Paints an intresting picture. Not one that should upset Nintendo, they are doing fine, but the 3rd part game publishers, well that is a different story.
Combined with a recent slashdot article that showed the Wii got the least playing hours, it seems the Wii has opened a new segment, the very casual, occasional game buying public. They got the money to spend and aren't afraid to buy new hardware/controllers but they just won't be buying a new title every month.
Nintendo loves this, they make money on their hardware sales so if somebody buys a Wii Fit set and NOTHING else EVER again, they are happy, they got their profit.
But for 3rd party "regular" game makers, that is not good. It means the install base is NOT the same as target audience size for your games.
That is the reason 3rd parties are not to committed for the Wii and continue to aim for the small install bases of the 360 and the Wii, few machines but more people who are into "real" games and will buy them on a regular basis.
It is in a way unfair to really put the three consoles in the same group. Really, you got multiple gaming markets.
1: Cheapo's. Free online games on the PC. Largest market by far with an install base in the hundreds of millions.
2: Hard core gamers. PC, willing to spend money, the land of the MMO's. Install base hard to estimate but tricky because of piracy, although games that don't have to worry about Piracy can make it big (just how much does WoW take in each month)
3: Gamers. PC, 360, PS3, somewhat willing to spend cash but not to much. The traditional gamer who is reluctant to pay a monthly fee and wants their games to last but also be traditional.
4: Mobile gamers. DS, PSP, mobile phones. Got money, but just want a nice game they can play on the go and that is fun and quick. Puzzle games do well, anything you can pick up and go and pause.
5: The non-gamers who just happen to use a gaming console. Wii. WiiFit and such are not really games, they are activities you just happen to use a game console to do. Potentially a huge market but there is a problem, they are by definition, unending games. You don't finish them. So you don't need to buy the sequel, or a clone, or even a different take of it. If you bought the Wii to keep fit, then that is the only purchase you will make for a LONG time. That is NOT the way the other markets work.
Sony made a mistake, not so much with the Cell as with the blueray drive they insisted upon. While DVD would NOT have been enough, Blueray was to much to soon. Either they should have waited or thought of a different solution.
However, I wouldn't count them out yet. The PS2 was called a failure to at the start, people always like to see the big guys fall, and many complained that it was to hard to code for. But look at the charts, PS2 games STILL sell and even make the charts. Where is the X-box or the gamecube or the gameboy advance? I have no idea if the PS3 has hidden depths but we know the limits of the 360 and the Wii. The race is not over until the next round has started. Will developers be able to keep the PS3 alive for as long as the PS2?
Will Microsoft, now even windows is not making them as much as it used to, be able to fund the next sequel in time? The X-box aged fast, how fast is the 360 going to age? Is the market going to want its sequel when the PS3 and the Wii will be cheaper and perhaps even just as good?
I wouldn't make to many conculusions yet about who won this round of the console wars. If there even can be a winner when 1 party has effectively said it is going to run a in a different race and another party is spending a fortune on repairing its consoles.
You also got the costs of storing all those bolts of cloth that need to either fed into the machine by a human being or have a HUGE system for all the various types and colors.
Sorry, but paperback style books that use 2 types of paper and 1 type of glue are feasable. Cloths that use all kinds of different materials are not, unless you want to be the one to tell the average woman she is going to wear the exact same materials as everyone else. Just check, how many people even have the same buttons on their jeans?
Anyway, it is far simpler, if you want a custom made piece, you go to a tailor. They still exist and they don't even cost that much (when you consider quality).
The clothing industry is just to different, to many styles, to many variations. Consider this, count the number of clothing stores vs the number of bookstores (which helps explain election results).
This printing on demand business won't be making chewable books, or pop-up books, or braille books, or picture books, or round books, or maps or hand-bound books. It spits out paperbacks.
A machine that could make jeans, 2-3 choices of cloth, different cuts and different sizes is "easy". A machine that can do all fashion would consume much of a supermarket just for its cloth feeder.
That extents EVEN to having no opinion on the law itself. He shouldn't be for or against a law, just rule on it. A judge ruling on a suicide should NOT be a member of the good samaritan help line. Bias.
Judges do more after all then just enforce the law, they judge the law itself. Plenty of laws made by politicians constantly get overturned by judges who not having any agenda but upkeeping the law rule that certain laws just cannot be.
One set of laws that has come under question is copyright law. How is a judge supposed to be able to listen unbiased to the for and againsts of a case if he already made clear what side he is on?
Remember that if this judge had rules the other way, new precedent would have been set, just as this ruling has set new precedent. To have that power, requires a judge not to go into the court with his mind made up. It is becoming clear that in this case, the accused were considered by the judge to be guilty before the trial had started.
if you don't see anything wrong with that, then my god man, you just don't deserve to live in a democracy.
Not anything complex, just for playing my MP3's without freezes or crashes when playing games on my windows machine. Old PC with linux, as I learned more and more it more and more became my desktop. Browser that didn't crash. Text-editor that didn't crash. P2P that didn't crash.
The odd thing? I am typing this on Vista but in a NXclient running on a linux machine. It saves the space of two desktops, gives me big screen access to my old linux machine and even if Vista crashes NXclient every now and then, it just resumes.
Vista, you still stuck. Linux just keeps getting better and better. (Why Vista? Needed 64bit for 8gig of memory and DX10 as well)
I do speak german and softwarehack is NOT a german word, it is a borrowed word and therefor means the same thing as you would expect it to. Never DOUBT. CHECK!
Your entire argument starts to look shakey because you asumed.
You then go on to claim that it is a seperate line. It is not, it is a wrap around of the previous line. Failure two.
You then go on to make your final claim. The email being fake. 2 strikes, is the third a hit? We already know you leap to conclusions, so might you have struck out completly?
The email indeed seems suspicious. The english in it is piss poor and that is coming from me. Could there be a reason? Nintendo is a japanese company, could we be dealing with an advanced case of engrish here? Maybe someone low in the hierachy whose native language is not english went outside the official channels to send this email?
It is important to remember that many internal emails would make any language teacher cry like a britney spears fan. I have seen worse.
The grammar itself is not enough to label the email a fake. That it came through an anonymous source, well that doesn't mean anything.
Finally, the wording. It isn't very proffesional but I am sure we all remember the halloween documents. If Balmer can throw chairs why can't a nintendo flunky send out this email?
So, two strikes and one questionable. I think you put to much faith in proffesionalism in individual employees. While I have no proof this email is wrong, it being stupid and badly written does not guarantee it as a fake. Really, read more leaked documents.
There seems to be a group of people who have taken healthy paranoid delusion and turned it into something sick and twisted. The GP is so far gone that thanks to the curved universe he is coming back from the other side.
Recently in the Netherlands we had a case that seemed a bit like his example. A call was made warning about an upcoming terrorist attack. The police investigated the alledged bombers and decided, based on their criminal record, to arrest them. Turns out, it wasn't a real call. Much crying by the lefties (who conveniently forgot that the entire family involved had an extensive criminal record) about how innocent people could be harassed like this.
Here is a hint: THAT IS HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS!
The police has the power and for that matter needs the power, to arrest people while investigating crimes EVEN if they are not yet 100% absolutely sure the person is guilty, even following suspicious information. It is part of how the system works. Sucks if you are the one being grinded up by its gears but over thousands of years of civilization, this is the best we found so far. Only in La-La land can the police only arrest 100% guilty people with absolutely no invasion of anyones privacy.
The idea of using videos made by the public to solve crimes seems near perfect to me. Sure, some will try to frame others with it. Women are not unknown to on occasion report false rape. Does that mean you don't allow any rape charges because someone might be investigated not just for something they didn't do, but for something that didn't happen? Of course not.
As for photoshopping, the police ain't all that stupid. Sure they make mistakes and we read about them all the time. That again shows the system works. I would be a far more worried if I lived in a society where I never read about the police screwing up badly. That would scare me. If I see a person coming out of jail after a decade for being wrongly convicted I see a system that works. Slow, but works. Convince me there is an other system that would work better.
Good luck convinging the world their is money to be made in killing muslims. Oddly enough, it was the muslims extremists who used to kill the pirates under islamic law. Then the west got rid of them in Somalie, so the pirates got free reign, then the big money attracted involvement from Dubai, a western muslim ally. You got to laugh. Or cry. I forget which.
Anyway, if bounties worked we would have no Mafia. We do.
Oooh, GOOD example. is this the basic training that led to the US defeat in Somalie?
Trained soldiers vs a ragtag army of civilians with "outdated" weapons. Who won again?
But you also forget the most important part of weapons training US and most good soldiers get. it has NOTHING to do with firing the weapon. It has everything to do with NOT firing the weapon. OBEYING ORDERS. The hard part ain't arming a man, it is disarming a man. If you armed all civilian vessels, how are you going to get them off again? Pirates can strike anywhere. Somalie is just in the news but other regions got their own pirates.
Where does a ship surrender its weapons? Do you allow any nation to carry arms into your waters? Do you really think the US wants chinese vessels armed to the teeth sailing straight into their harbour? For that matter, do you think China wants that?
The silly thing is that the US would have no problem with these pirates in normal times. One carrier fleet would be enough to control the entire area, but its big fleets are busy fighting the war on terror and that costs so much the US can't afford to patrol this bit as it intended (its carrier fleets exist to keep the sealanes save).
Other countries have cut down their own fleets because with no-more war we don't need these bottomless pits. After all, no war means no harm to international shipping.
Basically, we have to wake up to remember that the world is never going to be save, all it needs is a handful of people with guns to see more profit in war then peace. (Note the pirates happily attack vessels carrying food to their own people).
What about people for who $50 is a year salary? Congrats, you just split the internet into the rich and the poor. No more accessing the internet from africa from an old PC powered by a donated solar cell. Good job. You probably going to get a nobel price.
The problem is that a lot of people are afraid that one day, the nature of crime changes. Should rapist be caught by their DNA being recorded. Sure. But what if someday, they outlaw being a halfblood. Should then these people be rounded up by their DNA being on file and gassed? Oh godwin, you sneak, got yourself into another discussion.
But that is the point. In nazi-germany being the wrong race was outlawed. Suddenly the "harmless" census database became a tool for prosecution people who well actually were guilty. If I make it against the law to have blue eyes then all blue eyed people are criminals after all.
That is what some people fear. What if say 10 years after everyones DNA has been sampled a goverment decides to outlaw prosteting and arrests everyone present at a rally by sniffing their DNA? Sure sure, future tech paranoia but what if?
Not that we need tech, the huttu's and tuttu's didn't need tech, all they had was big knifes and a deep hatred and 1 million dead. Split evenly on both sides granted, if only one side had tech they could have had a proper massacre I suppose.
Another fear people have is simpler. Most people know they are criminals. Date rapers? Wife beaters etc etc? Slashdot is filled to the brim with them. Laws of averages after all. If you are at risk of being caught by a system then you are going to be against it.
So yes, the system has merits, to the innocent who has absolute faith in his/her goverment never abusing such a system. To the guilty or the paranoid/realists there are risks.
Personally, I think the paranoid are wrong. They worry about the wrong thing. Do not fight to keep tools of potential abuse out of the hands of goverment, fight to make sure you goverment will never abuse them. That is far harder and some might say impossible task but as the holocaust in ruwanda showed us, you don't need tech to cause a nightmare. Remember that DNA sniffer? Far simpler would be for a goverment to simply gundown everyone at a rally. Who needs DNA when you are a goverment on the loose? Keep the system honest and then the system can have all the tools available.
That is infact the theory behind the freedom to carry a gun. Don't ban guns, keep people from wanting to kill each other because if someone wants to kill they don't need a gun.
So, what exactly are you saying? That techonology fouled up but the people using it realised it and did NOT arrest this woman whose only crime is to contaminate sterile materials (would you want her in charge of handling medical equipment used on you) and break down her door or start a case against her?
The system, slowly, worked is what this story really is about.
Oh boy, do you got a LOUSY understanding of the legal system. You are convicted when it is decided that you are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. NOBODY claims it is proven you are guilty except the prosecutor perhaps. It is presumed, beyond a reasonable doubt. There is a difference.
Proven not guilty? Sorry, that only happens on tv. Not guilty really means, there is reasonable doubt. Although often it could also mean we don't doubt it, but we can't present the evidence that would nail you to the wall because of legal idiocies.
Anyway, you shouldn't have to be proven non-guilty since until you are convicted YOU are supposed to be presumed innocent. I know I know. Thing of the past.
Remind me again please which OS the botnet runs on? Thank you.
MS embeds all kinds of code from third parties. Drivers, libraries etc etc. It has been shown time and time again that there are huge security holes in MS code, holes that are actively exploited. It ain't for nothing that when the NSA wanted to make a proof of concept secure OS they choose linux.
You got a point, how can you trust any OS if you have not checked the code. Where you take a dive of the deep end is that you then suggest that MS can be trusted to check the code for you. Not trusting say Red Hat blindly that they checked all the code is sensible, trusting Microsoft that they checked all theirs is just plain silly. If they had, they wouldn't have so many bugs. And your fate in your goverment is bordering on the insane.
Anyway, that same goverment checks linux code. So either both are to be trusted or neither is.
The idea is idiotic and one of those crypto-idiot fantasies that the totally clueless and paranoid seem to have.
About the only way you could do this is to control the server itself since then only person who knows about the encryption keys is yourself or rather your server.
But the poster wants a third party to have his encrypted data, send him the key to that data and then open that data, look at it but not be able to look at it.
This is DRM. It don't work. If I want to encrypt something I have several things.
The sender, this entity MUST have the original data, the encryption key and the encrypted result.
The reader, this person must have the encrypted data, the decryption key and can with those two, obtain a copy of the original data.
In between is the messenger or untrusted party. The messenger should NEVER have the encrypted data and decryption key at the same time or they will be able to do what only the reader should be able to do.
Tradiotionaly this means the sender and reader meet, exchange keys and then part. The sender then uses a messenger to send the encrypted data to the reader. The messenger does not have they key and so is safe. If said messenger turns out to be unreliable, you only loose the encrypted data, they key is safe with you and the reader.
DRM fails, because it trusts the messenger but not the reader. DRM wishes to give the reader everything so it can read the message but not be able to read the message. This cannot be done and is the reason DRM fails.
I seen some people be confused by SSH. SSH seemingly allows you to securely connect to a remote system without a seperate exchange of keys. The problem is that SSH doesn't allow that at all. If you just ssh to a remote system you are NOT secure at all. How do you know you are connecting to the system you are connecting to and not something else? You are trusting the messenger, the internet, to be trustworthy. SSH warns you about this, when you first connect to a system asking you accept the remote machines key, if you have NOT in a seperate communication verified that this key belongs to the remote machine, then you are gambling the internet is trusthworthy.
Back to the system proposed. DRM's wet dream is to control the readers hardware so they can only read the message in a way that doesn't allow them to reproduce it. The Trusted Computing dream. If the whole end machine is encrypted, only the anolog hole remains.
You cannot send a reader all the data they need to read the data but not be able to read the data for their own purposes. If I want google to search my email, they must be able to read my email.
The idea to search in encrypted data is just plain silly. The whole point of encryption is to not be able to read in it. If you encrypt a piece of text in such a way that individual words can be encrypted the same as the same words in the document then you are asking to be cracked in no time.
Consider how human usuable encryptions are attacked. By looking for often repeating encodings that might relate to common words. If you know the text is in english, then in an encrypted text "4 231231 421 4 534534 4" it would be fairly easy to figure out that 4 = a. Find more common words by statiscal analysis and then you only need to figure out the encryption that results in that encoding of a very short string and voila, you can decode eveything. Good encryption does NOT allow the same data parts to be encrypted the same.
So the idea of sending encrypted words to seach for is idiotic. Even if you have the original data on your PC so you can create the same encoded data as on the server (but why then search on it remotly?) you still wouldn't be able to snip the bit you wanted out of it because the encryption shouldn't allow you to do that.
If IE always asked you to click something, then it would be safe. Exactly how the hell would you create an OS that you can actually install anything on while preventing you from installing something that MIGHT be bad? After all, if I want to install a spam program, that is my business. There after all plenty of legimate reasons to send mass emails. Yes really.
As for rootkit like software. It is your PC, you might have a reason for it. Security software be it anti-virus or DRM often needs to nest itself deep into the OS as well. If that is what the user wants, that is what the user should be able to do.
IE gets slammed because it allows installs without user activation. As soon as a "hack" requires user action then it is no longer an OS/software vulnerability but a social engineering one.
We don't blame money for being insecure because of pyramid schemes do we? We blame money for being insecure when it can be counterfitted, not when humans can be duped with their money.
People expect a certain amount basic honesty from others. If I ask a taxi-driver to take me to location X, I expect him to say if it is just ten meters down the road, not charge me for the ride.
Is it to unreasonable to expect a company to not outright lie, consitently on facts? Sure, of course Vista is great and will improve your life. But don't claim it boots in 2 seconds when it doesn't. Their is sales talk and their is lying and there is a difference.
MS, and various other companies have lost sight of this difference and it makes everything they say suspect and on the whole, irritating as hell. Coca Cola is not exactly telling the truth that when you open the can a party comes out, but neither is it claiming Coca Cola is more healthy then fruit juice or a glass of milk.
MS with this campaign is once again not just trying to show how good there products are but trying to bend facts until they break and claiming it is just advertising. For most of us, there is a limit.
Compare it to a job interview. If you tell the truth, that you are an average coder, well that is very honest but won't get you hired. Say you are a really good programmer and you might not be to honest but hey, it is a sales pitch and they know it so might hire you hoping for a good programmer. Say you are the best programmer and people will just laugh at you.
Slashdot Mirror
http://blog.wired.com/games/2009/04/march-2009s-top.html
Paints an intresting picture. Not one that should upset Nintendo, they are doing fine, but the 3rd part game publishers, well that is a different story.
Combined with a recent slashdot article that showed the Wii got the least playing hours, it seems the Wii has opened a new segment, the very casual, occasional game buying public. They got the money to spend and aren't afraid to buy new hardware/controllers but they just won't be buying a new title every month.
Nintendo loves this, they make money on their hardware sales so if somebody buys a Wii Fit set and NOTHING else EVER again, they are happy, they got their profit.
But for 3rd party "regular" game makers, that is not good. It means the install base is NOT the same as target audience size for your games.
That is the reason 3rd parties are not to committed for the Wii and continue to aim for the small install bases of the 360 and the Wii, few machines but more people who are into "real" games and will buy them on a regular basis.
It is in a way unfair to really put the three consoles in the same group. Really, you got multiple gaming markets.
1: Cheapo's. Free online games on the PC. Largest market by far with an install base in the hundreds of millions.
2: Hard core gamers. PC, willing to spend money, the land of the MMO's. Install base hard to estimate but tricky because of piracy, although games that don't have to worry about Piracy can make it big (just how much does WoW take in each month)
3: Gamers. PC, 360, PS3, somewhat willing to spend cash but not to much. The traditional gamer who is reluctant to pay a monthly fee and wants their games to last but also be traditional.
4: Mobile gamers. DS, PSP, mobile phones. Got money, but just want a nice game they can play on the go and that is fun and quick. Puzzle games do well, anything you can pick up and go and pause.
5: The non-gamers who just happen to use a gaming console. Wii. WiiFit and such are not really games, they are activities you just happen to use a game console to do. Potentially a huge market but there is a problem, they are by definition, unending games. You don't finish them. So you don't need to buy the sequel, or a clone, or even a different take of it. If you bought the Wii to keep fit, then that is the only purchase you will make for a LONG time. That is NOT the way the other markets work.
Sony made a mistake, not so much with the Cell as with the blueray drive they insisted upon. While DVD would NOT have been enough, Blueray was to much to soon. Either they should have waited or thought of a different solution.
However, I wouldn't count them out yet. The PS2 was called a failure to at the start, people always like to see the big guys fall, and many complained that it was to hard to code for. But look at the charts, PS2 games STILL sell and even make the charts. Where is the X-box or the gamecube or the gameboy advance? I have no idea if the PS3 has hidden depths but we know the limits of the 360 and the Wii. The race is not over until the next round has started. Will developers be able to keep the PS3 alive for as long as the PS2?
Will Microsoft, now even windows is not making them as much as it used to, be able to fund the next sequel in time? The X-box aged fast, how fast is the 360 going to age? Is the market going to want its sequel when the PS3 and the Wii will be cheaper and perhaps even just as good?
I wouldn't make to many conculusions yet about who won this round of the console wars. If there even can be a winner when 1 party has effectively said it is going to run a in a different race and another party is spending a fortune on repairing its consoles.
You also got the costs of storing all those bolts of cloth that need to either fed into the machine by a human being or have a HUGE system for all the various types and colors.
Sorry, but paperback style books that use 2 types of paper and 1 type of glue are feasable. Cloths that use all kinds of different materials are not, unless you want to be the one to tell the average woman she is going to wear the exact same materials as everyone else. Just check, how many people even have the same buttons on their jeans?
Anyway, it is far simpler, if you want a custom made piece, you go to a tailor. They still exist and they don't even cost that much (when you consider quality).
The clothing industry is just to different, to many styles, to many variations. Consider this, count the number of clothing stores vs the number of bookstores (which helps explain election results).
This printing on demand business won't be making chewable books, or pop-up books, or braille books, or picture books, or round books, or maps or hand-bound books. It spits out paperbacks.
A machine that could make jeans, 2-3 choices of cloth, different cuts and different sizes is "easy". A machine that can do all fashion would consume much of a supermarket just for its cloth feeder.
That extents EVEN to having no opinion on the law itself. He shouldn't be for or against a law, just rule on it. A judge ruling on a suicide should NOT be a member of the good samaritan help line. Bias.
Judges do more after all then just enforce the law, they judge the law itself. Plenty of laws made by politicians constantly get overturned by judges who not having any agenda but upkeeping the law rule that certain laws just cannot be.
One set of laws that has come under question is copyright law. How is a judge supposed to be able to listen unbiased to the for and againsts of a case if he already made clear what side he is on?
Remember that if this judge had rules the other way, new precedent would have been set, just as this ruling has set new precedent. To have that power, requires a judge not to go into the court with his mind made up. It is becoming clear that in this case, the accused were considered by the judge to be guilty before the trial had started.
if you don't see anything wrong with that, then my god man, you just don't deserve to live in a democracy.
Not anything complex, just for playing my MP3's without freezes or crashes when playing games on my windows machine. Old PC with linux, as I learned more and more it more and more became my desktop. Browser that didn't crash. Text-editor that didn't crash. P2P that didn't crash.
The odd thing? I am typing this on Vista but in a NXclient running on a linux machine. It saves the space of two desktops, gives me big screen access to my old linux machine and even if Vista crashes NXclient every now and then, it just resumes.
Vista, you still stuck. Linux just keeps getting better and better. (Why Vista? Needed 64bit for 8gig of memory and DX10 as well)
I do speak german and softwarehack is NOT a german word, it is a borrowed word and therefor means the same thing as you would expect it to. Never DOUBT. CHECK!
Your entire argument starts to look shakey because you asumed.
You then go on to claim that it is a seperate line. It is not, it is a wrap around of the previous line. Failure two.
You then go on to make your final claim. The email being fake. 2 strikes, is the third a hit? We already know you leap to conclusions, so might you have struck out completly?
The email indeed seems suspicious. The english in it is piss poor and that is coming from me. Could there be a reason? Nintendo is a japanese company, could we be dealing with an advanced case of engrish here? Maybe someone low in the hierachy whose native language is not english went outside the official channels to send this email?
It is important to remember that many internal emails would make any language teacher cry like a britney spears fan. I have seen worse.
The grammar itself is not enough to label the email a fake. That it came through an anonymous source, well that doesn't mean anything.
Finally, the wording. It isn't very proffesional but I am sure we all remember the halloween documents. If Balmer can throw chairs why can't a nintendo flunky send out this email?
So, two strikes and one questionable. I think you put to much faith in proffesionalism in individual employees. While I have no proof this email is wrong, it being stupid and badly written does not guarantee it as a fake. Really, read more leaked documents.
Windows 7 upgrade, $50, $200 if you have firefox installed? ..
Sorry, no deal. Won't even install it if you pay me $400 because I run firefox under linux. There ain't enough money in the WORLD!
There seems to be a group of people who have taken healthy paranoid delusion and turned it into something sick and twisted. The GP is so far gone that thanks to the curved universe he is coming back from the other side.
Recently in the Netherlands we had a case that seemed a bit like his example. A call was made warning about an upcoming terrorist attack. The police investigated the alledged bombers and decided, based on their criminal record, to arrest them. Turns out, it wasn't a real call. Much crying by the lefties (who conveniently forgot that the entire family involved had an extensive criminal record) about how innocent people could be harassed like this.
Here is a hint: THAT IS HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS!
The police has the power and for that matter needs the power, to arrest people while investigating crimes EVEN if they are not yet 100% absolutely sure the person is guilty, even following suspicious information. It is part of how the system works. Sucks if you are the one being grinded up by its gears but over thousands of years of civilization, this is the best we found so far. Only in La-La land can the police only arrest 100% guilty people with absolutely no invasion of anyones privacy.
The idea of using videos made by the public to solve crimes seems near perfect to me. Sure, some will try to frame others with it. Women are not unknown to on occasion report false rape. Does that mean you don't allow any rape charges because someone might be investigated not just for something they didn't do, but for something that didn't happen? Of course not.
As for photoshopping, the police ain't all that stupid. Sure they make mistakes and we read about them all the time. That again shows the system works. I would be a far more worried if I lived in a society where I never read about the police screwing up badly. That would scare me. If I see a person coming out of jail after a decade for being wrongly convicted I see a system that works. Slow, but works. Convince me there is an other system that would work better.
Geez, how hard was that?
Good luck convinging the world their is money to be made in killing muslims. Oddly enough, it was the muslims extremists who used to kill the pirates under islamic law. Then the west got rid of them in Somalie, so the pirates got free reign, then the big money attracted involvement from Dubai, a western muslim ally. You got to laugh. Or cry. I forget which.
Anyway, if bounties worked we would have no Mafia. We do.
If you are unarmed, I rob you. If you are armed, I murder you, then rob you. Proven fact. Why do you think the US has such a high murder rate?
Oooh, GOOD example. is this the basic training that led to the US defeat in Somalie?
Trained soldiers vs a ragtag army of civilians with "outdated" weapons. Who won again?
But you also forget the most important part of weapons training US and most good soldiers get. it has NOTHING to do with firing the weapon. It has everything to do with NOT firing the weapon. OBEYING ORDERS. The hard part ain't arming a man, it is disarming a man. If you armed all civilian vessels, how are you going to get them off again? Pirates can strike anywhere. Somalie is just in the news but other regions got their own pirates.
Where does a ship surrender its weapons? Do you allow any nation to carry arms into your waters? Do you really think the US wants chinese vessels armed to the teeth sailing straight into their harbour? For that matter, do you think China wants that?
The silly thing is that the US would have no problem with these pirates in normal times. One carrier fleet would be enough to control the entire area, but its big fleets are busy fighting the war on terror and that costs so much the US can't afford to patrol this bit as it intended (its carrier fleets exist to keep the sealanes save).
Other countries have cut down their own fleets because with no-more war we don't need these bottomless pits. After all, no war means no harm to international shipping.
Basically, we have to wake up to remember that the world is never going to be save, all it needs is a handful of people with guns to see more profit in war then peace. (Note the pirates happily attack vessels carrying food to their own people).
What about people for who $50 is a year salary? Congrats, you just split the internet into the rich and the poor. No more accessing the internet from africa from an old PC powered by a donated solar cell. Good job. You probably going to get a nobel price.
Ubuntu 8.10 = $0
Ubuntu 9.04 = $0
Vista Ultimate (remember, Ubuntu is Ultimate++Turbo (new and improved)) = $...
Windows 7.0 = $...
Oh, and don't forget to include the price of office, anti-virus and countless utils that are free under linux and come on the CD/Iso.
The problem is that a lot of people are afraid that one day, the nature of crime changes. Should rapist be caught by their DNA being recorded. Sure. But what if someday, they outlaw being a halfblood. Should then these people be rounded up by their DNA being on file and gassed? Oh godwin, you sneak, got yourself into another discussion.
But that is the point. In nazi-germany being the wrong race was outlawed. Suddenly the "harmless" census database became a tool for prosecution people who well actually were guilty. If I make it against the law to have blue eyes then all blue eyed people are criminals after all.
That is what some people fear. What if say 10 years after everyones DNA has been sampled a goverment decides to outlaw prosteting and arrests everyone present at a rally by sniffing their DNA? Sure sure, future tech paranoia but what if?
Not that we need tech, the huttu's and tuttu's didn't need tech, all they had was big knifes and a deep hatred and 1 million dead. Split evenly on both sides granted, if only one side had tech they could have had a proper massacre I suppose.
Another fear people have is simpler. Most people know they are criminals. Date rapers? Wife beaters etc etc? Slashdot is filled to the brim with them. Laws of averages after all. If you are at risk of being caught by a system then you are going to be against it.
So yes, the system has merits, to the innocent who has absolute faith in his/her goverment never abusing such a system. To the guilty or the paranoid/realists there are risks.
Personally, I think the paranoid are wrong. They worry about the wrong thing. Do not fight to keep tools of potential abuse out of the hands of goverment, fight to make sure you goverment will never abuse them. That is far harder and some might say impossible task but as the holocaust in ruwanda showed us, you don't need tech to cause a nightmare. Remember that DNA sniffer? Far simpler would be for a goverment to simply gundown everyone at a rally. Who needs DNA when you are a goverment on the loose? Keep the system honest and then the system can have all the tools available.
That is infact the theory behind the freedom to carry a gun. Don't ban guns, keep people from wanting to kill each other because if someone wants to kill they don't need a gun.
So, what exactly are you saying? That techonology fouled up but the people using it realised it and did NOT arrest this woman whose only crime is to contaminate sterile materials (would you want her in charge of handling medical equipment used on you) and break down her door or start a case against her?
The system, slowly, worked is what this story really is about.
Oh boy, do you got a LOUSY understanding of the legal system. You are convicted when it is decided that you are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. NOBODY claims it is proven you are guilty except the prosecutor perhaps. It is presumed, beyond a reasonable doubt. There is a difference.
Proven not guilty? Sorry, that only happens on tv. Not guilty really means, there is reasonable doubt. Although often it could also mean we don't doubt it, but we can't present the evidence that would nail you to the wall because of legal idiocies.
Anyway, you shouldn't have to be proven non-guilty since until you are convicted YOU are supposed to be presumed innocent. I know I know. Thing of the past.
Remind me again please which OS the botnet runs on? Thank you.
MS embeds all kinds of code from third parties. Drivers, libraries etc etc. It has been shown time and time again that there are huge security holes in MS code, holes that are actively exploited. It ain't for nothing that when the NSA wanted to make a proof of concept secure OS they choose linux.
You got a point, how can you trust any OS if you have not checked the code. Where you take a dive of the deep end is that you then suggest that MS can be trusted to check the code for you. Not trusting say Red Hat blindly that they checked all the code is sensible, trusting Microsoft that they checked all theirs is just plain silly. If they had, they wouldn't have so many bugs. And your fate in your goverment is bordering on the insane.
Anyway, that same goverment checks linux code. So either both are to be trusted or neither is.
Naked pics of a slashdotter. Might just rip the internet straight from my wall and torch the local datacenter, just to be sure.
Just because the wrong word has been used wrong for a long time doesn't make it right.
The idea is idiotic and one of those crypto-idiot fantasies that the totally clueless and paranoid seem to have.
About the only way you could do this is to control the server itself since then only person who knows about the encryption keys is yourself or rather your server.
But the poster wants a third party to have his encrypted data, send him the key to that data and then open that data, look at it but not be able to look at it.
This is DRM. It don't work. If I want to encrypt something I have several things.
The sender, this entity MUST have the original data, the encryption key and the encrypted result.
The reader, this person must have the encrypted data, the decryption key and can with those two, obtain a copy of the original data.
In between is the messenger or untrusted party. The messenger should NEVER have the encrypted data and decryption key at the same time or they will be able to do what only the reader should be able to do.
Tradiotionaly this means the sender and reader meet, exchange keys and then part. The sender then uses a messenger to send the encrypted data to the reader. The messenger does not have they key and so is safe. If said messenger turns out to be unreliable, you only loose the encrypted data, they key is safe with you and the reader.
DRM fails, because it trusts the messenger but not the reader. DRM wishes to give the reader everything so it can read the message but not be able to read the message. This cannot be done and is the reason DRM fails.
I seen some people be confused by SSH. SSH seemingly allows you to securely connect to a remote system without a seperate exchange of keys. The problem is that SSH doesn't allow that at all. If you just ssh to a remote system you are NOT secure at all. How do you know you are connecting to the system you are connecting to and not something else? You are trusting the messenger, the internet, to be trustworthy. SSH warns you about this, when you first connect to a system asking you accept the remote machines key, if you have NOT in a seperate communication verified that this key belongs to the remote machine, then you are gambling the internet is trusthworthy.
Back to the system proposed. DRM's wet dream is to control the readers hardware so they can only read the message in a way that doesn't allow them to reproduce it. The Trusted Computing dream. If the whole end machine is encrypted, only the anolog hole remains.
You cannot send a reader all the data they need to read the data but not be able to read the data for their own purposes. If I want google to search my email, they must be able to read my email.
The idea to search in encrypted data is just plain silly. The whole point of encryption is to not be able to read in it. If you encrypt a piece of text in such a way that individual words can be encrypted the same as the same words in the document then you are asking to be cracked in no time.
Consider how human usuable encryptions are attacked. By looking for often repeating encodings that might relate to common words. If you know the text is in english, then in an encrypted text "4 231231 421 4 534534 4" it would be fairly easy to figure out that 4 = a. Find more common words by statiscal analysis and then you only need to figure out the encryption that results in that encoding of a very short string and voila, you can decode eveything. Good encryption does NOT allow the same data parts to be encrypted the same.
So the idea of sending encrypted words to seach for is idiotic. Even if you have the original data on your PC so you can create the same encoded data as on the server (but why then search on it remotly?) you still wouldn't be able to snip the bit you wanted out of it because the encryption shouldn't allow you to do that.
The entire idea is idiotic.
If IE always asked you to click something, then it would be safe. Exactly how the hell would you create an OS that you can actually install anything on while preventing you from installing something that MIGHT be bad? After all, if I want to install a spam program, that is my business. There after all plenty of legimate reasons to send mass emails. Yes really.
As for rootkit like software. It is your PC, you might have a reason for it. Security software be it anti-virus or DRM often needs to nest itself deep into the OS as well. If that is what the user wants, that is what the user should be able to do.
IE gets slammed because it allows installs without user activation. As soon as a "hack" requires user action then it is no longer an OS/software vulnerability but a social engineering one.
We don't blame money for being insecure because of pyramid schemes do we? We blame money for being insecure when it can be counterfitted, not when humans can be duped with their money.
Nothing says real man more then Opera. After all with a browser name like that, you got to be a real man to use it right? Right? RIGHT?!?
Your floppy will be hard soon.
People expect a certain amount basic honesty from others. If I ask a taxi-driver to take me to location X, I expect him to say if it is just ten meters down the road, not charge me for the ride.
Is it to unreasonable to expect a company to not outright lie, consitently on facts? Sure, of course Vista is great and will improve your life. But don't claim it boots in 2 seconds when it doesn't. Their is sales talk and their is lying and there is a difference.
MS, and various other companies have lost sight of this difference and it makes everything they say suspect and on the whole, irritating as hell. Coca Cola is not exactly telling the truth that when you open the can a party comes out, but neither is it claiming Coca Cola is more healthy then fruit juice or a glass of milk.
MS with this campaign is once again not just trying to show how good there products are but trying to bend facts until they break and claiming it is just advertising. For most of us, there is a limit.
Compare it to a job interview. If you tell the truth, that you are an average coder, well that is very honest but won't get you hired. Say you are a really good programmer and you might not be to honest but hey, it is a sales pitch and they know it so might hire you hoping for a good programmer. Say you are the best programmer and people will just laugh at you.
You got to have your head very deeply insides balmer digestive tract to think the quote above is a good way to describe your own product.
Kay doesn't just drink the coolaid, he slurps it straight from Ballmers wiener.