A normal kid does not derive ethical codes from conduct he sees in a video game. Period. If your kid is an exception, the solution lies in fixing your parenting, not in instigating sweeping reform in the video games industry.
Talk about a scapegoat... why was this editorial even posted?
you cannot give up your legal rights by contract. No more than you can sign into slavery, or sign away your first amendment rights in the US. Such a clause would be, and has been judged to be an illegal clause, and thus stricken from the contract.
Err... people give up their first amendment rights with contracts all the time. They're called Non-Disclosure Agreements.
What ARE contracts if not a binding way to give up rights? Stop playing lawyer.
No, man. Any court ruling on Fair Use was talking about the Fair Use provision of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1978 (I think). In other words, they were interpreting Federal statutes. Congress gave us Fair Use in 1978. It's not a Constitutional privilege.
And what Congress giveth, Congress can taketh away. Has taken away, in fact: In 1997, Congress amended the U.S. Code with the DMCA.
Quantum cryptography as implemented in the article is only good for one-to-one communication between two points less than 50km apart.
Here's my much cheaper alternative for UNBREAKABLE CRYPTOGRAPHY in the same conditions.
Buy two massive RAID arrays ($1000 each = $2000). Completely fill them with identical random data, probably from a thermodynamic random number generator (let's guess $1000 -- it's to avoid a snooper second-guessing a software random number generator). Put one in a honda civic ($9000) and drive it to your other location. Have at least three people in the car at the time to minimize the odds of in-transit funny business. Drop it off at Point B and come back. (50km round trip = 2 hours' round trip * $60/man-hour * 3 men = $360. About 80 miles at 30mpg and $1.70 per gallon of gas = $4.54. Assume no tolls. We're not paying for car depreciation since we bought the damn car expressly for this.)
Now when you need to transmit data securely between the points, start going through your 10TB of one-time pad. It should last quite a while, assuming you aren't sending mountains of full-length DVD rips. If you constrain it to email, most places should go for years on this much one-time pad.
When you run out of data on your one-time pad, obviously you can't reuse it. That wouldn't be UNBREAKABLE CRYPTOGRAPHY. Instead, drive the civic (you kept it, right?) to Point B and come back with the RAID. You only need to send one person since the RAID doesn't contain sensitive data anymore; he can copy it if he wants (Same $4.54 gas price, and $120 of labor). Fill both RAIDs with fresh random data. Bring the second RAID back to Point B (all three guys gotta go this time, since it's full of sensitive data: $364.54).
So I've set up a system of UNBREAKABLE CRYPTOGRAPHY between two points less than 50km apart for no more than $12,364.54, a full $37,365.46 cheaper than that crack team of physicist/MBAs could offer you. Plus you get a good-condition used car out of it. Every few years, you'll have to pay $489.08 to refresh the one-time pads, so eventually the costs will even out. Assuming the one-time pads last 5 years, it should take 382 years of using my method before it's as expensive as the Quantum Thingamahoozy installation.
Maybe their market sector is immortals. Even so, you could invest the $37,365.46 in a money market and far surpass that over 382 years. At a mere annual 6% interest (compounded continuously), you'd turn it into $3,358,641,610,230,000, whereas if you put it into the Quantum Thingamahoozy, you'd only break even. So they must be targeting financially foolish immortals, which seems to me to be a small market sector. If they're that foolish, after all, they probably can't afford the $50,000 price tag in the first place.
The coin actually do spin, and the secret move is done at an offbeat moment.
When you catch the coin, feel it with your finger. If it is right-side-up, just open your hand. Otherwise, slam it down on your opposite wrist, which flips it over. Takes some practice to become smooth at it, but it works very well, especially if you can keep your audience's attention on your face while you're doing it.
It's really easy to design an effective solution when the problem is purely mechanical or natural. As long as you're working with spammers who don't adapt, you can slice through their shitstorms very effectively.
But when a single solution becomes mainstream, spammers will adapt to it. Bayesian filters tend to work very well, but now spammers are adding sprawls of randomly generated green-light text to offset the filter's score.
Google found an excellent way to rank websites, but then it became widespread enough that webmasters began to game the system it had created. It's been playing catch-up ever since.
Once the adversary begins to adapt, we lapse into the same cat-and-mouse game of technological barriers and counter-barriers that we've seen so many times before.
I bet if you took a poll of the best movies of all time of the moviegoers in the United States today, you would find very few instances of films released before 1990.
Corporations don't have ethics. They are constellations of contracts, and nothing more. There is no heart to break, no soul to damn. The only way to motivate them is to incentivise them with profit adjustments.
So the fact that they are implementing this suggests one of two things:
They think customers will want the feature and buy more of their products, or
Some external body is putting pressure on them, so that implementing the feature is cheaper than not.
Then don't be suprised to see things act quirky under safari.
I won't be surprised. I'll send a bug report to Apple, telling them that your page doesn't display correctly. Ideally, everyone else will be doing the same, and having the same problems on a lot of standard HTML pages. Then Apple would fix their browser, and we'd be much better off than if every webmaster individually wrote nonstandard HTML to circumvent the bugs.
First, computer gaming is on a trend AWAY from DRM. Long, long ago, diskette manufacturers screwed with the physical floppy to prevent copying. This caused more problems than the copy protection solved. Look-up solutions in game manuals ("Page 3, paragraph 2, word 4?") have also faded out as people became frustrated with keeping the manuals on hand. Recently, we're even seeing a move away from must-have-CD-in-drive copy protection.
Second, the computer game market is pretty elastic. If games become too expensive (as measured both in dollars and inconvenience), people will not buy them. They aren't like food (where you die of you don't have it), like MS Office (where you can't make money as effectively without it), or even like music (which we are culturally brainwashed to crave). If we don't have video games, we do something else.
Third, there are no central gaming companies secure enough in a monopoly to risk upsetting the market. If MS unilaterally started implementing fascist copy protection, people would turn to Nintendo or Sony. This is not a risk MS is willing to take.
So what? You'd be free to send anonymous email, just as I'd be free to reject it. Who knows -- with enough people switched to signed email, maybe spammers' economies of scale would tip over and anonymous mail would become usable again.
Re:Why do Verisign have this level of access anywa
on
Verisign Plans DNS Changes
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The boxes have to sit on someone's desk. "The community," disorganized and disparate as it is, is remarkably poor at doing anything. You'd have to invent some sort of hierarchy. Maybe have a General Manager of the Internet, and he could have a board of directors under him or something. They would be elected by the nation's population at large, and they'd have the final say on internet issues.
But it's be silly to give EVERYONE an equal vote in their elections, as the great majority of people have no clue how the internet works, and the campaigns for these positions would be totally unable to focus on real issues. They'd have to dumb it down and sugar-coat it so that sixpack joe can digest what they're saying, and at that level of simplicity, who could tell a good candidate from a bad?
Okay, so let's find some way of making sure only highly competent people can vote. We can't give a test, since we'd need someone to create and administer it, and the potential for corruption is too high. The only thing I can think of is selling the votes: that way, every vote is going to represent an informed citizen. After all, who would buy a vote if they don't understand the technology?
So at the point where we've got a CEO, a Board of Managers, and an equity market, we may as well package the whole thing as a corporation and name it VeriSign.
Life ALWAYS goes on. Life in Nazi Germany went on. Life under Stalin went on. You could find children playing in the streets at the height of the raids, the purges, the inhumanity.
But there's the rub, as soon as the key hits the blacklist, all spam sent under that key is disposed of for everyone receiving it. Spam in the morning, key blacklisted shortly thereafter, everyone checking email at lunch is spam free.
I don't think this would work. If blacklists are that fast, why can't we just run a blacklist on individual email addresses right now? Seems to me that the email takes just about as much time to reach the target servers as the blacklist update does. And spammers DO use disposable email addresses, so something isn't working.
What happens should the sender be unable to respond.
Then, like now, your email would bounce. The thing is, this would all be done on the ISP's side. If I send an email to joebloe@earthlink.net, and all of earthlink.net's mail servers are offline, then the email bounces. So the servers don't go offline at 3:00 AM. At least, this is all how I think it works. I might be wrong.
I really like your thinking, and I'm pretty sure that I would like to live in a future where all email was protected by six concrete feet of state-of-the-art encryption.
I think the devil, as always, would be in the details. How would one get a public key? I think this might only lead to the rise of disposable keys: a spammer would fire off a day's worth of spam, and then throw out the soon-to-be-useless key just as it starts hitting the blacklists. But I really don't know much about the state of encryption today, so I may well be overlooking something obvious.
Spam is coming from zombied hosts these days, computational charges will be distributed to the point that they are useless.
Computation microcharges, according to my calculations, couldn't be distributed among zombies. Choose a constant X: this is the number of seconds that a reasonably fast computer takes to pay its computational microcharge. A spammer who tries to send 30 million emails to people who haven't whitelisted him will need 347.2x days of computation. If X is set to five, he'll need approximately 4.75 years' worth of CPU cycles. That much processing power is a valuable commodity; if it's lying on the net waiting to be stolen, it will be snapped up by any number of interests that do not involve spamming. Moreover, the value of X will be up to the user; if you have a problem with spam, set it higher. Or disable it entirely if spam is not an issue.
It need not affect mailing list owners, since the charge is only levied against senders who are not whitelisted. Presumably, the receiver of the email would issue a challenge and it would be up to the sender to respond. If a mailing list owner gets such a challenge, he needs only discard it; it's not his problem if a subscriber did not whitelist the mailing list.
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A normal kid does not derive ethical codes from conduct he sees in a video game. Period. If your kid is an exception, the solution lies in fixing your parenting, not in instigating sweeping reform in the video games industry.
Talk about a scapegoat... why was this editorial even posted?
Err... people give up their first amendment rights with contracts all the time. They're called Non-Disclosure Agreements.
What ARE contracts if not a binding way to give up rights? Stop playing lawyer.
"Microsoft: We Break the Law and You Pay (TM)"
And what Congress giveth, Congress can taketh away. Has taken away, in fact: In 1997, Congress amended the U.S. Code with the DMCA.
Butt breath.
-1: Works for Microsoft
Because I'm not a single-issue voter.
Here's my much cheaper alternative for UNBREAKABLE CRYPTOGRAPHY in the same conditions. Buy two massive RAID arrays ($1000 each = $2000). Completely fill them with identical random data, probably from a thermodynamic random number generator (let's guess $1000 -- it's to avoid a snooper second-guessing a software random number generator). Put one in a honda civic ($9000) and drive it to your other location. Have at least three people in the car at the time to minimize the odds of in-transit funny business. Drop it off at Point B and come back. (50km round trip = 2 hours' round trip * $60/man-hour * 3 men = $360. About 80 miles at 30mpg and $1.70 per gallon of gas = $4.54. Assume no tolls. We're not paying for car depreciation since we bought the damn car expressly for this.)
Now when you need to transmit data securely between the points, start going through your 10TB of one-time pad. It should last quite a while, assuming you aren't sending mountains of full-length DVD rips. If you constrain it to email, most places should go for years on this much one-time pad.
When you run out of data on your one-time pad, obviously you can't reuse it. That wouldn't be UNBREAKABLE CRYPTOGRAPHY. Instead, drive the civic (you kept it, right?) to Point B and come back with the RAID. You only need to send one person since the RAID doesn't contain sensitive data anymore; he can copy it if he wants (Same $4.54 gas price, and $120 of labor). Fill both RAIDs with fresh random data. Bring the second RAID back to Point B (all three guys gotta go this time, since it's full of sensitive data: $364.54).
So I've set up a system of UNBREAKABLE CRYPTOGRAPHY between two points less than 50km apart for no more than $12,364.54, a full $37,365.46 cheaper than that crack team of physicist/MBAs could offer you. Plus you get a good-condition used car out of it. Every few years, you'll have to pay $489.08 to refresh the one-time pads, so eventually the costs will even out. Assuming the one-time pads last 5 years, it should take 382 years of using my method before it's as expensive as the Quantum Thingamahoozy installation.
Maybe their market sector is immortals. Even so, you could invest the $37,365.46 in a money market and far surpass that over 382 years. At a mere annual 6% interest (compounded continuously), you'd turn it into $3,358,641,610,230,000, whereas if you put it into the Quantum Thingamahoozy, you'd only break even. So they must be targeting financially foolish immortals, which seems to me to be a small market sector. If they're that foolish, after all, they probably can't afford the $50,000 price tag in the first place.
When you catch the coin, feel it with your finger. If it is right-side-up, just open your hand. Otherwise, slam it down on your opposite wrist, which flips it over. Takes some practice to become smooth at it, but it works very well, especially if you can keep your audience's attention on your face while you're doing it.
Um. Wasn't it a play?
It's really easy to design an effective solution when the problem is purely mechanical or natural. As long as you're working with spammers who don't adapt, you can slice through their shitstorms very effectively.
But when a single solution becomes mainstream, spammers will adapt to it. Bayesian filters tend to work very well, but now spammers are adding sprawls of randomly generated green-light text to offset the filter's score.
Google found an excellent way to rank websites, but then it became widespread enough that webmasters began to game the system it had created. It's been playing catch-up ever since.
Once the adversary begins to adapt, we lapse into the same cat-and-mouse game of technological barriers and counter-barriers that we've seen so many times before.
IMDB user rankings puts The Godfather first, and it was early 1970s.
Consider it an attack against yourself if you like. No one else cares.
So the fact that they are implementing this suggests one of two things:
I won't be surprised. I'll send a bug report to Apple, telling them that your page doesn't display correctly. Ideally, everyone else will be doing the same, and having the same problems on a lot of standard HTML pages. Then Apple would fix their browser, and we'd be much better off than if every webmaster individually wrote nonstandard HTML to circumvent the bugs.
By all means don't test your web pages for Safari compatibility. All I ask is standard HTML.
You shouldn't shout 'case law!' without providing references to some cases...
First, computer gaming is on a trend AWAY from DRM. Long, long ago, diskette manufacturers screwed with the physical floppy to prevent copying. This caused more problems than the copy protection solved. Look-up solutions in game manuals ("Page 3, paragraph 2, word 4?") have also faded out as people became frustrated with keeping the manuals on hand. Recently, we're even seeing a move away from must-have-CD-in-drive copy protection.
Second, the computer game market is pretty elastic. If games become too expensive (as measured both in dollars and inconvenience), people will not buy them. They aren't like food (where you die of you don't have it), like MS Office (where you can't make money as effectively without it), or even like music (which we are culturally brainwashed to crave). If we don't have video games, we do something else.
Third, there are no central gaming companies secure enough in a monopoly to risk upsetting the market. If MS unilaterally started implementing fascist copy protection, people would turn to Nintendo or Sony. This is not a risk MS is willing to take.
In conclusion, I think it's baloney.
Outlawing firewalls to protect against terrorism would be like outlawing locks to protect against burglary.
So what? You'd be free to send anonymous email, just as I'd be free to reject it. Who knows -- with enough people switched to signed email, maybe spammers' economies of scale would tip over and anonymous mail would become usable again.
The boxes have to sit on someone's desk. "The community," disorganized and disparate as it is, is remarkably poor at doing anything. You'd have to invent some sort of hierarchy. Maybe have a General Manager of the Internet, and he could have a board of directors under him or something. They would be elected by the nation's population at large, and they'd have the final say on internet issues.
But it's be silly to give EVERYONE an equal vote in their elections, as the great majority of people have no clue how the internet works, and the campaigns for these positions would be totally unable to focus on real issues. They'd have to dumb it down and sugar-coat it so that sixpack joe can digest what they're saying, and at that level of simplicity, who could tell a good candidate from a bad?
Okay, so let's find some way of making sure only highly competent people can vote. We can't give a test, since we'd need someone to create and administer it, and the potential for corruption is too high. The only thing I can think of is selling the votes: that way, every vote is going to represent an informed citizen. After all, who would buy a vote if they don't understand the technology?
So at the point where we've got a CEO, a Board of Managers, and an equity market, we may as well package the whole thing as a corporation and name it VeriSign.
So what? The fact is, they are cool. I don't care why.
Life ALWAYS goes on. Life in Nazi Germany went on. Life under Stalin went on. You could find children playing in the streets at the height of the raids, the purges, the inhumanity.
I don't think this would work. If blacklists are that fast, why can't we just run a blacklist on individual email addresses right now? Seems to me that the email takes just about as much time to reach the target servers as the blacklist update does. And spammers DO use disposable email addresses, so something isn't working.
What happens should the sender be unable to respond.
Then, like now, your email would bounce. The thing is, this would all be done on the ISP's side. If I send an email to joebloe@earthlink.net, and all of earthlink.net's mail servers are offline, then the email bounces. So the servers don't go offline at 3:00 AM. At least, this is all how I think it works. I might be wrong.
I think the devil, as always, would be in the details. How would one get a public key? I think this might only lead to the rise of disposable keys: a spammer would fire off a day's worth of spam, and then throw out the soon-to-be-useless key just as it starts hitting the blacklists. But I really don't know much about the state of encryption today, so I may well be overlooking something obvious.
Spam is coming from zombied hosts these days, computational charges will be distributed to the point that they are useless.
Computation microcharges, according to my calculations, couldn't be distributed among zombies. Choose a constant X: this is the number of seconds that a reasonably fast computer takes to pay its computational microcharge. A spammer who tries to send 30 million emails to people who haven't whitelisted him will need 347.2x days of computation. If X is set to five, he'll need approximately 4.75 years' worth of CPU cycles. That much processing power is a valuable commodity; if it's lying on the net waiting to be stolen, it will be snapped up by any number of interests that do not involve spamming. Moreover, the value of X will be up to the user; if you have a problem with spam, set it higher. Or disable it entirely if spam is not an issue.
It need not affect mailing list owners, since the charge is only levied against senders who are not whitelisted. Presumably, the receiver of the email would issue a challenge and it would be up to the sender to respond. If a mailing list owner gets such a challenge, he needs only discard it; it's not his problem if a subscriber did not whitelist the mailing list.
Just thinking out loud.