I have a feeling awesomesearchenginefortheinternet.com wouldn't do very well, know matter how good the underlying technology.
At some point maybe you could just do away with domain names themselves... As long as you can get to the search engine, you just pull up raw IP links. It would sure make the Internet safer without all those DNS vulnerabilities.
This brings to light a large misconception about intelligence.
As much as the focus tends to land on it, information gathering is not by any means the weakest link in the intelligence system. Probably we hear most about it because
a) it is glamourous (think James Bond), and
b) it often affects our civil liberties.
But the real problem with intelligence is the processing of retrieved raw information. They gather so much of the stuff it's extremely difficult to sort through it to figure out what's relevant and what's not.
That is why whenever something bad happens (like Sept 11) the intelligence community looks sloppy. In retrospect they can dig out wads of unprocessed information that would have given advance warning of the disaster. Then they take a lot of heat for missing it, even though they may not really be at fault. Sometimes it's a matter of finding a needle in a haystack.
It's a little more interesting to geeks because it's an issue of pure computer science. Processing raw data into meaningful information is computing at its best.
But developing better algorithms as a response to a national disaster is never going to be a solution that catches the public's imagination.
Inevitably the MPAA and RIAA will argue that robot-written scripts and music must be protected for the life of the robot + 70.
They will defend the constitutionality of it by arguing no robot will survive the theoretical end of the universe, and so the copyrights will expire 70 years after that, and are therefore of limited time.
Myself, I intend to make a lot of money off my AI project that composes rudimentary musical scores...
But seriously, while they seem to focus on civil liberties and privacy, there is a big cyberlaw issue that wasn't addressed: Digital Signatures.
How many American states will finally wake up and pass comprehensive digital signature laws, to complement the framework provided in the federal E-Sign law?
The west coast seems to be coming along well, but the east is really lagging, with most states not even having anything on the books.
Once again, Europe is leaving America in the dust on technology legislation...
When I was commissioned to write Cyber Law Journal in 1997, I thought that the best way to cover my beat would be to plop myself down at the intersection of law and cyberspace and watch the litigants, lawyers, cases, professors and judges pass by. That turned out to be as good a method as any, with the added benefit that parades are fun to watch. But now after four and a half years and well over 200 columns I'm leaving my seat. Today's column is the final Cyber Law Journal.
I want to thank the many experts who shared their insights and humor over the years. To my e-mail correspondents: I have been impressed by the depth of your concern about cyberlaw issues. To the members of the legal parade -- march on. It's been a privilege writing this column.
Of course the legal puzzles created by the realm of cyberspace haven't ended. So it's appropriate that this last installment is about the future.
What are the 2-3 major Internet law and policy issues that are likely to crop up in 2002? A group of legal mavens took up that challenge, and their edited predictions appear below.
Larry Lessig
Professor, Stanford Law School
Microsoft and Disney will become the most important allies in defending the core values of the Internet.
Cass Sunstein
Professor, University of Chicago Law School
It's hard to predict the future. But let's look closely at (a) efforts to use to Internet to track terrorism and other crimes, (b) the possible diminution of privacy rights, and (c) efforts to censor apparently dangerous speech on the Internet.
Ivan Fong
Senior Counsel, E-Commerce and Information Technology, General Electric
1. The USA Patriot Act [the anti-terrorism measure that, among other things, includes new rules about the government's access to information on the Internet] will largely survive constitutional challenges in the courts.
2. The Supreme Court will strike down, on First Amendment grounds, those portions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act that effectively criminalize the generation of digital images of fictitious children engaged in imaginary but explicit sexual conduct. The high court will urge Congress to draft a narrower prohibition.
3. Congress will pass legislation to encourage companies to share cyber-security data with the government, by exempting such data from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act and by providing antitrust protection for companies that collaborate on cyber-security matters.
James Boyle
Professor, Duke University Law School
The year 2002 will see the first real chance for the Supreme Court to signal, through its consideration of a number of cert petitions, what kind of constitutional restraints, if any, it will impose on the new expansions of intellectual property law: the range wars of the Internet.
While the most dangerous of these expansions -- the so-called database bill that gives property rights over unoriginal compilations of facts -- has not yet become law, there will be continued and intense pressure to pass it, with equally strong resistance from the science, research and civil liberties communities. If the Supreme Court signals some willingness to apply the First Amendment to intellectual property rules in a serious way, or to take seriously the restrictions of the Constitution's intellectual property clause, then the database bill will be in trouble. As a result it may be drafted in a less sweeping way. The converse is also true. Dismissive treatment from the Supreme Court will merely embolden the proponents of maximalist intellectual property protection. And in the long run, it is the property rules that will shape the Internet's future more thoroughly than the rules on censorship or filtering or taxation.
Dan L. Burk
Professor, University of Minnesota Law School
First, I expect to see increasingly sophisticated attacks against the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions [which prohibit the use of, or trafficking in, a computer code the circumvents the encryption scheme protecting certain digital content]. The courts in 2001 addressed some First Amendment issues, but ducked the really hard question: whether Congress in passing the DMCA exceeded the constitutional power given to it under the Intellectual Property clause. The Supreme Court has held that Congress' power under the IP clause is limited -- copyright cannot be extended to unoriginal or factual works, and patents cannot be extended to obvious inventions. But the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules make no differentiation between protectable and unprotectable material. This exceeds Congress' power under the IP clause.
I expect to see lawsuits filed during the next year that put that question front and center, and since it is the kind of question that the Supreme Court has shown an interest in, I would expect that the Court would like to take that kind of case.
Second, and perhaps ultimately more important to Internet law, will be the resolution to the negotiations on the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments. This is a treaty negotiation that has been going on for several years; during 2000 and 2001 it became clear that it is likely to shape the future of international e-commerce. The treaty deals with transborder enforcement of legal judgments. U.S. businesses initially pushed for this treaty, hoping to get more of their judgments enforced abroad, but apparently forgetting that it would work both ways judgments obtained in other countries could be enforced here. This has broad implications for, among other things, intellectual property, defamation, and the kind of situation Yahoo! got into regarding Nazi memorabilia in France.
David Post
Professor, Temple University Law School
Predictions are too difficult . . . though I think you can bet on the following headline: "Music Iindustry Fails in Attempts to Get Users to Patronize Sponsored Music Services."
Barry Steinhardt
American Civil Liberties Union
1. The upcoming decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in ACLU v. Ashcroft, which challenges the constitutionality of the Children's Online Protection Act -- Congress's second attempt to restrict all speech on the Internet to only that which is suitable for minors. The decision may test whether Internet speech continues to enjoy the highest constitutional protection.
2. The inevitable abuses of the free speech and privacy rights of law-abiding Americans under the USA Patriot Act. These abuses will occur under a cloak of national security and it will be years before they come to light.
3. The trial before a special U.S. Court in Philadelphia, which will test the constitutionality of the Children's Internet Protection Act, which forces libraries to install crude Internet filtering programs that will block lawful and valuable speech from their patrons -- children and adults alike.
Marc Rotenberg
Executive Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center
1. The Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments will grind to a halt. The already beleaguered effort to establish international rules for enforcement of private judgments still faces strong opposition from ISPs and consumer groups.
2. Consumer groups pressed the Federal Trade Commission in 2001 to look closely at the privacy and security implications of Microsoft's Passport -- a universal log-on service. Now that the Department of Justice's "Let-Us-Trust" Division has taken a pass on the long-running lawsuit and the private litigants seem ready to settle, the focus could quickly shift back to the FTC. Will the FTC act?
3. The copyright industry was on a roll in the past year, knocking out Napster and defending the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now the question is whether consumers are ready for digital products that track users, report to manufacturers and shut down when licenses expire.
Jack Balkin
Professor, Yale Law School
Certainly one of the most important developments this year will be the continuing struggle between free speech and intellectual property in the courts. Civil libertarians will try to push for recognized First Amendment defenses against copyright and paracopyright. At the same time, businesses will continue to try to invoke the First Amendment as a defense against government regulation of the telecom industry.
Although these two trends both invoke the First Amendment, they actually represent very different philosophies and, indeed, mutually opposed visions of what free speech is all about.
Jessica Litman
Professor, Wayne State University Law School
Some things I'll be watching in 2002: (1) What sorts of Internet privacy measures, those to enhance and those to diminish or prevent privacy and anonymity, will be acceptable in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and what will fly under the radar using prevention of terrorism as an excuse? (2) Whether a variety of government and business initiatives to respond to threats of cyber-terrorism will advance or undermine the adoption of open source software as an alternative to popular and currently vulnerable commercial computer programs.
Suppose a kid, let's call him Jon, is sitting in a country, let's say Norway, and writes software that does something that pisses off somebody else, let's say the Motion Picture Association of America, because it does something like, oh, decrypts the content scrambling system on DVDs.
Now let's say this is perfectly legal in Norway but not in the MPAA's country, let's call it America.
Does this enable the MPAA to sue poor Jon for breaking a law that does not apply where he lives?
Of course, maybe this has no point because of course it is purely hypothetical, as I said...
One thing to note is the composition of the team that is making these claims.
They have academics from all over the US and Europe. One notable is Dr. Steve Smale, Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and 1966 Field's Medal winner.
We are talking about a team of brilliant mathematicians here. If they think this is possible, it deserves at the very least serious consideration.
Whether their ideas will come to fruition and withstand peer scrutiny is another thing. But to claim they don't know what they are talking about is a long stretch.
This isn't very hard. Decompression requires you to know the number of iterations you used to compress the original string. Essentially, you have to know when to stop.
And to store the counter, you require N bits. Therefore you achieve 0 compression.
Okay, but in true random data no such patterns are guaranteed to exist. The number of patterns would be, in fact, random.
Therefore it is difficult to make claims about compression ratio. A random sequence could easily be uncompressable (and we know that every compression algorithm has some data that it cannot compress).
I'm skeptical of the claims, but I am unfamiliar with the math they are describing, so I have to give it a fair shake. They seem to be trying to describe a random sequence using a combinatorial series... how they can be certain the series is less complicated than the data itself I have no idea.
I am familiar with Shannon's work, however, and I have to say I don't think they are superceding it. They don't actually say that in the press release, if you read the language carefully: We perceive this advancement as a significant breakthrough to the historical limitations of digital communications as it was originally detailed by Dr. Claude Shannon in his treatise on Information Theory.
how he can track any and all forwards. Give me a break.
Actually you can. All the company e-mail is on Exchange Servers, and so anybody within the company forwarding it would be using those servers, and the admins can see it.
He mentioned the problem with auto-forwarding, because if it gets forwarded once then they can no longer track it. Once it's off the company network it is out of view.
Of course anyone can just as easily copy and paste the text into a web browser and send it from a Hotmail account, but security based on futile half-measures just makes me think this must be authentic Microsoft.
Anyway, it is addressed to Microsoft Sales and Marketing people, who probably know none of the above. They would most likely take whatever the guy says at face value.
I kind of like having only to plug into a wall to recharge my laptop, as opposed to having to stop off at a gas station, or buy a big supply of this stuff to keep in my garage.
I'm not looking for the Slashdot population to do my research -- I mostly want opinions on whether cracking a science satellite would be worth the time.
I'm not going to analyze the up-link protocol or try to brainstorm motivations for cracking your system, but as a security professional let me try to clarify the issue a bit.
You are on the right track with your questions. You are trying to figure out: a) how badly does somebody want to crack it, and b) how difficult is it for him to do so.
These two factors are precisely what define security risk. If the cost of breaking a system is greater than the reward for doing so, your security is adequate.
The first question cannot be answered by the Slashdot crowd. There are too many variables. Who are your competitors, and how much to they have to gain by sabotaging you? Could the satellite possibly be used for anything other than its intended purpose if control was usurped? How valuable is the satellite to people other than you if it is only being used for its intended purpose?
Perhaps people here could try to figure out the 'cracker bragging-rights' factor, but I suspect that would not be sufficient motivation to go to the lengths required to break your system (any glaring security holes notwithstanding).
From what it sounds like, the second question can't be answered by anybody. The rule of the day is 'provable security', which is why security by obscurity is frowned upon. It's not that it doesn't work, because sufficient obscurity is indeed security, it's that you can never be sure how well it works. This was the problem with the German Enigma machine in WWII, which ultimately provided the greatest incentive to proving lower bounds on security.
Encryption provides easily quantifiable security, demonstrated by mathematical proof (with the minor caveat being most of these proofs rely on P not equalling NP). The techniques you describe do not sound like they lend themselves to provable security. (Although physical security is usually considered pretty sound, provided it is comprehensive; this includes isolated networks and site protection, as you describe)
How difficult is it to gain access to a powerful radio-antenna? That's a key question. If the satellite is owned by a company in an industry with cutthroat competitors who also have satellites, it might not be difficult at all.
This attempt at 'net laws is aimed to appease the ultra conservatives , whilst being recognised as generally ineffective and useless.
What a great principle for making legislation. It's like saying "We know it's bad governance, but hey let's make the extreme elements happy."
Akin to:
- Dubya saying "I figure we'll just ban abortion to appease the ultra-conservatives, since women will have abortions anyway."
- Pervez Musharraf saying "I figure we'll just invade India to appease the ultra-conservatives, since India will kick our asses right back into Pakistan anyway."
Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, CANDU reactors have a secret backdoor knowable only to those who have spent much of their lives riding on dogsleds and playing Lacrosse.
Oh, and did I hear "scientific" space telescope? Well, space telescope, orbital missile defence platform, same thing, right?
Consider: if Canada keeps its laws relatively sane while the US does
not, it will become a haven for geeks. Brain drains get noticed
because they bite countries in the economy, and if
nothing else, that will restore freedom.
Wouldn't that be nice. Unfortunately it's not the case.
Canadian law will be updated to reflect current American law, both the CTEA and the DMCA. For the latter, it's a matter of international commitments. Don't blame the Americans, but blame WIPO and TRIPS (well, okay, blame the Americans too).
I read something once about advertisers and marketers trying to build lists of people according to their known interests so advertising can be more cost-effective.
Based on the e-mails I get, it would seem the advertising community has me pegged as a debt-ridden pervert with a small unit, sexual dysfunction, no education, and a penchant for get rich quick schemes.
I wonder how they know that. I must be an open book.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a feeling awesomesearchenginefortheinternet.com wouldn't do very well, know matter how good the underlying technology.
At some point maybe you could just do away with domain names themselves... As long as you can get to the search engine, you just pull up raw IP links. It would sure make the Internet safer without all those DNS vulnerabilities.
As much as the focus tends to land on it, information gathering is not by any means the weakest link in the intelligence system. Probably we hear most about it because
a) it is glamourous (think James Bond), and
b) it often affects our civil liberties.
But the real problem with intelligence is the processing of retrieved raw information. They gather so much of the stuff it's extremely difficult to sort through it to figure out what's relevant and what's not.
That is why whenever something bad happens (like Sept 11) the intelligence community looks sloppy. In retrospect they can dig out wads of unprocessed information that would have given advance warning of the disaster. Then they take a lot of heat for missing it, even though they may not really be at fault. Sometimes it's a matter of finding a needle in a haystack.
It's a little more interesting to geeks because it's an issue of pure computer science. Processing raw data into meaningful information is computing at its best.
But developing better algorithms as a response to a national disaster is never going to be a solution that catches the public's imagination.
They will defend the constitutionality of it by arguing no robot will survive the theoretical end of the universe, and so the copyrights will expire 70 years after that, and are therefore of limited time.
Myself, I intend to make a lot of money off my AI project that composes rudimentary musical scores...
Just like 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998...
But seriously, while they seem to focus on civil liberties and privacy, there is a big cyberlaw issue that wasn't addressed: Digital Signatures.
How many American states will finally wake up and pass comprehensive digital signature laws, to complement the framework provided in the federal E-Sign law?
The west coast seems to be coming along well, but the east is really lagging, with most states not even having anything on the books.
Once again, Europe is leaving America in the dust on technology legislation...
No, "divining". It means "predicting".
----
When I was commissioned to write Cyber Law Journal in 1997, I thought that the best way to cover my beat would be to plop myself down at the intersection of law and cyberspace and watch the litigants, lawyers, cases, professors and judges pass by. That turned out to be as good a method as any, with the added benefit that parades are fun to watch. But now after four and a half years and well over 200 columns I'm leaving my seat. Today's column is the final Cyber Law Journal.
I want to thank the many experts who shared their insights and humor over the years. To my e-mail correspondents: I have been impressed by the depth of your concern about cyberlaw issues. To the members of the legal parade -- march on. It's been a privilege writing this column.
Of course the legal puzzles created by the realm of cyberspace haven't ended. So it's appropriate that this last installment is about the future.
What are the 2-3 major Internet law and policy issues that are likely to crop up in 2002? A group of legal mavens took up that challenge, and their edited predictions appear below.
Larry Lessig
Professor, Stanford Law School
Microsoft and Disney will become the most important allies in defending the core values of the Internet.
Cass Sunstein
Professor, University of Chicago Law School
It's hard to predict the future. But let's look closely at (a) efforts to use to Internet to track terrorism and other crimes, (b) the possible diminution of privacy rights, and (c) efforts to censor apparently dangerous speech on the Internet.
Ivan Fong
Senior Counsel, E-Commerce and Information Technology, General Electric
1. The USA Patriot Act [the anti-terrorism measure that, among other things, includes new rules about the government's access to information on the Internet] will largely survive constitutional challenges in the courts.
2. The Supreme Court will strike down, on First Amendment grounds, those portions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act that effectively criminalize the generation of digital images of fictitious children engaged in imaginary but explicit sexual conduct. The high court will urge Congress to draft a narrower prohibition.
3. Congress will pass legislation to encourage companies to share cyber-security data with the government, by exempting such data from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act and by providing antitrust protection for companies that collaborate on cyber-security matters.
James Boyle
Professor, Duke University Law School
The year 2002 will see the first real chance for the Supreme Court to signal, through its consideration of a number of cert petitions, what kind of constitutional restraints, if any, it will impose on the new expansions of intellectual property law: the range wars of the Internet.
While the most dangerous of these expansions -- the so-called database bill that gives property rights over unoriginal compilations of facts -- has not yet become law, there will be continued and intense pressure to pass it, with equally strong resistance from the science, research and civil liberties communities. If the Supreme Court signals some willingness to apply the First Amendment to intellectual property rules in a serious way, or to take seriously the restrictions of the Constitution's intellectual property clause, then the database bill will be in trouble. As a result it may be drafted in a less sweeping way. The converse is also true. Dismissive treatment from the Supreme Court will merely embolden the proponents of maximalist intellectual property protection. And in the long run, it is the property rules that will shape the Internet's future more thoroughly than the rules on censorship or filtering or taxation.
Dan L. Burk
Professor, University of Minnesota Law School
First, I expect to see increasingly sophisticated attacks against the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions [which prohibit the use of, or trafficking in, a computer code the circumvents the encryption scheme protecting certain digital content]. The courts in 2001 addressed some First Amendment issues, but ducked the really hard question: whether Congress in passing the DMCA exceeded the constitutional power given to it under the Intellectual Property clause. The Supreme Court has held that Congress' power under the IP clause is limited -- copyright cannot be extended to unoriginal or factual works, and patents cannot be extended to obvious inventions. But the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules make no differentiation between protectable and unprotectable material. This exceeds Congress' power under the IP clause.
I expect to see lawsuits filed during the next year that put that question front and center, and since it is the kind of question that the Supreme Court has shown an interest in, I would expect that the Court would like to take that kind of case.
Second, and perhaps ultimately more important to Internet law, will be the resolution to the negotiations on the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments. This is a treaty negotiation that has been going on for several years; during 2000 and 2001 it became clear that it is likely to shape the future of international e-commerce. The treaty deals with transborder enforcement of legal judgments. U.S. businesses initially pushed for this treaty, hoping to get more of their judgments enforced abroad, but apparently forgetting that it would work both ways judgments obtained in other countries could be enforced here. This has broad implications for, among other things, intellectual property, defamation, and the kind of situation Yahoo! got into regarding Nazi memorabilia in France.
David Post
Professor, Temple University Law School
Predictions are too difficult . . . though I think you can bet on the following headline: "Music Iindustry Fails in Attempts to Get Users to Patronize Sponsored Music Services."
Barry Steinhardt
American Civil Liberties Union
1. The upcoming decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in ACLU v. Ashcroft, which challenges the constitutionality of the Children's Online Protection Act -- Congress's second attempt to restrict all speech on the Internet to only that which is suitable for minors. The decision may test whether Internet speech continues to enjoy the highest constitutional protection.
2. The inevitable abuses of the free speech and privacy rights of law-abiding Americans under the USA Patriot Act. These abuses will occur under a cloak of national security and it will be years before they come to light.
3. The trial before a special U.S. Court in Philadelphia, which will test the constitutionality of the Children's Internet Protection Act, which forces libraries to install crude Internet filtering programs that will block lawful and valuable speech from their patrons -- children and adults alike.
Marc Rotenberg
Executive Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center
1. The Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments will grind to a halt. The already beleaguered effort to establish international rules for enforcement of private judgments still faces strong opposition from ISPs and consumer groups.
2. Consumer groups pressed the Federal Trade Commission in 2001 to look closely at the privacy and security implications of Microsoft's Passport -- a universal log-on service. Now that the Department of Justice's "Let-Us-Trust" Division has taken a pass on the long-running lawsuit and the private litigants seem ready to settle, the focus could quickly shift back to the FTC. Will the FTC act?
3. The copyright industry was on a roll in the past year, knocking out Napster and defending the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now the question is whether consumers are ready for digital products that track users, report to manufacturers and shut down when licenses expire.
Jack Balkin
Professor, Yale Law School
Certainly one of the most important developments this year will be the continuing struggle between free speech and intellectual property in the courts. Civil libertarians will try to push for recognized First Amendment defenses against copyright and paracopyright. At the same time, businesses will continue to try to invoke the First Amendment as a defense against government regulation of the telecom industry.
Although these two trends both invoke the First Amendment, they actually represent very different philosophies and, indeed, mutually opposed visions of what free speech is all about.
Jessica Litman
Professor, Wayne State University Law School
Some things I'll be watching in 2002: (1) What sorts of Internet privacy measures, those to enhance and those to diminish or prevent privacy and anonymity, will be acceptable in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and what will fly under the radar using prevention of terrorism as an excuse? (2) Whether a variety of government and business initiatives to respond to threats of cyber-terrorism will advance or undermine the adoption of open source software as an alternative to popular and currently vulnerable commercial computer programs.
Suppose a kid, let's call him Jon, is sitting in a country, let's say Norway, and writes software that does something that pisses off somebody else, let's say the Motion Picture Association of America, because it does something like, oh, decrypts the content scrambling system on DVDs.
Now let's say this is perfectly legal in Norway but not in the MPAA's country, let's call it America.
Does this enable the MPAA to sue poor Jon for breaking a law that does not apply where he lives?
Of course, maybe this has no point because of course it is purely hypothetical, as I said...
They have academics from all over the US and Europe. One notable is Dr. Steve Smale, Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and 1966 Field's Medal winner.
We are talking about a team of brilliant mathematicians here. If they think this is possible, it deserves at the very least serious consideration.
Whether their ideas will come to fruition and withstand peer scrutiny is another thing. But to claim they don't know what they are talking about is a long stretch.
And to store the counter, you require N bits. Therefore you achieve 0 compression.
Therefore it is difficult to make claims about compression ratio. A random sequence could easily be uncompressable (and we know that every compression algorithm has some data that it cannot compress).
I'm skeptical of the claims, but I am unfamiliar with the math they are describing, so I have to give it a fair shake. They seem to be trying to describe a random sequence using a combinatorial series... how they can be certain the series is less complicated than the data itself I have no idea.
I am familiar with Shannon's work, however, and I have to say I don't think they are superceding it. They don't actually say that in the press release, if you read the language carefully:
We perceive this advancement as a significant breakthrough to the historical limitations of digital communications as it was originally detailed by Dr. Claude Shannon in his treatise on Information Theory.
It sounds more like they are extending his work.
Actually you can. All the company e-mail is on Exchange Servers, and so anybody within the company forwarding it would be using those servers, and the admins can see it.
He mentioned the problem with auto-forwarding, because if it gets forwarded once then they can no longer track it. Once it's off the company network it is out of view.
Of course anyone can just as easily copy and paste the text into a web browser and send it from a Hotmail account, but security based on futile half-measures just makes me think this must be authentic Microsoft.
Anyway, it is addressed to Microsoft Sales and Marketing people, who probably know none of the above. They would most likely take whatever the guy says at face value.
Why would refueling be preferable to recharging?
I kind of like having only to plug into a wall to recharge my laptop, as opposed to having to stop off at a gas station, or buy a big supply of this stuff to keep in my garage.
I'm not going to analyze the up-link protocol or try to brainstorm motivations for cracking your system, but as a security professional let me try to clarify the issue a bit.
You are on the right track with your questions. You are trying to figure out: a) how badly does somebody want to crack it, and b) how difficult is it for him to do so.
These two factors are precisely what define security risk. If the cost of breaking a system is greater than the reward for doing so, your security is adequate.
The first question cannot be answered by the Slashdot crowd. There are too many variables. Who are your competitors, and how much to they have to gain by sabotaging you? Could the satellite possibly be used for anything other than its intended purpose if control was usurped? How valuable is the satellite to people other than you if it is only being used for its intended purpose?
Perhaps people here could try to figure out the 'cracker bragging-rights' factor, but I suspect that would not be sufficient motivation to go to the lengths required to break your system (any glaring security holes notwithstanding).
From what it sounds like, the second question can't be answered by anybody. The rule of the day is 'provable security', which is why security by obscurity is frowned upon. It's not that it doesn't work, because sufficient obscurity is indeed security, it's that you can never be sure how well it works. This was the problem with the German Enigma machine in WWII, which ultimately provided the greatest incentive to proving lower bounds on security.
Encryption provides easily quantifiable security, demonstrated by mathematical proof (with the minor caveat being most of these proofs rely on P not equalling NP). The techniques you describe do not sound like they lend themselves to provable security. (Although physical security is usually considered pretty sound, provided it is comprehensive; this includes isolated networks and site protection, as you describe)
How difficult is it to gain access to a powerful radio-antenna? That's a key question. If the satellite is owned by a company in an industry with cutthroat competitors who also have satellites, it might not be difficult at all.
What a great principle for making legislation. It's like saying "We know it's bad governance, but hey let's make the extreme elements happy."
Akin to:
- Dubya saying "I figure we'll just ban abortion to appease the ultra-conservatives, since women will have abortions anyway."
- Pervez Musharraf saying "I figure we'll just invade India to appease the ultra-conservatives, since India will kick our asses right back into Pakistan anyway."
Sheesh.
Oh, and did I hear "scientific" space telescope? Well, space telescope, orbital missile defence platform, same thing, right?
The rest of the world will soon learn the virtues of putting cheese curds on french fries! BWAHAHAHA!
You can get an hour for a bowl of poutine and a few strips of back-bacon.
Fair warning, of course, this is just a small part of the grand Canadian master plan to take over the world.
Wouldn't that be nice. Unfortunately it's not the case.
Canadian law will be updated to reflect current American law, both the CTEA and the DMCA. For the latter, it's a matter of international commitments. Don't blame the Americans, but blame WIPO and TRIPS (well, okay, blame the Americans too).
Care to read about Canada's coming Intellectual Property reform? It's not for the faint of heart.
And here's some more reading material in case you're not sufficiently riled at our government already.
If Star Trek and Anti-Trek attempt to occupy the same time slot, do they both vanish in a brilliant flash of light?
1. It's 24 million, not 2.4. (39 million divided by 1.6)
2. I presume that means there are 24 million e-mail accounts in Korea.
Based on the e-mails I get, it would seem the advertising community has me pegged as a debt-ridden pervert with a small unit, sexual dysfunction, no education, and a penchant for get rich quick schemes.
I wonder how they know that. I must be an open book.