Ah Turbo C++. That's what I learnt to cut my teeth on. And the five-disk install wasn't too bad, but my programs had a tendency to take DOS down hard, and reinstalling happened quite often.
After using something that quick and responsive I could never get used to the noticeable latency on every operation in a "modern IDE", so I've reverted to vim and make...
I don't think that I've picked a side yet:) Part of me agrees with the but-you-can-copy-it-so-it-must-be-ok tribe. I guess that is the engineer part of me that accepts that trying to enforce copyright in a medium with zero copying and distribution costs is never going to work. In particular peer-to-peer lets non-commercial infringement occur on a commercial scale. I can't see a good way to resolve that basic issue, and I think we're going to see a lot more battles in the legal system trying to come to terms with a new type of activity.
Maybe it would be better to describe that as my scientist viewpoint. The engineer in me is more pragmatic and says "so you can't make it hard, but you can can make it damaging". Murder isn't hard to commit in this physical universe, yet we seem to have largely persuaded people not to do it. I'm not making a direct comparison between the morality of murder and copyright infringement, btw, just pointing out that something being easily supported by our laws of physics doesn't make it inevitable.
I think that one thing that has polarised the issue is large interests have tried to push copyright too far. People who would be moderates in the debate look at life+70 year terms, and 20 year trivial software patents, and people dying because the drugs they need are locked up behind ip.... etc etc.
My own take would be to reset the system. Equalise all "ownership" of IP to the same length; say 5 years. Set-up a massive repository of all public goods (which would be everything created before 2004) and then institute a process similar to the DMCA: media companies can identify their goods online and issue take-down orders to get the trackers closed. If the tracker owner wants to contest it then it stays up and their details get revealed publicly. Stop trying to penalise downloaders by abusing the definition of distribution, and only go after uploaders.
Oddly enough that is a game that the media companies could win. If the initial takedown process works fast enough then nobody would be able to complete an entire download before the tracker shut. With a huge collection of legal media to choose from, competition would start to work against piracy instead of for it.
But it will never happen, the anti-copyright tribe is too ardent to make a compromise, and the pro-copyright tribe is too abusive to be given takedown powers...:)
Personally I'll stick to buying music off itunes, ripping dvds that I rent and downloading Tv shows that I've missed but could have watched on cable. It doesn't match the legal definitions but it's close enough to my own personal ethics to do for now...
Really? Which basic principles of cryptography do you think collide? The OP describes a non-problem. There is already work that solves the basic search problem without leaking frequency information. The basic technique returns constant-length results to any query.
When you flick through your "good book about cryptography" you may want to look up Randomised Encryption Schemes, Homomorphic Encryption and Yao Circuits. Then you will maybe understand.
Good point (and interesting post above). Profit is perhaps the wrong term. The business unit in the BBC that handles overseas sales of programs and DVD sales is run to maximise revenues. As you point out these are not really profits as they are not over and above their tax income, and they are not passed on the shareholders. I believe that the revenues are used to fund costs, and so reduce the size of the tax imposed on TVs in the UK.
I'm not really sure what you mean. Assuming that A and B are roughly the same size, A, B and SQRT(c) will all have about n/2 bits. But I don't see the connection to discrete logs. The scheme assumes that the attacker can't compute Xd,Xs,Yd,Ys. If the attacker observes the D transmitted in steps 5,6 and 7 then he can attempt to invert the exponentiation revealing Xd and Ys.
My head is a bit too hungover to follow through the implications, but Xs is the multiplicative inverse of Ys and so should be unique and can be computed cheaply using Euclid's algorithm. The same holds for Xd and Yd, so if the attacker can solve discrete logs (inverting the modular exponentiation) then he can recover all four of Xd,Xs,Yd and Ys. This then reveals the original D.
In practice solving discrete logs for this type of group is about as hard as factoring. It hasn't been proven to be hard, but nobody has come up with an efficient way of doing it. Either proving a lower bound of O(2^n), or finding a cheap algorithm to solve the problem would be a significant break-through.
The other main problem with the scheme is that it is susceptible to a Man In The Middle attack. If the attacker can intercept and alter the communications between source and destination then he can substitute his own choice of Xd and Yd and reveal D directly. To get around this there needs to be some form of authentication as well as the encryption.
That looks familiar but I can't remember the name, what scheme is it?
The likelihood of breaking it is genuinely 1 in 2^n and can only be broken by brute force attack.
That's not strictly true. Although the discrete log problem is hard it is still a computational assumption. Proving that 2^n is a lower bound would be a significant achievement. This scheme is only "unbreakable" in the sense that RSA is - breaking it requires solving a problem that we suspect, but are unable to prove, is very hard.
The BBC is a perfect example of what you are saying. Despite being funded by the taxpayer they are run along commercial lines with orders to maximise profits...
You are assuming that watching video on the net is using the wrong tool for the job. Why? ISPs don't offer a "web browsing" service, they offer an internet connection.
No cable or dsl provider has even attempted to argue that they are offering unlimited time. You are the only person to try that one. Furthermore, here in the uk several ISPs have explicitly claimed unlimited downloads on their advertising before cutting people off for exceeding their FUP.
It's not really a good choice. In an ideal world all banks would be small enough to fail. The shareholders would get wiped out and the depositors would get compensated. But we are not in an ideal world. The government doesn't have a choice between letting small banks fail or propping them up.
Right now we have a system with a few huge banks that are all under-capitalised because the majority of their real assets just dropped 30% in value, and the majority of their unreal (leveraged) assets fell off of a cliff in response. Letting them go bankrupt right now will not allow an orderly one-by-one breakup.
The amount of debt owed between the banks means that any one bankruptcy will cause a default on assets, hence a write-down and then a domino chain of failure.
Right now, propping them up with freshly printed imaginary money may be the least worse alternative. Later on it is essential that they are broken into smaller companies that can be allowed to fail - because if the bad assets are not purged out of the system then the ensuing inflationary holocaust in five years will make this look like a picnic.
Not it is not the same with clouds and that was the researchers point. The term "Cloud" should not be a marketing buzzword for scalable. There should not be multiple "Clouds". The entire point of the Cloud as they refer to it was that it was amorphous and ubiquitous. One of their nicest points is that you slap a brand name on it then it is no longer the Cloud.
The current crop of so-called "Cloud" services (like Amazon) are a decent enough attempt to provide this type of platform, but provides a highly redundant platform as a single point of failure is not the same thing as removing the single point of failure. Amazon's platform can still fall over (and did for several hours earlier this year). In real Cloud computing that would not be an issue because rather than being tied to Amazons servers / datacenter you could execute your code anywhere that provided the service.
One of the problems with the real Cloud of the 90s was that it became too successful. So now we don't see it anymore. The architecture of the lower levels of the internet is now firmly entrenched: tcp/ip, dns etc. That is the real Cloud, a platform that we can write code for that really is ubiquitous. Services like Amazon are a logical progression of that platform, but they are not the logical endpoint. When there is a standardised API for code that will run on any of the major providers, accessing storage from any of the major providers, and able to replicate across them at will (chasing the cheapest prices) then the Cloud will really have arrived.
Finally, just to answer your question in a more concrete and exact way:
Coming back to your point (and that of the paper): you pick one cloud to host your application and then why would you want to be able to communicate with different clouds???
It's important to drill through the marketing buzzwords that the paper is rallying against. By definition there are no multiple clouds. So really what you are asking is why should I want to talk to different providers within the same Cloud?
Resilience. Partly to avoid downtime, partly to avoid vendor lockin. If I develop my application for EC2 and then Amazon decide to get out of the scalable computing business - I'm screwed. It's a similar situation to the drm-locked media where the license servers shut down after the company stopped selling it.
Another reason - competition. If I can move my application between Google and Amazon at will then I will pay the cheapest price for my cycles. If I have to recode my application to redeploy it then it will require a huge price differential before I do that.
But it has to be intentional - for you to claim that an EULA was binding over me you would have to show that I read the EULA and *intended* to enter into the contract. The defence that I just skip all EULAs because they are garbage would be valid, although I'm not aware of this being tested in uk law.
The only annoying omission is that some viewers lack page forward, like page down but go to the same point on the next page. This is really useful when preparing drafts and the screen is set to zoom in past the margins.
I can't really call the other missing feature an omission as I haven't found a viewer that does it yet, but it is on my wishlist. Most viewers do 2-up viewing, but they lock the parity - ie odd pages and even pages are always in the same place and you step through the document two pages at a time. Can somebody somewhere implement an n-up view that steps through one page at a time? It's not hard, I had to write a script that faked it once....
What you've said doesn't quite stack up. Peering agreements do mandate that traffic must be about the same in both direction. But this does not imply a sender pays system. It implies that anyone that has a surfeit of senders, or of receivers, pays. For example the AT&T peering agreement mandates that traffic flows must be within 2:1 in both directions.
Most ISPs are largely receivers of data. As a result they try and attract server business because it helps them balance their flows for negotiating peering agreements. So if everyone on TW maxed out their upstream allowance it may actually reduce TW's transit fees.
It's hard to find out how much upstream bandwidth costs as most colo providers seem to only do quotes by email these days, but Burst offer $0.05/GB. Unlike Verizon I'm guessing they understand what the decimal point is:)
Unfortunately the internet tends to be packet-switched rather than circuit-switched, so yes, it costs more to transmit a bunch of ones and zero than (not) to transmit a bunch of zeros.
Only if you assume that hours are continuous... real life hours maybe, but project hours? Nah... they're discrete and any fractions are *always* rounded upwards. If you're getting paid to do it then you can never reach zero because you'll have moved onto another project.
Whether or not it is possible to stop p2p depends entirely on how far you are willing to go, and much you would destroy the internet to make it happen. Media interests would be very happy with a walled garden approach - white-listing of acceptable services, monitoring of suspicious bandwidth / traffic patterns etc. With a compliant legislative body this is not impossible. A complete disaster for mankind, yes, but sadly, impossible - no.
Most of slashdot comes from a geeky background. Philosophy majors are somewhat underweight around, and the average tone of the place is somewhat juvenile. Most of the arguments (and reading some of the threads in this discussion today feels like a strong case of deja vu) seem to be based around a basic misconception.
Both sides are arguing whether or not they think that you should copy media. But I think both camps are using that word differently. There are really two issues at stake: is it practical to copy, and is it ethical? Most of the posts that I've read don't distinguish between the two.
One side of the debate will loudly trumpet that it's impractical to stop copying (the universe was made that way!) and hence it must be moral to copy freely. The less ardent members of that tribe will admit that there is no practical way to compensate creators without copyright.
The other side will loudly cry that it is immoral to take their work without payment. Hence it must be made impractical (ignoring fundamental issues about the ease of copying information in our universe).
They are using the same words, but arguing at cross purposes. I have a feeling that it is an argument that will rage on for quite some time.
I'm curious - why would you post a comment claiming that this can't even be done in theory, when the submitter included links in the summary to a paper that shows that it can?
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Ah Turbo C++. That's what I learnt to cut my teeth on. And the five-disk install wasn't too bad, but my programs had a tendency to take DOS down hard, and reinstalling happened quite often.
After using something that quick and responsive I could never get used to the noticeable latency on every operation in a "modern IDE", so I've reverted to vim and make...
I don't think that I've picked a side yet :) Part of me agrees with the but-you-can-copy-it-so-it-must-be-ok tribe. I guess that is the engineer part of me that accepts that trying to enforce copyright in a medium with zero copying and distribution costs is never going to work. In particular peer-to-peer lets non-commercial infringement occur on a commercial scale. I can't see a good way to resolve that basic issue, and I think we're going to see a lot more battles in the legal system trying to come to terms with a new type of activity.
Maybe it would be better to describe that as my scientist viewpoint. The engineer in me is more pragmatic and says "so you can't make it hard, but you can can make it damaging". Murder isn't hard to commit in this physical universe, yet we seem to have largely persuaded people not to do it. I'm not making a direct comparison between the morality of murder and copyright infringement, btw, just pointing out that something being easily supported by our laws of physics doesn't make it inevitable.
I think that one thing that has polarised the issue is large interests have tried to push copyright too far. People who would be moderates in the debate look at life+70 year terms, and 20 year trivial software patents, and people dying because the drugs they need are locked up behind ip.... etc etc.
My own take would be to reset the system. Equalise all "ownership" of IP to the same length; say 5 years. Set-up a massive repository of all public goods (which would be everything created before 2004) and then institute a process similar to the DMCA: media companies can identify their goods online and issue take-down orders to get the trackers closed. If the tracker owner wants to contest it then it stays up and their details get revealed publicly. Stop trying to penalise downloaders by abusing the definition of distribution, and only go after uploaders.
Oddly enough that is a game that the media companies could win. If the initial takedown process works fast enough then nobody would be able to complete an entire download before the tracker shut. With a huge collection of legal media to choose from, competition would start to work against piracy instead of for it.
But it will never happen, the anti-copyright tribe is too ardent to make a compromise, and the pro-copyright tribe is too abusive to be given takedown powers... :)
Personally I'll stick to buying music off itunes, ripping dvds that I rent and downloading Tv shows that I've missed but could have watched on cable. It doesn't match the legal definitions but it's close enough to my own personal ethics to do for now...
Really? Which basic principles of cryptography do you think collide? The OP describes a non-problem. There is already work that solves the basic search problem without leaking frequency information. The basic technique returns constant-length results to any query.
When you flick through your "good book about cryptography" you may want to look up Randomised Encryption Schemes, Homomorphic Encryption and Yao Circuits. Then you will maybe understand.
There is no known lower bound for division, so what kind of proof is used?
Good point (and interesting post above). Profit is perhaps the wrong term. The business unit in the BBC that handles overseas sales of programs and DVD sales is run to maximise revenues. As you point out these are not really profits as they are not over and above their tax income, and they are not passed on the shareholders. I believe that the revenues are used to fund costs, and so reduce the size of the tax imposed on TVs in the UK.
I'm not really sure what you mean. Assuming that A and B are roughly the same size, A, B and SQRT(c) will all have about n/2 bits. But I don't see the connection to discrete logs. The scheme assumes that the attacker can't compute Xd,Xs,Yd,Ys. If the attacker observes the D transmitted in steps 5,6 and 7 then he can attempt to invert the exponentiation revealing Xd and Ys.
My head is a bit too hungover to follow through the implications, but Xs is the multiplicative inverse of Ys and so should be unique and can be computed cheaply using Euclid's algorithm. The same holds for Xd and Yd, so if the attacker can solve discrete logs (inverting the modular exponentiation) then he can recover all four of Xd,Xs,Yd and Ys. This then reveals the original D.
In practice solving discrete logs for this type of group is about as hard as factoring. It hasn't been proven to be hard, but nobody has come up with an efficient way of doing it. Either proving a lower bound of O(2^n), or finding a cheap algorithm to solve the problem would be a significant break-through.
The other main problem with the scheme is that it is susceptible to a Man In The Middle attack. If the attacker can intercept and alter the communications between source and destination then he can substitute his own choice of Xd and Yd and reveal D directly. To get around this there needs to be some form of authentication as well as the encryption.
That looks familiar but I can't remember the name, what scheme is it?
That's not strictly true. Although the discrete log problem is hard it is still a computational assumption. Proving that 2^n is a lower bound would be a significant achievement. This scheme is only "unbreakable" in the sense that RSA is - breaking it requires solving a problem that we suspect, but are unable to prove, is very hard.
The BBC is a perfect example of what you are saying. Despite being funded by the taxpayer they are run along commercial lines with orders to maximise profits...
You are assuming that watching video on the net is using the wrong tool for the job. Why? ISPs don't offer a "web browsing" service, they offer an internet connection.
No cable or dsl provider has even attempted to argue that they are offering unlimited time. You are the only person to try that one. Furthermore, here in the uk several ISPs have explicitly claimed unlimited downloads on their advertising before cutting people off for exceeding their FUP.
That would be quite hard to prove... ;)
It's not really a good choice. In an ideal world all banks would be small enough to fail. The shareholders would get wiped out and the depositors would get compensated. But we are not in an ideal world. The government doesn't have a choice between letting small banks fail or propping them up.
Right now we have a system with a few huge banks that are all under-capitalised because the majority of their real assets just dropped 30% in value, and the majority of their unreal (leveraged) assets fell off of a cliff in response. Letting them go bankrupt right now will not allow an orderly one-by-one breakup.
The amount of debt owed between the banks means that any one bankruptcy will cause a default on assets, hence a write-down and then a domino chain of failure.
Right now, propping them up with freshly printed imaginary money may be the least worse alternative. Later on it is essential that they are broken into smaller companies that can be allowed to fail - because if the bad assets are not purged out of the system then the ensuing inflationary holocaust in five years will make this look like a picnic.
Not it is not the same with clouds and that was the researchers point. The term "Cloud" should not be a marketing buzzword for scalable. There should not be multiple "Clouds". The entire point of the Cloud as they refer to it was that it was amorphous and ubiquitous. One of their nicest points is that you slap a brand name on it then it is no longer the Cloud.
The current crop of so-called "Cloud" services (like Amazon) are a decent enough attempt to provide this type of platform, but provides a highly redundant platform as a single point of failure is not the same thing as removing the single point of failure. Amazon's platform can still fall over (and did for several hours earlier this year). In real Cloud computing that would not be an issue because rather than being tied to Amazons servers / datacenter you could execute your code anywhere that provided the service.
One of the problems with the real Cloud of the 90s was that it became too successful. So now we don't see it anymore. The architecture of the lower levels of the internet is now firmly entrenched: tcp/ip, dns etc. That is the real Cloud, a platform that we can write code for that really is ubiquitous. Services like Amazon are a logical progression of that platform, but they are not the logical endpoint. When there is a standardised API for code that will run on any of the major providers, accessing storage from any of the major providers, and able to replicate across them at will (chasing the cheapest prices) then the Cloud will really have arrived.
Finally, just to answer your question in a more concrete and exact way:
It's important to drill through the marketing buzzwords that the paper is rallying against. By definition there are no multiple clouds. So really what you are asking is why should I want to talk to different providers within the same Cloud?
Resilience. Partly to avoid downtime, partly to avoid vendor lockin. If I develop my application for EC2 and then Amazon decide to get out of the scalable computing business - I'm screwed. It's a similar situation to the drm-locked media where the license servers shut down after the company stopped selling it.
Another reason - competition. If I can move my application between Google and Amazon at will then I will pay the cheapest price for my cycles. If I have to recode my application to redeploy it then it will require a huge price differential before I do that.
So what year is it this year? :)
I remember when they promised it for Cairo. Of course it has slipped a little since then...
But it has to be intentional - for you to claim that an EULA was binding over me you would have to show that I read the EULA and *intended* to enter into the contract. The defence that I just skip all EULAs because they are garbage would be valid, although I'm not aware of this being tested in uk law.
The only annoying omission is that some viewers lack page forward, like page down but go to the same point on the next page. This is really useful when preparing drafts and the screen is set to zoom in past the margins.
I can't really call the other missing feature an omission as I haven't found a viewer that does it yet, but it is on my wishlist. Most viewers do 2-up viewing, but they lock the parity - ie odd pages and even pages are always in the same place and you step through the document two pages at a time. Can somebody somewhere implement an n-up view that steps through one page at a time? It's not hard, I had to write a script that faked it once ....
What you've said doesn't quite stack up. Peering agreements do mandate that traffic must be about the same in both direction. But this does not imply a sender pays system. It implies that anyone that has a surfeit of senders, or of receivers, pays. For example the AT&T peering agreement mandates that traffic flows must be within 2:1 in both directions.
Most ISPs are largely receivers of data. As a result they try and attract server business because it helps them balance their flows for negotiating peering agreements. So if everyone on TW maxed out their upstream allowance it may actually reduce TW's transit fees.
It's hard to find out how much upstream bandwidth costs as most colo providers seem to only do quotes by email these days, but Burst offer $0.05/GB. Unlike Verizon I'm guessing they understand what the decimal point is :)
Unfortunately the internet tends to be packet-switched rather than circuit-switched, so yes, it costs more to transmit a bunch of ones and zero than (not) to transmit a bunch of zeros.
Besides, the zeros compress better :)
Where from? The only £5/pm deals I could see on Google were tied into other product, like Virgin's offering.
Not yet, but she is working on it.
Only if you assume that hours are continuous... real life hours maybe, but project hours? Nah... they're discrete and any fractions are *always* rounded upwards. If you're getting paid to do it then you can never reach zero because you'll have moved onto another project.
Whether or not it is possible to stop p2p depends entirely on how far you are willing to go, and much you would destroy the internet to make it happen. Media interests would be very happy with a walled garden approach - white-listing of acceptable services, monitoring of suspicious bandwidth / traffic patterns etc. With a compliant legislative body this is not impossible. A complete disaster for mankind, yes, but sadly, impossible - no.
Most of slashdot comes from a geeky background. Philosophy majors are somewhat underweight around, and the average tone of the place is somewhat juvenile. Most of the arguments (and reading some of the threads in this discussion today feels like a strong case of deja vu) seem to be based around a basic misconception.
Both sides are arguing whether or not they think that you should copy media. But I think both camps are using that word differently. There are really two issues at stake: is it practical to copy, and is it ethical? Most of the posts that I've read don't distinguish between the two.
One side of the debate will loudly trumpet that it's impractical to stop copying (the universe was made that way!) and hence it must be moral to copy freely. The less ardent members of that tribe will admit that there is no practical way to compensate creators without copyright.
The other side will loudly cry that it is immoral to take their work without payment. Hence it must be made impractical (ignoring fundamental issues about the ease of copying information in our universe).
They are using the same words, but arguing at cross purposes. I have a feeling that it is an argument that will rage on for quite some time.
I'm curious - why would you post a comment claiming that this can't even be done in theory, when the submitter included links in the summary to a paper that shows that it can?