILNET Information.
Is it only coincidence that this falls on the second anniversary of the Hotmail/Passport outage that gave Michael Chaney his fifteen minutes of Slashdot fame?
You're right, the analogy doesn't hold up.
Sure, stealing is wrong, but might the term 'piracy' applied here be so over-the-top that young people simply can't take it seriously? What are our other options?
- Intellectual theft (too vague)
- technovampirism (too bloody)
- software parasitism (too icky)
Hey, wait? Why don't we just call it "copyright violation?" That's accurate, after all. Doesn't sound scary enough? Maybe because it isn't all that scary.We aren't talking about truckloads of baby food being waylaid by highwaymen; everyone who pays for the software still get their goods, after all. Is it really justified to fight a war on copyright violation the same way you'd fight a war on drugs or terrorism? Does anyone really think every KaZaa user represents a lost sale of Office XP Professional?
Again, I'm not saying it isn't wrong. But so is speeding, and that could be brought under control by mandatory cell-linked speed monitors in vehicles. It would save lives, after all, so why don't we do it? It would appear that no one wants to push the personal privacy issue unless there's considerable money (not lives) at stake.
Perhaps the industry and society as a whole would benefit if we shifted to a more palatable equilibrium point, and treated copyright violations at the user level as they've been treated since the advent of photocopiers and audiotape: frowned upon, but tolerated.
The Times of India story lists several of these hotbutton words—Kashmir, Lashkar, Pakistan, Musharraf, Jaish, attack, kill, rocket— along with an assurance that those who send email using these keywords will be put under surveillance.
Then they put a link at the bottom to email the story to your friends!!!
I can barely catch my breath, I'm laughing so hard!
Natural language processing has come a long way in just the last couple of years. Astonishingly effective applications such as Sinope Summarizer are freely available; I can only imagine what an organization with the motivation and resources of the IB, NSA, FBI or CIA might have. I'd feel somewhat disappointed if their software weren't vastly superior to anything I've seen.
I'd imagine it might be based on Cyc or a similar dark project, and might achieve a 97% or better success rate at identifying questionable messages, with very few false negatives.
Assuming a billion emails a day, and five million of them being questionable, I'd suspect such a system could cull that number down to a few thousand—if the target messages were truly that few in number. As a matter of fact, I'd suggest that if sufficient computing power were available, to skip the keyword-scanning filter entirely, since such communications might be carried on with an alternate vocabulary substituted for hotbutton terms. Finding those messages requires more language processing intelligence than Carnivore would seem to have currently.