Survivor: Rura' Penthe' - The future of television
on
Indoor Tropical Island
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· Score: 1
Yeah, I'd spend my vacation there! Unfortunately, Survivor has booked the whole place for the 387th season. You pay for your ticket, then they vote you off. The title is slated to be
Survivor: Rip-Off Island.
No, actually this season is rumored to be a joint production with the Klingon Empire's Tourism Board (also plagued by economic concerns, cf. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country), called Survivor: Rura' Penthe': Due to the dome, the audience gets the best of both worlds, as candidates have bat'leth fights for their lives in the jungle, and everyone voted out is simply escorted outside, where "the snow is blowing sideways", in their swimsuits... The new "forest" and "exterior" cameras introduced for these special occasions are expected to become a highly popular pay-per-view feature...;-)
Which leads to an interesting situation: Samsumg will be shipping all of their flawed displays outside of S. Korea. So rather than Samsung being the display that you should want to buy, it should be the display that you should avoid.
It should take no more than one phone call to Samsung by every reader who's been getting this impression from the annoucement. Someone may be fired for running them into a public relations nightmare outside South Korea anyway, but as there's no turning back without turning away customers, this way at least you'll certainly see the policy extented to the rest of the world (and followed by other manufacturers as well), probably no later than by Monday night or so...;-)
Enforce RFID by insinuating (in the "good" old war-on-terror way of "reasoning") that "concerned customers are just crooks who have something to hide"...
"To avoid banning home computers", make it compulsory for all software to be approved and electronically signed by M$ or one of a few other megacorps - as hardly anyone believes in the piracy pretext for DRM, "fighting forgeries" comes in handy as the badly-needed new excuse...
All of which helps to make people quite literally buy their own surveillance state, and "elegantly" disposes of Open Source on the way. For end results cf. "peaceful San Angeles under Dr. Cocteau" in Demolition Man...;-(
That makes no sense. Owning the Commodore brand doesn't give them any right to sue people copying C64/Amiga games.
They seem to try and use the trademark (which means that even without any copyright, they might have a case with respect to the firmware, operating system and other code supplied by the manufacturer at least) - and I really hate to see my predictions come true in a scenario like this...
...not only would this inventor be famous (the word "rich" is rather secondary indeed), but also every one of us would have up to thirty years of digital (quite possibly even: video!) recordings of the key moments in our lives, lacking which therefore is yet another true tragedy. As it seems, one more case to prove that the intellectual property regime as we know it is not always the best way to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
If the chip refuses to divulge the data until you've successfully authenticated yourself via a cryptographic challenge/response protocol, just having a reader won't do any good.
Although the govenrnment is not talking about cryptographic protection on reads (though they really, really should), they certainly will configure the chips to require a strong authentication for writes. It's very unlikely that you'll ever be able to modify the data on a passport like you could if it were encoded on a magnetic medium. And you could read it with easily-available equipment today, assuming the chip is willing to cough up the data.
So which would be a valid reason to assume this added complexity could actually enhance security?
Even on today's 3+ GHz PCs it is difficult (at best) to ensure watertight security - how can one reasonably expect to find the "perfect, proven unbreakable crypto" implemented in a sub-1$ RFID chip that may only have a few milliseconds of power to compute and transmit its replies?
And even if this did exist...
Theft may occur on every airport, every day - even huge pieces of luggage are easily just carried away in many places on this planet
Entire hard disks full of classified data have reportedly disappeared in maximum-security nuke labs
Entire five-foot tall ATMs are rumored to have been pulled off their foundations on a chain, in front of or even inside banks, and disappeared on the back of some pick-up truck
So, is it reasonable to assume that not even one "government-approved" portable RFID reader, maybe no more than 5 inches in size or so, will ever leave the hands and premises of airport security, and be put to illegitimate use elsewhere? For if it does, anyone in its possession could probably use it (with all the "official" cryptographic protection included) to single out very specific victims from a crowd, e.g. to direct whatever evil deed he is plotting against, say, "male caucasian blue-eyed baptist Texans age 40-65" only.
Where is the advantage to justify the use of a technology that brings about this kind of risk - when a 2D (or even conventional) bar code can serve the same purpose of contactless readability, but is much more easily concealed from unauthorized prying eyes?
The State Department says it may use the principle to give travelers an added
sense of security.
In other words, actual (increased) security is not what's been promised - rather, just the perception of it.
Really weird how one could choose to adopt this kind of technology (especially as -unlike a bar code- it is creating other risks for the holder) in the first place, under these circumstances...
In the countries considering RFID (US and many more, unfortunately), the governments' thinking with respect to RFID seems to be flawed in many ways:
They (incorrectly to their own knowledge) deny implications of RFID (in passports or otherwise) for the bearer's personal safety
They want to force RFID chips inside passports
Then they promise to shield it so the passport needs to be opened anyway - but could still be identified as e.g. a US one even when closed, and potentially still be read out with special (i.e. simply more powerful and/or sensitive) equipment, despite the apparent perception of security
Unlike with optical reading, where the document can simply be put out of sight, the bearer has no way of knowing whether and when an RFID shield actually works
Why pretend that only governments (or "the good guys" in general) would be able to procure RFID readers? This technology is not rocket science, and it could be every thug's dream come true (especially as the European Central Bank even seems to consider putting it into their money) - so "finally" for the nastier elements of society, remote assessment of who might be a "promising" victim e.g. for abduction, robbery or worse becomes possible
So there is always certain inconvenience -if not danger- to the bearer, but not a single valid reason for embedding RFID into a passport:
If it needs to be opened anyway, and faster machine-readability than with the current (already standardized) printed text is required, a simple printed barcode would do, at much greater reliability. Make no mistake, if RFID is enforced even though it does not have any benefit in the proposed application, there have to be ulterior motives for its use - then, however, it is no conspiracy theory to suggest that future mischief is implied in this scenario.
The site claims they'll be available next month (minimum order 100,000 units)
This the level that many retailers buy at. You're looking at Walmart, Target, Circuit City, Best Buy, etc., numbers.
But first of all, just put it on ThinkGeek instead - with Slashdot's user base close to the 7-digits, and certainly more than one out of ten ready to pre-order at a month's wait or so, the "kick-off quantity" could easily be reached by buyers from this site alone: a Slashdot effect in development funding...
And as the production lines just keep running, every first-world sale at $150 could subsidize a $50 half-price unit for countries that could otherwise hardly afford one even at $100.
Re:The contest,months of waiting...for a RED FLAG?
on
NetBSD Chooses New Logo
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Seems to me they wanted to be so neutral, so inoffensive to everyone in the entire world that they picked a logo that means nothing.
And then while they might insist this is "just orange", what they did pick looks awfully similar to a red flag, raising the specter of all the atrocities that have been committed in its name. BTW Mozilla ditched the red star for this very reason.
Neutral? Inoffensive? How "good" intentions often go terribly wrong (if the ones you name ever really were more than epitomes of "political correctness")...
And moreover, this one's already taken.
I
would gladly contribute to such a slashdotting, but if, and ONLY if syncML support is included. It is utterly pointless for me to get a PDA that can't sync with my computers. I should be able to use a standard calendaring and contact piece of software and sync with the unit, preferably via bluetooth, which isn't bundled with the unit (granted, it could be added).
Ask them for it, ask them about it, what else do I have to say? That's all up to Sharp, and this is their URL. What greater favor could you do them than saving them the money for a market study, as without ever even commissioning it, "the market" itself, one by one, simply mails this "study" to them?
There is no news as to whether Sharp will release this ludicrously desirable toy in the West, but I'm not hopeful personally.
As it has already been proposed more than once, the way to get a clamshell Zaurus in Europe and in the US is to let Sharp know about it. It only takes everyone on Slashdot asking the manufacturer about this once at least, and telling all their geek friends who would like to get this device as well to do the same... this will convincingly demonstrate the market potential and make bringing the line to the rest of the world an obvious business case.
OTOH, if you do not contact them, you may have to use WinCE and its siblings for the rest of your days. Well, the choice is yours, just don't say you never had one...;-/
The future is not set.
There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. John Connor 2029 AD
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.
One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
If the effect of higher temperature is equivalent to that achieved by lower pressure: could a material like this have the properties to be used as a liquid layer between an inner and an outer hull of a vessel in space (practicalities of getting it up there aside for the purposes of this argument of course) - so in case of a breach, the resulting drop in pressure would cause it to solidify around the point of an impact (e.g. of debris or micro-meteorites) exposing it to the vacuum, thus sealing the leak?
I just got married, and
my wife and I are putting together a home network in the (small) apartment we're now living in. We're both long-time FreeBSD users, so installing a *nix system is no big deal
First of all, congratulations on getting your geek girl...;-)
Since the WAF might be an issue even in this case, mini-itx.com should be a place to look for, where you'll find boards with two Ethernet ports like these. In general, fanless solutions targetted at the industrial (IPC) market come with a higher price tag, but they are advisable as you'll have no noise, failing fans or dust buildup to worry about. You might also like to look at e.g. Samsung 's SV series 5400rpm HDDs (current models 1203, 1604) which seem to be both reliable and silent.
How exactly does this technology turn the visitors of the park in to "serfs"? How does it make them property of the park?
Did I say literally? Then read my parent post again: It's all about analogy and an allusion (as always, those who don't get it mod it as troll), and we all should know the answer if someone asked what putting an RFID on a living being rather compares to:
a way of treating
customers
or
a way of treating cattle?
If THIS is not open to abuse, then what is?!
on
RFID Not Just for Kids
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· Score: 0, Troll
Can the park individually track where you are? probably, but it's their right to do so - you've voluntarily entered their private property after all, and paid for the privilege. Can they track your preferences within the park? probably.
Next time you entermy private property, remind me that by doing so you have also become my private property - as by your reasoning, you will thus have been reduced to serfdom, and indeed even have to pay for that "privilege"...;-/
So what's next - nanoprobe injections and assimilation chambers at the gates of entertainment sites?!:-(((
What it really amounts to is that if you do not "voluntarily" submit to Trusted Computing and turn over control of your computer you will be locked out.
Intel Outlines Strategy For Making The Internet Smarter, Safer, More Reliable And Useful (...) This would transform the Internet from a data transmission pipe into a vast platform for hosting a wide array of services available [add: for ________ $ / __ (+ your immortal soul where applicable)?, ed.] to the world's six billion inhabitants. Gelsinger referred to this approach as the ability to provide planetary-scale services. (...)
we are confident that we now can begin deploying and testing revolutionary, planetary-scale commercial services that will change the way business is done on the Internet. (...)
"A planetary-scale overlay of computational services would open the Internet up to a new era of innovation while complementing other Internet initiatives," Gelsinger added. "It would provide a platform on which Web services can run and a way to connect grid computing sites and utility data centers. It sits above the new physical infrastructure supplied by Internet 2 and above the networking layer where IPv6 functions, adding a new stratum of higher-level functionality to the Internet."
Oh, glad it's only about World Domination!;-) Nothing scary there, just what almost every computer company strives for. How reassuring... SCNR
Whoever wrote this may not have been stood up in front of a firing squad yet, but hopefully he's been sacked by now:
"Beware of the End of the World (Wide Web)," Says Intel
Yet bad HTML and childish language are the least of this blurb's problems - even the dot.com bubble in its heyday has probably never produced an article so full of vapor and devoid of the slightest piece of information at all:
the Internet will begin to collapse as millions of new computer users from developing nations begin to sign on.
"We're running up on some architectural limitations," Gelsinger was quoted as saying.
Gelsinger's solution is to build a new network over the current Internet, that would monitor and direct traffic and better fight security threats or traffic surges.
So how does one sum up this little "gem"?
As "Erm, vaguely, something, some day"?!
An while they are at it, how about defining the out-of-context "collapse" and "some architectural limitations" for this article to have any meaning whatsoever?
However, Cisco
controls most of the routers and switchers comprising the current web, and it may have other ideas.
OMG. Aren't we all just stunned by the writer's clarity, precision and thorough understanding of all things technical...
If there's an "anti-Pulitzer", a prize for the worst misachievements in journalism, Forbes&FinancialWire may just have given us a very promising "Candidate of the Year".
I wonder if anyone's thought of a name for this planet? (...) Life there would posess super-human strength as an adaptation to the enormous gravity. Were inhabitants of this planet to visit Earth, they would be faster than a speeding bullet, and stronger than a locomotive. I wager they'd be able to jump tall buildings with a single bound.
So since Krypton is already taken and any proposal on/. is bound to pay tribute to the home computer era of the 1980s, from your description of the life forms and their presumable favorite tourist activity on Earth, this planet's most appropriate name would quite obviously have to be... Rampage;-)
This should also have strong repercussions on the current policies and Terms&Conditions in many broadband plans where providers assert a "right to snoop" and monitor (or even just meter) their customers' connections and usage patterns.
As this decision unequivocally spells out, morbid curiosity & control frenzy can only be considered legally and economically suicidal, as they are a surefire recipe for providers to expose themselves to claims for respondeat superior vicarious liability.
So all providers should stop wasting resources on keeping under surveillance and curtailing P2P, but rather just offer pure and simple unmetered flatrate plans instead - where they can forget about Intellectual Property issues, and put their "network security" staff to better use for finally tracking down and terminating all spammers...
But since they are probably selling songs at a loss around $0.49, I just hope for real (or should that be with a capital R) that Microsoft hasn't patented "Limiting downloads of popular content to 2.5 million a day (even if everybody needs them)" [penguins spared, ed.] yet...
as copyright has become now that the legal landscape has so brutally been overturned to the detriment of consumers, "The study basically recommends not changing the copyright legislation in favor of any particular stakeholder."
To put it in other words, "now that the power has been shifted solely to one side, just keep it that way forever."
Fair and equitable, reasonable and well-balanced, huh? Certainly from a pigopolist's point of view, but I'm not so sure about how this status quo is supposed to benefit the rest of "us the people."
Slashdot Mirror
- Enforce RFID by insinuating (in the "good" old war-on-terror way of "reasoning") that "concerned customers are just crooks who have something to hide"...
- "To avoid banning home computers", make it compulsory for all software to be approved and electronically signed by M$ or one of a few other megacorps - as hardly anyone believes in the piracy pretext for DRM, "fighting forgeries" comes in handy as the badly-needed new excuse...
All of which helps to make people quite literally buy their own surveillance state, and "elegantly" disposes of Open Source on the way.For end results cf. "peaceful San Angeles under Dr. Cocteau" in Demolition Man...
They can't "sue those people" because they are "those people".
They seem to try and use the trademark (which means that even without any copyright, they might have a case with respect to the firmware, operating system and other code supplied by the manufacturer at least) - and I really hate to see my predictions come true in a scenario like this...
...not only would this inventor be famous (the word "rich" is rather secondary indeed), but also every one of us would have up to thirty years of digital (quite possibly even: video!) recordings of the key moments in our lives, lacking which therefore is yet another true tragedy. As it seems, one more case to prove that the intellectual property regime as we know it is not always the best way to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
- Theft may occur on every airport, every day - even huge pieces of luggage are easily just carried away in many places on this planet
- Entire hard disks full of classified data have reportedly disappeared in maximum-security nuke labs
- Entire five-foot tall ATMs are rumored to have been pulled off their foundations on a chain, in front of or even inside banks, and disappeared on the back of some pick-up truck
So, is it reasonable to assume that not even one "government-approved" portable RFID reader, maybe no more than 5 inches in size or so, will ever leave the hands and premises of airport security, and be put to illegitimate use elsewhere? For if it does, anyone in its possession could probably use it (with all the "official" cryptographic protection included) to single out very specific victims from a crowd, e.g. to direct whatever evil deed he is plotting against, say, "male caucasian blue-eyed baptist Texans age 40-65" only.Where is the advantage to justify the use of a technology that brings about this kind of risk - when a 2D (or even conventional) bar code can serve the same purpose of contactless readability, but is much more easily concealed from unauthorized prying eyes?
Really weird how one could choose to adopt this kind of technology (especially as -unlike a bar code- it is creating other risks for the holder) in the first place, under these circumstances...
- They (incorrectly to their own knowledge) deny implications of RFID (in passports or otherwise) for the bearer's personal safety
- They want to force RFID chips inside passports
- Then they promise to shield it so the passport needs to be opened anyway - but could still be identified as e.g. a US one even when closed, and potentially still be read out with special (i.e. simply more powerful and/or sensitive) equipment, despite the apparent perception of security
- Unlike with optical reading, where the document can simply be put out of sight, the bearer has no way of knowing whether and when an RFID shield actually works
- Why pretend that only governments (or "the good guys" in general) would be able to procure RFID readers? This technology is not rocket science, and it could be every thug's dream come true (especially as the European Central Bank even seems to consider putting it into their money) - so "finally" for the nastier elements of society, remote assessment of who might be a "promising" victim e.g. for abduction, robbery or worse becomes possible
So there is always certain inconvenience -if not danger- to the bearer, but not a single valid reason for embedding RFID into a passport: If it needs to be opened anyway, and faster machine-readability than with the current (already standardized) printed text is required, a simple printed barcode would do, at much greater reliability. Make no mistake, if RFID is enforced even though it does not have any benefit in the proposed application, there have to be ulterior motives for its use - then, however, it is no conspiracy theory to suggest that future mischief is implied in this scenario.And as the production lines just keep running, every first-world sale at $150 could subsidize a $50 half-price unit for countries that could otherwise hardly afford one even at $100.
And then while they might insist this is "just orange", what they did pick looks awfully similar to a red flag, raising the specter of all the atrocities that have been committed in its name. BTW Mozilla ditched the red star for this very reason. Neutral? Inoffensive? How "good" intentions often go terribly wrong (if the ones you name ever really were more than epitomes of "political correctness")... And moreover, this one's already taken.
It's not that nobody wanted a Zaurus - there just seem to be too few customers interested in a full-fledged Linux-system if it is confined to this "Palm-like shape": Instead of pulling their technology altogether, Sharp finally ought to start selling the clamshell models outside Japan as well - let them know what you would buy!
OTOH, if you do not contact them, you may have to use WinCE and its siblings for the rest of your days. Well, the choice is yours, just don't say you never had one...
If the effect of higher temperature is equivalent to that achieved by lower pressure: could a material like this have the properties to be used as a liquid layer between an inner and an outer hull of a vessel in space (practicalities of getting it up there aside for the purposes of this argument of course) - so in case of a breach, the resulting drop in pressure would cause it to solidify around the point of an impact (e.g. of debris or micro-meteorites) exposing it to the vacuum, thus sealing the leak?
Did I say literally? Then read my parent post again: It's all about analogy and an allusion (as always, those who don't get it mod it as troll), and we all should know the answer if someone asked what putting an RFID on a living being rather compares to:
Next time you enter my private property, remind me that by doing so you have also become my private property - as by your reasoning, you will thus have been reduced to serfdom, and indeed even have to pay for that "privilege"... ;-/
So what's next - nanoprobe injections and assimilation chambers at the gates of entertainment sites?! :-(((
Nothing scary there, just what almost every computer company strives for.
How reassuring...
SCNR
As "Erm, vaguely, something, some day"?!
An while they are at it, how about defining the out-of-context "collapse" and "some architectural limitations" for this article to have any meaning whatsoever?
OMG. Aren't we all just stunned by the writer's clarity, precision and thorough understanding of all things technical...
If there's an "anti-Pulitzer", a prize for the worst misachievements in journalism, Forbes&FinancialWire may just have given us a very promising "Candidate of the Year".
So since Krypton is already taken and any proposal on /. is bound to pay tribute to the home computer era of the 1980s, from your description of the life forms and their presumable favorite tourist activity on Earth, this planet's most appropriate name would quite obviously have to be... Rampage ;-)
As this decision unequivocally spells out, morbid curiosity & control frenzy can only be considered legally and economically suicidal, as they are a surefire recipe for providers to expose themselves to claims for respondeat superior vicarious liability.
So all providers should stop wasting resources on keeping under surveillance and curtailing P2P, but rather just offer pure and simple unmetered flatrate plans instead - where they can forget about Intellectual Property issues, and put their "network security" staff to better use for finally tracking down and terminating all spammers...
But since they are probably selling songs at a loss around $0.49, I just hope for real (or should that be with a capital R) that Microsoft hasn't patented "Limiting downloads of popular content to 2.5 million a day (even if everybody needs them)" [penguins spared, ed.] yet...
as copyright has become now that the legal landscape has so brutally been overturned to the detriment of consumers, "The study basically recommends not changing the copyright legislation in favor of any particular stakeholder."
To put it in other words, "now that the power has been shifted solely to one side, just keep it that way forever."
Fair and equitable, reasonable and well-balanced, huh?
Certainly from a pigopolist's point of view, but I'm not so sure about how this status quo is supposed to benefit the rest of "us the people."