Probably the best use for all the world's nuclear weapons would be to situate them around all the cities on earth so that everything on earth fell within a very, very high percentage kill zone. Then give everyone a very reliable detonator. Everyone suddenly has a much higher probability of being in a perfect Utopian universe.
An example of once such feature is a very loud stereo system.
Allow me to take this opportunity to thank you for waking me up in the middle of the night and hurting my ears when you're idling your decibel machine next to me. I only hope you'll thank me in a similar vein when I have perfected a HERF device capable of disabling loud stereos from a distance. You know, as an expression of my freedom to radiate RF at whatever power I please any time of the day or night.
The problem the FCC (and every other emission regulation body) has with open source and software radio is that it will be trivial to modify a device using these methods to emit at an arbitrarily high power level over a restricted wavelength, or using a band without using the proper medium access control. If this happened, the wavelength would be pretty much unusable for all other users until the FCC tracks down the emitter, and shuts him down.
Yeah, but anyone with access to radio shack can do the same thing with instructions from the Internet. In fact, it's probably much harder to get a properly working hardware radio built at home without leaking too much power on sidebands than it would be to write a good software radio program, much less download one. Obviously there would be programs available that are specifically designed for illegal jamming, but there are virus sites out there too. I was about to write an article much like your own, but then I realized that people are trusted with cars, computers (ooh, viruses!), and private airplanes all of which don't have any fundamental restrictions on them. What really matters is the law and how it can be enforced.
That's why today, most radio-enabled devices, and especially mobile phones, have to pass type conformance to be commercialized in a geographic area. In the current state of things, if the radio software can be changed by the user, the type conformance cannot be awarded. Software radio makes things worse, because it is harder to justify that a component cannot emit at a given frequency, if changing the software in this component would allow switching emission frequencies at will.
I believe that you are correct about the FCC being unable to approve devices that are end user modifiable. However, one solution would be to have a simple set of software, firmware, or hardware bandpass filters that prevent transmission on consumer devices except on the public spectrums. Those would be unmodifiable, but would still allow unlimited reception. I imagine that's basically what the FCC is trying to get across; they need some hard limit on the capability of the software radio to transmit in order to approve it.
This is a paradigm shift in the understanding of complex behavior of multicellular organisms. We have had good evidence of individual organisms acting smart, that was never in question. But until now, we have never had good scientific, mathematical evidence of intelligence at the group level. People may have suspected it, but now they have evidence to convince skeptics.
It shouldn't be too difficult to understand why, either. Humans have a large brain with lots of neurons that interact electrically and chemically, ants have small individual brains but link them together with chemical pheromones into a hive. They just do distributed computing instead of having what appears to be a single supercomputer like humans. Different paradigms, but ultimately the same approach to intelligence; hooking lots of processors (neurons) together with input from the environment. The only thing ant hive brains lack is direct electrical connections between them.
Oh, not personal information, you say? Just the ones and zeroes that we want access to, not the ones and zeroes that they want access to?
I have no problem with companies collecting credit information on me. I just want to be able to easily sue them for libel if they claim I'm late on my payments when I've actually been the victim of identity theft. The burden of proof should be entirely upon the credit agencies to prove that a given individual actually applied for credit and then defaulted on it. That would not only make the system more accurate but would also put the cost directly on criminals. If credit agencies could be sued for their mistakes, they would be much less likely to allow criminals to succeed at identity theft in the first place.
This got an insightful mod? Give me a fucking break. Yes, I've been on/. for four years, have over 2,000 posts and good karma but I'm trying to provide a link so I can scam people's personal information! That must be it!
(whoever puts code to header file should be shot at noon:)
Where else would you expect common macros (not inline functions) to live? The whole point of macros is that they have to be included in the source file using them, since you can't "compile" them to anything useful. Unless you want to be #include'ing.c files, they need to go in the header files.
I was under the impression that a rootkit was only supposed to be undetectable from _within_ the system.
Why would anyone arbitrarily limit themselves to online forensic tools? If you really think you have a rootkit, at least boot with a rescue CD or something to scan the system.
I wonder how many root kits are vulnerable to simple timing analysis? Unless they are very carefully written, the extra functions they perform will affect the exact timing of system calls, and this would be one of the most reliable ways to test for rootkits. Take baseline timings on all the system calls with the time stamp counter (in Intel architectures at least), and then compare it with the timings from the affected system. Are rootkits written to avoid timing attacks? It's doable, but would require a lot of sophistication that could eventually be detected. Assume that the rootkit executes more instructions than the operating system would otherwise, this means that running one process at 100% CPU while also timing the system calls would give differing results for one or both of the tests if the system has a rootkit. Only if the rootkit was written so that it actually optimized the operating system to cover for its own processing could it go undetected.
It's straightforward to detect *any* malware in this setup. If the hosts of the challenge can't find it, they deserve to lose more than just a laptop.
Step one: Pull the BIOS chips or stick a reader on them. Compare the images between the two laptops. Obviously flash them to the same revision beforehand.
Step two: Pull the hard disks and diff them in another system.
Step three: If the BIOS images are the same on the first two computers, put the drives in new computers of the same model and ask the rootkit to be demonstrated there. This step may be heating, since the contest was apparently only about two computers.
Step one covers BIOS rootkits, step two covers hard disk rootkits, and step three covers the (slightly) less likely case that the contestant will pick a model of laptop or hard disk with some other easily flashable device that can be used to store the rootkit. If the hard disk controller or hard disk itself can be flashed, it would be trivial to make it return a sector from some kernel driver with a rootkit installed only when a certain sequence of other reads have occurred since poweron. Just hash each read request, and only return the rootkit sector if the hash matches a certain value when the sector is read, and then don't return the rootkit version any more. It would just require one boot (with modified firmware) to discover the hash of sectors read by the BIOS and operating system as it boots, and then set the hash in the firmware and leave it. To discover such a hack, the people running the challenge would have to do basically the same thing, patch some firmware or load their own boot sector hack that recorded the exact sequence of reads from a boot, and then hotplug the rootkitted disk to trigger a poweron event and then play the sequence of reads (and any writes) back to the disk, possibly with the same timing, in order to discover the actual rootkit. They could also just read the firmware off the disk and try to debug it, or at least compare it to the firmware of a good drive, but both approaches require a pretty deep knowledge of the hardware and software being used, which gives the contestant an advantage.
There are almost certainly other random flashable devices laying around, especially on laptops, and any of these could be used in combination with a driver bug or some other "feature" to take over the computer. Since the contestant can pick the hardware, this is a distinct possibility. The only way to detect such a rootkit would be to load a higher level rootkit which can be prevented if the original rootkit virtualizes the entire system, but in that case it's probably quite vulerable to timing attacks to detect its presence. I think the hosts of the challenge can ultimately win, but they may spend quite a few hours on it. If they're sneaky, they'll just put their own rootkit on the laptops to begin with and record all the challenger's actions.
How about the fact that no matter who might be watching you, Mr Elf, you are still able to write what you just did.
Oh, sure, unless I post one of a few 16 byte numbers that violate the DMCA or some text from OC3. Slashdot is mostly anonymous and even the MAFIAA doesn't have time to track down and sue every evildoing DMCA breaker, but there's no reason I should have to play the odds for free speech in the first place. Likewise, I shouldn't have to be searched for liquids and toothpaste when I get on an airplane, or forced to carry around insecure RFID passports and IDs, or be barred from public assembly in some places, or worry about connecting to wireless access points in some states, or worry about being able to get married if I was gay, or be forced to accept binding arbitration with my employer in any dispute because some justices figured it would be okay to allow people to give away their right to due process.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean much without freedom from torture, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and freedom from huge corporations suing me for outrageous damages.
You say this like it is a bad thing. The less IT infrastructure these repressive regimes have the better. I personally think the embargo against Cuba at this point is counter-productive, but I am not going to cry because they can't use this software either.
Excellent point. Without technological infrastructure, things like the DMCA takedown notices, RIAA John Doe suits, Echelon, Carnivore, and CCTV cameras on street corners would all be impossible. Or do you have some other, more narrow, definition of "repressive" in mind?
Good god, is that high school level physics? Do they actually have any numbers in any of the questions, or is that just a selection of the worst questions?
You're also wrong about the "GNU Public License" bit. It is in fact the General Public License (plus or minus a GNU).
GPL - GNU = eeral Pblic License?
In other news, no one understands *all* the ramifications and implications of the GPL, which is why it's at version 2 and version 3 is in the works. Trying to explain what the GPL really means involves examining what copyright law really means and how it has been interpreted by various courts.
For example, they could simply do a search on limewire, The Pirate Bay, or wherever for a piece of copyrighted material that their member organizations own. They could then download the file, watching all the IPs that offer a piece of that file up to their computer. If, upon downloading the file, they find that it is indeed copyrighted material, they have strong reason to believe that each of those IPs represents someone illegally offering the file for download to others. That's not monitoring your connection, it's monitoring their own.
I'd hate for them to download any of my copyrighted files, say source code or other things that I accidentally put on a P2P client on my computer. Then I'd have to sue them for copyright infringement. I wonder how easy it is to detect the clients that they use to download files? My guess is they never download entire files, but instead download initial snippets and compare them against a database. It would be almost trivial to build MAFIAA detection into P2P clients and find the clients who always only download a small snippet of lots and lots of shared files. Additionally, put lots of random files in each P2P client's shared directory with private copyrighted information (have the user enter a short copyrightable paragraph and save it to lots of files named like popular songs) and then bring a multi-user class action infringement lawsuit against the shills the RIAA use to troll the P2P networks. Just start issuing John Doe suits against their IP addresses like they to do users.
but it's still valuable to talk about memetics versus genetics
What "versus"? Recognizing the common elements between different aspects of reality is where the big discoveries get made, not by neatly packaging genetics and ellipses and fields and linear algebra and statistics in their own neat little boxes so they don't mix. Using the language of one field to talk about another implies more usefulness in the language than having to make up extensive jargon for every subfield of science. As long as it's precise and accurate, generic language is preferable to specification. Yes, memetics are not exactly genetics, but they are quite similar.
i mean, both electricians and opticians work in the realm of electromagnetism, but that more top level understanding of things does not add any value to each professional's particluar realm of endeavour. christ, a cosmologist and a geneticist work in the same field, science, but so fucking what
You wouldn't have data projectors or CCDs if the optics guys and the electronics guys didn't get together. If cosmologists find extraterrestrial life, they will almost certainly work with geneticists, and when we want to send life to other planets the geneticists had better consult some cosmologists.
so don't get too top level. there is no added value in tying it all together, unless you merely want to ruminate philosphically on deep connections without any hope of practical application
My point is that it doesn't matter *what* mechanism influences genetics, it's still genetic evolution. Whether it's intelligence, environment, or the end of the universe, it's still genetic evolution. I don't think intelligence is purely genetic, so that's not the issue. When I was comparing genetic survival, I was simply pointing out that human genes have a higher likelihood of being around after the death of the solar system than horseshoe crab or slime mold genes. That's what genetic evolution is about, population densities of genes over time. I'm just making speculations about population densities in the future. It's really that simple.
except you're not talking about genetic evolution anymore. you're talking about memetic evolution, the evolution of ideas. which is of course, new to the human species, and a new realm of evolution, completely separate from any judgment for or against slime molds and horseshoe crabs. human beings straddle the worlds of memetic evolution and genetic evolution. in the world of genetic evolution, according to judgment of genetic evolutionary success, human beings are equivalent to horseshoe crabs and slime molds. meanwhile, in the realm of memetic evolution, you have luddites, and nihilists, and fundamentalists, and anarachists, etc. no horseshoe crab or slime mold need apply. and human culture is the framework, social groups of human beings, and the retention of ideas across generations. individual humans can create ideas and contribute to ideas, but they aren't the means of propagation, retention, and spread. also, the goals are all different between memetic and genetic evolution, although competition for success is the same, what "success" means in each realm is different
If the genetic descendants of humans escape the death of the solar system, then genetic evolution has selected for them. If humans take horseshoe crabs and slime molds with them, then they'll continue to be just as genetically successful, otherwise they'll go the way of the dodo and passenger pigeon and be genetically inferior, in large part due to their lack of intelligence; e.g. their lack of ability to survive in competition with intelligent species. Not all species go extinct because of more intelligent species, but a fair number do. It's just the way nature works, and intelligence is merely another property that is selected for. The only effect intelligence has on genetic evolution is that evolution occurs faster for more intelligent species. Genetic engineering, eugenics, and genocide are all forms of genetic selection that are made possible only by intelligence. Not everything that comes from intelligence is good, but it definitely has an impact on genetics.
The definition of success is the same for both genetic and memetic evolution: If you (gene or meme) are present in the environment, you have not yet lost. To exist is to succeed. In fact, evolution can be defined in this way over any variable set of objects. The evolution of dinner plates exists, despite plates being inanimate objects. The smooth, pretty ones that are easier to clean and look nice haven't lost yet, while the rough, partially unbaked clay ones are pretty much extinct, although we can find fossils of them. Memes are no different, they're just thoughts migrating through minds, living and dying according to their ability to reproduce themselves in other brains. That evolution is multileveled does not mean that genetics and memetics are separate, just that there is a spectrum of information encodings from genes to memes that are interdependent. In the end, everything is just information anyway.
Likewise, evolution doesn't care one stinking bit about what creatures are made, there is merely deviation from the average complexity of an animal, and occasionally the animal gets very complex. Like our brain. From evolution's point of view, it's just a statistical aberration in terms of complexity to get the primary job done: surviving death and breeding a new generation. Increasing complexity isn't the point. All evolution cares about is that we successfully breed, or not. From evolution's point of view, human beings, horseshoe crabs, and slime molds all do a good job of that, and so we are equivalent successes. That we do it with a lot more complexity than a slime mold means nothing at all. That horseshoe crabs have been doing it for billions of years while we only a few million or less means nothing at all.
Horseshoe crabs and slime molds won't outlive the solar system unless we (or some other beings capable of getting off the planet) help them. They'll bake as the Sun grows and cooks the Earth into Mercury. In the long term, it's obvious that intelligence has more survival potential than replication alone. The key is finding the blend of intelligence and replication that doesn't create complete nihilists or luddites.
These numbers are remarkably low, if true. I once cleaned over 1000 virii, rootkits and spyware apps off the computer of a busy, filesharing teenager. 800 from 200,000 employees is pretty low.
Unless they report each "incident" only once even if it affects hundreds or thousands of users and systems. "Oh look, Blaster just rooted all the unpatched servers, better rebuild them all and write up an incident report!"
There's no reason (aside from good old fashioned greed) that the U.S. should have aging, filtered, asynchronous, and broken Internet access almost everywhere.
You're correct, it's entirely possible that advanced AI will be very nihilist or simply prefer not to spread or grow, or even destroy itself entirely. It's also possible that the solar system will be "enough" for the future, but in the long run the sun will die and the solar system will cool to the point of uselessness. Any long term survival will either happen independent of this (a magic wand of energy or reversible computing), or require travel to other stars. I only consider magic wands to be things that actually break the currently known laws of physics, or their present interpretations. Basically, anything achieving 100% efficiency seem like magic to us, but is not necessarily disallowed by current physics, and it would allow virtually eternal existence without spreading to other stars. Beating the heat death would be true magic.
Gold farmers are a cancer to MMO games. Some people might not care, but these people negatively impact everyone's enjoyment of the game, be it because they destroy economies or hack or monopolize content. It's not healthy for games.
Hold on a second. Everything you said about gold farmers could be applied just as accurately to some hardcore gamers. They grief, they camp, they make it less fun for normal players. What you're really upset about is that people who cheat or who have a lot more time and knowledge can beat you at a game. That's just a given for any game in existence. The solution is to eliminate cheating for everyone, and to either make stats in the game unavailable for purchase to limit the effectiveness of dupes and mules, or make it very difficult to create dupe accounts. Just enforce a minimum percentage (like 80%) of the store value that players must charge to sell items to other players. It still makes player trading more lucrative than buying items at stores, but drastically decreases the effectiveness of dupes, and is more realistic in a role playing environment anyway.
To be clear, the decision today didn't look at that question, rather the question of whether a warrant is required to search email at all. I see that as so blatantly obvious that I'm shocked the government would even question it. Look, government, hey, you know for 250 years courts have consistently told you that you need a warrant to search just about everything that isn't an emergency, so by now you should be used to it.
How much leeway does the U.S. government have with the postal service to begin with? Are postcards considered "in plain sight" during transit, for instance? What about when they arrive? You have to open an envelope and pull the letter out to read it, but cops with a generic search warrant or who are invited in can almost certainly glance at the postcards you have taped to your fridge.
I think what Congress really needs to do is specify that sending things over the Internet is equivalent to broadcasting them with radio waves in terms of privacy; there is none. Encrypt, or suffer the consequences.
It's all in how you word it. Require negative evidence, make "educated" guesses, etc. Observe:
My best guess is that the RIAA has been feeding little children to alligators in third world countries and charging admission in order to pay for their webhosting, and their previous hosting company found out about it. I have no evidence that they have stopped the practice, but they may now be selling children on the black market as well because of the higher TCO for running Linux, as evidenced by all the non-libelous reports from Microsoft. Moreover, in my estimation the quickest way for the RIAA to migrate their pages to a Linux host involves slave labor in Chinese coding factories with 16 hour workdays, 7 days a week, paying the overworked programmers only One Pittance per month.It's also really easy to claim that any losses incurred during the switch were caused by "piracy." Now I'm not an expert on the RIAA or anything, but I would be completely surprised if it wasn't true.
Space colonization will be hard for current humans. Not for robots, and not for AI. Information can travel at light speed, so there's no need to pack humans into heavy life support systems when you can just ship a trillion tiny nanoassembly factories out at 50% light speed and let statistics handle the reassembly at the other end of the trip. Once the factories are running, send the information for whatever it is we want to travel at light speed and let them assemble it, whether it's the newest robot model or schematics for a reconstructed human.
I see the economics for space travel coming sometime after the singularity. Once we have the ability to build huge AIs that can control nano-machines to build even bigger AIs, we will run out of resources in the solar system. At that point, it will be logical to spread to any other star system that can be used as a resource to build more hardware to run our software. Even if it's horribly inefficient, it will still be more than what will be available to us in this solar system. We can also explore the universe right here with much better sensors. The universe has been sending tons of information about itself to us at light speed for the last 15 billion years, we just have to collect and interpret it properly. Then we (humans and our varied descendants) can explore the resulting datasets. There's no reason we can't have swashbuckling space adventure faster than the speed of light in a future MMORPG.
2. If, indeed, intellectual property theft is that high, one could probably make an argument that it is actually helping the world economy. If people/companies actually had to pay out a few hundred billion dollars more to buy legal copies, it would result in a few hundred million dollars less for silly things like capital investment and salaries.
This is by far the most important argument against the MAFIAA's claims of the economy losing billions of dollars to piracy. The economy is not losing billions of dollars, it is gaining "hundreds of billions" of dollars of intellectual property for free! Well, that is if everyone truly believes that every song is possession of every person on the planet is worth $1.
If anything, the MAFIAA's intellectual property is just being revalued at a much lower cost, and they'll have to meet the market realities by wasting less on themselves and marketing and lobbying, and focus on the actual business of letting musicians make music at a low enough cost to turn a profit in the new economy. So some rich chumps are taking it in the ass economically because they are too stupid to read the writing on the wall 10 years ago. This is bad, how?
Slashdot Mirror
Probably the best use for all the world's nuclear weapons would be to situate them around all the cities on earth so that everything on earth fell within a very, very high percentage kill zone. Then give everyone a very reliable detonator. Everyone suddenly has a much higher probability of being in a perfect Utopian universe.
An example of once such feature is a very loud stereo system.
Allow me to take this opportunity to thank you for waking me up in the middle of the night and hurting my ears when you're idling your decibel machine next to me. I only hope you'll thank me in a similar vein when I have perfected a HERF device capable of disabling loud stereos from a distance. You know, as an expression of my freedom to radiate RF at whatever power I please any time of the day or night.
The problem the FCC (and every other emission regulation body) has with open source and software radio is that it will be trivial to modify a device using these methods to emit at an arbitrarily high power level over a restricted wavelength, or using a band without using the proper medium access control. If this happened, the wavelength would be pretty much unusable for all other users until the FCC tracks down the emitter, and shuts him down.
Yeah, but anyone with access to radio shack can do the same thing with instructions from the Internet. In fact, it's probably much harder to get a properly working hardware radio built at home without leaking too much power on sidebands than it would be to write a good software radio program, much less download one. Obviously there would be programs available that are specifically designed for illegal jamming, but there are virus sites out there too. I was about to write an article much like your own, but then I realized that people are trusted with cars, computers (ooh, viruses!), and private airplanes all of which don't have any fundamental restrictions on them. What really matters is the law and how it can be enforced.
That's why today, most radio-enabled devices, and especially mobile phones, have to pass type conformance to be commercialized in a geographic area. In the current state of things, if the radio software can be changed by the user, the type conformance cannot be awarded. Software radio makes things worse, because it is harder to justify that a component cannot emit at a given frequency, if changing the software in this component would allow switching emission frequencies at will.
I believe that you are correct about the FCC being unable to approve devices that are end user modifiable. However, one solution would be to have a simple set of software, firmware, or hardware bandpass filters that prevent transmission on consumer devices except on the public spectrums. Those would be unmodifiable, but would still allow unlimited reception. I imagine that's basically what the FCC is trying to get across; they need some hard limit on the capability of the software radio to transmit in order to approve it.
This is a paradigm shift in the understanding of complex behavior of multicellular organisms. We have had good evidence of individual organisms acting smart, that was never in question. But until now, we have never had good scientific, mathematical evidence of intelligence at the group level. People may have suspected it, but now they have evidence to convince skeptics.
It shouldn't be too difficult to understand why, either. Humans have a large brain with lots of neurons that interact electrically and chemically, ants have small individual brains but link them together with chemical pheromones into a hive. They just do distributed computing instead of having what appears to be a single supercomputer like humans. Different paradigms, but ultimately the same approach to intelligence; hooking lots of processors (neurons) together with input from the environment. The only thing ant hive brains lack is direct electrical connections between them.
I thought information wants to be free?
Oh, not personal information, you say? Just the ones and zeroes that we want access to, not the ones and zeroes that they want access to?
I have no problem with companies collecting credit information on me. I just want to be able to easily sue them for libel if they claim I'm late on my payments when I've actually been the victim of identity theft. The burden of proof should be entirely upon the credit agencies to prove that a given individual actually applied for credit and then defaulted on it. That would not only make the system more accurate but would also put the cost directly on criminals. If credit agencies could be sued for their mistakes, they would be much less likely to allow criminals to succeed at identity theft in the first place.
This got an insightful mod? Give me a fucking break. Yes, I've been on /. for four years, have over 2,000 posts and good karma but I'm trying to provide a link so I can scam people's personal information! That must be it!
How do we know YOU didn't get scammed?
(whoever puts code to header file should be shot at noon:)
.c files, they need to go in the header files.
Where else would you expect common macros (not inline functions) to live? The whole point of macros is that they have to be included in the source file using them, since you can't "compile" them to anything useful. Unless you want to be #include'ing
I was under the impression that a rootkit was only supposed to be undetectable from _within_ the system.
Why would anyone arbitrarily limit themselves to online forensic tools? If you really think you have a rootkit, at least boot with a rescue CD or something to scan the system.
I wonder how many root kits are vulnerable to simple timing analysis? Unless they are very carefully written, the extra functions they perform will affect the exact timing of system calls, and this would be one of the most reliable ways to test for rootkits. Take baseline timings on all the system calls with the time stamp counter (in Intel architectures at least), and then compare it with the timings from the affected system. Are rootkits written to avoid timing attacks? It's doable, but would require a lot of sophistication that could eventually be detected. Assume that the rootkit executes more instructions than the operating system would otherwise, this means that running one process at 100% CPU while also timing the system calls would give differing results for one or both of the tests if the system has a rootkit. Only if the rootkit was written so that it actually optimized the operating system to cover for its own processing could it go undetected.
It's straightforward to detect *any* malware in this setup. If the hosts of the challenge can't find it, they deserve to lose more than just a laptop.
Step one: Pull the BIOS chips or stick a reader on them. Compare the images between the two laptops. Obviously flash them to the same revision beforehand.
Step two: Pull the hard disks and diff them in another system.
Step three: If the BIOS images are the same on the first two computers, put the drives in new computers of the same model and ask the rootkit to be demonstrated there. This step may be heating, since the contest was apparently only about two computers.
Step one covers BIOS rootkits, step two covers hard disk rootkits, and step three covers the (slightly) less likely case that the contestant will pick a model of laptop or hard disk with some other easily flashable device that can be used to store the rootkit. If the hard disk controller or hard disk itself can be flashed, it would be trivial to make it return a sector from some kernel driver with a rootkit installed only when a certain sequence of other reads have occurred since poweron. Just hash each read request, and only return the rootkit sector if the hash matches a certain value when the sector is read, and then don't return the rootkit version any more. It would just require one boot (with modified firmware) to discover the hash of sectors read by the BIOS and operating system as it boots, and then set the hash in the firmware and leave it. To discover such a hack, the people running the challenge would have to do basically the same thing, patch some firmware or load their own boot sector hack that recorded the exact sequence of reads from a boot, and then hotplug the rootkitted disk to trigger a poweron event and then play the sequence of reads (and any writes) back to the disk, possibly with the same timing, in order to discover the actual rootkit. They could also just read the firmware off the disk and try to debug it, or at least compare it to the firmware of a good drive, but both approaches require a pretty deep knowledge of the hardware and software being used, which gives the contestant an advantage.
There are almost certainly other random flashable devices laying around, especially on laptops, and any of these could be used in combination with a driver bug or some other "feature" to take over the computer. Since the contestant can pick the hardware, this is a distinct possibility. The only way to detect such a rootkit would be to load a higher level rootkit which can be prevented if the original rootkit virtualizes the entire system, but in that case it's probably quite vulerable to timing attacks to detect its presence. I think the hosts of the challenge can ultimately win, but they may spend quite a few hours on it. If they're sneaky, they'll just put their own rootkit on the laptops to begin with and record all the challenger's actions.
How about the fact that no matter who might be watching you, Mr Elf, you are still able to write what you just did.
Oh, sure, unless I post one of a few 16 byte numbers that violate the DMCA or some text from OC3. Slashdot is mostly anonymous and even the MAFIAA doesn't have time to track down and sue every evildoing DMCA breaker, but there's no reason I should have to play the odds for free speech in the first place. Likewise, I shouldn't have to be searched for liquids and toothpaste when I get on an airplane, or forced to carry around insecure RFID passports and IDs, or be barred from public assembly in some places, or worry about connecting to wireless access points in some states, or worry about being able to get married if I was gay, or be forced to accept binding arbitration with my employer in any dispute because some justices figured it would be okay to allow people to give away their right to due process.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean much without freedom from torture, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and freedom from huge corporations suing me for outrageous damages.
You say this like it is a bad thing. The less IT infrastructure these repressive regimes have the better. I personally think the embargo against Cuba at this point is counter-productive, but I am not going to cry because they can't use this software either.
Excellent point. Without technological infrastructure, things like the DMCA takedown notices, RIAA John Doe suits, Echelon, Carnivore, and CCTV cameras on street corners would all be impossible. Or do you have some other, more narrow, definition of "repressive" in mind?
Good god, is that high school level physics? Do they actually have any numbers in any of the questions, or is that just a selection of the worst questions?
You're also wrong about the "GNU Public License" bit. It is in fact the General Public License (plus or minus a GNU).
GPL - GNU = eeral Pblic License?
In other news, no one understands *all* the ramifications and implications of the GPL, which is why it's at version 2 and version 3 is in the works. Trying to explain what the GPL really means involves examining what copyright law really means and how it has been interpreted by various courts.
For example, they could simply do a search on limewire, The Pirate Bay, or wherever for a piece of copyrighted material that their member organizations own. They could then download the file, watching all the IPs that offer a piece of that file up to their computer. If, upon downloading the file, they find that it is indeed copyrighted material, they have strong reason to believe that each of those IPs represents someone illegally offering the file for download to others. That's not monitoring your connection, it's monitoring their own.
I'd hate for them to download any of my copyrighted files, say source code or other things that I accidentally put on a P2P client on my computer. Then I'd have to sue them for copyright infringement. I wonder how easy it is to detect the clients that they use to download files? My guess is they never download entire files, but instead download initial snippets and compare them against a database. It would be almost trivial to build MAFIAA detection into P2P clients and find the clients who always only download a small snippet of lots and lots of shared files. Additionally, put lots of random files in each P2P client's shared directory with private copyrighted information (have the user enter a short copyrightable paragraph and save it to lots of files named like popular songs) and then bring a multi-user class action infringement lawsuit against the shills the RIAA use to troll the P2P networks. Just start issuing John Doe suits against their IP addresses like they to do users.
but it's still valuable to talk about memetics versus genetics
What "versus"? Recognizing the common elements between different aspects of reality is where the big discoveries get made, not by neatly packaging genetics and ellipses and fields and linear algebra and statistics in their own neat little boxes so they don't mix. Using the language of one field to talk about another implies more usefulness in the language than having to make up extensive jargon for every subfield of science. As long as it's precise and accurate, generic language is preferable to specification. Yes, memetics are not exactly genetics, but they are quite similar.
i mean, both electricians and opticians work in the realm of electromagnetism, but that more top level understanding of things does not add any value to each professional's particluar realm of endeavour. christ, a cosmologist and a geneticist work in the same field, science, but so fucking what
You wouldn't have data projectors or CCDs if the optics guys and the electronics guys didn't get together. If cosmologists find extraterrestrial life, they will almost certainly work with geneticists, and when we want to send life to other planets the geneticists had better consult some cosmologists.
so don't get too top level. there is no added value in tying it all together, unless you merely want to ruminate philosphically on deep connections without any hope of practical application
My point is that it doesn't matter *what* mechanism influences genetics, it's still genetic evolution. Whether it's intelligence, environment, or the end of the universe, it's still genetic evolution. I don't think intelligence is purely genetic, so that's not the issue. When I was comparing genetic survival, I was simply pointing out that human genes have a higher likelihood of being around after the death of the solar system than horseshoe crab or slime mold genes. That's what genetic evolution is about, population densities of genes over time. I'm just making speculations about population densities in the future. It's really that simple.
except you're not talking about genetic evolution anymore. you're talking about memetic evolution, the evolution of ideas. which is of course, new to the human species, and a new realm of evolution, completely separate from any judgment for or against slime molds and horseshoe crabs. human beings straddle the worlds of memetic evolution and genetic evolution. in the world of genetic evolution, according to judgment of genetic evolutionary success, human beings are equivalent to horseshoe crabs and slime molds. meanwhile, in the realm of memetic evolution, you have luddites, and nihilists, and fundamentalists, and anarachists, etc. no horseshoe crab or slime mold need apply. and human culture is the framework, social groups of human beings, and the retention of ideas across generations. individual humans can create ideas and contribute to ideas, but they aren't the means of propagation, retention, and spread. also, the goals are all different between memetic and genetic evolution, although competition for success is the same, what "success" means in each realm is different
If the genetic descendants of humans escape the death of the solar system, then genetic evolution has selected for them. If humans take horseshoe crabs and slime molds with them, then they'll continue to be just as genetically successful, otherwise they'll go the way of the dodo and passenger pigeon and be genetically inferior, in large part due to their lack of intelligence; e.g. their lack of ability to survive in competition with intelligent species. Not all species go extinct because of more intelligent species, but a fair number do. It's just the way nature works, and intelligence is merely another property that is selected for. The only effect intelligence has on genetic evolution is that evolution occurs faster for more intelligent species. Genetic engineering, eugenics, and genocide are all forms of genetic selection that are made possible only by intelligence. Not everything that comes from intelligence is good, but it definitely has an impact on genetics.
The definition of success is the same for both genetic and memetic evolution: If you (gene or meme) are present in the environment, you have not yet lost. To exist is to succeed. In fact, evolution can be defined in this way over any variable set of objects. The evolution of dinner plates exists, despite plates being inanimate objects. The smooth, pretty ones that are easier to clean and look nice haven't lost yet, while the rough, partially unbaked clay ones are pretty much extinct, although we can find fossils of them. Memes are no different, they're just thoughts migrating through minds, living and dying according to their ability to reproduce themselves in other brains. That evolution is multileveled does not mean that genetics and memetics are separate, just that there is a spectrum of information encodings from genes to memes that are interdependent. In the end, everything is just information anyway.
Likewise, evolution doesn't care one stinking bit about what creatures are made, there is merely deviation from the average complexity of an animal, and occasionally the animal gets very complex. Like our brain. From evolution's point of view, it's just a statistical aberration in terms of complexity to get the primary job done: surviving death and breeding a new generation. Increasing complexity isn't the point. All evolution cares about is that we successfully breed, or not. From evolution's point of view, human beings, horseshoe crabs, and slime molds all do a good job of that, and so we are equivalent successes. That we do it with a lot more complexity than a slime mold means nothing at all. That horseshoe crabs have been doing it for billions of years while we only a few million or less means nothing at all.
Horseshoe crabs and slime molds won't outlive the solar system unless we (or some other beings capable of getting off the planet) help them. They'll bake as the Sun grows and cooks the Earth into Mercury. In the long term, it's obvious that intelligence has more survival potential than replication alone. The key is finding the blend of intelligence and replication that doesn't create complete nihilists or luddites.
These numbers are remarkably low, if true. I once cleaned over 1000 virii, rootkits and spyware apps off the computer of a busy, filesharing teenager. 800 from 200,000 employees is pretty low.
Unless they report each "incident" only once even if it affects hundreds or thousands of users and systems. "Oh look, Blaster just rooted all the unpatched servers, better rebuild them all and write up an incident report!"
There's no reason (aside from good old fashioned greed) that the U.S. should have aging, filtered, asynchronous, and broken Internet access almost everywhere.
You're correct, it's entirely possible that advanced AI will be very nihilist or simply prefer not to spread or grow, or even destroy itself entirely. It's also possible that the solar system will be "enough" for the future, but in the long run the sun will die and the solar system will cool to the point of uselessness. Any long term survival will either happen independent of this (a magic wand of energy or reversible computing), or require travel to other stars. I only consider magic wands to be things that actually break the currently known laws of physics, or their present interpretations. Basically, anything achieving 100% efficiency seem like magic to us, but is not necessarily disallowed by current physics, and it would allow virtually eternal existence without spreading to other stars. Beating the heat death would be true magic.
Gold farmers are a cancer to MMO games. Some people might not care, but these people negatively impact everyone's enjoyment of the game, be it because they destroy economies or hack or monopolize content. It's not healthy for games.
Hold on a second. Everything you said about gold farmers could be applied just as accurately to some hardcore gamers. They grief, they camp, they make it less fun for normal players. What you're really upset about is that people who cheat or who have a lot more time and knowledge can beat you at a game. That's just a given for any game in existence. The solution is to eliminate cheating for everyone, and to either make stats in the game unavailable for purchase to limit the effectiveness of dupes and mules, or make it very difficult to create dupe accounts. Just enforce a minimum percentage (like 80%) of the store value that players must charge to sell items to other players. It still makes player trading more lucrative than buying items at stores, but drastically decreases the effectiveness of dupes, and is more realistic in a role playing environment anyway.
To be clear, the decision today didn't look at that question, rather the question of whether a warrant is required to search email at all. I see that as so blatantly obvious that I'm shocked the government would even question it. Look, government, hey, you know for 250 years courts have consistently told you that you need a warrant to search just about everything that isn't an emergency, so by now you should be used to it.
How much leeway does the U.S. government have with the postal service to begin with? Are postcards considered "in plain sight" during transit, for instance? What about when they arrive? You have to open an envelope and pull the letter out to read it, but cops with a generic search warrant or who are invited in can almost certainly glance at the postcards you have taped to your fridge.
I think what Congress really needs to do is specify that sending things over the Internet is equivalent to broadcasting them with radio waves in terms of privacy; there is none. Encrypt, or suffer the consequences.
It's all in how you word it. Require negative evidence, make "educated" guesses, etc. Observe:
My best guess is that the RIAA has been feeding little children to alligators in third world countries and charging admission in order to pay for their webhosting, and their previous hosting company found out about it. I have no evidence that they have stopped the practice, but they may now be selling children on the black market as well because of the higher TCO for running Linux, as evidenced by all the non-libelous reports from Microsoft. Moreover, in my estimation the quickest way for the RIAA to migrate their pages to a Linux host involves slave labor in Chinese coding factories with 16 hour workdays, 7 days a week, paying the overworked programmers only One Pittance per month.It's also really easy to claim that any losses incurred during the switch were caused by "piracy." Now I'm not an expert on the RIAA or anything, but I would be completely surprised if it wasn't true.
Sue me for that, suckers.
Space colonization will be hard for current humans. Not for robots, and not for AI. Information can travel at light speed, so there's no need to pack humans into heavy life support systems when you can just ship a trillion tiny nanoassembly factories out at 50% light speed and let statistics handle the reassembly at the other end of the trip. Once the factories are running, send the information for whatever it is we want to travel at light speed and let them assemble it, whether it's the newest robot model or schematics for a reconstructed human.
I see the economics for space travel coming sometime after the singularity. Once we have the ability to build huge AIs that can control nano-machines to build even bigger AIs, we will run out of resources in the solar system. At that point, it will be logical to spread to any other star system that can be used as a resource to build more hardware to run our software. Even if it's horribly inefficient, it will still be more than what will be available to us in this solar system. We can also explore the universe right here with much better sensors. The universe has been sending tons of information about itself to us at light speed for the last 15 billion years, we just have to collect and interpret it properly. Then we (humans and our varied descendants) can explore the resulting datasets. There's no reason we can't have swashbuckling space adventure faster than the speed of light in a future MMORPG.
2. If, indeed, intellectual property theft is that high, one could probably make an argument that it is actually helping the world economy. If people/companies actually had to pay out a few hundred billion dollars more to buy legal copies, it would result in a few hundred million dollars less for silly things like capital investment and salaries.
This is by far the most important argument against the MAFIAA's claims of the economy losing billions of dollars to piracy. The economy is not losing billions of dollars, it is gaining "hundreds of billions" of dollars of intellectual property for free! Well, that is if everyone truly believes that every song is possession of every person on the planet is worth $1.
If anything, the MAFIAA's intellectual property is just being revalued at a much lower cost, and they'll have to meet the market realities by wasting less on themselves and marketing and lobbying, and focus on the actual business of letting musicians make music at a low enough cost to turn a profit in the new economy. So some rich chumps are taking it in the ass economically because they are too stupid to read the writing on the wall 10 years ago. This is bad, how?