Just re-encrypt your surreptitious crypto with your officially mandated backdoored crypto. Looks the same, and won't show its real nature until they get the subpoena - and find it useless. Oops.
Here's a totally contrariwise view to the mainstream: to prevent terrorism, allow weapons on planes.
Not guns (depressurization, fuel, fancy electrics and hydraulics that don't take well to bullet holes) and not tazers (fuel sparks) but such things as knives and tranquilizer dart pistols should be allowed, even encouraged. All staff should be prominently armed and trained in weapons use as a matter of course; it would be much harder to take over a plane full of passengers and staff armed to the teeth. "More guns less crime" works groundside, and I expect it would work airborne too.
On as positive note, "don't sacrifice freedom" is already spreading as a concept well beyond the confines of slashdot: witness this fox news article: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34300,00.html
A use that immediately strikes me: use RCII to install a rootkit, use the rootkit plus MS's deinstaller to hide the tracks of the initial RCII infection. Oops.
I intend to build a protocol that will utterly smash the idea of panoptic control of any data exchange, including monetary: http://fling.sourceforge.net
I would rather save a billion crooks from scrutiny than live in a police state. Let the cops catch people the old fashioned way, with detective work and stings. I will take my privacy, and you will be powerless to prevent it.
Y: Yes, it's easily transportable, non-degradable valuable stuff. If you own gold, you own some money.
X: And what is paper money?
Y: A promise of value, a letter of credit made out to the bearer.
X: What value?
Y: It used to be gold to be delivered on reciept, but now it's value based on taxation of the economy.
X: Who is this "economy"?
Y: You and I and anyone who's productive and profitable on balance.
X: And what is "taxation"?
Y: Democratically endorsed theft at implied gunpoint.
X: So you're saying that my paper money is a debt which I am to be made pay off to myself, by means of slave labor? That its value to me depends on what I instruct be stolen from other people later? That it makes me both a slave and a slave driver, and the more a slave the more I produce, the more a master the more I consume idly?
Without strong government-backed currency, there is NO stable financial system. This was fine back in the days when land was the basis of wealth, but is no longer acceptable today.
If you were talking about made up randum cruft like Beenz and whatnot, I'd agree that they'll fail. They have no worth beyond that of a handful of bits and an untried company's promise. Government money has no worth either, but it's backed by the ability of governments to steal money at implied gunpoint.
Gold on the other hand is Real Money. It's a pure element, nearly impossible to counterfeit, infinitely capable of being split, shaped, and recombined, and rare enough to be usable in portable quantities. Everywhere it's accepted as money, and its value is independant of any company, government, or individual's word.
E-gold simply extends these advantages to the realm of online currency by keeping track of ownership of real physical gold. For every gram of e-gold there is a corresponding gram of physical gold, there's no imaginary value there; they will even fedex it to you in one-bar increments for barely more than the shipping cost.
Actually, I wonder how anyone could like the idea of a monetary system that's not under government control. If such a system were widely accepted, it would make money-laundering a breeze
Money laundering is a fundamental human right. Your money, your property, your business and nobody else's. The government only hates it because it lets people bypass thieving taxes and idiot prohibition laws. Forget talk of "the mob" - they can launder money anyway, trivially, by coordinating a slew of tiny transactions. This BS about money laundering is aimed square at the free individual who doesn't want to have to ask government permission to spend his OWN DAMN MONEY.
This is the way to take micropayments. 1% fee, max 50 cents on any transaction, and it's not prone to the same frauds, charges and chargebacks which credit cards are. Plus it stores value as real physical gold, which they'll mail to you if you ask (in 400 oz bar increments only). Not some funny money prone to vanish when the company does.
Information is not harmful. Nudie pics are not harmful. If they start asking wierd questions, answer rationally and accurately. Treat grossness as dull and puerile, and beneath their dignity.
Explain that the internet is as open as a public street, and the general rule about not trusting strangers applies. Drill them in not being caught up by pedophiles. And keep communications channels open, not blocked by fear of consequences or embarrasment, so that you can chat about what wierdos they've met this time.
If you're American, teach your kids the second amendment, and train them to shoot straight. And home-school them if you can. --
"oh no, cellphones will fry our brains! those evil cellphone companies admit it now, they're selling brain shields! sue them!"
"oh no, we wasted our money on brain shields when it turns out that cellphones are harmless or maybe even beneficial! those evil cellphone companies have been ripping us off all this time wth expensive and useless brain shields! sue them!"
What I want to know is, if Tito is allowed to take his CD player into space, why do I have to turn off my palm pilot during takeoff?
My guess is: airplanes have more fiddly bits to get scrambled. Radar, fancy control electronics, engine computers, etc. While a rocket during the launch phase is just a long thin explosion with some people sat on top. 'sides, they build spacecraft to take hard gamma-radiation from the sun, so a palm pilot ain't gonna do much. --
Ahem. Let me put it this way. If Oracle open sources their database, they will probably do it while watching flying pigs dodging upward-falling bricks above the blue-moonlit icescape of Hell. During which period, federal taxes will drop to $0, the Israelis and Palestinians will shake hands and make nice, and the Pope will convert to Buddhism.
Oracle makes their money from a simple value proposition: "No matter what the load you need to handle, no matter how much clustering and fancy data synching you want, provided you hire a good DBA we can get you 24/7 uptime, 356 days a year, with perfect data integrity. If you have a problem, they will know how to fix it or work around it. For which, we expect you will be willing to pay through the nose, or other bodily orifice of your choice."
You are not limited by your birth nationality, you can buy citizenship in several countries at once. Then renounce your high-tax high-intrusion birth citizenship and slip between the cracks in the system.
Your secret key is as readable as any other bit of in-memory stuff. Which means: very, to root; not very, to most anyone else. But then, if they're root, they can just swap out the PGP binary for a weakened one.
Just snaffling the key file won't help Black Hat, though. It's ususally encrypted with a symmetric cypher before it's ever stored. That's what the key passphrase is for. --
The omens are that this will get worse. It seems that open source's time has come. It has been said that open source will provide 50% of software for the country. The result of this is less money into the economy. If people now buy one $50 Redhat installer instead of 10,000 Microsoft licenses, there is that much less money into the economy. Companies such as Microsoft will find that they will do less well, and the knockon effect will be on the economy - not just that of the US but economies around the world. The potential is for global recession without the growth caused by the IT industry.
How stupid are you?
Run that logic over an analogy: everyone should pay or their air, for fear of less money moving into the economy? Everyone must travel by space shuttle, since it's more expensive than car?
D'oh! I think not.
Communism damaged people because it was coercive. Free software is a gain because it is both more competitive and freely chosen.
As and when they open source it and kill any patents, I'll look again. You cannot beat good enough and cheap with perfect and expensive, especially not when good enough is already ubiquitous - ask NeXT.
And, lose the monitoring crud and silly EULA; anyone who thinks they can make money from a tollbooth on an empty road is nuts. --
This decision would legitimize a mirror-image "inquisition files" web site with wanted posters of murderous religious dorks and their ISPs and website support staff. --
Now you too can pay a few thou for a volumetric display, and show a three dimensional, virtual picture of a three dimensional, real, two dollar pot plant.
So, can you be more specific? What is it that you think you can't do in Java that you can do in Objective-C?
Short answer: nothing, any language sufficiently advanced can emulate any feature in another. Same could be said for COBOL or, heck, INTERCAL.
Long answer: a lot, if you're talking about "do nicely" rather than "do inefficiently and with ugly code".
Specifically, ObjC has two features which the whole NeXT concept relies on quite a lot. First, all calls are made using stringified name and parameter signature. That means that all calls are deferred, and are tested at run time. The result is you can do very clever tricks by plugging in objects.
Second, you can (because that deferred call system means there's no binary offsets to break) fiddle with the insides of objects after their creation, or make other objects pretend to be the first. Even if you didn't create that object, you just loaded it from a precompiled library. This allows the lovely distributed objects system they have - a proxy object at the client end actually makes out it's the real server-side object, but just shoots the data down the line to another proxy server-side which is pretending to be the client object. Totally transparent after the setup - very sweet.
This stuff you couldn't really do in Java without jumping through hoops, because it uses C++ style function calls.
You and all the other "X has (won/caught up)" folks miss the important point about opensource OSes - that there is no coerced standard, and little barrier to porting. Stuff like Berlin can grow in an "incubator" environment of skilled developers and early-adopters, and take its time in winning over ports and converts. Cross platform code like Mozilla and Abiword will get carried over. Emacs will. And nifty programs will build up over time. There is no commercial deadline, and no minimum-profitable user base.
Like all other opensource programs, Berlin will "win" or "lose" only in terms of its ability to attact development - and the attraction can but grow as it matures.
First: advertising is plain useless, unless it's for things that are actually worth buying. Even then, mostly people ignore it. There is no way around that - becoming more obnoxious just annoys the customers. This is especially true where competitors and comparison sites are only a click away. Most advertising is for cruft; therefore most advertisers will run out of money. As will anyone who leans on them to pay the bills.
Second: these portal sites try to be the middle men of the internet. Duh? Come again? The one medium where you don't need a middleman, and someone thinks you can make money off that?
Third: yes, you can get stupid users to browse from and around one site. Perhaps, you can shift them off MSN, AOL, and Netscape automatic home pages. But you can't make money off them - stupid people don't get rich.
Fourth: give away the razors, give away the blades, and what were you planning on making money from? Adverts on the packets?
Fifth: production costs for information providers on the internet are higher. You've got the whole damn world to stay current with, and people will dump you without mercy if you don't keep up. Keep up meaning: if they can click to your competitor and read a thirty minutes newer story, you're toast.
Your "freebie" larceny-supported space program got cut back again. Boo hoo. High time, says I - have you seen how much money that lot pour down the drain?
If you want a better space shuttle, make a business case, get investors, and build it yourself. Personally I thnk that's the future of space travel; privately funded missions, either direct prospecting for profit, or advertising supported. There's a lot of raw materials, a lot of real estate, a lot of business opportunities out there. And with the constraints of business, there will be no temptation to waffle around trying to Invent Nifty Technologies instead of getting the job done - which if you recall is why NASA dumped the mostly working "delta clipper" in favor of the "more technological" X33.
Heck, you may recall they named a famous spaceship "Enterprise"? Not "Tax funded".
President Bush should just auction off NASA. At which point I suspect that our 1960s style Progress Towards The Stars would resume, full-pace.
Slashdot Mirror
Just re-encrypt your surreptitious crypto with your officially mandated backdoored crypto. Looks the same, and won't show its real nature until they get the subpoena - and find it useless. Oops.
Here's a totally contrariwise view to the mainstream: to prevent terrorism, allow weapons on planes.
Not guns (depressurization, fuel, fancy electrics and hydraulics that don't take well to bullet holes) and not tazers (fuel sparks) but such things as knives and tranquilizer dart pistols should be allowed, even encouraged. All staff should be prominently armed and trained in weapons use as a matter of course; it would be much harder to take over a plane full of passengers and staff armed to the teeth. "More guns less crime" works groundside, and I expect it would work airborne too.
On as positive note, "don't sacrifice freedom" is already spreading as a concept well beyond the confines of slashdot: witness this fox news article: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34300,00.html
A use that immediately strikes me: use RCII to install a rootkit, use the rootkit plus MS's deinstaller to hide the tracks of the initial RCII infection. Oops.
I intend to build a protocol that will utterly smash the idea of panoptic control of any data exchange, including monetary: http://fling.sourceforge.net
I would rather save a billion crooks from scrutiny than live in a police state. Let the cops catch people the old fashioned way, with detective work and stings. I will take my privacy, and you will be powerless to prevent it.
You have been warned.
--
X: So what is this this money stuff then?
Y: It's abstracted, transportable value.
X: Is gold "money"?
Y: Yes, it's easily transportable, non-degradable valuable stuff. If you own gold, you own some money.
X: And what is paper money?
Y: A promise of value, a letter of credit made out to the bearer.
X: What value?
Y: It used to be gold to be delivered on reciept, but now it's value based on taxation of the economy.
X: Who is this "economy"?
Y: You and I and anyone who's productive and profitable on balance.
X: And what is "taxation"?
Y: Democratically endorsed theft at implied gunpoint.
X: So you're saying that my paper money is a debt which I am to be made pay off to myself, by means of slave labor? That its value to me depends on what I instruct be stolen from other people later? That it makes me both a slave and a slave driver, and the more a slave the more I produce, the more a master the more I consume idly?
Y: Yup, that's about the size of it.
X: I prefer gold.
--
Without strong government-backed currency, there is NO stable financial system. This was fine back in the days when land was the basis of wealth, but is no longer acceptable today.
If you were talking about made up randum cruft like Beenz and whatnot, I'd agree that they'll fail. They have no worth beyond that of a handful of bits and an untried company's promise. Government money has no worth either, but it's backed by the ability of governments to steal money at implied gunpoint.
Gold on the other hand is Real Money. It's a pure element, nearly impossible to counterfeit, infinitely capable of being split, shaped, and recombined, and rare enough to be usable in portable quantities. Everywhere it's accepted as money, and its value is independant of any company, government, or individual's word.
E-gold simply extends these advantages to the realm of online currency by keeping track of ownership of real physical gold. For every gram of e-gold there is a corresponding gram of physical gold, there's no imaginary value there; they will even fedex it to you in one-bar increments for barely more than the shipping cost.
--
Actually, I wonder how anyone could like the idea of a monetary system that's not under government control. If such a system were widely accepted, it would make money-laundering a breeze
Money laundering is a fundamental human right. Your money, your property, your business and nobody else's. The government only hates it because it lets people bypass thieving taxes and idiot prohibition laws. Forget talk of "the mob" - they can launder money anyway, trivially, by coordinating a slew of tiny transactions. This BS about money laundering is aimed square at the free individual who doesn't want to have to ask government permission to spend his OWN DAMN MONEY.
--
This is the way to take micropayments. 1% fee, max 50 cents on any transaction, and it's not prone to the same frauds, charges and chargebacks which credit cards are. Plus it stores value as real physical gold, which they'll mail to you if you ask (in 400 oz bar increments only). Not some funny money prone to vanish when the company does.
.sig
For the addy, see my
--
Information is not harmful. Nudie pics are not harmful. If they start asking wierd questions, answer rationally and accurately. Treat grossness as dull and puerile, and beneath their dignity.
Explain that the internet is as open as a public street, and the general rule about not trusting strangers applies. Drill them in not being caught up by pedophiles. And keep communications channels open, not blocked by fear of consequences or embarrasment, so that you can chat about what wierdos they've met this time.
If you're American, teach your kids the second amendment, and train them to shoot straight. And home-school them if you can.
--
"oh no, cellphones will fry our brains! those evil cellphone companies admit it now, they're selling brain shields! sue them!"
"oh no, we wasted our money on brain shields when it turns out that cellphones are harmless or maybe even beneficial! those evil cellphone companies have been ripping us off all this time wth expensive and useless brain shields! sue them!"
Some days you can't win.
--
"Worse, quantum encryption would be impossible, doe to the carrier's inability to fly in an entangled state."
I've heard cats work for that one (cf. Schrodinger et al). Although they need to stay unobserved, and herding them can be quite hard.
--
1. Either:
1.1. Use barcodes instead of OCR, or
1.2. Use magtape instead of paper.
2. Transmit redundant packets to cut lossage.
3. Use better trained pigeons.
4. Secure packets against rain damage using cling film (saran wrap).
--
What I want to know is, if Tito is allowed to take his CD player into space, why do I have to turn off my palm pilot during takeoff?
My guess is: airplanes have more fiddly bits to get scrambled. Radar, fancy control electronics, engine computers, etc. While a rocket during the launch phase is just a long thin explosion with some people sat on top. 'sides, they build spacecraft to take hard gamma-radiation from the sun, so a palm pilot ain't gonna do much.
--
Ahem. Let me put it this way. If Oracle open sources their database, they will probably do it while watching flying pigs dodging upward-falling bricks above the blue-moonlit icescape of Hell. During which period, federal taxes will drop to $0, the Israelis and Palestinians will shake hands and make nice, and the Pope will convert to Buddhism.
Oracle makes their money from a simple value proposition: "No matter what the load you need to handle, no matter how much clustering and fancy data synching you want, provided you hire a good DBA we can get you 24/7 uptime, 356 days a year, with perfect data integrity. If you have a problem, they will know how to fix it or work around it. For which, we expect you will be willing to pay through the nose, or other bodily orifice of your choice."
That ain't going away anytime soon.
--
You are not limited by your birth nationality, you can buy citizenship in several countries at once. Then renounce your high-tax high-intrusion birth citizenship and slip between the cracks in the system.
Also see: How to legally obtain a second citizenship and passport, for example in Grenada, South America, or Africa
--
Your secret key is as readable as any other bit of in-memory stuff. Which means: very, to root; not very, to most anyone else. But then, if they're root, they can just swap out the PGP binary for a weakened one.
Just snaffling the key file won't help Black Hat, though. It's ususally encrypted with a symmetric cypher before it's ever stored. That's what the key passphrase is for.
--
The omens are that this will get worse. It seems that open source's time has come. It has been said that open source will provide 50% of software for the country. The result of this is less money into the economy. If people now buy one $50 Redhat installer instead of 10,000 Microsoft licenses, there is that much less money into the economy. Companies such as Microsoft will find that they will do less well, and the knockon effect will be on the economy - not just that of the US but economies around the world. The potential is for global recession without the growth caused by the IT industry.
How stupid are you?
Run that logic over an analogy: everyone should pay or their air, for fear of less money moving into the economy? Everyone must travel by space shuttle, since it's more expensive than car?
D'oh! I think not.
Communism damaged people because it was coercive. Free software is a gain because it is both more competitive and freely chosen.
--
We need a proper offworld colony. Not this endless succession of rock-counting toys.
--
As and when they open source it and kill any patents, I'll look again. You cannot beat good enough and cheap with perfect and expensive, especially not when good enough is already ubiquitous - ask NeXT.
And, lose the monitoring crud and silly EULA; anyone who thinks they can make money from a tollbooth on an empty road is nuts.
--
This decision would legitimize a mirror-image "inquisition files" web site with wanted posters of murderous religious dorks and their ISPs and website support staff.
--
Now you too can pay a few thou for a volumetric display, and show a three dimensional, virtual picture of a three dimensional, real, two dollar pot plant.
Way to save money, dudes.
--
Long answer: a lot, if you're talking about "do nicely" rather than "do inefficiently and with ugly code".
Specifically, ObjC has two features which the whole NeXT concept relies on quite a lot. First, all calls are made using stringified name and parameter signature. That means that all calls are deferred, and are tested at run time. The result is you can do very clever tricks by plugging in objects.
Second, you can (because that deferred call system means there's no binary offsets to break) fiddle with the insides of objects after their creation, or make other objects pretend to be the first. Even if you didn't create that object, you just loaded it from a precompiled library. This allows the lovely distributed objects system they have - a proxy object at the client end actually makes out it's the real server-side object, but just shoots the data down the line to another proxy server-side which is pretending to be the client object. Totally transparent after the setup - very sweet.
This stuff you couldn't really do in Java without jumping through hoops, because it uses C++ style function calls.
You and all the other "X has (won/caught up)" folks miss the important point about opensource OSes - that there is no coerced standard, and little barrier to porting. Stuff like Berlin can grow in an "incubator" environment of skilled developers and early-adopters, and take its time in winning over ports and converts. Cross platform code like Mozilla and Abiword will get carried over. Emacs will. And nifty programs will build up over time. There is no commercial deadline, and no minimum-profitable user base.
Like all other opensource programs, Berlin will "win" or "lose" only in terms of its ability to attact development - and the attraction can but grow as it matures.
First: advertising is plain useless, unless it's for things that are actually worth buying. Even then, mostly people ignore it. There is no way around that - becoming more obnoxious just annoys the customers. This is especially true where competitors and comparison sites are only a click away. Most advertising is for cruft; therefore most advertisers will run out of money. As will anyone who leans on them to pay the bills.
Second: these portal sites try to be the middle men of the internet. Duh? Come again? The one medium where you don't need a middleman, and someone thinks you can make money off that?
Third: yes, you can get stupid users to browse from and around one site. Perhaps, you can shift them off MSN, AOL, and Netscape automatic home pages. But you can't make money off them - stupid people don't get rich.
Fourth: give away the razors, give away the blades, and what were you planning on making money from? Adverts on the packets?
Fifth: production costs for information providers on the internet are higher. You've got the whole damn world to stay current with, and people will dump you without mercy if you don't keep up. Keep up meaning: if they can click to your competitor and read a thirty minutes newer story, you're toast.
Your "freebie" larceny-supported space program got cut back again. Boo hoo. High time, says I - have you seen how much money that lot pour down the drain?
If you want a better space shuttle, make a business case, get investors, and build it yourself. Personally I thnk that's the future of space travel; privately funded missions, either direct prospecting for profit, or advertising supported. There's a lot of raw materials, a lot of real estate, a lot of business opportunities out there. And with the constraints of business, there will be no temptation to waffle around trying to Invent Nifty Technologies instead of getting the job done - which if you recall is why NASA dumped the mostly working "delta clipper" in favor of the "more technological" X33.
Heck, you may recall they named a famous spaceship "Enterprise"? Not "Tax funded".
President Bush should just auction off NASA. At which point I suspect that our 1960s style Progress Towards The Stars would resume, full-pace.