Your friendly DSL or cable broadband provider could implement this technique to enforce their single-machine license clause
Well, if it's to expensive to make a NAT box that's impervious to this kind of information gathering, then you can always approach the problem from the other end....
I'm wondering how hard it would be to configure a Linux box to generate all of the necessary traffic to make the number of machines *appear* to the cable company to be ludicrously high... like a few hundred or a thousand machines. Let's see them try to bill you extra for THAT with a straight face (kinda reminds me of my $32,000 Y2K water bill, actually).
In the suit, the DMA and four telemarketing firms said the FTC's effort would......discriminate against an industry that provides millions of jobs.
And in related news, the National Association of Crack Dealers filed suit in federal court today, aledging that the prohibition on crack cocaine discriminates against an industry that provides desperately needed jobs to millions of inner-city drop-outs.
Next, I suppose that Osama is going to file suit claiming that new U.S. standards for airport weapons screening is disrupting the morale of his legions of suicide bombers....
Is there really that much 'good stuff' on tv to watch, let alone save?
Actually, according to Nielsen's extrapolations, it is expected that there will be 16 good shows airing at the same time sometime around March 12, 2034...
... but that's only if they can find a good location for filming Survivor XXXVII.
If Joe-user gets a "FREE Certificate. v0.5beta" from some kind of business, he won't do the transaction. If I were a struggling webshop, i would go with VeriSign. It's sad, but that is just how it is right now.
This is probably true, but it certainly won't change unless there is a way to get that "FREE Certificate...".
Gradually, I can envision some vendors switching from Verisign to Free.... and I can envision myself ordering from them; For example, with vendors that I've ordered from in the past and had good experiences with.
Anyway, like several people have pointed out, a free cert is easy to make, with self-signing. The only advantage to a free-CA would be if their certs didn't generate warning messages on the browser like self-signed ones do.
In order to do that the right way, the free-CA would need to get their public key bundled into the popular browsers... a process that is probably pronounced "kickback".
The alternative way to do this is to try for a "grassroots" adoption of the CA's key into people's browsers. If you visit a site using a Free-CA-signed cert, you'd be encouraged by the site, somehow, to actually import the CA's public key... which would put Free-CA on an equal footing with Verisign and Thawte... on that browser, anyway. If that's the road that ends up getting taken, then I'd gladly load the Free-CD public key on all of my browsers on day 1.
Also keep in mind that this doesn't have to be massively successful in order to reap some gains. Even if it was mildly popular, it might entice Verisign and Thawte to drop their prices a bit in order to decrease the incentive to go with Free-CA.
What what pointless rants are we going to fling at our grandkids?
Actually, I recently pondered why my generation (GenX) is so aware of how dumb "Old Man Rants" are... aware enough that we probably won't ever do them in earnest.
What I concluded was that, it wasn't so much that my generation was *aware* of how dumb they are as much as it was that the previous generation was *un*aware. This, I concluded, must be because they were never on the receiving end of these kinds of rants.
Think about it for a moment. Recently, technology has been advancing at such an incredible rate that it drastically changes the life experiences of adjacent generations. For example, when I was growing up, the first remote control we had was a *sonic* one... with little internal hammers that would impact round aluminum bars and make certain frequencies of "pings". One generation later, we've got touch-screen LCD remotes whose buttons reconfigure themselves depending upon what device you're controlling.
But it wasn't always this way. For example, it was hundreds of years between major advancements in something so crucial as maritime navigation... things like the compass... a reliable time-piece... the telescope... the sextant. Several generations would live and die between these major advancements.
So, I've concluded that there just wasn't all that much different between generations back then... not enough stuff that made the next generation's life easier enough to make the previous generation bitter about it. I kind of imagine that the best rant they could come up with would be stuff like:
"When I was your age, we didn't HAVE maple axe handles.... we had OAK ones... and we were THANKFUL, DAMMIT!"
Just doesn't have the same ring to it... so I figured the old dudes just didn't bother. So, our parents never really got the overdose of "we were thankful" rants to realize how silly they sound.
Oh, and... next time one of your folks springs the "When I was your age, we didn't have..." line on you, just say "The *reason* you didn't have it was because of the depression... which is because you guys made the stock market tank... which was due to, in today's parlance, 'irrational exuberance'. So, you brought it on yourself... ya old fart!".
I recall reading an article in Scientific American about 15 years ago where researchers, working on some island somewhere, had unearthed remains of some boxes with strange inner workings. They eventually figured out that they were boolean gates to be used with *rope*. For example, the "AND" gate would have two ropes going in and one coming out. The mechanism inside was such that, if you pulled on both ropes, it would cause the third, outgoing, rope to get pulled. There were other boxed for OR gates and I don't recall if there was one for XOR.
The striking thing is that the article gave the impression that the island had been inhabited by a bunch of tribal villagers... kind of an Easter Island kinda deal. So, it was kind of interesting to think that, with enough rope and boxes, they could have turned the island into a huge calculator.
Actually, the notion of being able to take video and use it to deduce higher resolution dovetails with an idea that I've had for many years now... specifically, stuff that's *purposely* made low-res.
I'm referring to those video clips you see on TV where they obscure someone's face or a license plate with large square blocks that are, presumably, an average of all of the pixels "covered" by the square. The interesting thing is that, when the video pans or zooms even a little, the blocks all change their colors slightly... which divulges the subtle changes in the average pixel values.
With a few seconds of video... and with a sufficient amount of jitter on the part of the cameraman, it should be possible to get a much higher-res picture and, essentially, defeat all of this nonsense about trying to "protect identities, blah, blah, blah..".:)
Another less sinister application: PhotoHunt! At our local bars, we've got these little touch-screen video games mounted on the bar. They all play a variety of games (card games, memory games, etc.). One of these games is called "PhotoHunt", where the game shows you two images side-by-side. The images are identical except for about 5 differences (ie, the tree in the background might be missing some branches or something). Of course, the pictures always have very stunningly beautiful models in the foreground, to distract you from the task at hand.
Anyway, I've long wanted to write a program that would let me walk into the bar with my laptop and webcam (needless to say, I'd be going home alone on *that* night), point it at the PhotoHunt game and have the laptop instantly tell me where the differences are. Seems like this guy's comparative image processing would be right up that alley.
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I'm wondering how hard it would be to configure a Linux box to generate all of the necessary traffic to make the number of machines *appear* to the cable company to be ludicrously high... like a few hundred or a thousand machines. Let's see them try to bill you extra for THAT with a straight face (kinda reminds me of my $32,000 Y2K water bill, actually).
This is probably true, but it certainly won't change unless there is a way to get that "FREE Certificate...".
Gradually, I can envision some vendors switching from Verisign to Free.... and I can envision myself ordering from them; For example, with vendors that I've ordered from in the past and had good experiences with.
Anyway, like several people have pointed out, a free cert is easy to make, with self-signing. The only advantage to a free-CA would be if their certs didn't generate warning messages on the browser like self-signed ones do.
In order to do that the right way, the free-CA would need to get their public key bundled into the popular browsers... a process that is probably pronounced "kickback".
The alternative way to do this is to try for a "grassroots" adoption of the CA's key into people's browsers. If you visit a site using a Free-CA-signed cert, you'd be encouraged by the site, somehow, to actually import the CA's public key... which would put Free-CA on an equal footing with Verisign and Thawte... on that browser, anyway. If that's the road that ends up getting taken, then I'd gladly load the Free-CD public key on all of my browsers on day 1.
Also keep in mind that this doesn't have to be massively successful in order to reap some gains. Even if it was mildly popular, it might entice Verisign and Thawte to drop their prices a bit in order to decrease the incentive to go with Free-CA.
What I concluded was that, it wasn't so much that my generation was *aware* of how dumb they are as much as it was that the previous generation was *un*aware. This, I concluded, must be because they were never on the receiving end of these kinds of rants.
Think about it for a moment. Recently, technology has been advancing at such an incredible rate that it drastically changes the life experiences of adjacent generations. For example, when I was growing up, the first remote control we had was a *sonic* one... with little internal hammers that would impact round aluminum bars and make certain frequencies of "pings". One generation later, we've got touch-screen LCD remotes whose buttons reconfigure themselves depending upon what device you're controlling.
But it wasn't always this way. For example, it was hundreds of years between major advancements in something so crucial as maritime navigation... things like the compass... a reliable time-piece... the telescope... the sextant. Several generations would live and die between these major advancements.
So, I've concluded that there just wasn't all that much different between generations back then... not enough stuff that made the next generation's life easier enough to make the previous generation bitter about it. I kind of imagine that the best rant they could come up with would be stuff like:
"When I was your age, we didn't HAVE maple axe handles.... we had OAK ones... and we were THANKFUL, DAMMIT!"
Just doesn't have the same ring to it... so I figured the old dudes just didn't bother. So, our parents never really got the overdose of "we were thankful" rants to realize how silly they sound.
Oh, and... next time one of your folks springs the "When I was your age, we didn't have..." line on you, just say "The *reason* you didn't have it was because of the depression... which is because you guys made the stock market tank... which was due to, in today's parlance, 'irrational exuberance'. So, you brought it on yourself... ya old fart!".
I recall reading an article in Scientific American about 15 years ago where researchers, working on some island somewhere, had unearthed remains of some boxes with strange inner workings. They eventually figured out that they were boolean gates to be used with *rope*. For example, the "AND" gate would have two ropes going in and one coming out. The mechanism inside was such that, if you pulled on both ropes, it would cause the third, outgoing, rope to get pulled. There were other boxed for OR gates and I don't recall if there was one for XOR.
The striking thing is that the article gave the impression that the island had been inhabited by a bunch of tribal villagers... kind of an Easter Island kinda deal. So, it was kind of interesting to think that, with enough rope and boxes, they could have turned the island into a huge calculator.
Actually, the notion of being able to take video and use it to deduce higher resolution dovetails with an idea that I've had for many years now... specifically, stuff that's *purposely* made low-res. I'm referring to those video clips you see on TV where they obscure someone's face or a license plate with large square blocks that are, presumably, an average of all of the pixels "covered" by the square. The interesting thing is that, when the video pans or zooms even a little, the blocks all change their colors slightly... which divulges the subtle changes in the average pixel values. With a few seconds of video... and with a sufficient amount of jitter on the part of the cameraman, it should be possible to get a much higher-res picture and, essentially, defeat all of this nonsense about trying to "protect identities, blah, blah, blah..". :)
Another less sinister application: PhotoHunt! At our local bars, we've got these little touch-screen video games mounted on the bar. They all play a variety of games (card games, memory games, etc.). One of these games is called "PhotoHunt", where the game shows you two images side-by-side. The images are identical except for about 5 differences (ie, the tree in the background might be missing some branches or something). Of course, the pictures always have very stunningly beautiful models in the foreground, to distract you from the task at hand.
Anyway, I've long wanted to write a program that would let me walk into the bar with my laptop and webcam (needless to say, I'd be going home alone on *that* night), point it at the PhotoHunt game and have the laptop instantly tell me where the differences are. Seems like this guy's comparative image processing would be right up that alley.