Way wrong. The Titanic was compartmentalized, however the long gash in the hull flooded too many compartments.
And that's not the whole story, either. The compartments didn't reach high enough in the ship. It didn't matter that the compartments had watertight bulkheads, because as each breached compartment filled, it spilled over the tops of the bulkheads into the next compartment.
Ever heard of builtin obsolescence, where something is deliberately designed to wear out or become obsolete within some fairly short time?? As applied to CDs and DVDs, this means that the manufacturer has secured their revenue stream by making sure that your media can be damaged simply by playing it. It doesn't much matter to the media manufacturer, because you'll either: 1) buy blanks and copy the original to extend its life; or 2) buy a new original. Either way they get their slice of your cash...
So, here's a question for any material scientists in the/. readership - how hard would it be to make a CD unscratchable?? Don't care whether that's after-purchase, or during manufacture.
Rather than disabling audio inputs, they might just leave them out altogether. How many people shopping for a new PC would look for line-in/out, or even a mono-mic socket?? You then find yourself paying the "analog input tax" when you buy the addon card.
Yep, that too. Except that it's a lot easier to covertly discover who's generating traffic. Packet contents might be encrypted, but I don't think it would be difficult to track down the source of a movie-length stream...
It would be next to impossible to covertly infiltrate a dorm-room LAN party (laptops and a switch, disconnected from the campus net) and catching someone hand-carrying a sack of CDRs would require stop-and-search, which may or may not be illegal (can campus policy make it legal?), but would certainly catch more people with groceries and books than mp3s.
Just don't put the movie in a place where a filesharing app can see it. If it's not visible, and it's not being shared, they'll never know. Assuming you don't brag about it while drunk...
According to its technical summary, ACNS does not invade privacy. Rather, it assists universities or ISPs in enforcing their own policies on network abuse and copyright infringement. ACNS can also be used to protect networks from viruses, Trojan horses and other nefarious activity, the summary asserts.
Supposedly it doesn't invade privacy, so theoretically it won't be adware or spyware.... Note I said "theoretically"...
On the other hand, look at the **AA track record for securing things. CSS? Broken open by a Norwegian teenager. CD watermarking systems? Defeated by a number of US University researchers. That crazy invalid-track "protection"?? Defeated by a Sharpie, for crying out loud... And they have the gall to tout this thing as able to protect networks from viruses, Trojan horses and other nefarious activity. "Well, we've fucked up every other way of securing our content, so this one is obviously going to work, right??"
Assuming the **AA don't manage to mandate software installation on all student-owned campus PCs, this ACNS thing is probably going to be defeated by fileswapping LAN parties, or by SneakerNet. To paraphrase Dr Andrew Tanenbaum, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a backpack full of CDRWs".
BSOD was just an example. Anyone with control of a hardware company could as easily insert information stealing technology into either the drivers *or* the hardware. For that matter, the hardware in question could be a whole pre-built PC, with Windows installed...
Remember the fuss a couple of years ago about the "NSA keys" someone found embedded in Windows? It struck me as an incredibly stupid way to get caught, but maybe that was the equivalent of a street magician waving one hand in your face while stealing your watch with the other...
I really don't see the point of his cost benefit analysis of stealing an election.
It simply shows one possible way that such a thing could be financed. Obviously there are multiple other ways, just as there are multiple ways of achieving most things.
wouldn't we have seen more zero-day hacks in circulation
Just to play Devil's Advocate for a moment - suppose that Microsoft's code is close to perfect, and that some (a lot?) of the BSOD's you see are due to black hat trojans/worms/viruses trying to demonize Microsoft in an attempt to crash the US economy...
Disclaimer: I don't particularly like MS Windows, and won't use it unless I have to. I much prefer Gentoo.
Stop and think for a moment - when you buy a new peripheral that comes with a driver CD, do you simply slap the CD in your system and blindly assume that the company it came from is completely innocuous?? Suppose some secret-squirrel government entity were to start a company that built incredibly good sound cards, using technology "acquired" by the parent entity, and suppose the supplied drivers contained some kind of backdoor...
Yeah, I know, that's incredibly paranoid... I don't really believe it myself, but I guess it could happen. I only raise the point to light a fire under the DRM-in-hardware opponents.:)
Yep, that's right. Just as increased airport security will protect us from hijackings... So, anyone remember how far it is from Russia to Alaska? About 50 miles, I think, across the Bering Strait. In other words, a plane hijacked (or even bought) somewhere outside the US, could be stuffed full of terrorists and/or explosives and enter US airspace on a properly logged flightplan...
I don't know if there's a hell of a lot worth bombing in Alaska (oil fields, maybe?) but the plane wouldn't need to stop there. A 747 carries enough fuel to cross the Atlantic - assume it starts fully-fueled from as close to Alaska as possible, and it could reach any major city on the West Coast. What's the seating & cargo capacity of a 747? Load every seat with one passenger-equivalent of C4 (or dynamite, or fuel...) and load up the cargo space too, and you'd more than compensate for the fuel used to reach a major city.
I suppose the same goes for any country, really. I don't think any country is out of reach of a fanatic with a legitimately-owned airplane...
It's also your right to check whether or not your driver's license will stick to a really, really strong magnet.
That'll work right up until the police start carrying driver license scanners in their cars. Pissing off a bartender is trivial compared to the fun you'll have when you get pulled over for some minor offence and have to convince the officer your license isn't a fake when his swipe box can't read it.
So basically, people do know what to expect from a car, and can reognize when something is wrong with it. On the other hand, people do not know what to expect from a computer, and when something is wrong with it (and thus can't have it fixed).
I think I've just figured out why there's such a difference - it's related to what you see on TV and in movies...
Sometimes it's a plot point (e.g. flat battery, flat tire) to get two characters together or to stop a character from doing something, other times it's just part of the background (e.g. car being towed, cops questioning a mechanic). Whatever it is, it reinforces the message that vehicles are not 100% reliable and that trained professionals are available to fix them. Plus, if you buy any fairly recent model car, the salesdroid will try to push an extended warranty on you "for a low, low price", and you'll probably buy it because let's face it, who hasn't been in a vehicle that broke down?? You may have been driving, or you may have been a passenger, but you'll remember that when warrantys are mentioned.
Now contrast that with the computers you see on TV. They're always perfect - no viruses, no mismatched drivers, no BSOD or hard disk failures... They can pull a desktop out of a burned out building, or run a laptop over with a tank, and the experts back at the forensics lab will power it up and within minutes tell you who murdered whom, or where the hostages are, or why there's a large amount of money/drugs stashed away in an empty warehouse across town. You'll never see someone sit down at a PC and bitch about a BSOD, or phone the local PC shop for spare parts, unless that's absolutely essential to the plot.
and shortly ends up running their device on ext3 or some other file system
...which either is, or soon becomes, incompatible with Windows, thereby dooming the company to a niche market. Attempts to get drivers for their ext3 or other file system certified and signed by Microsoft are met with, "yeah, you're in the queue, but there's an 18-month delay due to the volume of requests." In the meantime, users attempting to install the unsigned drivers get a big, fat, hairy warning from Microsoft which says that installing unsigned drivers can completely fsck their systems.
The point being that if Microsoft's FAT patent is upheld, they can selectively support or destroy companies that make those other devices.
How about this scenario: in an effort to enforce DRM, Microsoft recommends to manufacturers of mp3 players that they build in checks for DRM labels that cause non-DRM mp3s to play badly or not at all. Company XYZ chooses not to comply and shortly finds their license to use the FAT filesystem has been revoked.
There may not be criminal penalties, but a patent holder can still sue a patent infringer. And unfortunately, the little guy doing the suing has to have a big warchest simply to start the process. If he wins (or settles out of court), he may get a settlement that looks like a big pile of money, but is in fact mere pocket-change to big business.
Which prompts the question: is the patent holder obliged to license his patent to anyone that asks, or can he grant licenses to some applicants and not to others??
Oh, don't worry, it won't take them long to figure out that they can slap the extra tax on Cat5 cables, switches, routers, and so on, in Best Buy, Circuit City, Walmart, etc. You know, just like that tax you pay on blank recordable media without even thinking about it, which the RIAA collects on the assumption that nobody could possibly want to back up stuff the RIAA doesn'town...
To be perfectly honest, in that situation I would expect to be picked up from the airport and driven to the meeting and/or hotel. After all, if I don't understand the language, chances are I won't be able to mapread and drive safely...
Hmmm... Sounds a bit like a company I used to work for. They build databases of towns and cities so that oil companies can decide where to build new (or refit old) gas stations. They start with detailed maps where possible, but have been known to use low-detail tourist maps if nothing better is available. They also use aerial photos if they can get them without being shot down...
Once the database is complete, the modelling program can estimate volume of gas sales at a given outlet to within about 10% (I think). The model also allows "what-if" scenarios, such as "what if we raise (or lower) prices a certain amount?"
They don't just work in the US, either. I've been to some of their clients offices in Dublin, Oslo, Hamburg, Paris and Vienna. According to one of the data fitters, their maps are sometimes better than what the locals have available... Leaving out the gas station placement part of it, the remainder would make a good start for the tourist location database.
You could also just rent the device as you walk through the airport terminal. It would be pre-loaded with that area's database, and updated every time it was returned. The main database would be kept up-to-date by the building permit office of the city (among others), and the local Dept of Transport could upload diversions due to planned roadworks, etc...
I'm not really convinced about the photo recognition thing, though. Camera orientation, lighting, weather, etc, would all have to be dealt with. I think, at least to start with, the system would be easier to set up using some kind of barcode, maybe on street corner lamp posts or traffic lights.
The device could have either a barcode scanner and look it up in the database immediately, or a camera 'eye' with much simpler image recognition. If it had the camera 'eye' and cellphone capability it could patch you through to a tourist information office if it couldn't identify your location.
Tourist information: "OK, sir, please point the camera left. A bit further? OK, you're at 10th & Main."
I suppose it could even use RFID tags instead of barcodes...
I wonder how long it would be before the devices were available for free to the tourist, paid for by local business advertising...
demand that you confirm...that you will remove the Infringing Material...and that there will be no further publication of the Infringing Material or any other material which infringes...
Kinda sweeping demand, isn't it?? I mean, leaving out the parody aspect for a moment, it seems like they're demanding that Brad promise to police the Internet to make sure that nobody would ever again post anything infringing. Not even whole governments have that much control of the Internet...
Slashdot Mirror
And that's not the whole story, either. The compartments didn't reach high enough in the ship. It didn't matter that the compartments had watertight bulkheads, because as each breached compartment filled, it spilled over the tops of the bulkheads into the next compartment.
So, here's a question for any material scientists in the /. readership - how hard would it be to make a CD unscratchable?? Don't care whether that's after-purchase, or during manufacture.
Rather than disabling audio inputs, they might just leave them out altogether. How many people shopping for a new PC would look for line-in/out, or even a mono-mic socket?? You then find yourself paying the "analog input tax" when you buy the addon card.
...where it will be one of: a) extremely large; b) extremely small; c) a fish...
A bit like the Heineken Uncertainty Principle - you can never be entirely sure how many beers you had last night...
Any bets on the RIAA trying to capitalize on this?? I'm sure they'd love to sell tracks that could only be played once,,.
It would be next to impossible to covertly infiltrate a dorm-room LAN party (laptops and a switch, disconnected from the campus net) and catching someone hand-carrying a sack of CDRs would require stop-and-search, which may or may not be illegal (can campus policy make it legal?), but would certainly catch more people with groceries and books than mp3s.
It's the sharers they're after.
Supposedly it doesn't invade privacy, so theoretically it won't be adware or spyware.... Note I said "theoretically"...
On the other hand, look at the **AA track record for securing things. CSS? Broken open by a Norwegian teenager. CD watermarking systems? Defeated by a number of US University researchers. That crazy invalid-track "protection"?? Defeated by a Sharpie, for crying out loud... And they have the gall to tout this thing as able to protect networks from viruses, Trojan horses and other nefarious activity. "Well, we've fucked up every other way of securing our content, so this one is obviously going to work, right??"
Assuming the **AA don't manage to mandate software installation on all student-owned campus PCs, this ACNS thing is probably going to be defeated by fileswapping LAN parties, or by SneakerNet. To paraphrase Dr Andrew Tanenbaum, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a backpack full of CDRWs".
Remember the fuss a couple of years ago about the "NSA keys" someone found embedded in Windows? It struck me as an incredibly stupid way to get caught, but maybe that was the equivalent of a street magician waving one hand in your face while stealing your watch with the other...
It simply shows one possible way that such a thing could be financed. Obviously there are multiple other ways, just as there are multiple ways of achieving most things.
Didn't someone already complete the recount and showed the Gore won??
Just to play Devil's Advocate for a moment - suppose that Microsoft's code is close to perfect, and that some (a lot?) of the BSOD's you see are due to black hat trojans/worms/viruses trying to demonize Microsoft in an attempt to crash the US economy...
Disclaimer: I don't particularly like MS Windows, and won't use it unless I have to. I much prefer Gentoo.
Stop and think for a moment - when you buy a new peripheral that comes with a driver CD, do you simply slap the CD in your system and blindly assume that the company it came from is completely innocuous?? Suppose some secret-squirrel government entity were to start a company that built incredibly good sound cards, using technology "acquired" by the parent entity, and suppose the supplied drivers contained some kind of backdoor...
Yeah, I know, that's incredibly paranoid... I don't really believe it myself, but I guess it could happen. I only raise the point to light a fire under the DRM-in-hardware opponents. :)
That stuff's not encrypted yet?? I guess they could defeat, or at least limit, that attack by using cellphones...
Yep, that's right. Just as increased airport security will protect us from hijackings... So, anyone remember how far it is from Russia to Alaska? About 50 miles, I think, across the Bering Strait. In other words, a plane hijacked (or even bought) somewhere outside the US, could be stuffed full of terrorists and/or explosives and enter US airspace on a properly logged flightplan...
I don't know if there's a hell of a lot worth bombing in Alaska (oil fields, maybe?) but the plane wouldn't need to stop there. A 747 carries enough fuel to cross the Atlantic - assume it starts fully-fueled from as close to Alaska as possible, and it could reach any major city on the West Coast. What's the seating & cargo capacity of a 747? Load every seat with one passenger-equivalent of C4 (or dynamite, or fuel...) and load up the cargo space too, and you'd more than compensate for the fuel used to reach a major city.
I suppose the same goes for any country, really. I don't think any country is out of reach of a fanatic with a legitimately-owned airplane...
That'll work right up until the police start carrying driver license scanners in their cars. Pissing off a bartender is trivial compared to the fun you'll have when you get pulled over for some minor offence and have to convince the officer your license isn't a fake when his swipe box can't read it.
I think I've just figured out why there's such a difference - it's related to what you see on TV and in movies...
Sometimes it's a plot point (e.g. flat battery, flat tire) to get two characters together or to stop a character from doing something, other times it's just part of the background (e.g. car being towed, cops questioning a mechanic). Whatever it is, it reinforces the message that vehicles are not 100% reliable and that trained professionals are available to fix them. Plus, if you buy any fairly recent model car, the salesdroid will try to push an extended warranty on you "for a low, low price", and you'll probably buy it because let's face it, who hasn't been in a vehicle that broke down?? You may have been driving, or you may have been a passenger, but you'll remember that when warrantys are mentioned.
Now contrast that with the computers you see on TV. They're always perfect - no viruses, no mismatched drivers, no BSOD or hard disk failures... They can pull a desktop out of a burned out building, or run a laptop over with a tank, and the experts back at the forensics lab will power it up and within minutes tell you who murdered whom, or where the hostages are, or why there's a large amount of money/drugs stashed away in an empty warehouse across town. You'll never see someone sit down at a PC and bitch about a BSOD, or phone the local PC shop for spare parts, unless that's absolutely essential to the plot.
...which either is, or soon becomes, incompatible with Windows, thereby dooming the company to a niche market. Attempts to get drivers for their ext3 or other file system certified and signed by Microsoft are met with, "yeah, you're in the queue, but there's an 18-month delay due to the volume of requests." In the meantime, users attempting to install the unsigned drivers get a big, fat, hairy warning from Microsoft which says that installing unsigned drivers can completely fsck their systems.
How about this scenario: in an effort to enforce DRM, Microsoft recommends to manufacturers of mp3 players that they build in checks for DRM labels that cause non-DRM mp3s to play badly or not at all. Company XYZ chooses not to comply and shortly finds their license to use the FAT filesystem has been revoked.
Which prompts the question: is the patent holder obliged to license his patent to anyone that asks, or can he grant licenses to some applicants and not to others??
Oh, don't worry, it won't take them long to figure out that they can slap the extra tax on Cat5 cables, switches, routers, and so on, in Best Buy, Circuit City, Walmart, etc. You know, just like that tax you pay on blank recordable media without even thinking about it, which the RIAA collects on the assumption that nobody could possibly want to back up stuff the RIAA doesn'town...
To be perfectly honest, in that situation I would expect to be picked up from the airport and driven to the meeting and/or hotel. After all, if I don't understand the language, chances are I won't be able to mapread and drive safely...
Once the database is complete, the modelling program can estimate volume of gas sales at a given outlet to within about 10% (I think). The model also allows "what-if" scenarios, such as "what if we raise (or lower) prices a certain amount?"
They don't just work in the US, either. I've been to some of their clients offices in Dublin, Oslo, Hamburg, Paris and Vienna. According to one of the data fitters, their maps are sometimes better than what the locals have available... Leaving out the gas station placement part of it, the remainder would make a good start for the tourist location database.
I'm not really convinced about the photo recognition thing, though. Camera orientation, lighting, weather, etc, would all have to be dealt with. I think, at least to start with, the system would be easier to set up using some kind of barcode, maybe on street corner lamp posts or traffic lights.
The device could have either a barcode scanner and look it up in the database immediately, or a camera 'eye' with much simpler image recognition. If it had the camera 'eye' and cellphone capability it could patch you through to a tourist information office if it couldn't identify your location.
Tourist information: "OK, sir, please point the camera left. A bit further? OK, you're at 10th & Main."
I suppose it could even use RFID tags instead of barcodes...
I wonder how long it would be before the devices were available for free to the tourist, paid for by local business advertising...
Kinda sweeping demand, isn't it?? I mean, leaving out the parody aspect for a moment, it seems like they're demanding that Brad promise to police the Internet to make sure that nobody would ever again post anything infringing. Not even whole governments have that much control of the Internet...