Region lockout of DVD movies is explicitly against European and British competition laws. All DVD players sold On The Continent should be region 0 / region 255 at time of purchase. Most brand-name DVD players sold in the UK are de-regionalisable using the remote control but are set to Region 2 at time of purchase. "No brand" DVD players sold in the UK are usually region 0 / region 255 at time of purchase and many can also play DivX movies.
Region lockout of console games probably breaks exactly the same laws, but I don't think there has been a test case yet. If and when there is, expect Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft to have their arses handed to them on a plate.
The solution is to insure yourself against losing. If the insurer believes you have a strong case, then they will take the job on. If they don't, then they won't. This acts to weed out time wasters, by keeping cases without merit away from the courts.
Obviously, it depends on the insurer's ability to predict success or failure; but that's exactly what insurers do for a living anyway. (It occurs to me that insuring is like placing very large bets at very short odds. If you get it right, you win an amount equal to the premium. If you get it wrong, you lose an amount equal to the claim.)
Depends if or not it zeros them out. If it actually overwrites the data on the disk, then it's not recoverable {anyone wishing to dispute this: please provide some actual evidence of actually-overwritten data, and not a copy of that data left lying around, being recovered}. If it just removes the directory entry for the file, then the data is recoverable.
I warned you all. I stand by what I have always ever said.
The only way to tell whether a program is any good is to examine the source code.
If the supplier doesn't want to show you the source code, the most probable reason for that is that there is something in there that they don't want you to know about. Back in the Classic Unix days, all software was distributed in source code form. You weren't necessarily allowed to pass copies about, but at least you could look at it and patch it. If the ugly truth be told, you probably had to patch it just because almost no two setups were ever identical.
I would like to see a (partial) return to those days. Maybe not the incompatibility (though it'd create employment opportunities for people who know one end of a shell prompt from the other) but the distribution of software in source code form, even if free and easy copying is not permitted, would be wonderful.
Disguising the source code does NOT make it harder to copy a program. It DOES make it harder to detect and repair problems. I would vote for anyone who intended to pass a law mandating that the administrator of a computer has the right to see the source code of any program running on that computer, and may use reasonable force to obtain it if necessary.
Yes, copyright violations are explicitly forbidden; but not every MP3 represents a copyright violation. The idea of "innocent until proven guilty" (we used to have that in the UK once) should still hold: any copy should be presumed to be permitted under the doctrine of "fair use" unless it can be proved otherwise. And the scope of fair use in the USA is quite broad.
If the US courts still work anything like the UK courts on which they were modelled, decisions in one court can set precedents. If enough people claim "fair use" and win, the scope of fair use will be widened. I guess the RIAA would sooner drop a case than continue prosecuting it and risk further expanding fair use. In the best case, a jury could even decide that P2P filesharing constitutes fair use!
Also, there are two things very wrong with the US legal system. One is that lawyers are allowed to demand payment before a verdict is agreed upon by all parties. And two is that even if you win a case, you have to pay your own costs. These two make it possible to bankrupt someone in the courts before a verdict is delivered. In a truly fair legal system, the lawyers would only be paid after all appeals were exhausted and both sides' costs would be borne by the losing party.
If you've ever received junk mail for a previous occupant of your home,
If you've ever received something that wasn't junk mail for a previous occupant of your home,
If you've ever been refused credit because of a bad debt run up by a previous occupant of your home,
Then you'll know why Megan's Law is a terrible idea.
(How easy would it be to get a stolen identity on the sex offenders' register? Did you know that you can get on there for taking a leak?)
I read the book, enjoyed it, followed the link to the other book, and enjoyed that even more. Nice cameo appearance on pp11-12..... check out the book the character is reading..... and don't tell me it isn't a reference:) Seriously, it's great that there is some accessible media supporting The Cause.
I'll definitely be printing them out for my little niece -- she's not reading yet, but she will be soon -- and sending the author a donation. That'll be easier all around than sending for the printed versions to be shipped from overseas, I think.
Computer forensics experts have been able to recreate some data from overwritten files.
References? And with dates, please. Modern HDDs use much higher data densities than were common around the time of the discredited Gutmann paper. Also, it's been known for old versions of files to hang around after a newer version was saved -- there's no guarantee that a file will be saved on the same sectors. In fact, if it has grown, it might well be moved by the OS to avoid fragmentation. Such files might be recoverable but they haven't, strictly speaking, been overwritten.
It is not a big concern, since it takes a lot of work, unless the NSA is coming after you.
It almost certainly takes more work than obtaining the information by alternative means..... but claiming that it was obtained from a disk drive is more politically expedient than admitting to use those methods, if you get what I mean.
The DoD standard calls for a number of random overwrites of each bit.
That's pure psyops, designed to make an enemy think that the USA has better abilities for recovering overwritten data than is really the case.
Since we're dealing with hysteresis loops, three passes such as 1 - 0 - 1 will ensure that every bit has done both changes. But we're also going so far into saturation that there's no way of knowing which side of the loop we arrived from. And it's definitely more expedient to do a single overwrite over the whole disk, then another and another than to do multiple overwrites on each bit in turn -- the first way is more secure against interruptions.
I just select Finder->Secure Empty Trash. Hopefully Vista will have this and pull Windows to the level of functionality the rest of the computing world has had for years.
What about the "h2=o" cookie I keep seeing? Anyone know what that's used for?
What I think I really want is name-based, as well as host-based, cookie filtering. I know PHPSESSID is usually fairly innocuous, as are bb_lastactivity and friends.
One overwrite is plenty. If there was any way to recover reliably what used to have been written on magnetic media, then it would have been done by now..... computers have been using various memory devices based on magnetic phenomena since forever, and a method for increasing storage density by using remanent "past" data would be extremely useful if it existed. The conspicuous absence of a storage device natively using this technology, let alone a software program for applying it to an existing HDD {even a closed-source program which only pretends to implement time-domain multiplexed storage but really just does simple on-the-fly compression -- the only way anyone will find out is if they violate the EULA}, suggests that your O-level physics teacher was right all along and it doesn't exist.
Quick method for removing sensitive data from an old PC: (1) Create many useless but innocuous files to fill the entire drive with junk, do not stop till there is no room to save anymore. (2) Delete the sensitive files. (3) Create more junk files. Since you filled up the drive at stage (1), the only place these files can possibly go is over the top of what you deleted at stage (2). (4) Delete all the junk files.
Well, if it's supposed to be secure, we want to be able to verify those claims; otherwise they are meaningless. And the best way to find out what a program really does is to read the source code. The second best way is to show it to a competent programmer whom you trust and ask them what they think.
Turning your question around, why do you closed-source advocates not like the idea of showing off your source code? Are you ashamed of it? Is it full of schoolboy errors? Perhaps you've been using ints as pointers, or making assumptions about arrays in memory. Did you shamelessly rip it off without crediting the original author? Or do you think that by not telling anyone about the huge buffer overrun vulnerabilities, they won't be exploited?
..... and I can't find a link to download the source code.
So-called "security" software without source code is worse than useless -- and would be outlawed if we had a sensible Minister for Information Technology. The information it's claiming to be hiding could be valuable, so there's a clear motive to lie about what it's doing -- and hiding the source code provides an obvious means. I, for one, wouldn't give it the opportunity.
I have set Firefox to ask me every time about cookies. As soon as I see a "__utma" or a "h2" cookie, I know at once the owners of that site have absolutely no concern for my privacy, and simply block all cookies from that site. Otherwise I usually accept cookies for the session only.
I also keep my day-to-day login password as secret as any of my root passwords, and always set up a brand new user account if anyone ever wants to use one of my computers for anything.
Re:What goes around comes around
on
The Future of NetBSD
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Someone in Theo's position isn't meant to be liked. In fact, if they are liked, they probably aren't doing their job properly. People like that are missed when they go, though, and their former subordinates muse on how they preferred working for a cunt than working for a wanker.
The problem is there are two conflicting requirements. As long as the phone stays with you, there's a requirement to preserve the integrity of the data at all costs. But at some point you are going to want rid of the data, and its integrity becomes a liability rather than an asset.
Now, it's not at all hard to implement a "FORGET ALL" functionality: all you have to do is overwrite the entire memory with any combination of ones and zeros that doesn't represent the stored data, and if you need more than 50 bytes for that then you're not trying. The problem is that, right up until the moment you want to pass the phone on to someone else, you don't want it to be at all easy to do this: you want it to be hard, so it doesn't happen accidentally {or get done to you maliciously}.
It needs to be hidden behind some complicated procedure that is never going to happen accidentally -- such as activating dial lock, plugging the recharger into the phone whilst switched off at the wall socket, then turning on the wall socket switch whilst pressing * and RH Soft Key together on the phone. {I think it would be best to require the recharger plugged in to perform the security erase, since the battery could conceivably run out mid-cycle and leave data intact.} Even then, some idiot is bound to try it out "just to see what it does".
And it probably needs to be a matter of law for manufacturers to implement such a feature, because phone companies have another good reason not to implement it: apart from idiots deliberately nuking their data then complaining when they can't get it back, if the only way to be sure the data is gone is to destroy the entire phone, then they will sell more phones. We also need, in the same bill, a legal onus on any person who acquires any kind of used data storage device to respect the confidentiality of any residual data left in that device. If you sell your phone containing personal information and the person who buys it reads your old text messages, they should be held liable if that information leaks out. If they're just using it normally, your messages will soon get obliterated by the new owner's messages. Actually poking about for data and disclosing it to third parties should be punishable.
Which is why it's important for as many honest people as possible to download this and check it out. Then the criminals might just slip under the noise floor.
They don't have to suppress facts, they just have to ridicule anyone who questions the official version of the truth -- which is how they deal with UFO sightings. Whether or not they are true, you have to admit, if UFOs were real and the government was hiding them, we would "know" just as much about them as we do now.
Actually, the British and American governments deliberately let people believe in UFO sightings to cover up military experiments. The famous cattle mutilations were just hasty attempts to obtain tissue samples to determine the effect of experimental weapons on living things; some samples were taken from areas away from the actual experiments, both to serve as a control {by providing samples unaffected by the experiment} and to divert attention from the experiments.
If anything useful had come from the experiments, it ought to have been replicated by someone else by now. However, the military are known to pursue useless lines of inquiry during peacetime. This serves two purposes; first, it distracts attention from any real research that may be going on {and having the inevitable copycats and hangers-on copy something glamourous but useless is better than having them copy something useful}; and second, it secures funding, which will be increased in the event of war.
Also, your RSA example does help -- how much later?
Original invention was by Clifford Cox at GCHQ in 1973, but not declassified until 25 years later. The RSA paper was published in 1977. The US patent was granted in 1983 and expired in 2000; according to most countries' laws, the 1977 paper counted as Prior Art and the patent would never have been valid there; which may explain why the US authorities were so keen to treat encryption as a weapon and restrict its export.
And certainly with modern tech, you often see good fields unexplored because they aren't yet seen as practical. A good example here is programming techniques -- there are some known good ones, yet the copy'n'paste, code-test-fix cycle is still under heavy use.
Well, it's used because it works:) Not just in programming, but in Nature {at least, outside Kansas}. Duplication of effort is waste of effort, and sensible use of abstraction {ie: between a means and an end, not just where it looks pretty} allows you to replace part of a program when a better way is found to achieve the same effect.
Food and electricity {which actually is used only for a brief moment by my cooker, since it's gas fired, but I'll be generous and assume you meant the generic $FUEL} are rivalrous goods. That is, once one person has used them, nobody else can use them.
By contrast, software is non-rivalrous: me making a copy does not affect the ability of the person who owned the original to make use of it. Please, you and everybody else, learn the difference in order not to look like idiots. Or do you genuinely believe that a sunset will look less beautiful if someone else is looking at it with you, and that your radio will get quieter when someone else switches theirs on?
Drop the candle on your carpeting, and soon the house which 'we' own is totally gone.
You really have been watching too many films.
Being generous {to you -- I hate carpets} and pretending I had carpet, which I don't -- just wood, laminate, quarry tiles and bare concrete -- dropping a candle would still be bloody unlikely to set fire to it. What almost invariably happens when a candle is dropped is that the flame goes out. This happens on the way down. Some liquid wax will be distributed, but this isn't actually very inflammable {look up the etymology of "paraffin" sometime}. The wick will probably have time to cool while falling. Carpets in synthetic fibres are not particularly inflammable, and carpets in natural fibres much less so; even a still-lit candle is unlikely to have the energy to ignite a carpet.
The most likely thing that will happen if you drop a candle onto a carpeted floor is that you will have to clear up a bit of spilt wax {WD40 will do the last bits, but that stuff is inflammable, so take care using it}. There probably won't even be any permanent discolouration. If you are horrendously unlucky, it might smoulder a little bit and you will have to stamp on it. But you definitely won't get a conflagration.
When an invention's time comes, the invention comes. The telephone was invented almost simultaneously by both Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Grey, who arrived at the patent office only a few hours too late. The phonograph was invented by Thomas Alva Edison at around the same time as the gramophone was invented by Emil Berliner. The filament bulb was invented by Thomas Alva Edison only one year after it had already been invented by Joseph Swan {and unfortunately still has not been banned}. A public-key encryption algorithm was invented in the UK in the 1970s, but kept under wraps by the UK authorities; it was later discovered independently by Rivest, Shamir and Adelman in the USA. Details of the UK invention emerged shortly before the US patent expired.
Given all of which, I think it's reasonable to suppose that when the time for quantum computing arrives, quantum computing will arrive. With even the current state of communication systems, and assuming that communications will continue improving over time, it would be damn nigh impossible to suppress the facts.
BTW, the next time I am in England, I look fowardard to the right to ENJOY the use of your home without restriction, the right to STUDY how your home works, the right to SHARE your home with my neighbours to improve the lot of humanity as a whole and the right to ADAPT your home to my needs.
Provided you can think of a way to do that without interfering with my use of my home {to any greater extent than my using a copy of a piece of software you wrote would interfere with your use of your copy of it}, I have no problem with you doing just that.
{You might think of a way while you're looking up the difference between rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods. Bonus points if you can devise an experiment to measure how much dimmer the picture gets on your TV set when someone else turns on their set which is tuned to the same station, or how much less impressive the Grand Canyon looks when someone else starts looking at it.}
If I spend my time writing something, it is my option to sell it. How is that any different than you making a chair, and I demand you give it to me for free?
It's different because in the first case, you still have the software you wrote even after I had taken my copy of it; whereas in the second case, I no longer have the chair. If you want a better comparison, think in terms of you measuring my chair with your own instruments, and fabricating your own chair from identical materials sourced by you, with the end result that we each have a chair. I have no objection to that.
As long as you supply your own food, and you pay me for the extra energy used in cooking yours + mine as opposed to mine alone {which will be less than half the total, since some of it is going into the pan and the air in the kitchen}, then, yes.
If I light my unlit candle from the flame of your lit one, we now have two lit candles and your room does not get any darker when I take mine away than it was before. That is an example of sharing without diminution. On the other hand, if I cut a pie in half and gave half to you, we would have only half a pie each -- not a whole pie each. That is an example of sharing with diminution.
Closed-source software is no more nor less than electronic subjugation; and subjugation is evil whatever form it takes. Therefore, it deserves to be banned.
On the other hand, it might not need to be banned: it's possible that a technological development could make it obsolete. Closed-source software survives only because the operation of taking some binary machine code and generating equivalent source code -- that is, source code which, when compiled, will produce a bitwise identical binary -- is currently hard. However, it is certainly not impossible. When there exists a viable "uncc", everyone's rights to STUDY and ADAPT will be upheld.
Of course, there is no reason why a program written in one language should not be decompiled into another language. This would enable two people who do not have a programming language in common to collaborate on a project.
The UK's government is neither socialist nor particularly democratic. After selling out the Labour party, ditching Clause Four and receiving votes from rather less than a quarter of the population, Tony Blair is basically carrying on with Thatcherism..... except that people let him get away with it, simply because he is not Thatcher.
Did I mention that he also licks G.W.Bush's arse?
The only reason the UK hasn't been booted out of the EU a long time ago is the hope that we might join the Euro. It would then be economically viable for the Euro, rather than the US dollar, to be used as the principal currency for trade in crude oil. However, despite the clear and obvious benefits to the majority of the population {lower prices, no more getting fleeced by bureaux de change when travelling abroad} the Murdoch-owned media {under the influence of the carpetbaggers who stand to lose most from the adoption of the Euro} has managed to hoodwink people into believing that using the same coin as our continental cousins would somehow compromise Britain's "sovereignty" despite not being able to provide an adequate definition of what sovereignty actually means.
Slashdot Mirror
Region lockout of DVD movies is explicitly against European and British competition laws. All DVD players sold On The Continent should be region 0 / region 255 at time of purchase. Most brand-name DVD players sold in the UK are de-regionalisable using the remote control but are set to Region 2 at time of purchase. "No brand" DVD players sold in the UK are usually region 0 / region 255 at time of purchase and many can also play DivX movies.
Region lockout of console games probably breaks exactly the same laws, but I don't think there has been a test case yet. If and when there is, expect Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft to have their arses handed to them on a plate.
The solution is to insure yourself against losing. If the insurer believes you have a strong case, then they will take the job on. If they don't, then they won't. This acts to weed out time wasters, by keeping cases without merit away from the courts.
Obviously, it depends on the insurer's ability to predict success or failure; but that's exactly what insurers do for a living anyway. (It occurs to me that insuring is like placing very large bets at very short odds. If you get it right, you win an amount equal to the premium. If you get it wrong, you lose an amount equal to the claim.)
Depends if or not it zeros them out. If it actually overwrites the data on the disk, then it's not recoverable {anyone wishing to dispute this: please provide some actual evidence of actually-overwritten data, and not a copy of that data left lying around, being recovered}. If it just removes the directory entry for the file, then the data is recoverable.
I warned you all. I stand by what I have always ever said.
The only way to tell whether a program is any good is to examine the source code.
If the supplier doesn't want to show you the source code, the most probable reason for that is that there is something in there that they don't want you to know about. Back in the Classic Unix days, all software was distributed in source code form. You weren't necessarily allowed to pass copies about, but at least you could look at it and patch it. If the ugly truth be told, you probably had to patch it just because almost no two setups were ever identical.
I would like to see a (partial) return to those days. Maybe not the incompatibility (though it'd create employment opportunities for people who know one end of a shell prompt from the other) but the distribution of software in source code form, even if free and easy copying is not permitted, would be wonderful.
Disguising the source code does NOT make it harder to copy a program. It DOES make it harder to detect and repair problems. I would vote for anyone who intended to pass a law mandating that the administrator of a computer has the right to see the source code of any program running on that computer, and may use reasonable force to obtain it if necessary.
Yes, copyright violations are explicitly forbidden; but not every MP3 represents a copyright violation. The idea of "innocent until proven guilty" (we used to have that in the UK once) should still hold: any copy should be presumed to be permitted under the doctrine of "fair use" unless it can be proved otherwise. And the scope of fair use in the USA is quite broad.
If the US courts still work anything like the UK courts on which they were modelled, decisions in one court can set precedents. If enough people claim "fair use" and win, the scope of fair use will be widened. I guess the RIAA would sooner drop a case than continue prosecuting it and risk further expanding fair use. In the best case, a jury could even decide that P2P filesharing constitutes fair use!
Also, there are two things very wrong with the US legal system. One is that lawyers are allowed to demand payment before a verdict is agreed upon by all parties. And two is that even if you win a case, you have to pay your own costs. These two make it possible to bankrupt someone in the courts before a verdict is delivered. In a truly fair legal system, the lawyers would only be paid after all appeals were exhausted and both sides' costs would be borne by the losing party.
If you've ever received junk mail for a previous occupant of your home,
If you've ever received something that wasn't junk mail for a previous occupant of your home,
If you've ever been refused credit because of a bad debt run up by a previous occupant of your home,
Then you'll know why Megan's Law is a terrible idea.
(How easy would it be to get a stolen identity on the sex offenders' register? Did you know that you can get on there for taking a leak?)
You want a tool to generate mock-up web pages in Linux? What's wrong with
/var/www/html
# cd
# pico example_page.html
?
Failing that, just get yourself an A4 quadrille pad and a propelling-pencil.
I read the book, enjoyed it, followed the link to the other book, and enjoyed that even more. Nice cameo appearance on pp11-12 ..... check out the book the character is reading ..... and don't tell me it isn't a reference :) Seriously, it's great that there is some accessible media supporting The Cause.
I'll definitely be printing them out for my little niece -- she's not reading yet, but she will be soon -- and sending the author a donation. That'll be easier all around than sending for the printed versions to be shipped from overseas, I think.
Since we're dealing with hysteresis loops, three passes such as 1 - 0 - 1 will ensure that every bit has done both changes. But we're also going so far into saturation that there's no way of knowing which side of the loop we arrived from. And it's definitely more expedient to do a single overwrite over the whole disk, then another and another than to do multiple overwrites on each bit in turn -- the first way is more secure against interruptions. Nice, subtle Mac advert
What about the "h2=o" cookie I keep seeing? Anyone know what that's used for?
What I think I really want is name-based, as well as host-based, cookie filtering. I know PHPSESSID is usually fairly innocuous, as are bb_lastactivity and friends.
One overwrite is plenty. If there was any way to recover reliably what used to have been written on magnetic media, then it would have been done by now ..... computers have been using various memory devices based on magnetic phenomena since forever, and a method for increasing storage density by using remanent "past" data would be extremely useful if it existed. The conspicuous absence of a storage device natively using this technology, let alone a software program for applying it to an existing HDD {even a closed-source program which only pretends to implement time-domain multiplexed storage but really just does simple on-the-fly compression -- the only way anyone will find out is if they violate the EULA}, suggests that your O-level physics teacher was right all along and it doesn't exist.
Quick method for removing sensitive data from an old PC: (1) Create many useless but innocuous files to fill the entire drive with junk, do not stop till there is no room to save anymore. (2) Delete the sensitive files. (3) Create more junk files. Since you filled up the drive at stage (1), the only place these files can possibly go is over the top of what you deleted at stage (2). (4) Delete all the junk files.
Well, if it's supposed to be secure, we want to be able to verify those claims; otherwise they are meaningless. And the best way to find out what a program really does is to read the source code. The second best way is to show it to a competent programmer whom you trust and ask them what they think.
Turning your question around, why do you closed-source advocates not like the idea of showing off your source code? Are you ashamed of it? Is it full of schoolboy errors? Perhaps you've been using ints as pointers, or making assumptions about arrays in memory. Did you shamelessly rip it off without crediting the original author? Or do you think that by not telling anyone about the huge buffer overrun vulnerabilities, they won't be exploited?
..... and I can't find a link to download the source code.
So-called "security" software without source code is worse than useless -- and would be outlawed if we had a sensible Minister for Information Technology. The information it's claiming to be hiding could be valuable, so there's a clear motive to lie about what it's doing -- and hiding the source code provides an obvious means. I, for one, wouldn't give it the opportunity.
I have set Firefox to ask me every time about cookies. As soon as I see a "__utma" or a "h2" cookie, I know at once the owners of that site have absolutely no concern for my privacy, and simply block all cookies from that site. Otherwise I usually accept cookies for the session only.
I also keep my day-to-day login password as secret as any of my root passwords, and always set up a brand new user account if anyone ever wants to use one of my computers for anything.
Someone in Theo's position isn't meant to be liked. In fact, if they are liked, they probably aren't doing their job properly. People like that are missed when they go, though, and their former subordinates muse on how they preferred working for a cunt than working for a wanker.
The problem is there are two conflicting requirements. As long as the phone stays with you, there's a requirement to preserve the integrity of the data at all costs. But at some point you are going to want rid of the data, and its integrity becomes a liability rather than an asset.
Now, it's not at all hard to implement a "FORGET ALL" functionality: all you have to do is overwrite the entire memory with any combination of ones and zeros that doesn't represent the stored data, and if you need more than 50 bytes for that then you're not trying. The problem is that, right up until the moment you want to pass the phone on to someone else, you don't want it to be at all easy to do this: you want it to be hard, so it doesn't happen accidentally {or get done to you maliciously}.
It needs to be hidden behind some complicated procedure that is never going to happen accidentally -- such as activating dial lock, plugging the recharger into the phone whilst switched off at the wall socket, then turning on the wall socket switch whilst pressing * and RH Soft Key together on the phone. {I think it would be best to require the recharger plugged in to perform the security erase, since the battery could conceivably run out mid-cycle and leave data intact.} Even then, some idiot is bound to try it out "just to see what it does".
And it probably needs to be a matter of law for manufacturers to implement such a feature, because phone companies have another good reason not to implement it: apart from idiots deliberately nuking their data then complaining when they can't get it back, if the only way to be sure the data is gone is to destroy the entire phone, then they will sell more phones. We also need, in the same bill, a legal onus on any person who acquires any kind of used data storage device to respect the confidentiality of any residual data left in that device. If you sell your phone containing personal information and the person who buys it reads your old text messages, they should be held liable if that information leaks out. If they're just using it normally, your messages will soon get obliterated by the new owner's messages. Actually poking about for data and disclosing it to third parties should be punishable.
Bravo! You managed to put it so clearly there.
I've nothing to add to this, till the next instalment.
Which is why it's important for as many honest people as possible to download this and check it out. Then the criminals might just slip under the noise floor.
If anything useful had come from the experiments, it ought to have been replicated by someone else by now. However, the military are known to pursue useless lines of inquiry during peacetime. This serves two purposes; first, it distracts attention from any real research that may be going on {and having the inevitable copycats and hangers-on copy something glamourous but useless is better than having them copy something useful}; and second, it secures funding, which will be increased in the event of war.
Original invention was by Clifford Cox at GCHQ in 1973, but not declassified until 25 years later. The RSA paper was published in 1977. The US patent was granted in 1983 and expired in 2000; according to most countries' laws, the 1977 paper counted as Prior Art and the patent would never have been valid there; which may explain why the US authorities were so keen to treat encryption as a weapon and restrict its export.
Well, it's used because it works
By contrast, software is non-rivalrous: me making a copy does not affect the ability of the person who owned the original to make use of it. Please, you and everybody else, learn the difference in order not to look like idiots. Or do you genuinely believe that a sunset will look less beautiful if someone else is looking at it with you, and that your radio will get quieter when someone else switches theirs on?
You really have been watching too many films.
Being generous {to you -- I hate carpets} and pretending I had carpet, which I don't -- just wood, laminate, quarry tiles and bare concrete -- dropping a candle would still be bloody unlikely to set fire to it. What almost invariably happens when a candle is dropped is that the flame goes out. This happens on the way down. Some liquid wax will be distributed, but this isn't actually very inflammable {look up the etymology of "paraffin" sometime}. The wick will probably have time to cool while falling. Carpets in synthetic fibres are not particularly inflammable, and carpets in natural fibres much less so; even a still-lit candle is unlikely to have the energy to ignite a carpet.
The most likely thing that will happen if you drop a candle onto a carpeted floor is that you will have to clear up a bit of spilt wax {WD40 will do the last bits, but that stuff is inflammable, so take care using it}. There probably won't even be any permanent discolouration. If you are horrendously unlucky, it might smoulder a little bit and you will have to stamp on it. But you definitely won't get a conflagration.
When an invention's time comes, the invention comes. The telephone was invented almost simultaneously by both Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Grey, who arrived at the patent office only a few hours too late. The phonograph was invented by Thomas Alva Edison at around the same time as the gramophone was invented by Emil Berliner. The filament bulb was invented by Thomas Alva Edison only one year after it had already been invented by Joseph Swan {and unfortunately still has not been banned}. A public-key encryption algorithm was invented in the UK in the 1970s, but kept under wraps by the UK authorities; it was later discovered independently by Rivest, Shamir and Adelman in the USA. Details of the UK invention emerged shortly before the US patent expired.
Given all of which, I think it's reasonable to suppose that when the time for quantum computing arrives, quantum computing will arrive. With even the current state of communication systems, and assuming that communications will continue improving over time, it would be damn nigh impossible to suppress the facts.
{You might think of a way while you're looking up the difference between rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods. Bonus points if you can devise an experiment to measure how much dimmer the picture gets on your TV set when someone else turns on their set which is tuned to the same station, or how much less impressive the Grand Canyon looks when someone else starts looking at it.}
As long as you supply your own food, and you pay me for the extra energy used in cooking yours + mine as opposed to mine alone {which will be less than half the total, since some of it is going into the pan and the air in the kitchen}, then, yes.
If I light my unlit candle from the flame of your lit one, we now have two lit candles and your room does not get any darker when I take mine away than it was before. That is an example of sharing without diminution. On the other hand, if I cut a pie in half and gave half to you, we would have only half a pie each -- not a whole pie each. That is an example of sharing with diminution.
See the difference?
Closed-source software is no more nor less than electronic subjugation; and subjugation is evil whatever form it takes. Therefore, it deserves to be banned.
On the other hand, it might not need to be banned: it's possible that a technological development could make it obsolete. Closed-source software survives only because the operation of taking some binary machine code and generating equivalent source code -- that is, source code which, when compiled, will produce a bitwise identical binary -- is currently hard. However, it is certainly not impossible. When there exists a viable "uncc", everyone's rights to STUDY and ADAPT will be upheld.
Of course, there is no reason why a program written in one language should not be decompiled into another language. This would enable two people who do not have a programming language in common to collaborate on a project.
The UK's government is neither socialist nor particularly democratic. After selling out the Labour party, ditching Clause Four and receiving votes from rather less than a quarter of the population, Tony Blair is basically carrying on with Thatcherism ..... except that people let him get away with it, simply because he is not Thatcher.
Did I mention that he also licks G.W.Bush's arse?
The only reason the UK hasn't been booted out of the EU a long time ago is the hope that we might join the Euro. It would then be economically viable for the Euro, rather than the US dollar, to be used as the principal currency for trade in crude oil. However, despite the clear and obvious benefits to the majority of the population {lower prices, no more getting fleeced by bureaux de change when travelling abroad} the Murdoch-owned media {under the influence of the carpetbaggers who stand to lose most from the adoption of the Euro} has managed to hoodwink people into believing that using the same coin as our continental cousins would somehow compromise Britain's "sovereignty" despite not being able to provide an adequate definition of what sovereignty actually means.