Laymen can check that their votes were counted correctly after the fact. However they can not check what their vote actually was, so a third party can't verify that the layman voted the way they wished.
I read the whole paper, but I didn't entirely follow it. How does the voter verify that their votes were counted correctly? That seems to be what the convoluted nested Russian doll spiel was about.
I also don't see how you can prevent someone from making a phoney ballot. Can't someone just take the public keys and generate a thousand phoney ballots? If the election doesn't turn out the way they would like, they can contest it (look, my ballot wasn't counted). If that's the case, the whole system is useless.
Obviously, the machine has all it needs to generate a ballot, so security of the machine is still critical.
Applications for space flight
on
Son of Concorde
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The biggest cost to space flight is fuel. Most fuel is spend just getting the rest of the fuel off the ground. Of the fuel, 1/8th of the mass is oxygen. It stands to reason, that if we had an air-breathing plane handle the first leg of the journey, we could dramatically reduce the fuel requirements for space flight. It would be great to see something like this used as a launching platform for spacecraft.
And nobody would look at alternative kernels (eg. the BSDs).
From the article:
We need to get our arms around the BSD front. We can only focus so much with our limited energies. Right now, we're focusing on Linux.
We'll get to BSD next year.
$2.2 Billion is the average cost, with R&D expenses divided over the 20 units built (out of 144 units planned). I can't find a reference, but I believe the marginal cost of building one more B-2 is about $600 billion
$2.2 Billion x 144 = $316.8 Billion. How that averages out to $600 Billion for one plane is beyond me. $316.8 Billion spread out across 21 planes is $15 Billion per plane.
I wonder if maybe Best Buy is in the right and has an interest in keeping their items and prices under their hat.
Who cares what Best Buy's interests are? I have an interest in executing anyone who critices me. Does that mean I have the right to do so? No!!!!!
The point here is that Best Buy is trying to censor information they have no right to censor. Bust Buy can not invoke the DMCA unless they have a copyright on the content they wish to control. Facts (e.g. prices) are not copyrightable. Bust Buy knows they have no case. They are simply hoping that FatWallet naively caves into their demands.
The bar for sending out DMCA takedown notices is too low. Takedown notices have real effects on real people's lives. Corporations should face some consequences when they file illegitimate notices.
I think the precedent is the fact that SCO claims GPL is not enforceable. If the court agreed that GPL is a legal license, that will make any challenge in the future against GPL hard or impossible. Which gives open source softwares some legal backings.
So you would bow at the alter of IBM hoping that IBM agrees with your interpretation of the GPL? IBM could present a defense that leads the court to interpret the GPL in a manner far different than you would like.
Albolishing copyright is socialism, a concept where the public automatically owns the work of an author.
Capitalism is all about the free market. Copyright is a regulation of the market. Those who would have the government grant monopolies are anti-capitalist. The fact is, copyright doesn't fall under any of the three big economic ideologies (Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism). You could just as easily say:
Abolishing copyright is capitalism, a concept where people are free to compete by manufacturing any product they want.
I'd like to hear from people who do not want to go back to the moon. Most of the soical programs they advocate funding in place of space exploration have their own difficulties, but maybe there are other reasons they have which get little/no attention.
While I would like to see us advance our space program and return to the moon, I see good reasons to hold off.
Suppose we develop space flight to the point that anyone can go into space. At that point, any country in the world could build its own space program.
Do you know how distressed the US gets when North Korea and Iraq have rockets that can travel a couple hundred miles? Imagine if every country in the world could fire on any target from anywhere they choose. At least we have the ability to shoot down medium range rockets. We can't stop a warhead travelling 16,000 miles per hour.
Its natural vacuum and near-constant illuminated surface allow for massive energy and chemical manufacturing.
The proposed means of transferring energy back to the earth is through microwave radiation. A device capable of transmitting a Gigawatt of power via microwave radiation could be utilized as a weapon of mass destruction.
Let's look at this from a different angle. Another author releases his work into the public domain, but only distributes it to his web site, where he has a click-wrap license agreement: "This work is in the public domain and you may download and use one copy, but you may not copy it, distribute or publish it, or modify it in any way". No use of copyright at all, just the law of contract. Would this contract be considered legally valid? If so, is there a point in copyright at all?
Suppose someone downloads the work, then distributes it in violation of the license agreement. The person they distributed to is not bound by the license, and so they can redistribute all they want. Copyright prevents this sort of behavior.
HOWEVER, if you attempt to exercise any of your intellectual rights regarding your (derivative) work (i.e. publication, distribution, etc) every copy you make of your work will be an infringement of the copyright of the copyright holder of the original.
What does the conditional have to do with anything? If your work is a derivative, every copy violates the original authors rights, regardless of any attempt to enforce your rights.
but if you make a product for production, you charge a hell of a lot of money for it since you know it'll have a limited market. This is designed for consumers and is actually very inexpensive even compared to other consumer jigs.
Market share is irrelavent. The company's real expense is production, not design. People have been making dove-tail joints for centuries. For all we know, they could have used someone else's jig to make theirs.
The reason for restrictions on copying, is that it tends to cost a fortune to design the original. The creator must be able to control the supply in order to recoup the cost of creating the original. That isn't the case with a dove-tail jig.
A strict definition is the government shall not pass any law that restricts the content or distribution of information via the press. Last time I checked, online journalists (who you might say provide press services on the internet) are not restricted what they are or are not allowed to publish.
Well check again. You might want to start with the article:
The third problem with the FBI's letter is that it requests that I not "disclose this request or its contents to anyone."
That sounds like a restriction to me. If Mr. McCullagh had obeyed the letter, this very report of government abuse would have been censored. One must wonder how many times the Justice Department has already pulled this shenanigan.
In this case, the government is exploring their legal rights to determine the source of the material that is being distributed.
The government has no such right. Freedom of the press protects a reporter's right to keep their source confidentional. Again from the article:
Who would confide in a reporter who was nothing but a lackey for Attorney General John Ashcroft?
Freedom of the press is meaningless if reporters can be compelled to act as government informants. Imagine if the publisher of the Federalist Papers were compelled to reveal his source. The very constitution Ashcroft swore to uphold may have never been ratified.
From your own source:
The First Amendment gives the press the right to publish news, information and opinions
without government interference.
But please recall the alleged (then dropped) DMCA charges by Vivendi against bnetd
When did Vivendi drop the bnetd case? I've heard nothing about it. As far as I can tell, the EFF is still working on it.
the group alleging that GenToo was distributing PACMAN.
That was a DMCA takedown notice. They didn't file suit.
Please recall that DMCA allegation are made under the onus of perjury.
According to the law, the only claim the lawyer has to make under penalty of perjury is that they represent the person they claim to represent. They only have to have a "good faith belief" that the rest of the notice is correct.
In case you're interested, I noticed this other very interesting comment shortly after I posted. Apparently Mozart created a set of 1.3e29 sounds two centuries ago.
As for the reverse mapping, you could generate your entire set of sounds (a much smaller set than 1.3e29) and compute the SHA1 hash of each sound. You then have an almost certainly unique key for each sound, which you can map to a number. You can distribute that map with the decoding program. You could even turn the map into a cryptographic key!
This whole thing is getting more and more interesting.
To expand on my own post, suppose you create a set of 256 pleasant sounds. You could take each byte of a file and map it into one of those sounds. Naturally, you could take the sound and map it back to retrieve the original data.
If you had enough volunteers, you could create a set of 65536 sounds, allowing you to map every two bytes to a unique melody. You could generate another set of sounds to transition from one melody to another.
To get more complex, you could have one part of the data set the beat, another set the pace, and another set the style.
This sounds like it would be really nifty. I could see an entire open source project springing up around this.
About ten years ago, I heard about a system that took samples of music and played them pseudorandomly. The system was used in gaming. During combat, the system tended to play intense music. When the player was loafing around, the system played more relaxing music. People apparently found the sound very pleasing.
Mr. Matthews could and should change his system to generate real music rather than scrambled garbage. He could even enhance the system so it plays different sets of instruments based on the MD5 sum, for example.
Suppose Mr. Matthews were to create such a system. Suppose he were to stream open source software from an internet radio station. Suppose lots of people tuned in to listen to it. Would that count as music?
Uh, ever heard of incitement to commit a crime? That's a crime too, ya know.
Inciting someone (or a crowd) to commit a crime is not illegal unless it creates a clear and present danger. Clear meaning the expression will almost certainly motivate the audiance to commit a crime. For example:
"That Hergenhahn bastard raped three girls, chopped up their bodies, and served their flesh at his restaurant. Two witnesses saw it. He confessed. Yet the judge let him off on a technicality. The sheriff is out of town right now. Let's all cart this scissors over to Hergenhahn's house and show that pedophile some justice!"
Present meaning it would incite the crime before anyone has an opportunity to counter the expression.
It is not at all clear that GTA incites crime. Millions of kids play it, yet over 99.9% of them have never killed anyone. Even if GTA were a clear danger, the parents certainly had an opportunity to explain that the game does not reflect reality.
it is clear that the game influenced them by giving them ideas.
Do you want to back that up with some evidence?
Even if it's true, it isn't against the law to give out ideas. In fact it's a constitutional right.
Re:We really need a different language
on
Secure Programming
·
· Score: 1
Did you do an opinion poll to get that bit of FUD? Or is it just that your next door neighbour open source coder an arrogant SOB? Fuckwad.
I posted several similar comments on Slashdot and got quite a few responses asserting that security holes are due to stupid programmers. The moderations on the grandparent comment say it all.
We really need a different language
on
Secure Programming
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
The most common security hole is a buffer overflow. OpenBSD is well regarded as one of the most secure systems in the world. It was extensively audited, yet it still had a remote root exploit. And what type of exploit was it? A buffer overflow!
Buffer overflows should not happen in the first place. In most languages, they are impossible. They happen because A) most code is written in C or C++, and B) everyone makes mistakes (even the finest open source developers overlook simple buffer overflows).
Microsoft is moving to languages with managed types. If they had been using managed types all along, the overwhelming majority of Microsoft security holes would have never happened. In a few years, Microsoft software will be more secure than anything Open Source has to offer.
Open Source developers, on the other hand, arrogantly believe that they are immune to mistakes. They somehow overlook the countless exploits discovered in their own code (more than 500 in Debian over the past 4 years).
It is time for open source to wake up and start using better tools and better practices.
The DMCA grants Online Service Providers immunity from some forms of copyright infringement. To maintain safe harbor status, the OSP must register with the copyright office, assign someone to take DMCA complaints, inform users of their policies, and comply with takedown requests. As far as those requirements go, Google is in compliance.
However, as soon as an OSP takes control of their content and/or sells the content, they lose safe harbor status for that content. So it is possible Google could be held liable for their sponsored links even if they comply with takedown notices.
Could this be the most effective attempt on their part, so far? It's hard to argue against them, without being labelled as a supporter of kiddie-porn.
If you can't argue against them, argue along side them. The purpose of copyright is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". If congress opposes pornography, why do they promote it with copyrights? The RIAA is not going to be happy if congress cancels copyrights on all sexually-explicit material.
On their About Us page, you'll learn that Technology Review has been a publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1899
That page says, "Since 1899, Technology Review has been MIT's magazine of innovation." Notice how they don't explain what the initials stand for. It appears however, that the publication has been around long enough to predate a trademark on "MIT".
They never refer to their parent as Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They always say MIT. The only place they spell the name out is when referring to the board members (some of whom are associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). In that case they go to great lengths to spell it out.
At any rate, their parent organization is the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I found an article which explains their apparent downward spiral from "most credible" to the garbage they spew out today.
Regardless of their (non)relationship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they still have no credibility. They consider advertising 26 times more important than fact checking. As far as I can tell, there is no peer-review. Their articles read like paid advertisements (it wouldn't surprise me if they are paid advertisements).
The editor-in-chief is a big-time media whore.
The CEO formerly worked for Time and Fortune. Prior to that he was involved in T.V. Entertainment and TV Sports. His great accomplishments were to increase circulation and revenue.
Their home page is an advertisement. All of their other pages are bursting with advertisements. It is clear where Technology Review's priorities lie, and it is not with reporting the truth.
I think their title is a bit misleading. They call themselves MIT Technology Review, but I can't find any relationship between them and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I also can't find what the MIT in their name is supposed to mean.
If you look at their staff list, you will notice they have ONE fact checker and 21 people involved in marketing and sales.
I give this article about as much credibility as I gave the last several MIT Technology Review articles posted here on Slashdot. In other words, none.
All I ask that they please write it in a language other than C or C++. Linux has tons of security holes. Most of those security holes exist only because the software was written in one of the least secure languages in the industry.
A programming language is an interface between the machine and the programmer. If a language makes security holes nearly impossible to avoid, you need a better language.
Slashdot Mirror
I read the whole paper, but I didn't entirely follow it. How does the voter verify that their votes were counted correctly? That seems to be what the convoluted nested Russian doll spiel was about.
I also don't see how you can prevent someone from making a phoney ballot. Can't someone just take the public keys and generate a thousand phoney ballots? If the election doesn't turn out the way they would like, they can contest it (look, my ballot wasn't counted). If that's the case, the whole system is useless.
Obviously, the machine has all it needs to generate a ballot, so security of the machine is still critical.
The biggest cost to space flight is fuel. Most fuel is spend just getting the rest of the fuel off the ground. Of the fuel, 1/8th of the mass is oxygen. It stands to reason, that if we had an air-breathing plane handle the first leg of the journey, we could dramatically reduce the fuel requirements for space flight. It would be great to see something like this used as a launching platform for spacecraft.
From the article:
$2.2 Billion x 144 = $316.8 Billion. How that averages out to $600 Billion for one plane is beyond me. $316.8 Billion spread out across 21 planes is $15 Billion per plane.
Who cares what Best Buy's interests are? I have an interest in executing anyone who critices me. Does that mean I have the right to do so? No!!!!!
The point here is that Best Buy is trying to censor information they have no right to censor. Bust Buy can not invoke the DMCA unless they have a copyright on the content they wish to control. Facts (e.g. prices) are not copyrightable. Bust Buy knows they have no case. They are simply hoping that FatWallet naively caves into their demands.
The bar for sending out DMCA takedown notices is too low. Takedown notices have real effects on real people's lives. Corporations should face some consequences when they file illegitimate notices.
So you would bow at the alter of IBM hoping that IBM agrees with your interpretation of the GPL? IBM could present a defense that leads the court to interpret the GPL in a manner far different than you would like.
Capitalism is all about the free market. Copyright is a regulation of the market. Those who would have the government grant monopolies are anti-capitalist. The fact is, copyright doesn't fall under any of the three big economic ideologies (Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism). You could just as easily say:
While I would like to see us advance our space program and return to the moon, I see good reasons to hold off.
Suppose we develop space flight to the point that anyone can go into space. At that point, any country in the world could build its own space program.
Do you know how distressed the US gets when North Korea and Iraq have rockets that can travel a couple hundred miles? Imagine if every country in the world could fire on any target from anywhere they choose. At least we have the ability to shoot down medium range rockets. We can't stop a warhead travelling 16,000 miles per hour.
Its natural vacuum and near-constant illuminated surface allow for massive energy and chemical manufacturing.
The proposed means of transferring energy back to the earth is through microwave radiation. A device capable of transmitting a Gigawatt of power via microwave radiation could be utilized as a weapon of mass destruction.
Suppose someone downloads the work, then distributes it in violation of the license agreement. The person they distributed to is not bound by the license, and so they can redistribute all they want. Copyright prevents this sort of behavior.
What does the conditional have to do with anything? If your work is a derivative, every copy violates the original authors rights, regardless of any attempt to enforce your rights.
Market share is irrelavent. The company's real expense is production, not design. People have been making dove-tail joints for centuries. For all we know, they could have used someone else's jig to make theirs.
The reason for restrictions on copying, is that it tends to cost a fortune to design the original. The creator must be able to control the supply in order to recoup the cost of creating the original. That isn't the case with a dove-tail jig.
Well check again. You might want to start with the article:
That sounds like a restriction to me. If Mr. McCullagh had obeyed the letter, this very report of government abuse would have been censored. One must wonder how many times the Justice Department has already pulled this shenanigan.
In this case, the government is exploring their legal rights to determine the source of the material that is being distributed.
The government has no such right. Freedom of the press protects a reporter's right to keep their source confidentional. Again from the article:
Freedom of the press is meaningless if reporters can be compelled to act as government informants. Imagine if the publisher of the Federalist Papers were compelled to reveal his source. The very constitution Ashcroft swore to uphold may have never been ratified.
From your own source:
When did Vivendi drop the bnetd case? I've heard nothing about it. As far as I can tell, the EFF is still working on it.
the group alleging that GenToo was distributing PACMAN.
That was a DMCA takedown notice. They didn't file suit.
Please recall that DMCA allegation are made under the onus of perjury.
According to the law, the only claim the lawyer has to make under penalty of perjury is that they represent the person they claim to represent. They only have to have a "good faith belief" that the rest of the notice is correct.
As for the reverse mapping, you could generate your entire set of sounds (a much smaller set than 1.3e29) and compute the SHA1 hash of each sound. You then have an almost certainly unique key for each sound, which you can map to a number. You can distribute that map with the decoding program. You could even turn the map into a cryptographic key!
This whole thing is getting more and more interesting.
If you had enough volunteers, you could create a set of 65536 sounds, allowing you to map every two bytes to a unique melody. You could generate another set of sounds to transition from one melody to another.
To get more complex, you could have one part of the data set the beat, another set the pace, and another set the style.
This sounds like it would be really nifty. I could see an entire open source project springing up around this.
Mr. Matthews could and should change his system to generate real music rather than scrambled garbage. He could even enhance the system so it plays different sets of instruments based on the MD5 sum, for example.
Suppose Mr. Matthews were to create such a system. Suppose he were to stream open source software from an internet radio station. Suppose lots of people tuned in to listen to it. Would that count as music?
Inciting someone (or a crowd) to commit a crime is not illegal unless it creates a clear and present danger. Clear meaning the expression will almost certainly motivate the audiance to commit a crime. For example:
Present meaning it would incite the crime before anyone has an opportunity to counter the expression.
It is not at all clear that GTA incites crime. Millions of kids play it, yet over 99.9% of them have never killed anyone. Even if GTA were a clear danger, the parents certainly had an opportunity to explain that the game does not reflect reality.
Do you want to back that up with some evidence?
Even if it's true, it isn't against the law to give out ideas. In fact it's a constitutional right.
I posted several similar comments on Slashdot and got quite a few responses asserting that security holes are due to stupid programmers. The moderations on the grandparent comment say it all.
Buffer overflows should not happen in the first place. In most languages, they are impossible. They happen because A) most code is written in C or C++, and B) everyone makes mistakes (even the finest open source developers overlook simple buffer overflows).
Microsoft is moving to languages with managed types. If they had been using managed types all along, the overwhelming majority of Microsoft security holes would have never happened. In a few years, Microsoft software will be more secure than anything Open Source has to offer.
Open Source developers, on the other hand, arrogantly believe that they are immune to mistakes. They somehow overlook the countless exploits discovered in their own code (more than 500 in Debian over the past 4 years).
It is time for open source to wake up and start using better tools and better practices.
However, as soon as an OSP takes control of their content and/or sells the content, they lose safe harbor status for that content. So it is possible Google could be held liable for their sponsored links even if they comply with takedown notices.
More information at Chilling Effects.
If you can't argue against them, argue along side them. The purpose of copyright is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". If congress opposes pornography, why do they promote it with copyrights? The RIAA is not going to be happy if congress cancels copyrights on all sexually-explicit material.
That page says, "Since 1899, Technology Review has been MIT's magazine of innovation." Notice how they don't explain what the initials stand for. It appears however, that the publication has been around long enough to predate a trademark on "MIT".
They never refer to their parent as Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They always say MIT. The only place they spell the name out is when referring to the board members (some of whom are associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). In that case they go to great lengths to spell it out.
At any rate, their parent organization is the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I found an article which explains their apparent downward spiral from "most credible" to the garbage they spew out today.
Regardless of their (non)relationship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they still have no credibility. They consider advertising 26 times more important than fact checking. As far as I can tell, there is no peer-review. Their articles read like paid advertisements (it wouldn't surprise me if they are paid advertisements).
The editor-in-chief is a big-time media whore.
The CEO formerly worked for Time and Fortune. Prior to that he was involved in T.V. Entertainment and TV Sports. His great accomplishments were to increase circulation and revenue.
Their home page is an advertisement. All of their other pages are bursting with advertisements. It is clear where Technology Review's priorities lie, and it is not with reporting the truth.
If you look at their staff list, you will notice they have ONE fact checker and 21 people involved in marketing and sales.
I give this article about as much credibility as I gave the last several MIT Technology Review articles posted here on Slashdot. In other words, none.
A programming language is an interface between the machine and the programmer. If a language makes security holes nearly impossible to avoid, you need a better language.