I really hope these extras SciFi is providing pays off for them in the end. This sort of thing is exactly what so many people have been asking for, the fact they are willing to take the risk and go for it is very impressive. I hope it generates some profit for them and they can take it to the next level and maybe influence how every channel does TV.
My personal hope is they end up allowing downloads for all the previous season's episodes. Maybe in a lower resolution and without extras to provide incentive for people to buy the DVDs when they come out. It's probably a pipe dream, but it seems more likely given what SciFi has already done.
This sounds an awful lot like the great firewall of china. The article says that ISPs must be able to block any site that is on a "harmful to children" list, if the customer so desires. Well there goes half the internet. How long before the children figure out proxy servers? Or go to a friend's house whos parents don't block the sites. Also it sounds like the bill only applies to websites, not other traffic like streaming video, IRC, p2p, etc, all of which contain that same 'harmful to children' content.
I say leave this as a parent's responsibility and leave the ISPs out of it.
...if it passes. As I see it, voting is something that needs to be taken more seriously in this country, and this bill would be a decent step forward. I like the fact there would be criminal penalties for interfering with an election, and I like the hardware and software standards that would be applied.
Personally I don't see why both sides of the fence aren't jumping to support this. The Dems want it in place to reduce the number of fubar'ed elections and the Reps should want it so when the next election comes around they can actually prove they won. There would be more work, and it isn't a magic solution to the problems (both reasons why it might not pass), but it is a good start.
I just wished they had linked to the researchers or the academic paper. I have a hard time taking things in the news at face value, especially about something like this
(disclaimer: Yes, I know there is global warming, I'm just not sure it's all the humans' fault)
Consider for a moment that there exists a god. He (she or it, whatever) is basically our caretaker, maybe even our creator. Here's the deal though, nobody really knows anything about him, and I'd wager to say anyone who thinks they know anything is pretty fscking arrogant. What if (yes, this is just a theory), god doesn't really have great influential power in the universe (i.e. can't make the moon fall out of the sky in one night, or hurl the earth at the sun, etc), but can only subtly manipulate it through chaotic interactions. If this were true, wouldn't that mean patterns in chaos could very well be the face of god? It might even make fortune telling by random chance (tarot, rune casting, coin flipping, etc) legitimate. Assuming it were true and provable to be true, really it's just an interesting idea. Something like this story though, assuming it's true, makes it a bit more plausible.
One thing that would be interesting to see is if location affects these Eggs. The article mentioned the Eggs notice global events. I wonder if you put an Egg in a small town whether or not it would detect something like a murder or a natural disaster local to the town. Might be something for these guys to try.
I don't think it would make it easier, considering the number of possible combinations of quotes available in the bible, or any other media (and the large number of characters). If everybody did it, then yeah, there would be situations like the one you described, but if you were careful enough and translated parts of it into h4x0r, then it wouldn't be much different than current passwords. Passphrases are basically longer passwords.
That's the problem with passphrases in my opinion, too long. Not everyone is a good typist and my 80+ character PGP passphrase isn't all that fun to retype.
People with big brains so to speak have an easy time going through high school and often college. Getting things without real effort doesn't teach you much, so when the shit hits the fan (or you just think it does) it's a lot easier to panic. Those who have to work for what they achieve can learn perseverence and patience.
I'm one of those big brained folk myself and am running into that problem right now.
I agree, FoolProof only works against the fools. A friend of mine simply renamed the windows swap file to a text file then rebooted and read the new text file. Passwords were found in plaintext.
Of course all you really needed to do to get around fool proof was to rename any file you were trying to execute to something else. The install for some backdoor? rename to iexplore.exe and you're g2g.
Unlike the music industry, television folks are trying to get ahead of the curve and offer TV downloads in a legal and easy to use manner.
If the television networks or maybe the producers want to allow me to download their shows w/out ads, the same day they're aired at a fast download speed for a reasonable rate, then I'd probably bite. I sure as hell won't buy a DVD set of a single season of any TV show for fifty bucks. Maybe a subscription service for 20-30 bucks a month that lets me download the shows I want might be worth it to me.
Of course what I just described is a pipe dream, so for the moment I'll remain content with the hdtv rips available.
Just the description is enough FUD. Seriously, just as everyone's saying, there are EULA's in all Microsoft's products that have that little disclaimer at the bottom saying they have no liability for bugs, hackers and other nasty suprises. The GPL has a similar liability clause.
But if we're going to talk about microsoft-style accountability, the group who actually made the software are "accountable". The kernel team are responsible for the bugs in the kernel, the kde team responsible for kde. Just because these groups aren't often companies doesn't mean there aren't people one can talk to about fixing the bugs.
I notice a lot of people are saying to forward all traffic through an ssh tunnel. That's all well and good, and would probably conceal whatever you're doing on the net, but is it legal? I know in some other countries encryption is considered illegal; does anyone know what the legal status of encryption in China is?
A DVD can store 4.7 GB (Single layer). 500 GB ~ 107 DVDs. A fair amount to be sure, but still within the realm of possibility for a chronic downloader.
I think the heat ray representation was pretty accurate. I didn't see any visible beams of light, just trees bursting into flame, which is basically what happened in the book.
http://movies.apple.com/movies/paramount/warofthew orlds/waroftheworlds_m480.mov
Having just watched this I'm filled with some hope. I've only read the first part of WotW, but with the opening monologue and seeing the way the heat ray worked (invisible beam being the most notable feature), I'd say there may just be hope for this movie.
I wish I had more experience with code obfuscation, then I might actually submit something. Probably the poor man's way of doing this might be to copy their vote.c and then have some sort of on-the-fly vote redirector to favor one candidate. Compile it to assembly then copy the relavant portion back to the origional source code and do an inline assembly replacing the origional c code. if the assembly is especially long, it's likely nobody will be able to decode it anyway since almost nobody knows assembly anymore. Add a little more fun with some #defines at the top and you have something that's fairly obfuscated (to an untrained eye) and does what you want with the host language remaining the same. Don't know what the rules are on inline assembly though....
You might be going in the right direction, but I think your feelings in this are a little extreme. First off, how the hell is he supposed to find the guy this belonged to? The card was found in a taxi in NYC. Going to the police wouldn't do anything as they would be more concerned with catching murderers and rapists than returning somebody's momentos. Leaving it in the cab wouldn't do any good either, as it would end up in the hands of another rider later on, or pawned off as soon as the driver found it at the end of the day. The only feasible way this would get back to the owner in a physical manner would be to give it to the driver of the cab and hope he puts it in lost and found. This would of course require the owner to call that particular cab company to see if someone picked up a memory card for a camera.
Secondly, the copyright infringement case would be difficult to make. Granted he is infringing on someone else's copyright, but he is not doing it for financial gain. I don't even see ads on the page (aside from a blogger banner at the top). Also how would somebody assess the value of these pictures. Criminal offenses for copyright infringement don't occur until the infringer has caused a significant amount of financial damage (a few hundred thousand dollars IIRC). I would be hard pressed to believe these pictures are worth that much.
If I was the person who lost the card, and I found out about the site, and if I were angry about it, I'd get a cease and desist letter sent and prove that I was the owner of the card. It's likely the blogger would close the page and return the card. The end result of this is the guy who lost his card would get it back, and the site would go down if the owner chose to do so. This would not happen if the site was not getting this much publicity, and may infact become the best chance for the owner to get his card back, along with some measure of internet immortality.
Personally, I hope the owner of the card gets it back and doesn't mind seeing the blogger continue his series.
if it cost us $100 to generate 100 kwh with current sources (coal, oil, etc), then if we used wind power instead we could generate 10000 kwh. The amount of energy would be similar to the amount we have generated in the last 400 years, or something like that. (I know these figures are inaccurate btw).
As for whether or not this would have an effect on global warming, who knows. I know there are more than a few climatologists who say we are in a period where average global temperature increases, and while we may be having an effect, it isn't as great as we think. *shrug* my $.02.
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I really hope these extras SciFi is providing pays off for them in the end. This sort of thing is exactly what so many people have been asking for, the fact they are willing to take the risk and go for it is very impressive. I hope it generates some profit for them and they can take it to the next level and maybe influence how every channel does TV.
My personal hope is they end up allowing downloads for all the previous season's episodes. Maybe in a lower resolution and without extras to provide incentive for people to buy the DVDs when they come out. It's probably a pipe dream, but it seems more likely given what SciFi has already done.
This sounds an awful lot like the great firewall of china. The article says that ISPs must be able to block any site that is on a "harmful to children" list, if the customer so desires. Well there goes half the internet. How long before the children figure out proxy servers? Or go to a friend's house whos parents don't block the sites. Also it sounds like the bill only applies to websites, not other traffic like streaming video, IRC, p2p, etc, all of which contain that same 'harmful to children' content.
I say leave this as a parent's responsibility and leave the ISPs out of it.
...if it passes. As I see it, voting is something that needs to be taken more seriously in this country, and this bill would be a decent step forward. I like the fact there would be criminal penalties for interfering with an election, and I like the hardware and software standards that would be applied.
Personally I don't see why both sides of the fence aren't jumping to support this. The Dems want it in place to reduce the number of fubar'ed elections and the Reps should want it so when the next election comes around they can actually prove they won. There would be more work, and it isn't a magic solution to the problems (both reasons why it might not pass), but it is a good start.
IIRC, didn't someone try something like this by trademarking Linux? And didn't he fail?
Judging from the other posts all this guy is going to get is a lot of hate mail and offers for viagra.
I just wished they had linked to the researchers or the academic paper. I have a hard time taking things in the news at face value, especially about something like this
(disclaimer: Yes, I know there is global warming, I'm just not sure it's all the humans' fault)
Consider for a moment that there exists a god. He (she or it, whatever) is basically our caretaker, maybe even our creator. Here's the deal though, nobody really knows anything about him, and I'd wager to say anyone who thinks they know anything is pretty fscking arrogant. What if (yes, this is just a theory), god doesn't really have great influential power in the universe (i.e. can't make the moon fall out of the sky in one night, or hurl the earth at the sun, etc), but can only subtly manipulate it through chaotic interactions. If this were true, wouldn't that mean patterns in chaos could very well be the face of god? It might even make fortune telling by random chance (tarot, rune casting, coin flipping, etc) legitimate. Assuming it were true and provable to be true, really it's just an interesting idea. Something like this story though, assuming it's true, makes it a bit more plausible.
One thing that would be interesting to see is if location affects these Eggs. The article mentioned the Eggs notice global events. I wonder if you put an Egg in a small town whether or not it would detect something like a murder or a natural disaster local to the town. Might be something for these guys to try.
I don't think it would make it easier, considering the number of possible combinations of quotes available in the bible, or any other media (and the large number of characters). If everybody did it, then yeah, there would be situations like the one you described, but if you were careful enough and translated parts of it into h4x0r, then it wouldn't be much different than current passwords. Passphrases are basically longer passwords.
That's the problem with passphrases in my opinion, too long. Not everyone is a good typist and my 80+ character PGP passphrase isn't all that fun to retype.
People with big brains so to speak have an easy time going through high school and often college. Getting things without real effort doesn't teach you much, so when the shit hits the fan (or you just think it does) it's a lot easier to panic. Those who have to work for what they achieve can learn perseverence and patience. I'm one of those big brained folk myself and am running into that problem right now.
I agree, FoolProof only works against the fools. A friend of mine simply renamed the windows swap file to a text file then rebooted and read the new text file. Passwords were found in plaintext.
Of course all you really needed to do to get around fool proof was to rename any file you were trying to execute to something else. The install for some backdoor? rename to iexplore.exe and you're g2g.
Unlike the music industry, television folks are trying to get ahead of the curve and offer TV downloads in a legal and easy to use manner.
If the television networks or maybe the producers want to allow me to download their shows w/out ads, the same day they're aired at a fast download speed for a reasonable rate, then I'd probably bite. I sure as hell won't buy a DVD set of a single season of any TV show for fifty bucks. Maybe a subscription service for 20-30 bucks a month that lets me download the shows I want might be worth it to me.
Of course what I just described is a pipe dream, so for the moment I'll remain content with the hdtv rips available.
Just the description is enough FUD. Seriously, just as everyone's saying, there are EULA's in all Microsoft's products that have that little disclaimer at the bottom saying they have no liability for bugs, hackers and other nasty suprises. The GPL has a similar liability clause.
But if we're going to talk about microsoft-style accountability, the group who actually made the software are "accountable". The kernel team are responsible for the bugs in the kernel, the kde team responsible for kde. Just because these groups aren't often companies doesn't mean there aren't people one can talk to about fixing the bugs.
I notice a lot of people are saying to forward all traffic through an ssh tunnel. That's all well and good, and would probably conceal whatever you're doing on the net, but is it legal? I know in some other countries encryption is considered illegal; does anyone know what the legal status of encryption in China is?
A DVD can store 4.7 GB (Single layer). 500 GB ~ 107 DVDs. A fair amount to be sure, but still within the realm of possibility for a chronic downloader.
What a sad, lonely, despicable person you must be.
That was quoted from the article.
I think the heat ray representation was pretty accurate. I didn't see any visible beams of light, just trees bursting into flame, which is basically what happened in the book.
http://movies.apple.com/movies/paramount/warofthew orlds/waroftheworlds_m480.mov
Having just watched this I'm filled with some hope. I've only read the first part of WotW, but with the opening monologue and seeing the way the heat ray worked (invisible beam being the most notable feature), I'd say there may just be hope for this movie.
ouyay ispelledmay 'obodyyay'.
Can we please worry about christmas AFTER Thanksgiving please. Thank you.
I wish I had more experience with code obfuscation, then I might actually submit something. Probably the poor man's way of doing this might be to copy their vote.c and then have some sort of on-the-fly vote redirector to favor one candidate. Compile it to assembly then copy the relavant portion back to the origional source code and do an inline assembly replacing the origional c code. if the assembly is especially long, it's likely nobody will be able to decode it anyway since almost nobody knows assembly anymore. Add a little more fun with some #defines at the top and you have something that's fairly obfuscated (to an untrained eye) and does what you want with the host language remaining the same. Don't know what the rules are on inline assembly though....
Interesting, I thought it was more. I know Civil cases can start almost immediately. Hrm...
;-)
Even so, I still don't think those pictures are even worth that much. I mean, if they are, I've got around two hundred of my own for sale
You might be going in the right direction, but I think your feelings in this are a little extreme. First off, how the hell is he supposed to find the guy this belonged to? The card was found in a taxi in NYC. Going to the police wouldn't do anything as they would be more concerned with catching murderers and rapists than returning somebody's momentos. Leaving it in the cab wouldn't do any good either, as it would end up in the hands of another rider later on, or pawned off as soon as the driver found it at the end of the day. The only feasible way this would get back to the owner in a physical manner would be to give it to the driver of the cab and hope he puts it in lost and found. This would of course require the owner to call that particular cab company to see if someone picked up a memory card for a camera.
Secondly, the copyright infringement case would be difficult to make. Granted he is infringing on someone else's copyright, but he is not doing it for financial gain. I don't even see ads on the page (aside from a blogger banner at the top). Also how would somebody assess the value of these pictures. Criminal offenses for copyright infringement don't occur until the infringer has caused a significant amount of financial damage (a few hundred thousand dollars IIRC). I would be hard pressed to believe these pictures are worth that much.
If I was the person who lost the card, and I found out about the site, and if I were angry about it, I'd get a cease and desist letter sent and prove that I was the owner of the card. It's likely the blogger would close the page and return the card. The end result of this is the guy who lost his card would get it back, and the site would go down if the owner chose to do so. This would not happen if the site was not getting this much publicity, and may infact become the best chance for the owner to get his card back, along with some measure of internet immortality.
Personally, I hope the owner of the card gets it back and doesn't mind seeing the blogger continue his series.
I believe he said like a WRT54G. As in, similar size and power consumption, yadda yadda.
The two best suggestions I've heard so far is the old laptop, and the Via mainboards. Both seem equally ideal to this situation.
Jeez, I hope it doesn't crash
I think what he means is this:
if it cost us $100 to generate 100 kwh with current sources (coal, oil, etc), then if we used wind power instead we could generate 10000 kwh. The amount of energy would be similar to the amount we have generated in the last 400 years, or something like that. (I know these figures are inaccurate btw).
As for whether or not this would have an effect on global warming, who knows. I know there are more than a few climatologists who say we are in a period where average global temperature increases, and while we may be having an effect, it isn't as great as we think. *shrug* my $.02.