Our system is totoally screwed up. On the one hand, we have no control about what data people collect about us - whoever collects it owns it, and we have no say. On the other hand, if that data is compromised and hurts us, now who is accountable? The owner of the data? No, the individual has to go to all the trouble and expense of cleaning up after the company's screwup.
I didn't gather whether these are point-to-point transmissions, or broadcasts of some kind. Hopefully point-to-point.
But is that so infeasable? I don't think so. I download episodes of "Lost" because they look better than on my (analog) cable TV - yet the stream is under 1 megabit per second. Could today's infrastructure handle that for everybody? Certainly not, but the Internet will never grow unless applications push it. And 1 megabit for everybody isn't so hard to imagine. A lot of us are paying Comcast over $1000 per year for this stuff, that means they have the resources to do something cool if competition requires it.
Are stolen cellphones really worth anything? I wouldn't think so, considering they're always included with the service. And who wants a used cellphone, they're kind of personal. For that matter I'm surprised they don't transmit a UID that would make tracking a stolen phone all too easy.
To do any theory you have to specify your computational model, and I seem to have fallen short there. I was assuming unlimited memory and range, as is usual.
In college, my professor challenged the entire class to find an algorithm that takes an array, and returns a single value larger than the median of values in the array, in sub-linear time.
Naturally, he had us stumped, because the task is impossible. Without checking at least half the numbers, you can't be sure of the answer.
But, he pointed out, here's what you can do: pick 1000 numbers from the array at random and return the largest - a constant time operation! This "algorithm" just might return a wrong answer. But the chances of that happening are far less than the odds that you're in a nuthouse hallucinating this message right now. The odds are far less than the liklihood that a computer would botch a deterministic algorithm during executation anyways. The odds of making a mistake with the algorithm are 0, for all intents and purposes. So is that OK?
One of the main obstacles to better security is that people are fundamentally lazy. Typing 30 or 40 characters is difficult to do, and it takes time, so people won't do it. Or if forced to do it, they will whine about it -- a lot.
Lazy, or rational? Like anything else there is a sweet spot for security vs. inconvenience / expense, and past that point you may be boosting security a little but mainly you're wasting resources.
Most of us don't put bars over our windows. Would it boost security? Yes, a bit. But there are other considerations too.
And to the computer system, both biometrics and passwords are both just a string of bytes, nothing more. If you're trying to authenticate with online banking, all the server knows is that an acceptable sequence of bytes has been transmitted; whether those bytes actually came from an image of a fingerprint is another question.
I'm not convinced that biometrics are much better than getting a tatoo of your password.
Surely you gest. Haven't you heard of Moore's Law? In the past 20 years transistor counts have grown a thousandfold from 1e5 to 1e8. So if Oracle were $10,000 back then it would now be $10,000,000, and $100,000,000 by 2007. I don't think that will fly.
On the other hand, do you really think the people punished got the exact same punishment they would have, if their errors had been uncovered under different circumstances? I mean, the management had already sworn that heads would roll. It would be nice to think there's a sound, rational basis for quantifying security breaches, and even-handed application of fairly written penal code... but in reality, I think circumstances and politics will weigh in heavily.
Heaven forbid you should be caught with your hand in the cookie jar when dad comes home drunk.
providing the performance of a typical 7200RPM desktop drive.
How do you figure? The benchmarks I'm lookingat show normal desktop hard drives have 50% higher sustained read/write speeds! Let's not confuse "RPM" with "performance."
I can't figure out why people so looks and form factor will accept external devices at all. Who wants a system glommed together with lots of separate parts and cabling? That honkin' external PSU on the 'mini is bad enough already.
As a result, we're organising a demonstration [ffii.org] next Tuesday in Brussels. Everyone's welcome!
Good luck, but is there any way to actually WIN - to kill this off for good? If it becomes law, it will *stay* law, but if not, can't "they" just try again next month?
Either the browser supports it, or doesn't... it does what it designed to do.
What planet do you live on, where software does just what it was intended to do, and nothing more?
If that were true, first off, there would be no security vulnerabilities.
And you wouldn't have people in an online strategy game stacking dozens of chairs to get to the top of a tower instead fighting their way up the staircase as they were meant to do.
The original designers of HTML never foresaw all the crazy tricks people would use TABLE tags to accomplish.
Anytime you have more than a simple mechanism, the possible outcomes become unforseeable. That's the fun of it!
I had a fairly early Amiga 500. I don't remember how many times we had that thing fixed due to static electricity. Ultimately we had it sitting on a sheet of aluminum foil grounded to a wall outlet, and used anti-static spray on our hands before touching the Amiga.
Here's a wierdness: I don't have the JRE installed. The first time I accessed the page it prompted me to download Java, which I did not do. But then the second time I tried the page, it worked. I can still drag the maps. Yet the JRE is still not installed and my process list has no JVM running.
Another cool thing: I was suprised when it automatically brought up a big, clear map that almost fills a 1600x1200 screen. I guess the Java app knows how many pixels it has to work with, and automatically makes the most of it. In a side-by-side with yahoo maps, after manually clicking Yahoo's "make map larger" button, the google map is still 4x the size.
Most.doc files are so big because of embedded graphics for illustrations, letterheads, backdrops, whatever. Why don't we convert a few bitmaps to.eps for LaTeX and compare once again?
They wouldn't let just anybody in the control room at Paddington station in London, would they?
This is irrelevant. Nobody took over a train station; the story title is a lie. All they did was circumvent the payment system for wifi internet access and avoid paying an hourly fee for internet access. The fact that this was at a train station has nothing to do with the story, except making it read better.
That is a sad statement about how much trouble we accept from our computer software. Cars shouldn't have to be rebooted, they shouldn't have software failures in the first place.
I don't understand the "should/shouldn't" attitude. The fact is nobody knows how to make really complex systems without bugs, like it or not, and software systems are more complex than anything else.
I'm sure the relatively simple, high consequence functions such as antilock brakes will continue to be carried out by small standalone systems, like they are now. Most of the bugs will be in the cutting-edge features with fancy UIs, network communications, and so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
Our system is totoally screwed up. On the one hand, we have no control about what data people collect about us - whoever collects it owns it, and we have no say. On the other hand, if that data is compromised and hurts us, now who is accountable? The owner of the data? No, the individual has to go to all the trouble and expense of cleaning up after the company's screwup.
But is that so infeasable? I don't think so. I download episodes of "Lost" because they look better than on my (analog) cable TV - yet the stream is under 1 megabit per second. Could today's infrastructure handle that for everybody? Certainly not, but the Internet will never grow unless applications push it. And 1 megabit for everybody isn't so hard to imagine. A lot of us are paying Comcast over $1000 per year for this stuff, that means they have the resources to do something cool if competition requires it.
Are stolen cellphones really worth anything? I wouldn't think so, considering they're always included with the service. And who wants a used cellphone, they're kind of personal. For that matter I'm surprised they don't transmit a UID that would make tracking a stolen phone all too easy.
infinity isn't a number.
To do any theory you have to specify your computational model, and I seem to have fallen short there. I was assuming unlimited memory and range, as is usual.
Naturally, he had us stumped, because the task is impossible. Without checking at least half the numbers, you can't be sure of the answer.
But, he pointed out, here's what you can do: pick 1000 numbers from the array at random and return the largest - a constant time operation! This "algorithm" just might return a wrong answer. But the chances of that happening are far less than the odds that you're in a nuthouse hallucinating this message right now. The odds are far less than the liklihood that a computer would botch a deterministic algorithm during executation anyways. The odds of making a mistake with the algorithm are 0, for all intents and purposes. So is that OK?
Most of us don't put bars over our windows. Would it boost security? Yes, a bit. But there are other considerations too.
I'm not convinced that biometrics are much better than getting a tatoo of your password.
On the other hand, do you really think the people punished got the exact same punishment they would have, if their errors had been uncovered under different circumstances? I mean, the management had already sworn that heads would roll. It would be nice to think there's a sound, rational basis for quantifying security breaches, and even-handed application of fairly written penal code... but in reality, I think circumstances and politics will weigh in heavily. Heaven forbid you should be caught with your hand in the cookie jar when dad comes home drunk.
Well if that's you bag, how about
echo GET | netcat cnn.com 80
Whoo! Fast!
I can't figure out why people so looks and form factor will accept external devices at all. Who wants a system glommed together with lots of separate parts and cabling? That honkin' external PSU on the 'mini is bad enough already.
If that were true, first off, there would be no security vulnerabilities.
And you wouldn't have people in an online strategy game stacking dozens of chairs to get to the top of a tower instead fighting their way up the staircase as they were meant to do.
The original designers of HTML never foresaw all the crazy tricks people would use TABLE tags to accomplish.
Anytime you have more than a simple mechanism, the possible outcomes become unforseeable. That's the fun of it!
I had a fairly early Amiga 500. I don't remember how many times we had that thing fixed due to static electricity. Ultimately we had it sitting on a sheet of aluminum foil grounded to a wall outlet, and used anti-static spray on our hands before touching the Amiga.
Here's a wierdness: I don't have the JRE installed. The first time I accessed the page it prompted me to download Java, which I did not do. But then the second time I tried the page, it worked. I can still drag the maps. Yet the JRE is still not installed and my process list has no JVM running.
Another cool thing: I was suprised when it automatically brought up a big, clear map that almost fills a 1600x1200 screen. I guess the Java app knows how many pixels it has to work with, and automatically makes the most of it. In a side-by-side with yahoo maps, after manually clicking Yahoo's "make map larger" button, the google map is still 4x the size.
Most .doc files are so big because of embedded graphics for illustrations, letterheads, backdrops, whatever. Why don't we convert a few bitmaps to .eps for LaTeX and compare once again?
I'm sure the relatively simple, high consequence functions such as antilock brakes will continue to be carried out by small standalone systems, like they are now. Most of the bugs will be in the cutting-edge features with fancy UIs, network communications, and so forth.