Now the challenge is to think of other words containing "eval", and then do a Google search to see if Yahoo has mangled them. I found a story in which a person drank a cup of Greviewia coffee, for example.
I read the patent too. The claim (which surely can be beaten by prior art) is much less pitiful than ChrisD states. What is being patented is the ability to decide whether to reject or accept a request for web content, according to whether a URL implies that the request is legal. A web site deciding in which countries it can show nazi memorabilia might have to license (or challenge) this patent.
This is BOTTOM UP design (bad, very bad)
on
The Power of Palladium
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The idea of Palladium is obviously to design a low level trustworthiness that can be used somehow, or in many ways somehow. To get something useful you need to start defining the problem to solve, and then specify your way down to what's in the chip and the OS. If all that specification were public now, I might believe in Palladium.
We can think of a million ways that the software USING this new capability can be compromised. The designers have to start by figuring out, and tell us about, the secure usages first.
Microsoft, the author of an operating system (Win 2000) in which you HAVE to have massive user privileges or you won't even know that most software installs are failing due to lack of privilege, is going to give us a trusty capability with enough degrees of variation to be useful? As if!
Were these subjects playing Chess, Doom, Civilization, what?
I find it difficult to believe that ALL video games produce the same effects in people in general.
Also, were they using a flying spot CRT, or an LCD screen? The brain processes these images differently.
OKAY, can someone really point to a specific Scientific American article that precedes the Harper's story? I searched carefully on the web, and I think the Harper's story is a made-up spoof. Almost all web references (there are now so many it WILL be an urban legend) either refer back to the Harper's article or copy its wording in big gobs. One web site has a picture of Hahn, but it copies the Harper's text, and the picture does not match the text description of what Hahn looks like. (Text: blue eyed and blond; picture: dark eyed and dark haired.)
The Michigan state list of superfund cleanups does not inlcude this one! Take a look! http://www.michigan.gov/deq/1,1607,7-135-3311_4109 ---,00.html
Also ask yourself how a man with a history of blowing things up and terrbile health prospects gets (and keeps) a job on a Nuclear ship in the Navy, which will have to pay (eventually) for all his interesting health costs.
I'm also curious about the guide "Goin' Fission" mentioned in the article. It was my failure to find this guide that originally raised my suspicions; This guide could be for real, but you won't find it by searching the American Nuclear Society's web site.
Software hacking on Palm OS PDAs follows a similar model to TiVo and, I think, precedes it. http://www.palm.com/ is happy to benefit from the immense variety of shareware, and (so far as I know) has not given anyone trouble, or warrantee worries, from use of Hacks.
Poorly written software on the Palm can crash a pda so badly that it must be (in essence) reformatted, so this is not a trivial position.
At the Autofact show of 1985, GM and Boeing hosted a large demo booth. The goal of the booth was to prove that the now defunct MAP protocol really worked. They got 25 companies to spend money on the demo: a distributed system that took your name, packed (robotically) a tower of hanoi puzzle, printed your ID on the package, and gave it to you. The companies spent (I'm not making this up) $125 million US to develop the systems JUST for the 3-day show. (I'm counting costs that had no other value, this was show-specific.)
5,000 of the Tower-of-hanoi boxes were given away, and show particiapnts therefore called them $25,000 gifts, distributing the booth cost among its outputs. The puzzle itself had negligible value, so let's assign that $25,000 to the pesonalized IDs, typically about 25 bytes, per package. That's about $1,000 per byte.
While we're at it, please remeber that for most of the 1960's, mainframe memory cost 10 cents a bit, which was close to $4.50 a byte (there were check bits in those days, but computer memory was geenraly organized in larger "words" with far more than 8 bits per address). That's just the cost of storage before anything of value went into it.
Now the challenge is to think of other words containing "eval", and then do a Google search to see if Yahoo has mangled them. I found a story in which a person drank a cup of Greviewia coffee, for example.
I read the patent too. The claim (which surely can be beaten by prior art) is much less pitiful than ChrisD states. What is being patented is the ability to decide whether to reject or accept a request for web content, according to whether a URL implies that the request is legal. A web site deciding in which countries it can show nazi memorabilia might have to license (or challenge) this patent.
The idea of Palladium is obviously to design a low level trustworthiness that can be used somehow, or in many ways somehow. To get something useful you need to start defining the problem to solve, and then specify your way down to what's in the chip and the OS. If all that specification were public now, I might believe in Palladium. We can think of a million ways that the software USING this new capability can be compromised. The designers have to start by figuring out, and tell us about, the secure usages first. Microsoft, the author of an operating system (Win 2000) in which you HAVE to have massive user privileges or you won't even know that most software installs are failing due to lack of privilege, is going to give us a trusty capability with enough degrees of variation to be useful? As if!
Were these subjects playing Chess, Doom, Civilization, what? I find it difficult to believe that ALL video games produce the same effects in people in general. Also, were they using a flying spot CRT, or an LCD screen? The brain processes these images differently.
OKAY, can someone really point to a specific Scientific American article that precedes the Harper's story? I searched carefully on the web, and I think the Harper's story is a made-up spoof. Almost all web references (there are now so many it WILL be an urban legend) either refer back to the Harper's article or copy its wording in big gobs. One web site has a picture of Hahn, but it copies the Harper's text, and the picture does not match the text description of what Hahn looks like. (Text: blue eyed and blond; picture: dark eyed and dark haired.) The Michigan state list of superfund cleanups does not inlcude this one! Take a look! http://www.michigan.gov/deq/1,1607,7-135-3311_4109 ---,00.html
Also ask yourself how a man with a history of blowing things up and terrbile health prospects gets (and keeps) a job on a Nuclear ship in the Navy, which will have to pay (eventually) for all his interesting health costs.
I'm also curious about the guide "Goin' Fission" mentioned in the article. It was my failure to find this guide that originally raised my suspicions; This guide could be for real, but you won't find it by searching the American Nuclear Society's web site.
Software hacking on Palm OS PDAs follows a similar model to TiVo and, I think, precedes it. http://www.palm.com/ is happy to benefit from the immense variety of shareware, and (so far as I know) has not given anyone trouble, or warrantee worries, from use of Hacks. Poorly written software on the Palm can crash a pda so badly that it must be (in essence) reformatted, so this is not a trivial position.
At the Autofact show of 1985, GM and Boeing hosted a large demo booth. The goal of the booth was to prove that the now defunct MAP protocol really worked. They got 25 companies to spend money on the demo: a distributed system that took your name, packed (robotically) a tower of hanoi puzzle, printed your ID on the package, and gave it to you. The companies spent (I'm not making this up) $125 million US to develop the systems JUST for the 3-day show. (I'm counting costs that had no other value, this was show-specific.)
5,000 of the Tower-of-hanoi boxes were given away, and show particiapnts therefore called them $25,000 gifts, distributing the booth cost among its outputs. The puzzle itself had negligible value, so let's assign that $25,000 to the pesonalized IDs, typically about 25 bytes, per package. That's about $1,000 per byte.
While we're at it, please remeber that for most of the 1960's, mainframe memory cost 10 cents a bit, which was close to $4.50 a byte (there were check bits in those days, but computer memory was geenraly organized in larger "words" with far more than 8 bits per address). That's just the cost of storage before anything of value went into it.