Ok, so it only recorded 3000 votes of 8000? I'd guess that would mean 5000 votes were lost, not 4500. But let's just think about those 3000 votes for now... the election was decided by 2300 votes. So that means, of the 3000 votes that got counted, 2650 were for Candidate A and 350 were for Candidate B. If Candidate A got 88% of the vote so far, isn't it somewhat silly to think that it's going to suddenly swing to Candidate B if they count the other 60% of the ballots?
The Certance tape drives (manufactured by Seagate) crossed the line. The Travan 20 (STT20000A) and Travan 40 (STT3401A) claim to store up to 20 gig or 40 gig. Of course, this assumes 2:1 compression, which is a standard assumption in the tape backup industry.
The catch? These drives don't support hardware compression. Furthermore, they don't support a variable block size, so you also can't perform software compression. The *only* way you could compress your backups would be to compress them to a file on your hard drive, then back up that file. In other words, you can only back up a 10 (or 20) gig file of (possibly-compressed) data.
To top it off, they claim to support Linux, but their tech-support people have no clue about it. They can guess about using TAR (yes, they like to use caps), but that's about it.
First, note that these files generated by the attack must be constructed to have a collision. You can't just take a given file and generate another one that collides with it. In particular, the attack is simply encrypting stuff using a key -- getting this to work on a video file is a different problem.
I'm also not particularly concerned that the OP is going to construct a collision. I think it goes without saying that using either of the two known collisions (presented in the Wang paper) to construct an answer to my challenge is an obvious cheat. Of course, it would still be interesting to see it be done -- it just wouldn't get the $50.;)
Your calculations are correct for an accidental collision. But for someone putting money on it (me) it's safest to take into account the possibility that the OP would try to come up with a collision using a birthday attack. And that takes 2^(N/2) operations, which is why I used 2^64 in my calculation.
I'll give you $50 if you can back that claim up. I want to see two video files. They must start out the same, but have a difference about half-way through. And they have to have the same md5 sum. Just post where I can download the two files, and your paypal address.
The way I see it, you've got a 1/2^64 chance of being right. So I'm risking $50/184467440737095516, which isn't a whole lot.
Disclaimer: I'm a/. reader. This could be completely wrong.
I'd guess that the interference is coming in through the power lines. Others have talked of filtering, ways of rearranging your lifestyle, etc. But nobody has mentioned the obvious: plug your audio equipment in through a UPS. Most UPSes have line conditioners built in. I'd expect that they would eliminate most line noise. Just a guess though. Still, it's worth trying since it's so simple.
"You may have a mortgage from January 2001 -- Which of the following is the monthly payment?" The answer for me was 'None of the above'
Scary thought: if you did have an error (identity theft, mistake, whatever) then you wouldn't be able to answer that question correctly. Then how would you go about proving yourself to them?
Gives a whole new meaning to "identity theft". I'd always thought of it as someone else copying your identity. But actually, you could lose your identity also. Yikes!
Think of it this way... if you're still doing exactly the same thing in 20 years, wouldn't you want to kill yourself? I mean, there's only so many times you can restart the same crashing service before you write a cronjob to automate it.
In any case, I don't look at it as putting myself out of a job. After all, they'll still keep me on staff to watch their stuff, just in case something goes wrong. Besides, my boss doesn't necessarily know that I've automated my entire job into a few cron jobs.
In the end, what happens is I take another job and automate everything there too. As things get automated, they can lay off their other employees, since I'll have everything under control by myself. Then it's time for me to assimilate a new company.
Most cars will slide before rolling. Of course, once they slide off the road, there's a decent chance of a roll.
As for rolling a Citroen, I'm guessing it wouldn't be too hard if you were actually trying. Just skid it sideways into a curb. The sudden stop should make it roll.
My dad had a funny story from his younger days: a group of guys would buy a car that ran from a junkyard for about $10. Then they'd drive it around some abandoned lot and try to roll it. They discovered the only way to roll a car was in reverse. After rolling it, they'd all roll it back over and try again. At the end of the day, they'd return it to the junkyard for $5. Sure beats going to the movies, eh?
It travels at the speed of light, so unless Voyager is already listening and buffering data, they'd have no way to tell it to start listening before the signal had already passed.
I'm neglecting, of course, listening to reflected signals. For example, they could buy themselves about 1/2 hour by listening for signals bouncing off Jupiter, or something.
One of my users is apparently following your strategy: his home directory currently contains 2160 files. I've learned not to just type "ls" in that directory, since the sorting (alphabetical order) takes too long. He's also learned that the only way to find a file is to sort by date (ls -ltr). Since he usually remembers if he last modified a file today or a month ago, it doesn't take too long to locate it. Especially if you remember part of the name.
My strategy? I've got folders like: Computer, Research, Personal, Crypt (for cryptography, not encrypted files), and tmp. In the end, I've got "only" 152 files in my homedir. Of course, I've also got massive confusion about whether something goes under Computer or Crypt....
The comment about not wanting spam is what really got me. I had someone complain that they were getting 100 spams/week. I pointed out they only received 75 emails that week, and 30 of them were auto-filtered. So no, they didn't. They didn't really believe me, though, and asked me to fix the problem.
Of course, that's not nearly as bad as when I caught myself skimming over their caught-spam folder to check for false positives, because they couldn't be bothered to learn to do that. Pretty sad what life has come to -- reading other people's spam. And not being paid for it (unlike Bill G's lackeys).
Agreed. A few years back, we had a whole bunch of SGI Indy power supply failures. AFter we ran out of spares, I had to shop around for a replacement power supply. Turns out a power supply was $250. Or a computer for $300. We paid the $300, got some extra parts, and I think even had a slightly faster machine as a result. All that was from a company called XS Net. They do Sun stuff too.
Oh, and if anyone is throwing away a working SGI Indy, pull the power supply and NVRAM. Those parts are probably still worth something on eBay, since 100% of the failures I've seen involve one of them.
Oh, sorry. I suppose now that some kid wrote an article on something I did a few years ago, I should throw out all my experience in favor of reading someone else's claims.
I was going to try it for a talk I was giving from my laptop, but didn't have the LCD projector. So I removed the LCD from my laptop and laid it down on an overhead projector. Problem is the image is rather dark. Basic problem of the way LCDs work: white is actually 50% gray due to the polarizing filters. And the overhead projectors just aren't bright enough. Might be ok in a very dark room, but otherwise I wouldn't recommend it.
Look at the file sizes. 6 meg on a floppy? I'm guessing that's NOT what the grandparent meant. The last release to support floppy boot was FC1. The 2.6 kernel of FC2 and above is simply too large to fit on a floppy, even with most drivers stripped out.
Then change it back. The variable is set based on the version of the fedora-release package. So really you just had to download the fedora-release package from the fc3 dir and do:
rpm -Uvh fedora-release
yum update yum
yum upgrade
Disclaimer: I haven't tried FC3 yet, so I can't claim that the yum updating procedure will actually work.
Yup. I'm in IL, and it's pretty much guaranteed to go for Kerry. So I'm voting for Badnarik. Not because I like him, but because he's the only third-party candidate on the rolls, and I want to send a message that the two-party system sucks.
I use a multi-pronged approach to keep the other admins under control:
sudo logs their actions
tripwire tells me what files they change
firewall prevents them from starting new services
Overall, it works pretty well. (I think) I know about every change that happens to my systems. At least, strange stuff doesn't happen without an audit trail to figure out who was responsible.
Disclaimer: if you're one of my cow-orkers, please assume this was written in regard to one of my other systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so it only recorded 3000 votes of 8000? I'd guess that would mean 5000 votes were lost, not 4500. But let's just think about those 3000 votes for now... the election was decided by 2300 votes. So that means, of the 3000 votes that got counted, 2650 were for Candidate A and 350 were for Candidate B. If Candidate A got 88% of the vote so far, isn't it somewhat silly to think that it's going to suddenly swing to Candidate B if they count the other 60% of the ballots?
The Certance tape drives (manufactured by Seagate) crossed the line. The Travan 20 (STT20000A) and Travan 40 (STT3401A) claim to store up to 20 gig or 40 gig. Of course, this assumes 2:1 compression, which is a standard assumption in the tape backup industry.
The catch? These drives don't support hardware compression. Furthermore, they don't support a variable block size, so you also can't perform software compression. The *only* way you could compress your backups would be to compress them to a file on your hard drive, then back up that file. In other words, you can only back up a 10 (or 20) gig file of (possibly-compressed) data.
To top it off, they claim to support Linux, but their tech-support people have no clue about it. They can guess about using TAR (yes, they like to use caps), but that's about it.
I'm also not particularly concerned that the OP is going to construct a collision. I think it goes without saying that using either of the two known collisions (presented in the Wang paper) to construct an answer to my challenge is an obvious cheat. Of course, it would still be interesting to see it be done -- it just wouldn't get the $50. ;)
Your calculations are correct for an accidental collision. But for someone putting money on it (me) it's safest to take into account the possibility that the OP would try to come up with a collision using a birthday attack. And that takes 2^(N/2) operations, which is why I used 2^64 in my calculation.
I'll give you $50 if you can back that claim up. I want to see two video files. They must start out the same, but have a difference about half-way through. And they have to have the same md5 sum. Just post where I can download the two files, and your paypal address.
The way I see it, you've got a 1/2^64 chance of being right. So I'm risking $50/184467440737095516, which isn't a whole lot.
http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/12/images/CC_Af fidavit_120604.pdf
I'd guess that the interference is coming in through the power lines. Others have talked of filtering, ways of rearranging your lifestyle, etc. But nobody has mentioned the obvious: plug your audio equipment in through a UPS. Most UPSes have line conditioners built in. I'd expect that they would eliminate most line noise. Just a guess though. Still, it's worth trying since it's so simple.
Scary thought: if you did have an error (identity theft, mistake, whatever) then you wouldn't be able to answer that question correctly. Then how would you go about proving yourself to them?
Gives a whole new meaning to "identity theft". I'd always thought of it as someone else copying your identity. But actually, you could lose your identity also. Yikes!
In any case, I don't look at it as putting myself out of a job. After all, they'll still keep me on staff to watch their stuff, just in case something goes wrong. Besides, my boss doesn't necessarily know that I've automated my entire job into a few cron jobs.
In the end, what happens is I take another job and automate everything there too. As things get automated, they can lay off their other employees, since I'll have everything under control by myself. Then it's time for me to assimilate a new company.
I predict total world domination in 20 years.
Do you have a reference for that? As interesting as it would be to believe you, I'm finding it implausible.
As for rolling a Citroen, I'm guessing it wouldn't be too hard if you were actually trying. Just skid it sideways into a curb. The sudden stop should make it roll.
My dad had a funny story from his younger days: a group of guys would buy a car that ran from a junkyard for about $10. Then they'd drive it around some abandoned lot and try to roll it. They discovered the only way to roll a car was in reverse. After rolling it, they'd all roll it back over and try again. At the end of the day, they'd return it to the junkyard for $5. Sure beats going to the movies, eh?
The best part? This was before seatbelts!
I'm neglecting, of course, listening to reflected signals. For example, they could buy themselves about 1/2 hour by listening for signals bouncing off Jupiter, or something.
No. But then again, I'm a male. Females might have differing views (they usually do).
Why is that a problem?
My strategy? I've got folders like: Computer, Research, Personal, Crypt (for cryptography, not encrypted files), and tmp. In the end, I've got "only" 152 files in my homedir. Of course, I've also got massive confusion about whether something goes under Computer or Crypt....
The comment about not wanting spam is what really got me. I had someone complain that they were getting 100 spams/week. I pointed out they only received 75 emails that week, and 30 of them were auto-filtered. So no, they didn't. They didn't really believe me, though, and asked me to fix the problem.
Of course, that's not nearly as bad as when I caught myself skimming over their caught-spam folder to check for false positives, because they couldn't be bothered to learn to do that. Pretty sad what life has come to -- reading other people's spam. And not being paid for it (unlike Bill G's lackeys).
The aliens have been impersonating humans for years, in an effort to guide us into doing what they want. This is hardly anything newsworthy.
Oh, and if anyone is throwing away a working SGI Indy, pull the power supply and NVRAM. Those parts are probably still worth something on eBay, since 100% of the failures I've seen involve one of them.
Or not.
I was going to try it for a talk I was giving from my laptop, but didn't have the LCD projector. So I removed the LCD from my laptop and laid it down on an overhead projector. Problem is the image is rather dark. Basic problem of the way LCDs work: white is actually 50% gray due to the polarizing filters. And the overhead projectors just aren't bright enough. Might be ok in a very dark room, but otherwise I wouldn't recommend it.
Look at the file sizes. 6 meg on a floppy? I'm guessing that's NOT what the grandparent meant. The last release to support floppy boot was FC1. The 2.6 kernel of FC2 and above is simply too large to fit on a floppy, even with most drivers stripped out.
Then change it back. The variable is set based on the version of the fedora-release package. So really you just had to download the fedora-release package from the fc3 dir and do:
- rpm -Uvh fedora-release
- yum update yum
- yum upgrade
Disclaimer: I haven't tried FC3 yet, so I can't claim that the yum updating procedure will actually work.Yup. I'm in IL, and it's pretty much guaranteed to go for Kerry. So I'm voting for Badnarik. Not because I like him, but because he's the only third-party candidate on the rolls, and I want to send a message that the two-party system sucks.
I use a multi-pronged approach to keep the other admins under control:
- sudo logs their actions
- tripwire tells me what files they change
- firewall prevents them from starting new services
Overall, it works pretty well. (I think) I know about every change that happens to my systems. At least, strange stuff doesn't happen without an audit trail to figure out who was responsible.Disclaimer: if you're one of my cow-orkers, please assume this was written in regard to one of my other systems.
Heh. I clicked on the /. one, and it took about 5 seconds to respond. I was thinking it was a pretty cool DoS to have slashdot link to itself....