Of course, if you use the entire 2.4 GHz band, your neighbor can't. That's part of the reason why we have multiple channels to keep everybody from running into each other time. I highly doubt this group has bothered to test what kind of downside there is for a standard-issue WiFi setup operating 100 yards away.
Microsoft can at least assure that they know where their coders spend their workdays, and can submit their programmers for higher-level government background checks if need be. Open Source can't exactly counter that... I mean, how do you prove that an OSS project it's being tampered with by contributors loyal to the enemy?
Annonymous anything is annoying to the military. They need to be able to trust who and what they're dealing with. They want to be friendly with the Iraqis in the street as much as possible, but when they can't tell the difference between a needy kid and a suicide bomber, they end up treating every kid they see as a bomber until they know therwise... So, the issue of "Can we trust this?" is a big one here. OSS might be trustworthy enough for my desk, but the military has higher standards.
Linux, in a proper definition, isn't very functional. It's the OS kernel... you're gonna need some software to go with that. So, which distro should be the "standard issue" for a military use?
Drawing a line between what's secure enough to make the grade, and what that's out there might not be trustworthy enough for "secure" use is quite a tough thing. Sure, Open Source allows the code to be reviewed... but the government doesnt have the time to do that so that's no good for them.
Microsoft can at least come forward and show a big company standing behind their product... how can Linux match that?
AntiVirus software writers need to realize that not every malware program these days self replicates, but their anti-virus program-identifying scans could very easily pick up adware programs simply by throwing them into the definition files.
Gator's programs are not pure spyware because they at least provide some level of functionality. The first Gator offering was a personal-info remembering "wallet" that'd nicely fill in web forms similar to what the Google Toolbar's AutoFill feature offers.
Another one of their schemes offers to download a program that will automatically sync your system time, which is useful to most people who notice that consumer PCs are usually pathetic at keeping a system time. However, I personally use the adware-free Automachron which provides the same useful function.
So, they're really a bait-and-switch operation. They actively market utilities that people want, and are rather trivial to make.... and then tag-on their adware code for the ride. Better options for all of their offerings exist, but the public often doesn't know where to go.
I caught WinPup32... a pop up deployer on my system. I knew something was up when my popup blockers suddenly all got turned off.
I couldn't run AdAware because it hung on my IE cookies. I couldn't clean my IE cookies because a running process was using half of them. I had to drop to Safe Mode to clean out the cookies before AdAware could do its thing to clean up the mess.
I know I must have accidently clicked a "Yes" when I should have clicked a "No" somewhere in the last few days. The number of sites trying to push these things is way through the roof.
The selection of the name "Claria" is a study how to avoid a mucked-up name... pick a made up word that has the seems to have the a tie to the words that represent what you wish you weren't so bad at.
People think you can't keep your promises? Call yourself Verizon or Verisign... "Vari-" meaning "truth" You're stuck in the drug business trying to make people get high? Call yourself Altria... "alt-" meaning high People confused about complex multiple rate plan options? Call yourself Cingular... kinda sounds like "singular" where there's only one option. You're main product requires confusing people into aceptng it to work? Call yourself Claria... even though there's nothing clear to users about what they're getting themselves into.
Napster was a dead company walking from a legal perspective from day one. Nobody was that surprised when it got shutdown. However, it was able to float an IPO...
Sometimes, crime does pay. Even if Gator is made illegal by state laws, they'll still be functioning until such laws are enforced. Simply passing a law won't make them go away.
Anybody got a current quote for what SCOX is going for while we're at it?
If you RTFA... the only discussion about phones is that people on the ground watching the ballon structure can use their mobile phones to hear what the ballon is hearing... since the whole structure will be teathered to the ground anyway, they could just be using a wired microphone with a really long extention cord to feed the phone system that everybody's going to be dialing into.
Uhm... speakers on the ground might have been a cheaper idea to use...
Re:Are the real logisitics of this being considere
on
Listen to the Sky
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Cell phones are also optimized to only capture and playback sounds in the human vocal range. They weren't designed to carry any sound outside of that range... and may just discard it as noise.
Re:Using mobile phones at altitude?
on
Listen to the Sky
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I thought using mobile phones at high altitudes put a strain on the system, because the phone sees so many towers. Or is that an urban legend?
No, that's a true reason why the FCC prohibits the use of cell phones while in an airplane.
Within each providers allocated slot of bandwidth, they subdivide that space into a number of channels, and assign each tower on their network a channel. If you're using your phone while in motion, when the signal from the tower you're actively talking falls below the acceptable line, it moves you over to the channel on which you are getting the strongest signal, because that's most likely coming from the tower you've moved closer too. Of course, for this to work, at no place should you be able to get two towers on the same channel... that'd be real confusing, and could lead to calls being assigned to the wrong tower. In practice, that's no big deal, that signal will just weaken quickly and you'll pick again until you get it right.
However, somebody in a high-altitude plane is in just that ugly situation.... they can see far too many towers from that height with no hills in the way. As proven on 9/11/01, such a call works if done in small numbers... the call will end up bouncing around from tower to tower a lot of times, but since those handoffs are invisible to the user, nothing really bad happens to the call. However, if everybody did that... there'd be far too many transfers for the system to keep up with, and the whole system would bog down. That's one reason why they tell you not to do that.
The FAA also prohibits the use of cell phones due to a possible risk of interference to the airplane navigation systems. However, this is distinct from the FCC's ban. Even if the FAA were to lighten up on this one, the FCC's ban would be unaffected.
Anything that's totally given away for free meant to help a certain segment of society should at least seek proof that the person taking advantage of the service is a member of that segment of society.
No government in the USA hands out handcapped parking permits to everyone who asks. There's a documentation process to certify that one is entitled to it. Sure, that process sometimes gets fooled into giving a permit to somebody not entitled to it, but as least there's a paper trail created by such a fraud that can be followed once it is discovered.
Free TTY services be allowed to issue usernames and passwords to their customers, keep text logs of the conversations, and able to revoke the access of those who abuse their accounts. Basically, the laws that are requiring them to be open are also regulating this service to its death. This needs to be fixed quick.
You're a retard. There are good guys and bad guys but they all use the same tools.
True, which is why these two projects end up looking so similar. It's all a matter of presentation of those tools...
In poorly designed stoplight situations, there can be an area called "the dilema zone" where drivers get caught in the situation where they cannot stop their car without crossing the stop line. If one is going the full speed within the dliema zone when the light first turns yellow, they are screwed... they will physically have to run the red light because slamming the brake pedal won't be enough.
Usually, dilema zone situations are created by there being too short of a yellow light sequence to allow the car in the zone to go through, or the speed limit being too high to corrispond to the yellow light time they wanted to use. Fixing one or the other elimiates the zone.
Therefore, I fear this stop light project is headed for failure. A true speeder is either going to run the yellow or red light. The only people its going punish are the legal speed cars behind the speeders...
Physical barriers also stand in the way of lossless tracks. Simply put... downloading everything as a.wav file would mean multi-hour downloads even on broadband. Even the first digital file captured contails some loss from the analog audio that was available at the studio.
So lossless is a myth. You've gotta pick the point that's "good enough for most consumers' ears" somewhere.
Besides, its not only the RIAA members who want DRM on their tracks. You don't see any of the indie labels on iTMS demanding that Apple use non-DRMed AACs for them.
Apple's license likely gives them the right and requirement to send the letter on behalf of the music publishing companies. Think of it as a limited power of a attorney within the license contracts.
"Designed for a minidisc" really just means that they're intentionally limiting themselves to fit on the smaller disc. Of course, you can always decompress an ISO image to a larger disc than needed and have leftover space...
having non-prime factors makes the cipher much weaker
Actually, using a non-prime makes your encryption bullet-proof against any check against the domain of all known prime numbers...
Therefore, the much larger domain of near-primes also needs to be considered. Afterall, you can get a known near-prime just by multiplying two known primes by each other, the only factors will be 1, itself, and the two primes by each other. To check all of those, it'll take quite the load of processor time too.
And that leads to a guessing situation as to which subset of the possible numbers to check first. If the "blue team" checks all the prime known numbers in a situation where the "red team" has has selected a near-prime... the near-prime will take longer to solve than had any known prime been selected. If the "blue team" checks the near-primes with the same priority of as the primes while the "red team" has selected a prime number, then the possiblity of the near-primes has lead to a time-costing distraction from the real solution.
I'm not sure the government has more efficient algorithms for most of the commerically-used encryption schemes... I seriously doubt the government has encryption-busters publishing classified theory discoveries that we don't know about.
However, they most certainly have the resources to create a reduced instruction set processor dedicated to breaking an instance of a popular encryption scheme, and the ability to buy lots of such to build a supercomputer.
I think it's enough to say the theory is proven... no number of bits of security is ever going to be "enough" to be uncrackable. However, a LARGE number of processor-time units on even the fastest processors available is needed to crack strong encryption.
I think the only remaining point of the challenges are just to prove that the ability to legally aquire $10,000 and the point of saying it's been done is enough to motivate people to contribute their processor time to such a project. We should have stats prediction formulas that should be able to give pretty reliable statements for how many processor-time units a security key will require to discover by now... the challenges just give us real-world datapoints to verify theories.
No, but Google does have a bias in favor of more popular sites, particularly news sites. If you require two words in the name of the site in your search, the site still comes up. There's a big difference between "censored" and "knocked off the first position" at Google...
Simply put. Sites with higher pagerank, including this one, have started using that phrase and not given a link back to the originating site...
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, if you use the entire 2.4 GHz band, your neighbor can't. That's part of the reason why we have multiple channels to keep everybody from running into each other time. I highly doubt this group has bothered to test what kind of downside there is for a standard-issue WiFi setup operating 100 yards away.
Microsoft can at least assure that they know where their coders spend their workdays, and can submit their programmers for higher-level government background checks if need be. Open Source can't exactly counter that... I mean, how do you prove that an OSS project it's being tampered with by contributors loyal to the enemy?
Annonymous anything is annoying to the military. They need to be able to trust who and what they're dealing with. They want to be friendly with the Iraqis in the street as much as possible, but when they can't tell the difference between a needy kid and a suicide bomber, they end up treating every kid they see as a bomber until they know therwise... So, the issue of "Can we trust this?" is a big one here. OSS might be trustworthy enough for my desk, but the military has higher standards.
Linux, in a proper definition, isn't very functional. It's the OS kernel... you're gonna need some software to go with that. So, which distro should be the "standard issue" for a military use?
Drawing a line between what's secure enough to make the grade, and what that's out there might not be trustworthy enough for "secure" use is quite a tough thing. Sure, Open Source allows the code to be reviewed... but the government doesnt have the time to do that so that's no good for them.
Microsoft can at least come forward and show a big company standing behind their product... how can Linux match that?
Wow... that's a lot of work for something that's GUI exposed. Right click the clock, select Adjust Date/Time, and then move to the Internet Time tab.
My personal problem with that is it's hard-set to only query once per week. That's not ususally enough for error-prone PC clocks.
AntiVirus software writers need to realize that not every malware program these days self replicates, but their anti-virus program-identifying scans could very easily pick up adware programs simply by throwing them into the definition files.
Why don't they do that?
Gator's programs are not pure spyware because they at least provide some level of functionality. The first Gator offering was a personal-info remembering "wallet" that'd nicely fill in web forms similar to what the Google Toolbar's AutoFill feature offers.
Another one of their schemes offers to download a program that will automatically sync your system time, which is useful to most people who notice that consumer PCs are usually pathetic at keeping a system time. However, I personally use the adware-free Automachron which provides the same useful function.
So, they're really a bait-and-switch operation. They actively market utilities that people want, and are rather trivial to make.... and then tag-on their adware code for the ride. Better options for all of their offerings exist, but the public often doesn't know where to go.
Calling the Gator software GAIN was just an attempt to try to associate themselves with a clean, fresh scent.
I caught WinPup32... a pop up deployer on my system. I knew something was up when my popup blockers suddenly all got turned off.
I couldn't run AdAware because it hung on my IE cookies. I couldn't clean my IE cookies because a running process was using half of them. I had to drop to Safe Mode to clean out the cookies before AdAware could do its thing to clean up the mess.
I know I must have accidently clicked a "Yes" when I should have clicked a "No" somewhere in the last few days. The number of sites trying to push these things is way through the roof.
The selection of the name "Claria" is a study how to avoid a mucked-up name... pick a made up word that has the seems to have the a tie to the words that represent what you wish you weren't so bad at.
People think you can't keep your promises? Call yourself Verizon or Verisign... "Vari-" meaning "truth"
You're stuck in the drug business trying to make people get high? Call yourself Altria... "alt-" meaning high
People confused about complex multiple rate plan options? Call yourself Cingular... kinda sounds like "singular" where there's only one option.
You're main product requires confusing people into aceptng it to work? Call yourself Claria... even though there's nothing clear to users about what they're getting themselves into.
Napster was a dead company walking from a legal perspective from day one. Nobody was that surprised when it got shutdown. However, it was able to float an IPO...
Sometimes, crime does pay. Even if Gator is made illegal by state laws, they'll still be functioning until such laws are enforced. Simply passing a law won't make them go away.
Anybody got a current quote for what SCOX is going for while we're at it?
If you RTFA... the only discussion about phones is that people on the ground watching the ballon structure can use their mobile phones to hear what the ballon is hearing... since the whole structure will be teathered to the ground anyway, they could just be using a wired microphone with a really long extention cord to feed the phone system that everybody's going to be dialing into.
Uhm... speakers on the ground might have been a cheaper idea to use...
Cell phones are also optimized to only capture and playback sounds in the human vocal range. They weren't designed to carry any sound outside of that range... and may just discard it as noise.
I thought using mobile phones at high altitudes put a strain on the system, because the phone sees so many towers. Or is that an urban legend?
No, that's a true reason why the FCC prohibits the use of cell phones while in an airplane.
Within each providers allocated slot of bandwidth, they subdivide that space into a number of channels, and assign each tower on their network a channel. If you're using your phone while in motion, when the signal from the tower you're actively talking falls below the acceptable line, it moves you over to the channel on which you are getting the strongest signal, because that's most likely coming from the tower you've moved closer too. Of course, for this to work, at no place should you be able to get two towers on the same channel... that'd be real confusing, and could lead to calls being assigned to the wrong tower. In practice, that's no big deal, that signal will just weaken quickly and you'll pick again until you get it right.
However, somebody in a high-altitude plane is in just that ugly situation.... they can see far too many towers from that height with no hills in the way. As proven on 9/11/01, such a call works if done in small numbers... the call will end up bouncing around from tower to tower a lot of times, but since those handoffs are invisible to the user, nothing really bad happens to the call. However, if everybody did that... there'd be far too many transfers for the system to keep up with, and the whole system would bog down. That's one reason why they tell you not to do that.
The FAA also prohibits the use of cell phones due to a possible risk of interference to the airplane navigation systems. However, this is distinct from the FCC's ban. Even if the FAA were to lighten up on this one, the FCC's ban would be unaffected.
Federal, state, county, and city/town levels... there's a lot.
Anything that's totally given away for free meant to help a certain segment of society should at least seek proof that the person taking advantage of the service is a member of that segment of society.
No government in the USA hands out handcapped parking permits to everyone who asks. There's a documentation process to certify that one is entitled to it. Sure, that process sometimes gets fooled into giving a permit to somebody not entitled to it, but as least there's a paper trail created by such a fraud that can be followed once it is discovered.
Free TTY services be allowed to issue usernames and passwords to their customers, keep text logs of the conversations, and able to revoke the access of those who abuse their accounts. Basically, the laws that are requiring them to be open are also regulating this service to its death. This needs to be fixed quick.
You're a retard. There are good guys and bad guys but they all use the same tools. True, which is why these two projects end up looking so similar. It's all a matter of presentation of those tools...
In poorly designed stoplight situations, there can be an area called "the dilema zone" where drivers get caught in the situation where they cannot stop their car without crossing the stop line. If one is going the full speed within the dliema zone when the light first turns yellow, they are screwed... they will physically have to run the red light because slamming the brake pedal won't be enough.
Usually, dilema zone situations are created by there being too short of a yellow light sequence to allow the car in the zone to go through, or the speed limit being too high to corrispond to the yellow light time they wanted to use. Fixing one or the other elimiates the zone.
Therefore, I fear this stop light project is headed for failure. A true speeder is either going to run the yellow or red light. The only people its going punish are the legal speed cars behind the speeders...
Physical barriers also stand in the way of lossless tracks. Simply put... downloading everything as a .wav file would mean multi-hour downloads even on broadband. Even the first digital file captured contails some loss from the analog audio that was available at the studio.
So lossless is a myth. You've gotta pick the point that's "good enough for most consumers' ears" somewhere.
Besides, its not only the RIAA members who want DRM on their tracks. You don't see any of the indie labels on iTMS demanding that Apple use non-DRMed AACs for them.
Apple's license likely gives them the right and requirement to send the letter on behalf of the music publishing companies. Think of it as a limited power of a attorney within the license contracts.
I think the key difference is that this is a White Hat tool, while PHLAK is meant for people weariing Black Hats...
"Designed for a minidisc" really just means that they're intentionally limiting themselves to fit on the smaller disc. Of course, you can always decompress an ISO image to a larger disc than needed and have leftover space...
having non-prime factors makes the cipher much weaker
Actually, using a non-prime makes your encryption bullet-proof against any check against the domain of all known prime numbers...
Therefore, the much larger domain of near-primes also needs to be considered. Afterall, you can get a known near-prime just by multiplying two known primes by each other, the only factors will be 1, itself, and the two primes by each other. To check all of those, it'll take quite the load of processor time too.
And that leads to a guessing situation as to which subset of the possible numbers to check first. If the "blue team" checks all the prime known numbers in a situation where the "red team" has has selected a near-prime... the near-prime will take longer to solve than had any known prime been selected. If the "blue team" checks the near-primes with the same priority of as the primes while the "red team" has selected a prime number, then the possiblity of the near-primes has lead to a time-costing distraction from the real solution.
I'm not sure the government has more efficient algorithms for most of the commerically-used encryption schemes... I seriously doubt the government has encryption-busters publishing classified theory discoveries that we don't know about.
However, they most certainly have the resources to create a reduced instruction set processor dedicated to breaking an instance of a popular encryption scheme, and the ability to buy lots of such to build a supercomputer.
I think it's enough to say the theory is proven... no number of bits of security is ever going to be "enough" to be uncrackable. However, a LARGE number of processor-time units on even the fastest processors available is needed to crack strong encryption.
I think the only remaining point of the challenges are just to prove that the ability to legally aquire $10,000 and the point of saying it's been done is enough to motivate people to contribute their processor time to such a project. We should have stats prediction formulas that should be able to give pretty reliable statements for how many processor-time units a security key will require to discover by now... the challenges just give us real-world datapoints to verify theories.
No, but Google does have a bias in favor of more popular sites, particularly news sites. If you require two words in the name of the site in your search, the site still comes up. There's a big difference between "censored" and "knocked off the first position" at Google...
Simply put. Sites with higher pagerank, including this one, have started using that phrase and not given a link back to the originating site...