Electro-magnetic emissions. A human soldier can turn off his WAN/LAN if he doesn't want to be detected. A remote controlled robot becomes about as useful as a boulder when this happens.
IR emissions. A robot soldier can turn off it's heat-generating equipment if it doesn't want to be detected. A human becomes about as useful as a pork loin when this happens.
So... do we think the enemy troops are more likely to be carrying IR gear, or EM detectors? Hmm.... which one is more popular today?
10 inches of armour and a 20kg shoulder fired missile can still kill it.
20kg is more than most people can carry around (while keeping concealed in a hot desert). One shot of LOSAT has the weight of 100s of machinegun rounds.
The number of machine gun rounds it can absorb will be near irrelevant because the opposition are going to be raining anti-tank armaments down on you.
No they aren't. The "opposition" won't be an equipped military force. They'll be guerillas with barely enough firepower to rob a Los Angelos bank.
The REAL reason damage becomes irrelevant is that soon after the powered exoskeletons are perfected, the human operators will be transfered to a secured remote-control facility...
The advantage of killing a man standing behind a tree by launching a small grenade that detonates right next to his head outweighs the complexity of the extra buttons. The OICW's grenades are virtually "smart bombs" compared to a normal mounted grenadelauncher.
Military snooping comes in two forms: COMINT and ELINT. Avoiding COMINT observation might be easy, as all authorized users can synch-up encryption keys ahead of time (which only works until an enemy mugs one of your guys- but that's close enough).
But avoiding ELINT surveillance is a different matter. The more you rely on infantry reporting their actions on radio, the more likely the opposition will be to use radios to guess your position and evade the assault.
thus not broadcasting any false information to others,
Actually, if the enemy captured a fancy-suit and tried to use it, you'd want him to continue broadcasting. Of course, the data should be flagged so your own troops know not to rely on it, but the commander will like to know where the suit goes, so he can direct a retrieval mission. Or simply put a JDAM on it.
Trivial problems, I would think.
No, they're quite important. Combat is fast and chaotic. Any mechanism meant to keep the device out of enemy hands runs the risk of hitting a false-positive and denying itself to a legitimate US soldier, who might not have time to re-enter a password when taking fire.
And then just TRY to match the biometric voice-recognizer when sucking out from a pierced lung...
(On a related note, tanks don't have ignition keys.)
I've checked a number of physics texts, and none of them address this problem.
Get some better textbooks, maybe? (Say for example, Univeristy Physics by Young & Freedman- I don't have it, but at $150, it had better be good) Problems like that this are, to my recollection, standard material for a second semester college physics course.
It's called "rigid body kinematics/dynamics". You start by studying spheres of uniform density, then consider objects composed of multiple such spheres locked together. That provides sufficient equations for many programmers, because they can represent the object as an approximation of many spheres.
Or, if you know calculus, you can derive closed-form solutions to problems involving objects whose shape or density varies as a more complex function. A textbook will provide solved examples for handy things like cylinders, cones, or prisms.
it may suffice to rely on their fellow passengers whacking 'em across the back of the head with a drink tray for "air rage" on domestic and international flights,
All NASA flights are equipped with hypodermic sedatives and duct tape, and the standard training pamphlets show each crewman how to employ them in the event of either homicidal or suicidial outbreaks.
Of course, once restrained, the uncontrollable passenger is still a major problem- just guess who's gonna take him to the toilet...
No. Not even 5% die. And it's only as high as 5% if you count deaths vs success (reaching the top). Deaths vs (success + nonlethal failures) is a smaller percentage.
That 10% figure would only be right if you go back for many decades.... which would make the price quoted inaccurate. Nowadays climbers have much better equipment.
And surgeons too! They totally hope to see everyone tear their hands off in snowblowers, so they can pull down the big insurance dollars sewing it all back together. I once caught a pair of ER surgeons trying to drain my break fluid!
And then there are dentists, who are even worse. NEVER brush your teeth with "complementary" supplies from the dentist- they put acid in them!
I could explain about firemen too, but you surely get the idea...
Just because you can re-route audio that doesn't mean you are breaking the DRM.
Yes it does. Maybe the RIAA isn't aware of it yet, or just hasn't reacted because it doesn't consider the threat either immient or solvable. But it IS breaking the DRM. It's a way you can get a perfect digital copy with no analog degradation, which is exactly what the RIAA moans about.
DRM today is in an embryonic state- there are many ways to break or avoid it, and this is just one of them. But the foot is in the door. We can expect DRM to increase in power on proprietary OSes, so that Windows and MacOS will refuse to play DRMed music if your audio-driver and soundcard don't match a pre-approved list of Trusted players.
When that happens, the RIAA (or the computer/audio hardware companies that work with them) will try to make iTunes, and every other DRM-trusted player, incompatible with emulated environments. There will be technical steps, and legal steps (DMCA).
In a future with strong-DRM or Trusted Computing, it will not be possible to simply pay for a commercially produced Trusted media player to run on a Free OS (unless code signing was used to guarrantee that although you have the OS's source code, you didn't edit & recompile)
No. Wine is a version of Windows. It's not Microsoft(tm) Windows(r) XP, but it is a kind of windows, in the same sense that Hewlett Packard sells xerox machines.
I love being able to use embedded quicktime in firefox in linux =) It rules.
The dominant Linux video player, MPlayer, has a plugin version, which can play embedded QuickTimes in Firefox. Because it avoids the overhead of duplicating Win32 calls, it may be faster than the Crossover way.
Plus, the last time I looked at it, Quicktime on windows had some user-hostile features, such as restrictions on rescaling the playback window. MPlayerPlugin will avoid those too.
Remember that anything already presented to the public cannot be patented.
Untrue. Publically-known things shouldn't be patentable; but given the minimal investigative efforts of patent examiners, they sometimes are.
Sure, such weak patents can possibly be defeated in court- but bringing any lawsuit is a structural weakness of Open Source projects, which are typically non-profit or at least cash-poor.
but then were re-applied copyright retroactively when the terms of copyright law were extended
Those things are illegal not because of ex-post-facto, but because it violates the 5th Amendment: private property was taken without compensation.
Copyrights which had been scheduled (since their inception) to be turned over to the public were seized by the government, and then handed over to the copyright registrants. This is flagrantly illegal, and if Lawrence Lessig were a better litigator, he could've proved so in the Eldered case.
The primary purpose of port knocking is to hide the fact that you have open ports to begin with
That benefit can be essentially obtained without portknocking.
The practical effect of PK is that you have an additional wrapper protocol that must be negotiated before your REAL TCP daemons will talk to someone. That outside wrapper could be implemented with TCP (hiding all your various services behind one port #), UDP (a single packet containing authent key which wakes up the daemon), or PK as we know it.
All 3 of those methods are moving your N open ports behind 1 protective layer. But which protocol that wrapper is implemented in doesn't change it's overall effectiveness... except that PK messages are currently likely to be ignored by modern loggers, and/or difficult to read even if they do get logged.
The real benefits of PK is simply that attack tools and sysadmins aren't used to seeing it yet.
AND port knocking so no active scanner detects your open ports.
Imagine two possible future worlds. In one, all servers require PK, appearing to have zero ports open, but really running potentially 100s of services behind that shield. In another world, all servers have exactly one port open: 22/ssh, which can gateway authenticated clients to any one of 100s of services that might be running.
Only in the same sense that passwords are security through obscurity.
Nope. Port knocking is truely Security Through Obscurity in the worse way.
PK is an abuse of the TCP/IP protocol- by repeatedly sending data to a "closed" port which the remote is really listening to, you can send some data which a typical eavesdropper might ignore. But that only lasts until PK becomes common enough that network-sniffing tools get checkboxes added to record this new data stream.
Right combination of keystrokes, right combination of ports to knock, these sound very similar to me.
Yes, they are similar! So similar that port-knocking doesn't provide any more security than straightforward passwords... so why even bother?
In the long run, all the "attempting to talk to closed ports" nonense is just a temporary evasion of loggers.
I, for one, would asume the risk of a "drug dealer" in importing it (from freer countries) and selling it.
If TC becomes reality, there won't be freer countries. Everything in the WTO will be required to build TC hardware only. Everyplace else that manufactures flexible computers will be threatened by the USA with supporting economic terrorism.
Are there surveys of who libertarians would vote for if they didn't vote LP that you can reference?
Libertarians are for small government. Republicans claim to be for a smaller government than Democrats. Although they're lying, they can still expect to get more Libertarian votes.
PS. Note that the poster should've said "vote Libertarian", not "vote libertarian". Uncapitalized, it's not the name of a politcal party, and means something else.
All major US politicians will, if you ask them with the dictionary definition, claim to be simultaneously a republican, democrat, and libertarian. There's nothing contradictory amoung those words.
There is other SF with similar plot features, but this one discusses it in detail. (Also, recall Star Trek: Dr. McCoy evidenced a suppressed transporter-phobia)
Slashdot Mirror
Electro-magnetic emissions. A human soldier can turn off his WAN/LAN if he doesn't want to be detected. A remote controlled robot becomes about as useful as a boulder when this happens.
IR emissions. A robot soldier can turn off it's heat-generating equipment if it doesn't want to be detected. A human becomes about as useful as a pork loin when this happens.
So... do we think the enemy troops are more likely to be carrying IR gear, or EM detectors? Hmm.... which one is more popular today?
10 inches of armour and a 20kg shoulder fired missile can still kill it.
20kg is more than most people can carry around (while keeping concealed in a hot desert). One shot of LOSAT has the weight of 100s of machinegun rounds.
The number of machine gun rounds it can absorb will be near irrelevant because the opposition are going to be raining anti-tank armaments down on you.
No they aren't. The "opposition" won't be an equipped military force. They'll be guerillas with barely enough firepower to rob a Los Angelos bank.
The REAL reason damage becomes irrelevant is that soon after the powered exoskeletons are perfected, the human operators will be transfered to a secured remote-control facility...
I imagine the real deal is more user-friendly.
The advantage of killing a man standing behind a tree by launching a small grenade that detonates right next to his head outweighs the complexity of the extra buttons. The OICW's grenades are virtually "smart bombs" compared to a normal mounted grenadelauncher.
or allowing anyone to snoop,
Military snooping comes in two forms: COMINT and ELINT. Avoiding COMINT observation might be easy, as all authorized users can synch-up encryption keys ahead of time (which only works until an enemy mugs one of your guys- but that's close enough).
But avoiding ELINT surveillance is a different matter. The more you rely on infantry reporting their actions on radio, the more likely the opposition will be to use radios to guess your position and evade the assault.
thus not broadcasting any false information to others,
Actually, if the enemy captured a fancy-suit and tried to use it, you'd want him to continue broadcasting. Of course, the data should be flagged so your own troops know not to rely on it, but the commander will like to know where the suit goes, so he can direct a retrieval mission. Or simply put a JDAM on it.
Trivial problems, I would think.
No, they're quite important. Combat is fast and chaotic. Any mechanism meant to keep the device out of enemy hands runs the risk of hitting a false-positive and denying itself to a legitimate US soldier, who might not have time to re-enter a password when taking fire.
And then just TRY to match the biometric voice-recognizer when sucking out from a pierced lung...
(On a related note, tanks don't have ignition keys.)
I've checked a number of physics texts, and none of them address this problem.
Get some better textbooks, maybe? (Say for example, Univeristy Physics by Young & Freedman- I don't have it, but at $150, it had better be good) Problems like that this are, to my recollection, standard material for a second semester college physics course.
It's called "rigid body kinematics/dynamics". You start by studying spheres of uniform density, then consider objects composed of multiple such spheres locked together. That provides sufficient equations for many programmers, because they can represent the object as an approximation of many spheres.
Or, if you know calculus, you can derive closed-form solutions to problems involving objects whose shape or density varies as a more complex function. A textbook will provide solved examples for handy things like cylinders, cones, or prisms.
Also, you don't seriously believe that solar panels could withstand the heat and radiation on Mercury do you?
Uh oh! You better tell NASA quickly! The solar panels that they've just launched to inside the orbit of Mecury are gonna kersplode!
it may suffice to rely on their fellow passengers whacking 'em across the back of the head with a drink tray for "air rage" on domestic and international flights,
All NASA flights are equipped with hypodermic sedatives and duct tape, and the standard training pamphlets show each crewman how to employ them in the event of either homicidal or suicidial outbreaks.
Of course, once restrained, the uncontrollable passenger is still a major problem- just guess who's gonna take him to the toilet...
About 10% die in the process.
No. Not even 5% die. And it's only as high as 5% if you count deaths vs success (reaching the top). Deaths vs (success + nonlethal failures) is a smaller percentage.
That 10% figure would only be right if you go back for many decades.... which would make the price quoted inaccurate. Nowadays climbers have much better equipment.
That would be bad for business.
And surgeons too! They totally hope to see everyone tear their hands off in snowblowers, so they can pull down the big insurance dollars sewing it all back together. I once caught a pair of ER surgeons trying to drain my break fluid!
And then there are dentists, who are even worse. NEVER brush your teeth with "complementary" supplies from the dentist- they put acid in them!
I could explain about firemen too, but you surely get the idea...
Just because you can re-route audio that doesn't mean you are breaking the DRM.
Yes it does. Maybe the RIAA isn't aware of it yet, or just hasn't reacted because it doesn't consider the threat either immient or solvable. But it IS breaking the DRM. It's a way you can get a perfect digital copy with no analog degradation, which is exactly what the RIAA moans about.
DRM today is in an embryonic state- there are many ways to break or avoid it, and this is just one of them. But the foot is in the door. We can expect DRM to increase in power on proprietary OSes, so that Windows and MacOS will refuse to play DRMed music if your audio-driver and soundcard don't match a pre-approved list of Trusted players.
When that happens, the RIAA (or the computer/audio hardware companies that work with them) will try to make iTunes, and every other DRM-trusted player, incompatible with emulated environments. There will be technical steps, and legal steps (DMCA).
In a future with strong-DRM or Trusted Computing, it will not be possible to simply pay for a commercially produced Trusted media player to run on a Free OS (unless code signing was used to guarrantee that although you have the OS's source code, you didn't edit & recompile)
was running on wine, not windows. BIG difference.
No. Wine is a version of Windows. It's not Microsoft(tm) Windows(r) XP, but it is a kind of windows, in the same sense that Hewlett Packard sells xerox machines.
I love being able to use embedded quicktime in firefox in linux =) It rules.
The dominant Linux video player, MPlayer, has a plugin version, which can play embedded QuickTimes in Firefox. Because it avoids the overhead of duplicating Win32 calls, it may be faster than the Crossover way.
Plus, the last time I looked at it, Quicktime on windows had some user-hostile features, such as restrictions on rescaling the playback window. MPlayerPlugin will avoid those too.
Ignorance of the facts, however, may be (at least in the UK).
The same in the USA (and most modern places).
"Yes, I know it's illegal to shoot an unarmed, outnumbered man, but I didn't know he had no gun! That cellphone cuts a really menacing profile!"
only person he got a direct quote from was Rob Enderle!
Untrue. There's also Linus Torvalds.
Remember that anything already presented to the public cannot be patented.
Untrue. Publically-known things shouldn't be patentable; but given the minimal investigative efforts of patent examiners, they sometimes are.
Sure, such weak patents can possibly be defeated in court- but bringing any lawsuit is a structural weakness of Open Source projects, which are typically non-profit or at least cash-poor.
but then were re-applied copyright retroactively when the terms of copyright law were extended
Those things are illegal not because of ex-post-facto, but because it violates the 5th Amendment: private property was taken without compensation.
Copyrights which had been scheduled (since their inception) to be turned over to the public were seized by the government, and then handed over to the copyright registrants. This is flagrantly illegal, and if Lawrence Lessig were a better litigator, he could've proved so in the Eldered case.
I'm fairly sure that initially, TV was just the programmes and nothing else,
Well yeah. And those programs were sponsored by RCA, which sold the TVs needed to watch them.
The primary purpose of port knocking is to hide the fact that you have open ports to begin with
That benefit can be essentially obtained without portknocking.
The practical effect of PK is that you have an additional wrapper protocol that must be negotiated before your REAL TCP daemons will talk to someone. That outside wrapper could be implemented with TCP (hiding all your various services behind one port #), UDP (a single packet containing authent key which wakes up the daemon), or PK as we know it.
All 3 of those methods are moving your N open ports behind 1 protective layer. But which protocol that wrapper is implemented in doesn't change it's overall effectiveness... except that PK messages are currently likely to be ignored by modern loggers, and/or difficult to read even if they do get logged.
The real benefits of PK is simply that attack tools and sysadmins aren't used to seeing it yet.
AND port knocking so no active scanner detects your open ports.
Imagine two possible future worlds. In one, all servers require PK, appearing to have zero ports open, but really running potentially 100s of services behind that shield. In another world, all servers have exactly one port open: 22/ssh, which can gateway authenticated clients to any one of 100s of services that might be running.
There's no real difference between those worlds.
Only in the same sense that passwords are security through obscurity.
Nope. Port knocking is truely Security Through Obscurity in the worse way.
PK is an abuse of the TCP/IP protocol- by repeatedly sending data to a "closed" port which the remote is really listening to, you can send some data which a typical eavesdropper might ignore. But that only lasts until PK becomes common enough that network-sniffing tools get checkboxes added to record this new data stream.
Right combination of keystrokes, right combination of ports to knock, these sound very similar to me.
Yes, they are similar! So similar that port-knocking doesn't provide any more security than straightforward passwords... so why even bother?
In the long run, all the "attempting to talk to closed ports" nonense is just a temporary evasion of loggers.
I, for one, would asume the risk of a "drug dealer" in importing it (from freer countries) and selling it.
If TC becomes reality, there won't be freer countries. Everything in the WTO will be required to build TC hardware only. Everyplace else that manufactures flexible computers will be threatened by the USA with supporting economic terrorism.
by FAR the biggest transportation subsidies go towards the automotive transport systems.
Don't forget that all the 100s of billions of dollars spent on Gulf War I & II are automotive subsidizes too! As are all the dead people...
I'd love it if we could get the war budget just added into gas... show people where the money's really going.
(Yes, air, sea & rail need fuel too. But most of the oil liberated from Iraq goes to cars & truck)
How about we pass a law that says only U.S. citizens can contribute or financially support a candidate?
Hmm... Freedom of Speech? Right to be secure in private property? Any of that...
Are there surveys of who libertarians would vote for if they didn't vote LP that you can reference?
Libertarians are for small government. Republicans claim to be for a smaller government than Democrats. Although they're lying, they can still expect to get more Libertarian votes.
PS. Note that the poster should've said "vote Libertarian", not "vote libertarian". Uncapitalized, it's not the name of a politcal party, and means something else.
All major US politicians will, if you ask them with the dictionary definition, claim to be simultaneously a republican, democrat, and libertarian. There's nothing contradictory amoung those words.
please, sombody give me a title
Certainly: "Think Like A Dinosaur".
There is other SF with similar plot features, but this one discusses it in detail. (Also, recall Star Trek: Dr. McCoy evidenced a suppressed transporter-phobia)
it's not like the Republicans hold some sort of monopoly on bad IP law.
True, IP is one of the many positions where the two parties are indistinguishable.
How about the "Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act" that protected artists by giving
Sonny Bono was a Republican. The act was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress.