You would be surprised to know that some crucial IT decisions in the MOD are taken by humans that can be competent soldiers but incompetent IT technicians. Or, simply, bribery-open people close to retirement.
Ok, to be fair to the RN they're such an important target that an attacker would write a virus for any OS they run on, Linux, OSX, anything. However the network should have been protected. No USB drives, no connections with the outside, etc.
Once again, you need two things to be able to write a virus :
- resources
- a flaw that allows it to infect the PC and spread to others
There exist people with resources willing to make virus for such systems. That is true for any army in the world. That is why armies usually tend to be paranoiac about the flaws they could introduce in their systems. Spending billions and an army of hackers won't be able to create a flaw in a secure system. It is simply true that flaws are more common and less efficiently patched in Microsoft products than in any other.
I would also like to point out that the virus allegedly did just disrupt some minor functionality (email, intranet access) for a few days in a non critical period. I doubt it was specifically tailored for this attack. It really looks like they caught a common virus.
I stated these three components as things that can be used for core gameplays. I tried to quote games that focused very strongly on one of these aspects and disregards the others : dices don't have any bluffing and tactical planning. Chess does have a dose of bluff but its core is tactical planning. Poker has randomness and a bit of tactical planning but psychology and bluff is at its core.
Well, I have thought a lot about it as well, this being a field of interest for me...
Emergence is one of the most interesting phenomenon in computer science, in my opinion. It happens when simple rules create a behavior that is an order of magnitude more complex than the rules. In gaming, it happens when a ruleset offers simple problems that have complex solution. It may be possible to detect such occurrences, but you would need an AI able to solve the problems and measure the solution complexity. It is not a trivial matter.
I don't think that this headline defined the problem well. Yes, some parts of fun can be automatically generated. But no, to make a fun game, it has to be interesting to a human, not just to a turing machine. And for that, you really need other humans to make the games, or you don't have the depth required for real "fun".
Why I disagree on the fact that the automatically generatable parts of fun are not enough to make a human-enjoyable game, I don't really have more counter arguments than there are arguments. That would make for an enjoyable Turing test. My only counter-argument is that I know of quite a few games which do not depend on depth to be fun.
The more I play games, both video games, board games or pen and paper RPGs, the more I see the obvious patterns that exist beneath them.
I stopped playing new boardgames as all these become obvious after a few games, and if you tend to like one, old games already implement them perfectly. You basically have 3 (arguably 4) components in any board game : randomness (go play dices if you like it), tactical planning (go play chess), bluffing (go play poker) and, arguably, negotiation that can be seen as a merge between tactics and planning but that often use a whole different range of social skills.
Video games have also some recurring ingredients. I played less of them so I fail to see them more clearly, but some of them are obvious :
- a sentiment of progression. Whether artificial (through leveling in RPG games) or real (from FPS where you get better at shooting, rocket jumping, etc...)
- hidden content of the game, that the player has to find or guess. It is usually some content voluntarily put there by the game developer (quests, levels, maps) some hidden game logic that one must understand (AIs behavior, puzzles, research trees). In the most interesting games (in my humble opinion) there is also content that is almost emergent. The creator only loosely coded some rules and it is the player's actions that create his own problems to solve. It often happens in strategic or development games, where you discover that a design you chose had some vulnerabilities and that by correcting this, you create a whole bunch of new problems.
That one last part is the most difficult to reproduce automatically, in my opinion. But a lot of successful games don't have any such emergent content, so I guess that automated games generation can prove quite fruitful !
Still, I believe this is just a publicity stunt for the proposer of the bill. I think every representative, be them conservative or liberal, understand how fucking ridiculous this thing is.
Car thieves go to jail. These people don't ? Even a few days ? A short but firm jail time would convince the whole jazz that white-collared stealing is on par with burglars. Just having to pay a fine makes it look like a legit business plan where you have to balance the act of getting caught against your profit.
Well, it is harder to kill someone with a fork than with a gun.
It is still possible but it requires no hesitation, no emotion, and a minimal physical strength.
In case one of these criterion is missing, a gun can help. With a gun you can kill someone out of anger, while filled of contradictory emotions, while crying and without really wanting it. That is how must murders are made. As you pointed out, when carefully planned, a murder do not require a gun. Guns are too noisy and too easy to track down.
S: In your professional opinion, how can people avoid adware?
M: Um, run UNIX.
S: [ laughs]
M: We did actually get the ad client working under Wine on Linux.
S: That seems like a bit of a stretch!
M: That was a pretty limited market, I'd say.
Another one, at the conclusion:
S: Is there anything else you wanted to comment on?
M: People can have things as good as they are willing to work for. If you want to have a system that's clean of nasty software, you can do that. If you want to have personal privacy, it's possible- very hard, but possible. And I think it's worth it.
People need to stop thinking that insecure software is a fatality.
Actually, most practices of border guards are directly inspired by American ones. Out of curiosity, two years ago I spent some time in Asia including Japan. I never left any fingerprint anywhere. When was it ?
And this is doubly great : now if someone shares a file by putting myxiplx@slashdot.org instead of their own address, they will immediately be able to track the pirate.
I mean, seriously, if you want to implement digital right protection, you either do it completely (hint : you can't) or not at all. Partial implementation like this one are completely useless.
When Bob fail at math, Bob is bad at math. When Alice fails at math, girls are bad at math.
When an application crashes under Windows, the application failed. When an application crashes under Linux, Linux fails.
I may sound pompous, but the first bias is being fought by using techniques that could be used in the second as well. The most simple method that yields results is incredibly cheap : show people they have a bias. Most people don't like to feel that they are being sexist and try to correct their bias if they perceive it. Most people (especially teacher, where I live) don't like to feel they are doing the job of a corporate lackey, or helping a monopoly. Microsoft does have a bad rep, not only among geeks. People also don't like to feel that they are being cheated in paying too much for so few.
That, and I was really impressed by wine progresses (under the standard Ubuntu install) these years. Most of your old Windows applications will work better under Ubuntu than under Vista. Even file sharing through netbios/samba worked more easily.
Psychology 102 is often all that separates the dorky geek from the socializing geek. Just make sense of their codes, kids, it is a fuzzy system but science cracked it more than 95% of the people like to admit. What makes character, acquaintances, love, attraction, understanding, trust, is being studied, quantified, results have been flowing from decades, and what is best : people refuse to read them. They are still a large test population for you to play with. Take socialization as a game, as an experiment. It works. It is easy.
There has been a lot of efforts put on the Terrorist Information Awareness program to create a robust datamining software (I read a lot about it, I wanted to work for Cycorp at one point). The goal was to merge data from various heterogeneous databases into a coherent file of individuals. Couldn't we reuse part of this job ?
$100 billion seems really excessive for that single work alone. For $100 billion you could create a whole R&D lab dedicated to the task of solving this problem in an automated fashion. Hell, you could even buy Google to do the work for you !
I agree, we need rules. Here is my proposal : anything about flying cars that only use future tense and that promise something in more than one year should not make it to Slashdot frontpage.
Ok, I should have been more specific. This particular equipment was made for a theme park, so it was made very robust. It resulted in the bulky design you see (it is actually a sawed plastic pistol for arcade shooting game, we put a polhemus device inside). The device itself exist in a wire mode (and can move in a cube of about 1m edge) or wireless (cube of 0.5m of edge). A wireless device is smaller than a wiimote. Here are pictures of a wired one and of a wireless one.
It used to be very expensive (around $5000) but that was before the Wii was released. I don't know of their current prices. They maintained it high because they were sitting on the patents for this kind of radio-location. But I think that production costs were somewhere around $50-$100. Seriously, once you have played a bit with this kind of sensors, a Wiimote is just laughable.
Slashdot Mirror
You would be surprised to know that some crucial IT decisions in the MOD are taken by humans that can be competent soldiers but incompetent IT technicians. Or, simply, bribery-open people close to retirement.
Ok, to be fair to the RN they're such an important target that an attacker would write a virus for any OS they run on, Linux, OSX, anything. However the network should have been protected. No USB drives, no connections with the outside, etc.
Once again, you need two things to be able to write a virus :
- resources
- a flaw that allows it to infect the PC and spread to others
There exist people with resources willing to make virus for such systems. That is true for any army in the world. That is why armies usually tend to be paranoiac about the flaws they could introduce in their systems. Spending billions and an army of hackers won't be able to create a flaw in a secure system. It is simply true that flaws are more common and less efficiently patched in Microsoft products than in any other.
I would also like to point out that the virus allegedly did just disrupt some minor functionality (email, intranet access) for a few days in a non critical period. I doubt it was specifically tailored for this attack. It really looks like they caught a common virus.
Agreed. Anyone who happened to work at Redmond for an extended period of time should be denied any IT job in a critical structure.
Completely off-topic but "I use linux since the last century" becomes to be sigable...
Welcome to Tor...
I stated these three components as things that can be used for core gameplays. I tried to quote games that focused very strongly on one of these aspects and disregards the others : dices don't have any bluffing and tactical planning. Chess does have a dose of bluff but its core is tactical planning. Poker has randomness and a bit of tactical planning but psychology and bluff is at its core.
Well, I have thought a lot about it as well, this being a field of interest for me...
Emergence is one of the most interesting phenomenon in computer science, in my opinion. It happens when simple rules create a behavior that is an order of magnitude more complex than the rules. In gaming, it happens when a ruleset offers simple problems that have complex solution. It may be possible to detect such occurrences, but you would need an AI able to solve the problems and measure the solution complexity. It is not a trivial matter.
Are you of the team who made the program ?
I don't think that this headline defined the problem well. Yes, some parts of fun can be automatically generated. But no, to make a fun game, it has to be interesting to a human, not just to a turing machine. And for that, you really need other humans to make the games, or you don't have the depth required for real "fun".
Why I disagree on the fact that the automatically generatable parts of fun are not enough to make a human-enjoyable game, I don't really have more counter arguments than there are arguments. That would make for an enjoyable Turing test. My only counter-argument is that I know of quite a few games which do not depend on depth to be fun.
The more I play games, both video games, board games or pen and paper RPGs, the more I see the obvious patterns that exist beneath them.
I stopped playing new boardgames as all these become obvious after a few games, and if you tend to like one, old games already implement them perfectly. You basically have 3 (arguably 4) components in any board game : randomness (go play dices if you like it), tactical planning (go play chess), bluffing (go play poker) and, arguably, negotiation that can be seen as a merge between tactics and planning but that often use a whole different range of social skills.
Video games have also some recurring ingredients. I played less of them so I fail to see them more clearly, but some of them are obvious :
- a sentiment of progression. Whether artificial (through leveling in RPG games) or real (from FPS where you get better at shooting, rocket jumping, etc...)
- hidden content of the game, that the player has to find or guess. It is usually some content voluntarily put there by the game developer (quests, levels, maps) some hidden game logic that one must understand (AIs behavior, puzzles, research trees). In the most interesting games (in my humble opinion) there is also content that is almost emergent. The creator only loosely coded some rules and it is the player's actions that create his own problems to solve. It often happens in strategic or development games, where you discover that a design you chose had some vulnerabilities and that by correcting this, you create a whole bunch of new problems.
That one last part is the most difficult to reproduce automatically, in my opinion. But a lot of successful games don't have any such emergent content, so I guess that automated games generation can prove quite fruitful !
Still, I believe this is just a publicity stunt for the proposer of the bill. I think every representative, be them conservative or liberal, understand how fucking ridiculous this thing is.
Car thieves go to jail. These people don't ? Even a few days ? A short but firm jail time would convince the whole jazz that white-collared stealing is on par with burglars. Just having to pay a fine makes it look like a legit business plan where you have to balance the act of getting caught against your profit.
Well, it is harder to kill someone with a fork than with a gun.
It is still possible but it requires no hesitation, no emotion, and a minimal physical strength.
In case one of these criterion is missing, a gun can help. With a gun you can kill someone out of anger, while filled of contradictory emotions, while crying and without really wanting it. That is how must murders are made. As you pointed out, when carefully planned, a murder do not require a gun. Guns are too noisy and too easy to track down.
S: In your professional opinion, how can people avoid adware?
M: Um, run UNIX.
S: [ laughs]
M: We did actually get the ad client working under Wine on Linux.
S: That seems like a bit of a stretch!
M: That was a pretty limited market, I'd say.
Another one, at the conclusion :
S: Is there anything else you wanted to comment on?
M: People can have things as good as they are willing to work for. If you want to have a system that's clean of nasty software, you can do that. If you want to have personal privacy, it's possible- very hard, but possible. And I think it's worth it.
People need to stop thinking that insecure software is a fatality.
Nothing forbids Microsoft and Adobe to get government money for developing FOSS
I would like to add, that being unhappy of having a safer place than thought for kids to be is a fucked up sentiment.
Actually, most practices of border guards are directly inspired by American ones. Out of curiosity, two years ago I spent some time in Asia including Japan. I never left any fingerprint anywhere. When was it ?
Hey, one day I decided to be modded as a troll so I acted like a zealous Apple fanboy. I was modded as "funny"...
Microsoft...always trying to re-invent the wheel and try to pass it on as a new invention.
[troll] A truly American company ![/troll]
And this is doubly great : now if someone shares a file by putting myxiplx@slashdot.org instead of their own address, they will immediately be able to track the pirate.
I mean, seriously, if you want to implement digital right protection, you either do it completely (hint : you can't) or not at all. Partial implementation like this one are completely useless.
When Bob fail at math, Bob is bad at math. When Alice fails at math, girls are bad at math.
When an application crashes under Windows, the application failed. When an application crashes under Linux, Linux fails.
I may sound pompous, but the first bias is being fought by using techniques that could be used in the second as well. The most simple method that yields results is incredibly cheap : show people they have a bias. Most people don't like to feel that they are being sexist and try to correct their bias if they perceive it. Most people (especially teacher, where I live) don't like to feel they are doing the job of a corporate lackey, or helping a monopoly. Microsoft does have a bad rep, not only among geeks. People also don't like to feel that they are being cheated in paying too much for so few.
That, and I was really impressed by wine progresses (under the standard Ubuntu install) these years. Most of your old Windows applications will work better under Ubuntu than under Vista. Even file sharing through netbios/samba worked more easily.
Psychology 102 is often all that separates the dorky geek from the socializing geek. Just make sense of their codes, kids, it is a fuzzy system but science cracked it more than 95% of the people like to admit. What makes character, acquaintances, love, attraction, understanding, trust, is being studied, quantified, results have been flowing from decades, and what is best : people refuse to read them. They are still a large test population for you to play with. Take socialization as a game, as an experiment. It works. It is easy.
I certainly hope not. Some kind of cryptography, sure, but a published and non-obfuscated standard, one could hope.
There has been a lot of efforts put on the Terrorist Information Awareness program to create a robust datamining software (I read a lot about it, I wanted to work for Cycorp at one point). The goal was to merge data from various heterogeneous databases into a coherent file of individuals. Couldn't we reuse part of this job ?
$100 billion seems really excessive for that single work alone. For $100 billion you could create a whole R&D lab dedicated to the task of solving this problem in an automated fashion. Hell, you could even buy Google to do the work for you !
I agree, we need rules. Here is my proposal : anything about flying cars that only use future tense and that promise something in more than one year should not make it to Slashdot frontpage.
Ok, I should have been more specific. This particular equipment was made for a theme park, so it was made very robust. It resulted in the bulky design you see (it is actually a sawed plastic pistol for arcade shooting game, we put a polhemus device inside). The device itself exist in a wire mode (and can move in a cube of about 1m edge) or wireless (cube of 0.5m of edge). A wireless device is smaller than a wiimote. Here are pictures of a wired one and of a wireless one.
It used to be very expensive (around $5000) but that was before the Wii was released. I don't know of their current prices. They maintained it high because they were sitting on the patents for this kind of radio-location. But I think that production costs were somewhere around $50-$100. Seriously, once you have played a bit with this kind of sensors, a Wiimote is just laughable.