Sorry for the ambiguity. I'm not a lawyer, but lawyer jokes (at least the ones which are only "funny" because they involve killing lawyers) are offensive to me.
The difference would be that the other groups you mention aren't engaging in millions of counts of petty theft on a daily basis.
No, but alcoholics pose a public-safety problem (at least spam doesn't kill people; drunk driving does). And some see dissidents as "trying to destroy the American way."
You know as well as I do that this list will be used for vigilante justice against spammers. Remember the list of abortion doctors? You could say, "at least spammers aren't engaging in thousands of acts of murder..." The result of vigilantes posting the list was many acts of terrorism, vandalism and homicide. I doubt the spam vigilantes will go this far, but it still creeps me out to have them discussing how many clips they need...
Fine. I think spamming is immoral, expensive, and really, really annoying. It's a serious problem. I don't think it's a Great Evil, though. Some people on Slashdot do. Some people I know down the street see homosexuality as a Great Evil. Some people in my city would go on a hate-crime spree if they got a list of political dissidents or closet gays. I'm appalled by both.
Spammers are just people who don't give a damn about anyone else, and are willing to make money off of crippling a mechanism that millions of people depend on every day.
You're overgeneralizing. They're insensitive jerks, but many of them do, in fact, give a damn about other people. They see themselves as enterprising businessmen. So do the advertisers on TV. People pay for cable TV, but they don't bitch and moan about the ad's on it.
There are some people who hate alcoholics. There are many people who hate left-wing dissidents. There are people who would kill them given the chance. Many of these people would regard spammers as a minor annoyance, and, say dissidents as a Great Evil.
Or suppose it were a peer-support group for closet gays or something. Living in a state where the KKK still holds rallies, I would guess there would be considerable illegal action resulting. Heck, even at Harvard there were several hate crimes against gays last year. And I consider my life a sheltered one.
I certainly dislike spammers much more than any of these other groups, and I don't sympathise with them much at all. I don't mind laughing (or cursing) at these spammers, especially when their server gets compromised. I don't mind if you write enraged letters to them. But remember that they are still humans, if disagreeable ones. It is a very disturbing sign in a community when something like this comes out and people treat it as a list of where to send mail bombs.
Now I'm not saying I'M going to go vigilanti on their collective ass, but I'm more than willing to turn a blind eye to anyone who does.
And I'm not. And if the law in this country were willing to turn a blind eye to vigilante justice against people it didn't like, I would leave. This is the 21st century, not the 19th. We don't lynch people anymore.
They're criminals, and they're perpetrating crimes against ME!
No, they're not. As long as they don't forge headers or falsely advertise (under the false advertising laws), they're not breaking the law. Personally, I don't find spams any more annoying than ads on TV, or in the newspaper, or on the web, or by phone, or in the mail, or people handing out fliers on the street. I may be biased because I have a fast connection and don't get much spam (at least, compared to 300/day that some people get).
How much do you pay per month for your internet access? ~30% of that is because of spammers.
That's bullshit. Spammers pay for their bandwidth, and they're sure not using 30% of mine. Mine goes into slashdotting, CVS updates, hosting a web (not mail) server, and online art (no, not *that* kind...) Some people's costs may be higher, but I doubt that most people's are that high. Even if 90% of your mail were spam, you mostly read (and hence download) the 10% that isn't.
I don't mind people taking legal action against illegal spammers, or writing them angry letters. I *do* mind collateral damage (SPEWS), DOSing their servers (except through tarpits; this is a defense and not a counterattack), illegal counter-spamming (Ralsky), and jokes about going on a killing spree.
As bad as spam is, vigilante justice is worse, and it has to end before we can find a solution.
Yes. Spammers are really, really annoying. Lawyers who sue everyone and everything in sight are annoying, too. But excuse me for using an 18th-century speil, when everyone seems to be treating the spam problem like it's some fucking witch-hunt.
Jokes about the number of bullets you need for these spammers/lawyers are not funny. They are offensive, and not only to spammers and lawyers (for instance, me). We need to talk about 21st century ways to solve these problems (you know, better laws, improved protocol design) instead of hating the people who exploit them.
I'm not a spammer. I don't sympathize with spammers, especially after my little sister got porn-spammed out of her first email account. But the way you talk about these people is appalling.
If this data were left exposed, collected and put online about most any other group, be it alcoholics or political dissidents, you people would all be appalled, talking about 1984, dissing Microsoft for bad security even though they have nothing to do with it...
But instead, one of the first comments is a calculation of how much ammo we'll need...
Have a heart, people! Sure, spammers are jerks, we can laugh at them and make fun of them, but don't you have any sense of decency?
I think you missed the point. If you're the programmer of the system and you cannot see the difference between images of three people, how on the earth are you going to come up with an algorithm for the computer to do the thing instead?
First of all, it is often easier for a human to tell the difference between detailed images of three people than it is to tell between the people IRL, since images can be studied in detail and at length. The problem is generally that the distinguishing features are things that you don't normally notice when looking at a face, because of looking at only one race. In this case, I think that programmers knowing what to look for in Asian faces is not a problem.
The computer has the advantage for both of these reasons. Often, general methods of solving a classification problem work on variations of that problem, even if specific ones don't. In text analysis, for instance, Bayesian and chi^2 statistical filters, and whatever generalization of Bayes' thm CRM114 uses, can classify other sorts of text; they can tell, say, philosophy from history essays. I expect that in facial analysis, a general method which can tell apart two Caucasians accurately would work on two Arabs.
In face and sound recognition, humans are somewhat crippled in that information fed to recognition systems is temporary (it doesn't all stay in memory as the person moves), and it has been extracted by other subsystems from much more detailed data. While these subsystems are very effective, they have been trained on a very limited set of data (people/voices you know), and so may not be effective on data outside that range. With a computer, you have to develop entirely different methods, and train them on a wide variety of people. While this is extremely difficult, it leads to a more general algorithm.
I don't have any research results for face recognition, but I have heard about speech recognition. Many current speech recognition systems today are language-specific, because they are based on clues derived from speakers of that language. But my roommate last year worked on a principle-component-analysis system (more or less those axes you were talking about) which could (in theory) be trained to work on basically any language. The training did not need to be to an individual, but it was very processor-intensive, and recognition wasn't cheap either. I don't think he developed it very far, though (as in, phonemes->words, and optimizations to reduce the CPU time), and ended up applying the technology to voice compression. His compression tech provides very good compression, possibly the best ratio in the field for a given (subjective) quality, but also requires a buttload of CPU. Therefore, it can't (yet?) be used in the intended market, which was cellphones. He estimated that a 600MHz PC would be required to compress and decompress in realtime, so this might be useful for VoIP-type technology.
Heh, yep. She's definitely a geek. Hot too. Uses Linux, TeXs all her papers. She got a perfect score on the USA math olympiad. Her dad was a major contributor to emacs and a minor one to perl. If you can't google her after all that...
And before you start cracking girlfriend jokes, I do have a girlfriend, and it's not her. And even if I didn't have a girlfriend, I wouldn't make a pass at her after watching my other friends fighting over her.
For your friends w. problems doing the video-out with movie players, tell them to get a video-out card (tv-out) that just does a clone of the current screen. by this, I don't mean nVidia's clone-screen mode (nVidea cards need to be configured), but ATI's default mode, which is done in hardware without any need to load/configure software.
There's no need to configure video-out-to-tv on (at least the) ati cards (that I've tested). They just copy whatever's on the screen. While they were made for windows, they work great under linux too (for those non-svcd torrents:-). But they also make a great way to see what's on your screen remotely.
Mind you, a video splitter would do the same thing.
Replacing the video card would be overkill, and the issue was really not wanting to keep 2 dozen people with popcorn waiting. We could have borrowed a Linux laptop or dragged out someone's tower (or my eMac) had we gotten desperate.
There were two incidents, both on laptops (so no video splitter). I don't remember the specifics exactly of the dorm-movie one. We wanted to do a dorm movie on a projector. I think it blocked playing the movie to video-to-tv, but the monitor port worked, or something like that. However, we had to borrow a monitor cable from someone because the projector we borrowed didn't have one in the box. This was just plain annoying Windows DRM.
In the other case, a few of us were in a friend's dorm and decided to see a movie on his computer. He had an old Windows laptop with a broken screen, and had removed it and connected a CRT through the monitor-out port. (In other words, it was a free desktop with decent processing power.) We had brought the movie on DVD, but the system was using hardware playback and only played to the nonexistent built-in screen. No video splitter in this case, and I don't even know whether it was software DRM, hardware DRM, or just hardware not designed for the task. Anyway, someone went back to her dorm and brought a Linux laptop, and played it on that.
If your country allows the government to detain you indefinitely without arrest or communication or access to a lawyer (under the guise of anti-terrorism or homeland security) , you should be VERY concerned about false positives.
The US doesn't, and even if it did, it would double-check things beforehand.
But I'd like to see what would happen if these systems designed to recognize faces from afar in public streets and parks started registering thousands and thousands of sightings of known terrorists on the monitors down in the Big Brother Bunker.
And there are humans looking at these face systems. They'd probably pull up the tapes, figure out you were being a jackass, and get on with things. Even if not, what would they do if you suddenly ordered several truckloads of ammunition and ammonium nitrate to an urban address? They'd damn well watch you, because there aren't that many jerks who go out and impersonate terrorists for kicks.
Call it monkeywrenching. Call it free expression. Call it a costume party.
This is for airports. There are guards. They are not (all) blind. If you try to fool the cameras, you will be searched, and free speech does not matter. If you make yourself a false positive, it's you that suffers.
Now the tech people may scream "those aren't false positives! the system is correclty identifying Mr. Terrorist!"
If you're using this to decide whom to search (instead of to track someone), this sort fo false positive doesn't matter. If you put 10 jars of peanut butter in your luggage (looks like plastic explosives to scanners) and get searched as a result, this also is a false positive. (More worrisome is breaking the jars of peanut butter and smearing them in your bag, along with some well-hidden plastique, but this attack probably wouldn't work and does not generalize to face scanners anyway.) If you go around talking about how best to blow up a plane, you will be kicked off the flight; that is also a false positive. Nobody complains about this. Nobody cares if the airlines inconvenience jackasses who intentionally trigger their security system by impersonating hijackers.
Remeber the fingerprint system that got fooled by gelatine-gummi's ?
Yeah. Thats' what guards are for. While they might not catch your gummy finger, they'd probably notice you holding up a George Bush mask as you walk by the scanner.
Careful disguises are a little tougher, but from what I've read about these systems, they do better than your average human against disguises (they use different clues, and don't put as much weight on obvious things like facial hair). This might put your human past the tolerance though, as you'd have to set tolerance pretty low to avoid excessive false positives.
Proof: Take your average ignorant North American, (like myself) and ask him to tell the difference between 3 different Asian individuals. There is a good chance that we would fail that test because we are not used to (or mentally trained to) spot the difference.
Fine, but there are things that the computer can tell better than humans, even things that humans "should" be able to do better. For instance, your average ignorant North American can't tell the difference between the Hindi consonants/d/ and/dh/, even with fairly extensive training. A computer can, however. I imagine that a computer would also be at least comparably able to tell apart similar-looking Asians.
Caveat: following is IIRC; this is from a basic developmental psych class that I took for breadth requirements. I got a lousy grade in the class mostly for failing to remember specific details, so some of this may be just plain wrong. Go to Scirus or something and search for this stuff before using it in your doctoral thesis.
Human face recognition is also built-in. Psych experiments on newborns (straight out of the maternity ward), as well as older infants, indicate that they can detect faces early on. This is not the case with all visual abilities that people have! There are many types of spacial recognition and object-parsing tasks that infants, and even toddlers, simply can't do.
Newborns pay more attention to shapes that look like a face > over those that are schematically similar > over those those with eyes, noses etc but in different arrangements > over ovals with random junk > over blank ovals...
Also at an early age (don't remember when; I don't think they tested it on newborns, but I wouldn't be surprised if they can do this too), babies can tell familiar faces from unfamiliar ones, and show an inverted habituation effect; that is, they prefer to look at familiar faces than unfamiliar ones (unlike most shapes, where they get bored with the familiar ones).
Also at an early age (again, I don't remember how early, but less than a year), infants map others' faces onto their own and imitate. That is, if you stand in front of them for a few minutes with your tongue sticking out, they often stick theirs out too. If you have one eye open and one closed, they'll copy that too (I don't remember which eye tho).
From an early age, babies can also follow gazes to tell what someone is looking at; this is important in the development of language as well as vision, because babies use it to figure out what an adult is talking about. It is, IIRC, used more than what the adult is *pointing* at.
In addition to recognizing faces, babies can recognise other body parts, and treat an action differently based on whether it is done by a hand or a stick (when they don't see the hand holding the stick). If it is done by a hand or other object perceived to be animate, it is treated as goal-oriented and categorized partly by the perceived goal; if done by an "inanimate" object, the baby does not look for a goal. This is studied through habituation experiments; different actions with the same goal were seen as more similar (and hence less interesting) than those with the same basic appearance, if and only if they were performed by an animate-looking object such as a hand.
Like I said... this is to prevent *trivial* copying. A hacker could still circumvent it (if only as root), and you obviously just go tell someone what secret stuff the file had in it. "If I can see it, I can copy it" and so on; there's nothing they can do about bringing a digital camera...
However, it wouldn't be as easy as you say. At least on a UNIX system you can do much better than these easy hacks. I don't know as much about Windows (nor do I know how much effort/competence MS will put into this feature). For instance:
You really can't block out printscreen for all applications, and once a person tabs to another app, there's nothing to prevent them from grabbing the whole desktop, and not just the current workspace.
Windows already has some sort of lock on printscreens, which stops you from doing it to a movie player. It also stops movie player windows from going to video-out (sends them black), which *really* annoyed me and some friends as we tried to set up a projector for a dorm movie.
In any case, you could install an extension which traps printscreen, or you could block the window in the background (ick), or you could...
Not sure how this would work on X11, having never written anything for it.
On top of that, the data is sitting in memory unencrypted. There are utilities that will allow you to grab this. For example, you can see (in real time) the password someone is typing in instead of the replacement character (usually an asterisk).
Windows has protected memory. So does UNIX. You'd have to be root/admin to do this. Admittedly, on Windows you are generally admin anyway...
Also, unless they're encrypting their swap file and tmp contents, they'll always leave stuff behind that running "strings" on can recover.
You can pin stuff to memory both in Windows and in UNIX. It then won't be written out to swap, no matter what. GPG does this on both platforms, as do a variety of other crypto programs. And swap and stuff can only be read by root anyway.
In fact, the "much-vaunted police tool" for recovering data from crooks hard disks is just a bunch of perl scripts that do this, along with some pattern searching. The average/.er could probably do better:-)
The average/.er is probably a technically inclined person, but certainly not a hacker. Even I have grep'ed swap (a non-geeky friend of mine, who uses MacOS X, wrote a 10-page term paper without saving once...), but I strongly doubt that the average/.er could crack this thing quickly if MS puts much effort at all into it. Of course, for all we know, their "DRM" will just be encryption with XOR-ECB and the password will be "susageP"...
That would only work if '.' were the FIRST element in their path...
Yeah, I know that. There is still the possibility of an attack, by putting a file named 'cta' or 'sl' or something in/tmp. It's not as likely to work, though. My sig is mostly there to make the point that you should not have . in your path if you're browsing publicly-writable directories. I mostly keep . out of my path to avoid doing dumb things.
Maybe I should replace it with some other UNIX terrorism... Something like the following, perhaps?
I mean, it's annoying that OpenOffice.org can't read them, but DRM on word docs is reasonable in an office setting. The current protocol for confidential files is to encrypt them, and trust the employees who know the password not to download it to their USB Flash Drives and take them home. This would let them actually enforce something. It can surely be circumvented, but probably not trivially so.
It has a potential for abuse, but not that much of one. You don't generally buy content via word doc, so who cares if people can DRM them? And you can still read the non-DRMed ones in OO.org or whatever.
Well, you can separate the really-long-lived isotopes (of where there are pretty small quantities) from the only-sort-of-long-lived ones. This makes your storage problem smaller after a few thousand years.
Sounds more like a hardware problem than a XP problem.
I'm not sure actually. I can boot Knoppix on it fine, and it runs for as long as I tested it without panicking or anything, which means that if it's a hardware problem, it's probably the hard drive. The hard drive scans fine with CHKDISK, but that doesn't mean it's not occasionally encountering failures. Right now, it usually either bluescreens on boot with a "can't page in" type error, or else it gives "No bootable media found", which certainly hints that it could be the HD. Sometimes it boots fine, but usually crashes pretty quick.
OTOH, she was hit by blaster, and probably installed several trojans (she sometimes gets popup ads on the desktop), and generally does not run a tight ship, so the system could just be h0sed.
I suggested that she either take it into the shop, or else back it up (this would be via ethernet to someone else's computer, as she has no CDR), wipe the hard drive, and reinstall.
It hasn't ever crashed on me at work, and I've been messing with the registry, installing undocumented hacks, and... whoops, here comes my boss...
However, one of my friends has had no end to trouble with it. Her computer is now refusing to boot, I think, on some weird error. Before that it was randomly freezing or bluescreening... not pretty.
Could be. You never know with those "visions", especially the prophecies to take place at an unspecified later time (you shall know neither the day nor the hour).
Still, many of the events prophecied in Revelation are becoming possible today, much more than they were in ancient times.
Particularly evocative is the whole "number of the beast" thing, in which nobody will be able to buy or sell without being marked. Several technologies today could fulfill this if they become ubiquitous, such as RFID, wireless credit cards, etc. Barcodes were denounced at some point, because they are everywhere, and because they appear to contain the code "666" (the left, center, and right alignment codes, widths 1-1-1, look like the code for 6, which is 1-1-1-3).
I personally am not sure how much of the prophecy is to be taken literally, and how much is figurative. I'm not against barcodes, and I find it unlikely that apocalypse will happen within my lifetime, but if other signs appear, I will consider it a possibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry for the ambiguity. I'm not a lawyer, but lawyer jokes (at least the ones which are only "funny" because they involve killing lawyers) are offensive to me.
The difference would be that the other groups you mention aren't engaging in millions of counts of petty theft on a daily basis.
No, but alcoholics pose a public-safety problem (at least spam doesn't kill people; drunk driving does). And some see dissidents as "trying to destroy the American way."
You know as well as I do that this list will be used for vigilante justice against spammers. Remember the list of abortion doctors? You could say, "at least spammers aren't engaging in thousands of acts of murder..." The result of vigilantes posting the list was many acts of terrorism, vandalism and homicide. I doubt the spam vigilantes will go this far, but it still creeps me out to have them discussing how many clips they need...
Fine. I think spamming is immoral, expensive, and really, really annoying. It's a serious problem. I don't think it's a Great Evil, though. Some people on Slashdot do. Some people I know down the street see homosexuality as a Great Evil. Some people in my city would go on a hate-crime spree if they got a list of political dissidents or closet gays. I'm appalled by both.
Spammers are just people who don't give a damn about anyone else, and are willing to make money off of crippling a mechanism that millions of people depend on every day.
You're overgeneralizing. They're insensitive jerks, but many of them do, in fact, give a damn about other people. They see themselves as enterprising businessmen. So do the advertisers on TV. People pay for cable TV, but they don't bitch and moan about the ad's on it.
There are some people who hate alcoholics. There are many people who hate left-wing dissidents. There are people who would kill them given the chance. Many of these people would regard spammers as a minor annoyance, and, say dissidents as a Great Evil.
Or suppose it were a peer-support group for closet gays or something. Living in a state where the KKK still holds rallies, I would guess there would be considerable illegal action resulting. Heck, even at Harvard there were several hate crimes against gays last year. And I consider my life a sheltered one.
I certainly dislike spammers much more than any of these other groups, and I don't sympathise with them much at all. I don't mind laughing (or cursing) at these spammers, especially when their server gets compromised. I don't mind if you write enraged letters to them. But remember that they are still humans, if disagreeable ones. It is a very disturbing sign in a community when something like this comes out and people treat it as a list of where to send mail bombs.
Now I'm not saying I'M going to go vigilanti on their collective ass, but I'm more than willing to turn a blind eye to anyone who does.
And I'm not. And if the law in this country were willing to turn a blind eye to vigilante justice against people it didn't like, I would leave. This is the 21st century, not the 19th. We don't lynch people anymore.
They're criminals, and they're perpetrating crimes against ME!
No, they're not. As long as they don't forge headers or falsely advertise (under the false advertising laws), they're not breaking the law. Personally, I don't find spams any more annoying than ads on TV, or in the newspaper, or on the web, or by phone, or in the mail, or people handing out fliers on the street. I may be biased because I have a fast connection and don't get much spam (at least, compared to 300/day that some people get).
How much do you pay per month for your internet access? ~30% of that is because of spammers.
That's bullshit. Spammers pay for their bandwidth, and they're sure not using 30% of mine. Mine goes into slashdotting, CVS updates, hosting a web (not mail) server, and online art (no, not *that* kind...) Some people's costs may be higher, but I doubt that most people's are that high. Even if 90% of your mail were spam, you mostly read (and hence download) the 10% that isn't.
I don't mind people taking legal action against illegal spammers, or writing them angry letters. I *do* mind collateral damage (SPEWS), DOSing their servers (except through tarpits; this is a defense and not a counterattack), illegal counter-spamming (Ralsky), and jokes about going on a killing spree.
As bad as spam is, vigilante justice is worse, and it has to end before we can find a solution.
Yes. Spammers are really, really annoying. Lawyers who sue everyone and everything in sight are annoying, too. But excuse me for using an 18th-century speil, when everyone seems to be treating the spam problem like it's some fucking witch-hunt.
Jokes about the number of bullets you need for these spammers/lawyers are not funny. They are offensive, and not only to spammers and lawyers (for instance, me). We need to talk about 21st century ways to solve these problems (you know, better laws, improved protocol design) instead of hating the people who exploit them.
I'm not a spammer. I don't sympathize with spammers, especially after my little sister got porn-spammed out of her first email account. But the way you talk about these people is appalling.
But instead, one of the first comments is a calculation of how much ammo we'll need...
Have a heart, people! Sure, spammers are jerks, we can laugh at them and make fun of them, but don't you have any sense of decency?
I think you missed the point. If you're the programmer of the system and you cannot see the difference between images of three people, how on the earth are you going to come up with an algorithm for the computer to do the thing instead?
First of all, it is often easier for a human to tell the difference between detailed images of three people than it is to tell between the people IRL, since images can be studied in detail and at length. The problem is generally that the distinguishing features are things that you don't normally notice when looking at a face, because of looking at only one race. In this case, I think that programmers knowing what to look for in Asian faces is not a problem.
The computer has the advantage for both of these reasons. Often, general methods of solving a classification problem work on variations of that problem, even if specific ones don't. In text analysis, for instance, Bayesian and chi^2 statistical filters, and whatever generalization of Bayes' thm CRM114 uses, can classify other sorts of text; they can tell, say, philosophy from history essays. I expect that in facial analysis, a general method which can tell apart two Caucasians accurately would work on two Arabs.
In face and sound recognition, humans are somewhat crippled in that information fed to recognition systems is temporary (it doesn't all stay in memory as the person moves), and it has been extracted by other subsystems from much more detailed data. While these subsystems are very effective, they have been trained on a very limited set of data (people/voices you know), and so may not be effective on data outside that range. With a computer, you have to develop entirely different methods, and train them on a wide variety of people. While this is extremely difficult, it leads to a more general algorithm.
I don't have any research results for face recognition, but I have heard about speech recognition. Many current speech recognition systems today are language-specific, because they are based on clues derived from speakers of that language. But my roommate last year worked on a principle-component-analysis system (more or less those axes you were talking about) which could (in theory) be trained to work on basically any language. The training did not need to be to an individual, but it was very processor-intensive, and recognition wasn't cheap either. I don't think he developed it very far, though (as in, phonemes->words, and optimizations to reduce the CPU time), and ended up applying the technology to voice compression. His compression tech provides very good compression, possibly the best ratio in the field for a given (subjective) quality, but also requires a buttload of CPU. Therefore, it can't (yet?) be used in the intended market, which was cellphones. He estimated that a 600MHz PC would be required to compress and decompress in realtime, so this might be useful for VoIP-type technology.
Heh, yep. She's definitely a geek. Hot too. Uses Linux, TeXs all her papers. She got a perfect score on the USA math olympiad. Her dad was a major contributor to emacs and a minor one to perl. If you can't google her after all that...
And before you start cracking girlfriend jokes, I do have a girlfriend, and it's not her. And even if I didn't have a girlfriend, I wouldn't make a pass at her after watching my other friends fighting over her.
For your friends w. problems doing the video-out with movie players, tell them to get a video-out card (tv-out) that just does a clone of the current screen. by this, I don't mean nVidia's clone-screen mode (nVidea cards need to be configured), but ATI's default mode, which is done in hardware without any need to load/configure software.
:-). But they also make a great way to see what's on your screen remotely.
There's no need to configure video-out-to-tv on (at least the) ati cards (that I've tested). They just copy whatever's on the screen. While they were made for windows, they work great under linux too (for those non-svcd torrents
Mind you, a video splitter would do the same thing.
Replacing the video card would be overkill, and the issue was really not wanting to keep 2 dozen people with popcorn waiting. We could have borrowed a Linux laptop or dragged out someone's tower (or my eMac) had we gotten desperate.
There were two incidents, both on laptops (so no video splitter). I don't remember the specifics exactly of the dorm-movie one. We wanted to do a dorm movie on a projector. I think it blocked playing the movie to video-to-tv, but the monitor port worked, or something like that. However, we had to borrow a monitor cable from someone because the projector we borrowed didn't have one in the box. This was just plain annoying Windows DRM.
In the other case, a few of us were in a friend's dorm and decided to see a movie on his computer. He had an old Windows laptop with a broken screen, and had removed it and connected a CRT through the monitor-out port. (In other words, it was a free desktop with decent processing power.) We had brought the movie on DVD, but the system was using hardware playback and only played to the nonexistent built-in screen. No video splitter in this case, and I don't even know whether it was software DRM, hardware DRM, or just hardware not designed for the task. Anyway, someone went back to her dorm and brought a Linux laptop, and played it on that.
If your country allows the government to detain you indefinitely without arrest or communication or access to a lawyer (under the guise of anti-terrorism or homeland security) , you should be VERY concerned about false positives.
The US doesn't, and even if it did, it would double-check things beforehand.
But I'd like to see what would happen if these systems designed to recognize faces from afar in public streets and parks started registering thousands and thousands of sightings of known terrorists on the monitors down in the Big Brother Bunker.
And there are humans looking at these face systems. They'd probably pull up the tapes, figure out you were being a jackass, and get on with things. Even if not, what would they do if you suddenly ordered several truckloads of ammunition and ammonium nitrate to an urban address? They'd damn well watch you, because there aren't that many jerks who go out and impersonate terrorists for kicks.
Call it monkeywrenching. Call it free expression. Call it a costume party.
This is for airports. There are guards. They are not (all) blind. If you try to fool the cameras, you will be searched, and free speech does not matter. If you make yourself a false positive, it's you that suffers.
Now the tech people may scream "those aren't false positives! the system is correclty identifying Mr. Terrorist!"
If you're using this to decide whom to search (instead of to track someone), this sort fo false positive doesn't matter. If you put 10 jars of peanut butter in your luggage (looks like plastic explosives to scanners) and get searched as a result, this also is a false positive. (More worrisome is breaking the jars of peanut butter and smearing them in your bag, along with some well-hidden plastique, but this attack probably wouldn't work and does not generalize to face scanners anyway.) If you go around talking about how best to blow up a plane, you will be kicked off the flight; that is also a false positive. Nobody complains about this. Nobody cares if the airlines inconvenience jackasses who intentionally trigger their security system by impersonating hijackers.
Anyone able to tell me how this would differentiate between siblings that look very very much alike?
Well... they'd probably have trouble. OTOH, humans can reliably tell the difference if they know the twins well.
Furthermore, I'd want to be extra careful around someone whose twin brother is know to be a terrorist...
Remeber the fingerprint system that got fooled by gelatine-gummi's ?
/d/ and /dh/, even with fairly extensive training. A computer can, however. I imagine that a computer would also be at least comparably able to tell apart similar-looking Asians.
Yeah. Thats' what guards are for. While they might not catch your gummy finger, they'd probably notice you holding up a George Bush mask as you walk by the scanner.
Careful disguises are a little tougher, but from what I've read about these systems, they do better than your average human against disguises (they use different clues, and don't put as much weight on obvious things like facial hair). This might put your human past the tolerance though, as you'd have to set tolerance pretty low to avoid excessive false positives.
Proof: Take your average ignorant North American, (like myself) and ask him to tell the difference between 3 different Asian individuals. There is a good chance that we would fail that test because we are not used to (or mentally trained to) spot the difference.
Fine, but there are things that the computer can tell better than humans, even things that humans "should" be able to do better. For instance, your average ignorant North American can't tell the difference between the Hindi consonants
Caveat: following is IIRC; this is from a basic developmental psych class that I took for breadth requirements. I got a lousy grade in the class mostly for failing to remember specific details, so some of this may be just plain wrong. Go to Scirus or something and search for this stuff before using it in your doctoral thesis.
Human face recognition is also built-in. Psych experiments on newborns (straight out of the maternity ward), as well as older infants, indicate that they can detect faces early on. This is not the case with all visual abilities that people have! There are many types of spacial recognition and object-parsing tasks that infants, and even toddlers, simply can't do.
Newborns pay more attention to shapes that look like a face > over those that are schematically similar > over those those with eyes, noses etc but in different arrangements > over ovals with random junk > over blank ovals...
Also at an early age (don't remember when; I don't think they tested it on newborns, but I wouldn't be surprised if they can do this too), babies can tell familiar faces from unfamiliar ones, and show an inverted habituation effect; that is, they prefer to look at familiar faces than unfamiliar ones (unlike most shapes, where they get bored with the familiar ones).
Also at an early age (again, I don't remember how early, but less than a year), infants map others' faces onto their own and imitate. That is, if you stand in front of them for a few minutes with your tongue sticking out, they often stick theirs out too. If you have one eye open and one closed, they'll copy that too (I don't remember which eye tho).
From an early age, babies can also follow gazes to tell what someone is looking at; this is important in the development of language as well as vision, because babies use it to figure out what an adult is talking about. It is, IIRC, used more than what the adult is *pointing* at.
In addition to recognizing faces, babies can recognise other body parts, and treat an action differently based on whether it is done by a hand or a stick (when they don't see the hand holding the stick). If it is done by a hand or other object perceived to be animate, it is treated as goal-oriented and categorized partly by the perceived goal; if done by an "inanimate" object, the baby does not look for a goal. This is studied through habituation experiments; different actions with the same goal were seen as more similar (and hence less interesting) than those with the same basic appearance, if and only if they were performed by an animate-looking object such as a hand.
Like I said... this is to prevent *trivial* copying. A hacker could still circumvent it (if only as root), and you obviously just go tell someone what secret stuff the file had in it. "If I can see it, I can copy it" and so on; there's nothing they can do about bringing a digital camera...
/.er could probably do better :-)
/.er is probably a technically inclined person, but certainly not a hacker. Even I have grep'ed swap (a non-geeky friend of mine, who uses MacOS X, wrote a 10-page term paper without saving once...), but I strongly doubt that the average /.er could crack this thing quickly if MS puts much effort at all into it. Of course, for all we know, their "DRM" will just be encryption with XOR-ECB and the password will be "susageP"...
However, it wouldn't be as easy as you say. At least on a UNIX system you can do much better than these easy hacks. I don't know as much about Windows (nor do I know how much effort/competence MS will put into this feature). For instance:
You really can't block out printscreen for all applications, and once a person tabs to another app, there's nothing to prevent them from grabbing the whole desktop, and not just the current workspace.
Windows already has some sort of lock on printscreens, which stops you from doing it to a movie player. It also stops movie player windows from going to video-out (sends them black), which *really* annoyed me and some friends as we tried to set up a projector for a dorm movie.
In any case, you could install an extension which traps printscreen, or you could block the window in the background (ick), or you could...
Not sure how this would work on X11, having never written anything for it.
On top of that, the data is sitting in memory unencrypted. There are utilities that will allow you to grab this. For example, you can see (in real time) the password someone is typing in instead of the replacement character (usually an asterisk).
Windows has protected memory. So does UNIX. You'd have to be root/admin to do this. Admittedly, on Windows you are generally admin anyway...
Also, unless they're encrypting their swap file and tmp contents, they'll always leave stuff behind that running "strings" on can recover.
You can pin stuff to memory both in Windows and in UNIX. It then won't be written out to swap, no matter what. GPG does this on both platforms, as do a variety of other crypto programs. And swap and stuff can only be read by root anyway.
In fact, the "much-vaunted police tool" for recovering data from crooks hard disks is just a bunch of perl scripts that do this, along with some pattern searching. The average
The average
I post a lot.
That would only work if '.' were the FIRST element in their path...
Yeah, I know that. There is still the possibility of an attack, by putting a file named 'cta' or 'sl' or something in
Maybe I should replace it with some other UNIX terrorism... Something like the following, perhaps?
You can block printscreen. And if it's a big enough file, typing it out can be tiresome.
This is largely to prevent *trivial* copying.
I mean, it's annoying that OpenOffice.org can't read them, but DRM on word docs is reasonable in an office setting. The current protocol for confidential files is to encrypt them, and trust the employees who know the password not to download it to their USB Flash Drives and take them home. This would let them actually enforce something. It can surely be circumvented, but probably not trivially so.
It has a potential for abuse, but not that much of one. You don't generally buy content via word doc, so who cares if people can DRM them? And you can still read the non-DRMed ones in OO.org or whatever.
Asteroids are not necessarily spherical, as they do not have enough gravity to become round that way.
So it does not have to have been 10x10x10 times bigger.
Well, you can separate the really-long-lived isotopes (of where there are pretty small quantities) from the only-sort-of-long-lived ones. This makes your storage problem smaller after a few thousand years.
-atto denotes 10^18. That's a very small number.
Perhaps you meant terawatt, or petawatt, or something?
Sounds more like a hardware problem than a XP problem.
I'm not sure actually. I can boot Knoppix on it fine, and it runs for as long as I tested it without panicking or anything, which means that if it's a hardware problem, it's probably the hard drive. The hard drive scans fine with CHKDISK, but that doesn't mean it's not occasionally encountering failures. Right now, it usually either bluescreens on boot with a "can't page in" type error, or else it gives "No bootable media found", which certainly hints that it could be the HD. Sometimes it boots fine, but usually crashes pretty quick.
OTOH, she was hit by blaster, and probably installed several trojans (she sometimes gets popup ads on the desktop), and generally does not run a tight ship, so the system could just be h0sed.
I suggested that she either take it into the shop, or else back it up (this would be via ethernet to someone else's computer, as she has no CDR), wipe the hard drive, and reinstall.
It hasn't ever crashed on me at work, and I've been messing with the registry, installing undocumented hacks, and ... whoops, here comes my boss...
However, one of my friends has had no end to trouble with it. Her computer is now refusing to boot, I think, on some weird error. Before that it was randomly freezing or bluescreening... not pretty.
Could be. You never know with those "visions", especially the prophecies to take place at an unspecified later time (you shall know neither the day nor the hour).
Still, many of the events prophecied in Revelation are becoming possible today, much more than they were in ancient times.
Particularly evocative is the whole "number of the beast" thing, in which nobody will be able to buy or sell without being marked. Several technologies today could fulfill this if they become ubiquitous, such as RFID, wireless credit cards, etc. Barcodes were denounced at some point, because they are everywhere, and because they appear to contain the code "666" (the left, center, and right alignment codes, widths 1-1-1, look like the code for 6, which is 1-1-1-3).
I personally am not sure how much of the prophecy is to be taken literally, and how much is figurative. I'm not against barcodes, and I find it unlikely that apocalypse will happen within my lifetime, but if other signs appear, I will consider it a possibility.