3) Unlike the Movie - you CAN'T be tried and convicted for killing someone (for instance) and then actually kill them. Those are actually TWO separate crimes. Makes for a good movie, but the law isn't paid attention to.
When I was 7 or 8 I was given a russian puzzle game now called tetris. I remember athletics taking me away from running my multi-node anti-fido net BBS and my precious tetris for weeks at a time. I was actually running the game in my head, and found the sequences with which I would device to produce pieces on the fly would actually advance as I practiced more
I did the same thing with Freecell. At one point I was so addicted to Freecell that I could play it in my sleep (literally). One time I devised a strategy to deal with a particular scenario in a dream, and it came up in a game the next day. Of course I have also fixed the occasional bug in my code while asleep as well.
Are you using WindowsXP, MacOS 10.2, (insert Distribution here)Linux, or your old personal favorite... Sun? Hmmm, maybe you will try them all? You are a sneaky one.
Why are so many people asking questions like "Which OS will you use?" He is still banned from using computers. He was very contrite during the last interview, so a) I doubt he has used any of these OSs, and b) admitting to having done so would violate his parole. If these questions are submitted, they will be wasted.
The real long term danger of Internet voting is vote selling. Obviously, organized vote buying would leave a big footprint and that would keep it in check (although the mob could still buy votes using their existing distribution channels).
There is also a more subtle scam involving vote-swapping. Let's go back to the 2000 US election where Nader supporters in a swing state could have secured the election for Gore. If each of the Nader supporters in Florida had traded their vote with a Democrat in Texas, they could guarantee that Gore would win the election but Nader would still get his 5%. The fact that this scam exists shows that the US voting system is flawed, but it still wouldn't work without Internet voting.
Sorry, I mean 'action at a distance', which also has a snazzy buzzword description which I thought was somewhere along those lines...but I can't be bothered to have a look through my books at the moment.
Anyone remember LinuxOne? I don't know about you guys but I just get a sleazy feeling from Lindows, the same kind of vibe I got from LinuxOne. How about Loki? I'm not trying to lump Loki in with them per se, there were some good guys that worked there but the company, the CEO, were on the sleezier side of things. I think they are a bit more honest than LinuxOne but I don't think that they are looking to do anything other than make a quick buck.
Let's face it, but this is no surprise. When you take a product that is free and you encourage people to commercialize it, you tend to attract slimeballs. That's why so many websites sell your personal info. That's why Kazaa includes spyware. I don't know how many times I've heard Redhat descibed as the next redmond or how they're taking over the world with blue curve and bucking; the truth is Redhat has been walking the walk as much as talking the talk and giving a lot back.
RedHat management may be idealists right now, but who owns RedHat? They are a public company, and if they don't start making significant profits, the board of directors (or the major shareholders) are going to rise up and install their own management. Business is business.
Except that this complaint that CDs are more expensive than DVDs is a BS stat that was invented by/. readers in order to justify a pre-ordained conclusion. I live in Canada. While it is true that I see CDs for $21 in WalMart, when I go to the CD store they usually range from $12 to $17 for a new release (that's rock music, not pop). I don't buy DVDs, but I often see my friends spend $25 to $30 to buy them (new) at the video store.
I did a little experiment to test this point. I just went to Amazon and I compared the average price of the top 5 new DVDs to the price of the top 5 new CDs. The DVDs cost $21.5 on average and the CDs were only $14.5. All the above items were supposedly on sale (typically around 30% off).
Anyway, perhaps you'd like to comment on my little experiment. Admittedly it's a small data set, but it appears to confirm what I've believed all along, which is that the whiners on/. are deliberately comparing the high range of CD prices to the low range of DVD prices.
Movies, music, art etc are a vital part of our culture and our lives. In the past these media were distributed by a wide range of sources and were available to most of the populace.
I agree that movies, music, and art are a vital part of our lives, and the government needs to ensure that poor people have access to them as well. However, this does not mean that non-paying users should get access to whatever media they want whenever they want. Ever heard of the radio? The library? Broadcast TV? If there comes a time when poor people no longer have accesses to these free resources, only then will I agree with you. I have the right to do whatever I want as long as it isnt hurting anyone.
a) No you don't. b) I don't believe you are qualified to determine when your actions will hurt somebody. Do you really want 5 multinational conglomerates controlling ever aspect of american culture and then determining what price you will have to pay to be a part of it?
No, but I support several remedies that don't involve ripping off other people's music: a) unsigned artists selling their music directly on the web, b) congress imposing certain limits on the terms of record contracts, and allowing some escape clauses. (Interestingly enough, no one has ever bothered to refute this point.) 100% of the stuff I download is stuff that I would NOT buy otherwise.
How do you know you wouldn't buy it? More importantly, how do they know you will only download stuff that you wouldn't buy? When you examine human behaviour, there is typically a huge difference between what people do and what they say they are going to do.
Furthermore, I suspect that most people only have a limited appetite for music. If you can sate part of that appetite with free music, you will probably buy fewer CDs. Therefor there is no loss or harm done to the RIAA members therefor what I do is not illegal.
That's pretty weak. As you probably know, the "I didn't break the law because I invented an alternative law" defense doesn't hold up in court. I dont distribute anything either. If someone downloads out of my media folder when I'm not looking there isnt much I can do about that because my P2P clients dont have a way to turn off uploads.
Ignorance is bliss (especially when you're not really ignorant).
Saying that OSes and PLs are the same thing is a silly semantic argument, and it strikes me as an example of black and white thinking. The fact is, there is some overlap between what OSes and PLs typically do, so sometimes there is a bit of a grey area where a PL is doing an OS-like thing or vice-versa. But to say that "I cannot draw a hard and fast line between the definition of a PL and the definition of an OS therefore they are the same thing" would be wrong. OSes and PLs are different abstractions that serve different purposes, and it seems likely that there will continue to be a conceptual distinction between the two.
I also say it's gotta hurt them, because it makes me place my feelings about Real (the company) at a very low level. I don't think it's illegal, and I know they're out to make money like everyone else. However, I say don't screw over your customers, and they'll come back. Piss them off, and you will certainly regret it later.
I think they have maybe discovered that customer loyalty doesn't matter much in this day and age. The 'customer' is just out there looking for a free lunch. Look at Mandrake, a highly respected company, but they still went bankrupt. Meanwhile, the spam merchants are living high on the hog. I'm sure they have realized that 99% of users are never going to upgrade, so they might as well squeeze out as much money as possible.
While there is some truth in that of course, it is only part of the truth. The much larger truth is that without the content, the publisher has nothing, ZERO, zilch. Commensurate with this, the publisher does not really deserve much credit nor profit --- he is a middleman, useful, but still just a middleman.
There are a million aspiring authors out there, but there are a lot fewer people who are willing to say "I like your book. I'm willing to gamble $50,000 that it will be a success." Therefore, publishers do deserve some credit.
Nonsense. By this reasoning, the tulipomania bubble prices of tulips were "right" and the normal pre- and post-bubble prices were "wrong", as evidenced by the fact that lots of people lost their shirts in the transition from the former to the latter.
I think you're trying to oversimplify the matter. Capitalism is regulated by the laws of supply and demand. But every once in a while, the public goes a little crazy and speculation becomes popular (witness recent dot-com bubble). The laws of supply and demand did not apply in the case of the tulip bubble because there was no real demand for tulips (only a perceived demand). However, there is a real demand for music. (There was also the South Sea bubble, which was just an out-and-out scam.)
What happens when you need to change the key, because the encryption scheme you've used has become trivial to brute force? Historically most encryption has proven vulnerable to brute force attacks given enough time an computing power. I would imagine cracking the key out of the concrete would have a large pain-in-the-ass factor. Just a thought; keys aren't always permanent.
Well, this is your ultra-paranoid key, so you're going to want to choose a big enough safety margin that the brute force attack doesn't just sneak up on you. But anyway, when you want to change the key, you just tell the device to generate a new key. It then signs the new key with the old key and revokes the old key. That's the way key roll-over normally works. Of course, if you need to create a much larger key, you're probably going to need to beef up your hardware as well, so you might want to take the latest crypto processor and embed it in concrete.
You could always just take Bob's thumb. You could also find out some piece of information about Bob that could be used to make Bob want to let you in. You could drug Bob. You or someone working for you could seduce Bob. You could offer Bob a large amount of money/pr0n/whateverelseBobwants. You could convince Bob that you are good and that the person running the system you want access to is evil and that Bob should let you in.
Do not fool yourself *anytime* there is a human involved you can use social engineering to get in.
I never said that the system was perfect, I just said that it was basically immune to social engineering. The attacks you describe seem more akin to corporate espionage (with the exception of cutting off the thumb, which is assault). I don't know if there is a definative definition of "social engineering", but I did a quick Google search and the definitions I found did not appear to include corporate espionage or violence.
Do not discount the possibility of someone stealing the box [slashdot.org].
One of the purposes of the concrete is to make the box impossibly heavy. Also, for best results, the box should be surrounded by lasers in a locked room in a secret military facility hidden in the side of a volcano.
Seriously though, I don't think this kind of precaution is something every business needs to take. This is for the army's root key, or maybe a large company with a very sensitive CA (e.g. Microsoft or Verisign).
It's called a KEY, Eisenstein. You can find them at the hardware store.
LOL... if sarcastically calling someone Einstein implies that they are stupid, does sarcastically calling someone Eisenstein imply that they are spouting propaganda?
The reader would probably check if there is blood circulating through the thumb. I don't know about the commmercial fingerprint readers, but the retinal scanners definitely do that. You could maybe fool them with some kind of specialized pump, but it's not something the average thief could concoct.
The one I like is RFID on the employee's nametag and a biometric reader (thumbprint in this case) on the terminal. User walks up, computer detect that Bob Jones is standing there, Bob Jones presses thumb, computer says that this is in fact Bob Jones. Unlock.
That's a pretty good system, although it has a few fundamental flaws that make it unsuitable for ultra-paranoid environments. The problem is that Bob's fingerprint is a static key. If I want to fool the system, all I have to do is to capture Bob's fingerprint. Then I walk up to the computer, unplug the fingerprint reader and substitute my own device which simply reports that I am Bob.
You could improve the fingerprint reader system a bit by encrypting the wire protocol between the hardware and the device driver, but it's still technically feasible to break open the device and splice in the pre-computed signal. Still, admittedly the fingerprint reader is not open to a social engineering attack.
Can't you get cryptographic keys that are sealed inside a black box device so that no-one can access them? Couldn't this sort of thing be done for at least some hardware?
This may not be what you meant, but I would venture a bet that there are some ultra-sensitive keys out there that *no one* has access to. For example, consider the private key for a very important root CA server. I would take that sucker, make everything triply redundant, and seal the whole mess in a thick layer of concrete. Now no one could possibly steal the private key without stealing the box.
District Judge Stephen V. Wilson refusing to drop a copyright infringement suit against Kazaa owner Sharman Networks Ltd. (based in Austrailia [cia.gov], incorporated in Vanuatu [cia.gov])
And I wonder why they are incorporated in Vanuatu, but based in Australia. Does anyone in Vanuatu even have an Internet connection? It's a common practice to base your company in a small foreign country that is willing to look the other way. Typically, this is for the purpose of income tax evasion (remember Enron?) or government regulation (e.g. cruise ships) but it can also be to avoid certain laws.
The government is wise to these loopholes, which is why the law allows them to prosecute overseas companies that have assets in the US (or in a country like Australia that has certain reciprocal treaties with them). Do you really think that companies should be able to avoid all forms of taxes and regulations just by incorporating overseas?
The Internet tax is a no brainer. It should have been there from the start, but the loss was small (as with mail order catalogs). Now that eCommmerce is a bigger part of the economy, the laws need to adapt to the new circumstance. It's no surprise that/. readers are against this, as they seem to support any opportunity to get a free lunch.
Slashdot Mirror
3) Unlike the Movie - you CAN'T be tried and convicted for killing someone (for instance) and then actually kill them. Those are actually TWO separate crimes. Makes for a good movie, but the law isn't paid attention to.
Uhh... did you watch the movie?
-a
When I was 7 or 8 I was given a russian puzzle game now called tetris. I remember athletics taking me away from running my multi-node anti-fido net BBS and my precious tetris for weeks at a time. I was actually running the game in my head, and found the sequences with which I would device to produce pieces on the fly would actually advance as I practiced more
I did the same thing with Freecell. At one point I was so addicted to Freecell that I could play it in my sleep (literally). One time I devised a strategy to deal with a particular scenario in a dream, and it came up in a game the next day. Of course I have also fixed the occasional bug in my code while asleep as well.
-a
Are you using WindowsXP, MacOS 10.2, (insert Distribution here)Linux, or your old personal favorite... Sun?
Hmmm, maybe you will try them all? You are a sneaky one.
Why are so many people asking questions like "Which OS will you use?" He is still banned from using computers. He was very contrite during the last interview, so a) I doubt he has used any of these OSs, and b) admitting to having done so would violate his parole. If these questions are submitted, they will be wasted.
-a
The real long term danger of Internet voting is vote selling. Obviously, organized vote buying would leave a big footprint and that would keep it in check (although the mob could still buy votes using their existing distribution channels).
There is also a more subtle scam involving vote-swapping. Let's go back to the 2000 US election where Nader supporters in a swing state could have secured the election for Gore. If each of the Nader supporters in Florida had traded their vote with a Democrat in Texas, they could guarantee that Gore would win the election but Nader would still get his 5%. The fact that this scam exists shows that the US voting system is flawed, but it still wouldn't work without Internet voting.
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I don't get it either. The parent comment is rated informative, but where's the information? All I see is unsubstantiated opinion.
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Sorry, I mean 'action at a distance', which also has a snazzy buzzword description which I thought was somewhere along those lines...but I can't be bothered to have a look through my books at the moment.
Quantum entanglement?
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Thing is, we don't know why or with what mechanism paired particles retain that odd connection...that's why it's called the 'strange attraction'
Uhh... the "strange attraction" I know about refers to co-dominant poles that can cause iterative functions to become chaotic (but deterministic).
Could you please explain what this has to do with quantum mechanics?
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This is hardly a similar situation to commercial-skipping technology.
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Anyone remember LinuxOne? I don't know about you guys but I just get a sleazy feeling from Lindows, the same kind of vibe I got from LinuxOne. How about Loki? I'm not trying to lump Loki in with them per se, there were some good guys that worked there but the company, the CEO, were on the sleezier side of things. I think they are a bit more honest than LinuxOne but I don't think that they are looking to do anything other than make a quick buck.
Let's face it, but this is no surprise. When you take a product that is free and you encourage people to commercialize it, you tend to attract slimeballs. That's why so many websites sell your personal info. That's why Kazaa includes spyware.
I don't know how many times I've heard Redhat descibed as the next redmond or how they're taking over the world with blue curve and bucking; the truth is Redhat has been walking the walk as much as talking the talk and giving a lot back.
RedHat management may be idealists right now, but who owns RedHat? They are a public company, and if they don't start making significant profits, the board of directors (or the major shareholders) are going to rise up and install their own management. Business is business.
-a
Except that this complaint that CDs are more expensive than DVDs is a BS stat that was invented by /. readers in order to justify a pre-ordained conclusion. I live in Canada. While it is true that I see CDs for $21 in WalMart, when I go to the CD store they usually range from $12 to $17 for a new release (that's rock music, not pop). I don't buy DVDs, but I often see my friends spend $25 to $30 to buy them (new) at the video store.
/. are deliberately comparing the high range of CD prices to the low range of DVD prices.
I did a little experiment to test this point. I just went to Amazon and I compared the average price of the top 5 new DVDs to the price of the top 5 new CDs. The DVDs cost $21.5 on average and the CDs were only $14.5. All the above items were supposedly on sale (typically around 30% off).
Anyway, perhaps you'd like to comment on my little experiment. Admittedly it's a small data set, but it appears to confirm what I've believed all along, which is that the whiners on
-a
Movies, music, art etc are a vital part of our culture and our lives. In the past these media were distributed by a wide range of sources and were available to most of the populace.
I agree that movies, music, and art are a vital part of our lives, and the government needs to ensure that poor people have access to them as well. However, this does not mean that non-paying users should get access to whatever media they want whenever they want. Ever heard of the radio? The library? Broadcast TV? If there comes a time when poor people no longer have accesses to these free resources, only then will I agree with you.
I have the right to do whatever I want as long as it isnt hurting anyone.
a) No you don't.
b) I don't believe you are qualified to determine when your actions will hurt somebody.
Do you really want 5 multinational conglomerates controlling ever aspect of american culture and then determining what price you will have to pay to be a part of it?
No, but I support several remedies that don't involve ripping off other people's music: a) unsigned artists selling their music directly on the web, b) congress imposing certain limits on the terms of record contracts, and allowing some escape clauses. (Interestingly enough, no one has ever bothered to refute this point.)
100% of the stuff I download is stuff that I would NOT buy otherwise.
How do you know you wouldn't buy it? More importantly, how do they know you will only download stuff that you wouldn't buy? When you examine human behaviour, there is typically a huge difference between what people do and what they say they are going to do.
Furthermore, I suspect that most people only have a limited appetite for music. If you can sate part of that appetite with free music, you will probably buy fewer CDs.
Therefor there is no loss or harm done to the RIAA members therefor what I do is not illegal.
That's pretty weak. As you probably know, the "I didn't break the law because I invented an alternative law" defense doesn't hold up in court.
I dont distribute anything either. If someone downloads out of my media folder when I'm not looking there isnt much I can do about that because my P2P clients dont have a way to turn off uploads.
Ignorance is bliss (especially when you're not really ignorant).
-a
Saying that OSes and PLs are the same thing is a silly semantic argument, and it strikes me as an example of black and white thinking. The fact is, there is some overlap between what OSes and PLs typically do, so sometimes there is a bit of a grey area where a PL is doing an OS-like thing or vice-versa. But to say that "I cannot draw a hard and fast line between the definition of a PL and the definition of an OS therefore they are the same thing" would be wrong. OSes and PLs are different abstractions that serve different purposes, and it seems likely that there will continue to be a conceptual distinction between the two.
-a
I can't see why anyone would be upset about this
You can't see why people would be upset about a Linux industry spokesperson publishing obvious FUD?
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I also say it's gotta hurt them, because it makes me place my feelings about Real (the company) at a very low level. I don't think it's illegal, and I know they're out to make money like everyone else. However, I say don't screw over your customers, and they'll come back. Piss them off, and you will certainly regret it later.
I think they have maybe discovered that customer loyalty doesn't matter much in this day and age. The 'customer' is just out there looking for a free lunch. Look at Mandrake, a highly respected company, but they still went bankrupt. Meanwhile, the spam merchants are living high on the hog. I'm sure they have realized that 99% of users are never going to upgrade, so they might as well squeeze out as much money as possible.
-a
While there is some truth in that of course, it is only part of the truth. The much larger truth is that without the content, the publisher has nothing, ZERO, zilch. Commensurate with this, the publisher does not really deserve much credit nor profit --- he is a middleman, useful, but still just a middleman.
There are a million aspiring authors out there, but there are a lot fewer people who are willing to say "I like your book. I'm willing to gamble $50,000 that it will be a success." Therefore, publishers do deserve some credit.
-a
Nonsense. By this reasoning, the tulipomania bubble prices of tulips were "right" and the normal pre- and post-bubble prices were "wrong", as evidenced by the fact that lots of people lost their shirts in the transition from the former to the latter.
I think you're trying to oversimplify the matter. Capitalism is regulated by the laws of supply and demand. But every once in a while, the public goes a little crazy and speculation becomes popular (witness recent dot-com bubble). The laws of supply and demand did not apply in the case of the tulip bubble because there was no real demand for tulips (only a perceived demand). However, there is a real demand for music. (There was also the South Sea bubble, which was just an out-and-out scam.)
-a
What happens when you need to change the key, because the encryption scheme you've used has become trivial to brute force? Historically most encryption has proven vulnerable to brute force attacks given enough time an computing power. I would imagine cracking the key out of the concrete would have a large pain-in-the-ass factor. Just a thought; keys aren't always permanent.
Well, this is your ultra-paranoid key, so you're going to want to choose a big enough safety margin that the brute force attack doesn't just sneak up on you. But anyway, when you want to change the key, you just tell the device to generate a new key. It then signs the new key with the old key and revokes the old key. That's the way key roll-over normally works. Of course, if you need to create a much larger key, you're probably going to need to beef up your hardware as well, so you might want to take the latest crypto processor and embed it in concrete.
-a
You could always just take Bob's thumb. You could also find out some piece of information about Bob that could be used to make Bob want to let you in. You could drug Bob. You or someone working for you could seduce Bob. You could offer Bob a large amount of money/pr0n/whateverelseBobwants. You could convince Bob that you are good and that the person running the system you want access to is evil and that Bob should let you in.
Do not fool yourself *anytime* there is a human involved you can use social engineering to get in.
I never said that the system was perfect, I just said that it was basically immune to social engineering. The attacks you describe seem more akin to corporate espionage (with the exception of cutting off the thumb, which is assault). I don't know if there is a definative definition of "social engineering", but I did a quick Google search and the definitions I found did not appear to include corporate espionage or violence.
-a
Do not discount the possibility of someone stealing the box [slashdot.org].
One of the purposes of the concrete is to make the box impossibly heavy. Also, for best results, the box should be surrounded by lasers in a locked room in a secret military facility hidden in the side of a volcano.
Seriously though, I don't think this kind of precaution is something every business needs to take. This is for the army's root key, or maybe a large company with a very sensitive CA (e.g. Microsoft or Verisign).
-a
It's called a KEY, Eisenstein. You can find them at the hardware store.
LOL... if sarcastically calling someone Einstein implies that they are stupid, does sarcastically calling someone Eisenstein imply that they are spouting propaganda?
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But I've cut off his thumb, let me in...
The reader would probably check if there is blood circulating through the thumb. I don't know about the commmercial fingerprint readers, but the retinal scanners definitely do that. You could maybe fool them with some kind of specialized pump, but it's not something the average thief could concoct.
-a
The one I like is RFID on the employee's nametag and a biometric reader (thumbprint in this case) on the terminal. User walks up, computer detect that Bob Jones is standing there, Bob Jones presses thumb, computer says that this is in fact Bob Jones. Unlock.
That's a pretty good system, although it has a few fundamental flaws that make it unsuitable for ultra-paranoid environments. The problem is that Bob's fingerprint is a static key. If I want to fool the system, all I have to do is to capture Bob's fingerprint. Then I walk up to the computer, unplug the fingerprint reader and substitute my own device which simply reports that I am Bob.
You could improve the fingerprint reader system a bit by encrypting the wire protocol between the hardware and the device driver, but it's still technically feasible to break open the device and splice in the pre-computed signal. Still, admittedly the fingerprint reader is not open to a social engineering attack.
-a
Can't you get cryptographic keys that are sealed inside a black box device so that no-one can access them? Couldn't this sort of thing be done for at least some hardware?
This may not be what you meant, but I would venture a bet that there are some ultra-sensitive keys out there that *no one* has access to. For example, consider the private key for a very important root CA server. I would take that sucker, make everything triply redundant, and seal the whole mess in a thick layer of concrete. Now no one could possibly steal the private key without stealing the box.
-a
District Judge Stephen V. Wilson refusing to drop a copyright infringement suit against Kazaa owner Sharman Networks Ltd. (based in Austrailia [cia.gov], incorporated in Vanuatu [cia.gov])
And I wonder why they are incorporated in Vanuatu, but based in Australia. Does anyone in Vanuatu even have an Internet connection? It's a common practice to base your company in a small foreign country that is willing to look the other way. Typically, this is for the purpose of income tax evasion (remember Enron?) or government regulation (e.g. cruise ships) but it can also be to avoid certain laws.
The government is wise to these loopholes, which is why the law allows them to prosecute overseas companies that have assets in the US (or in a country like Australia that has certain reciprocal treaties with them). Do you really think that companies should be able to avoid all forms of taxes and regulations just by incorporating overseas?
-a
The Internet tax is a no brainer. It should have been there from the start, but the loss was small (as with mail order catalogs). Now that eCommmerce is a bigger part of the economy, the laws need to adapt to the new circumstance. It's no surprise that /. readers are against this, as they seem to support any opportunity to get a free lunch.
-a