So a single point of failure that allows someone access to everything is better than multiple points?
Which allow access to everything, yes.
You neglect to understand that with passwords, you can use different passwords in different places.
True. However, most people, out of convenience, only use a small number of passwords in those different places.
OpenID certainly doesn't require you to use the same identity everywhere, either, or even the same provider. In your own language, this is a simple grain of truth that you don't seem to be able to see or understand.
But, for the same reason someone might want to use the same username and password everywhere, people will likely use the same OpenID login everywhere.
Either usage pattern leads to at least as much security, if not more, from the OpenID approach. If you have a dozen accounts with a dozen OpenID providers, how is that less secure than having a dozen accounts with a dozen random PHPBB forums? At least you have the freedom to choose among the secure providers, rather than being forced into whatever authentication is supported by whatever random forum you actually want to post on.
I did point this out in a first draft, but I was trying to cut it down to be "concise".
I think it's only the people who don't train themselves to work with a lot of "simple" yet strong passwords
no, not here, where I post unpopular opinions as AC because of mods that over-react to any *gasp* different opinion as if it were flamebait and trolling
Offtopic, but you're still going to be modded. What's the point of being anonymous here, then, and having your posts start out modded lower?
Passwords are still the single best method of authentication, because they live in my mind and are only released on demand.
They have other problems, though:
A key may be kept physically secured, and never transmitted over the wire. A password, on the other hand, must sooner or later be transmitted, at least to a local terminal. If you don't trust the local terminal, all is lost -- not so, with certain kinds of physical tokens.
Now, it's great that you think your password could never be coerced from your mind. (*cough* torture *cough* blackmail...)
But it would be a hell of a lot harder, I think, to train yourself to be able to perform public-key encryption in your head -- or even a simple hashing algorithm.
It's up to me to ensure they are used correctly and securely. Sad that people don't want that responsibility anymore.
It's not so much that people don't want it, as that they can't handle it -- and that computers are much better at this.
Someone else mentioned some OpenID providers which support authentication based on browser-side certs -- that is, a private key lives in your browser. This would be impossible to phish, in the traditional sense -- even if you make a page that looks identical to a login page, your browser knows it isn't. And even if you mistakenly try to authenticate to the wrong page, you'll give that other page no credentials that would help them authenticate as you.
However, "something held" can be considerably more secure than "something known".
Either way, the point is that TFA represents OpenID as a reduction in security, when, in fact, it allows you to implement whatever security measures you want.
This is a common misconception -- that OpenID is simply single-sign-on in new clothes. It's actually an opportunity to give the user responsibility for their own security, and that's a powerful thing.
I mean this is the way credit cards work. No password whatsoever, and I can present my card, and a purchase is made, no password ever.
Yes. Isn't it encouraging how credit cards are far less secure than my virtual server?
I mean, I don't use a username/password to enter my $500,000 house, or to drive my $100,000 car,
No, but you hopefully are using a key, at least. And I know some of us use combination locks -- which is, you know, entering a passcode to get into your house or car. Or office.
If you don't use either, would you mind posting where you live?
But I felt it was important enough to write directly, and concisely, because you seem to have missed a fundamental point of OpenID.
OpenID promotes "Single Sign-On": with it, logging on to one OpenID Web site with one password will grant entrance during that session to all Web sites that accept OpenID credentials.
OpenID supports single-sign-on. There is nothing about it which requires you to use the same identity everywhere -- or even the same provider.
But more importantly:
OpenID offers, at best, a little convenience, and ignores the security vulnerability inherent in the process of typing a password into someone else's Web site.
Nothing about OpenID requires a password.
I'll say that again: NOTHING about OpenID requires a password.
What OpenID does is, in proper implementations, it allows us to sign in with any provider we choose. I could choose my own server as a provider -- thus, it's not necessarily "someone else's web site". And I don't have to use passwords -- I can use a password and a "security question", I can use public-key cryptography, or I can hire a secretary to sit at the server in question and only authorize requests when she receives a phone call from me.
Even if we assume everyone continues to use the same password, with the same account, everywhere, it's still better than a conventional login. With the conventional login, every site I log into could steal my password and use it to login as me elsewhere. With OpenID, only my OpenID provider can do that.
One single-point-of-failure is better than N single-point-of-failure.
You can't use Microsoft-issued OpenID at Yahoo, nor Yahoo's at Microsoft.
If true, that seems about on par for a technology in its infancy. Remember email? Used to be, you could only send mail to other people with the same ISP. Now, I can send mail to anyone, on any ISP, so long as I have their address.
So that says more about Yahoo and Microsoft's understanding of the technology than it says about the technology itself.
Poorly, yes, but they do also affect gameplay directly, when used properly.
For a really trivial example, try adjusting the crosshairs on your favorite FPS. Most gamers I know like to use a little dot, dead-center in the screen, to show exactly where the bullet is going to go (assuming the gun is accurate). But just try turning it off for a moment -- are you even playing the same game? The difficulty just went up a hell of a lot.
Try that all around -- toggle HUD displays and see what happens.
For a more relevant example, take lighting. People like to say that HDR adds nothing to gameplay -- and to some extent, they're right. But say someone has a sunset to their back -- how are you going to aim at all into that lense flare? Whereas they can see you just fine -- in fact, you're all lit up by the setting sun -- better duck down quick and find some shadow. And maybe sneak up behind them, and reverse that situation.
For an extreme example, the visuals and controls can be designed as a gameplay gimmick -- take the final level of Beyond Good & Evil. (SPOILER: Having your character be as messed up in the head as if she'd been drugged has a profound impact on gameplay, and this was, in fact, the single hardest moment in the game for me.)
And finally, let's take the best game I've played in a long time -- Portal. It's about gameplay, right? Everyone will tell you, it's a whole new paradigm of gameplay about portals.
Well, what if those portals were just blue and orange circles. What if you couldn't see through them. Would the gameplay be at all the same? (Play through with the developer commentary if you need it spelled out for you.) What if it wasn't for the visual cue of white-ish walls to show you where you can legally place a portal?
And would it be the same game without GlaDOS? Or the theme song?
Yes, I realize GlaDOS wasn't that impressive visually -- I'm talking about her voice. My point is that everything about the game has the potential to change the way it's played. And you will never know how little or how much until you actually get people to play it. Honestly, did anyone at Id imagine rocket jumping, before someone else discovered it?
And yes, it does suck when visuals are used as a substitution for gameplay. With few exceptions, the visuals do not make up for the gameplay.
(I'll make an exception for Final Fantasy, which are worth watching, even if they're more like a season of anime with a crappy RPG minigame squeezed in.)
But that is not a reason to immediately dismiss any eye candy as completely useless, without giving it a moment's thought.
You appear to have linked to yet another Google technology which is used internally, which they've open sourced because they've found it useful.
It's no more relevant to this discussion than what filesystem they're using. (And, for the record, they rolled their own FS anyway.)
Remember: I said "support open standards". I didn't say "exclusively uses open standards for everything, including stuff the public was never meant to see."
Are you running on OpenFirmware? Have you flashed your BIOS with Coreboot?
No? Then how is Google any worse? I'd call this better -- at least they've given us some source to play with. I still wish Apple would give me the firmware to my fucking keyboard.
//Personally, I don't consider tags a replacement for folders
I consider them to be a superset, though I do wish they were hierarchical. Writing an open-source Gmail replacement is at #3 or #4 on my list of weekend projects. Unfortunately, the first one is taking more weekends than I anticipated...
Steal the key, copy it, put key back to avoid getting caught... something like that.
Or, copy the key in the 2-3 minutes (or 20-30 seconds) you have access to it.
Then use the copy to go wherever you want!
More importantly, to use whenever you want, making it that much harder, if they ever find out someone's been snooping, to figure out where the breach in security was.
Think: 2 minutes or so, you have access to the key -- maybe you're a janitor, and the guy left his office open to go down the hall to the bathroom. Then, two months later, you use the key to do something nasty. But they never know how you did it, so there's no way they can stop you from doing it again -- unless they catch you, personally, of course.
The fundamental difference is about opt-in vs opt-out.
In the real world, you didn't opt-in. As far as we know, you didn't choose to be born, or where to be born, or who your parents would be. This is fundamental to the truths we hold to be self-evident; that all are created equal, and should thus be granted equal rights at birth -- that only through your own actions, after birth, can you limit your rights.
However, on the Internet, you absolutely did opt-in, in the most fundamental way -- there is no basic human necessity to use a computer, let alone place information on a publicly accessible webserver. Therefore, we can assume that when people opt-in to these communities, they've had the opportunity to learn about how ROBOTS.TXT works -- or simply to assume that Google will index everything.
I'm not sure the change is that fundamental, though. How much opportunity do we have in the real world? There is enough empty space, both in civilization and outside it. Structures are easy to build. It is therefore possible for most people to be able to hide themselves.
I would argue that, within a city (the only place "street view" has a point), people are generally citizens, who have generally chosen to play by the rules -- and one of these rules is, quite simply, that the street (and anything it can see) is public property and fair game.
Briefly:
When Google started scanning books and offering them online, it was behaving like a net company, assuming that if it went to a library, everything was available to them unless specifically prohibited, just like on a website. But the real world doesn't work like the web, and Google got sued by publishers.
Well, except the real world does work that way. I don't know about you, but my public library includes a copy machine. I don't know if I've seen scanners on their computers, but I have seen printers, and I wouldn't be surprised.
I have never, in my life, gone up and asked for permission to copy a single page. Nor have I seen anyone else ask.
In other words, it's a question of magnitude, and possibly of commercial interest. I'm not xeroxing the entire book, even once, and I'm certainly not putting ads on each copied page to make a profit.
When Google started offering news stories written by others online, it was behaving like a net company, assuming that if it's on somebody's website, they can use it unless the ROBOTS.TXT says otherwise. But in the real world, those websites were only licensed to display syndicated news stories from the big organizations (Reuters, AP, AFP,...), and Google got rightly sued.
In this case, I would argue that it's the real-world rules which are at fault -- given that it is trivial to block a particular bot from indexing your pages (or even all bots), and it is also trivial to demand that Google stop indexing your site -- there is quite possibly no human involvement from them in such a demand.
If these technical solutions are inadequate, it's certainly not because Google wishes to "pirate" news stories. A simple solution would be to talk to Google, either before or during the suit, about a technical solution -- maybe ask (kindly) that Google respect some new way of using ROBOTS.TXT to allow indexing, for search purposes only, but not syndication.
When Google stated that Gmail wouldn't necessarily delete peoples' emails even if they shut their accounts, they got in trouble. In the real world, emails are considered private by most people, and just because they use Google's service doesn't mean they want Google to keep everything.
This is, again, a case of misunderstanding on the part of people using Gmail. If these aren't in the terms of service, that would be the simple solution.
Take the case of the Craigslist troll. While I might, in good faith, expect that a kinky BDSM photo sent to a prospectiv
But Google solutions tend to at least support established open standards.
That is: You can archive your Gmail account via IMAP. You can probably download your Google Calendar appointments as an iCal file. While I'm not sure of the best way to automate it, all of your documents in Google Docs are available in OpenDocument.
they want to use physx because as is clear right now, nobody other than Nvidia can use it 100% accurately yet.
Maybe because NVIDIA acquired AGEIA, which is the company that made the original PhysX cards.
That's a bit like saying "Nobody other than Microsoft can do.NET 100% accurately yet," only moreso, because at least Microsoft is pretending.NET is portable. I'm not sure PhysX was ever meant to be. (Consider the -X ending, implying DirectX, rather than something like PhysicsGL, or PhysL, implying OpenGL -- you know, the actually portable industry standard for graphics.)
Each group of journalists could have had their own separate connection to a properly configured router
Implying they could attack each other, still.
Another thing - there's any number of industry-standard authentication & encryption systems out there. IPSEC, 802.1X, Radius, etc.
And if someone didn't even bother to use SSL, what makes you think they'll set all these up on their own computer?
The organizers were just lazy...
For what? Not mandating every journalist use a known-good computer? For not blocking port 80 in favor of 443? For allowing these people on the Internet at all?
Tell me -- given that it's impossible to idiot-proof a single computer, how are you proposing that they idiot-proof an entire network of humans -- humans who can and will make mistakes?
You'd think the organizers of the Black Hat convention could properly secure a wired network.
Which they did. They just didn't secure it from the other journalists.
Consider that it is actually impossible to do so, and allow journalists to bring their own laptops. The best you can do is secure a network, not secure the computers on the network, without insisting on admining each such computer -- think Mordac-style.
Actually, I'd even go so far as to say that yanking it is a great illustration of why locking down the iPhone -- and having the App Store be the only easy way to get software onto the iPhone, free or not -- is a very dangerous thing.
Why should it have been taken down? At all? What possible reason could Apple have, other than that they think it's stupid?
Today, they think "I Am Rich" is stupid. Tomorrow, maybe it'll be an actually useful app, that just happens to be inconvenient for Apple... Wait, that's already happened.
What's frightening is that I wasn't that shocked. It seemed perfectly believable -- just somewhat frightening. I was contemplating possible routes to take to continue using Linux instead -- everything from cracking it to angry letters to lawsuits...
Wasn't till I clicked through to TFA -- and even then, only after I noticed that there seemed to be quite a lot of mention of Visa. Were they the only company stupid enough to make a deal with Microsoft about Vista?!... Oh. Oh.
Slashdot Mirror
So a single point of failure that allows someone access to everything is better than multiple points?
Which allow access to everything, yes.
You neglect to understand that with passwords, you can use different passwords in different places.
True. However, most people, out of convenience, only use a small number of passwords in those different places.
OpenID certainly doesn't require you to use the same identity everywhere, either, or even the same provider. In your own language, this is a simple grain of truth that you don't seem to be able to see or understand.
But, for the same reason someone might want to use the same username and password everywhere, people will likely use the same OpenID login everywhere.
Either usage pattern leads to at least as much security, if not more, from the OpenID approach. If you have a dozen accounts with a dozen OpenID providers, how is that less secure than having a dozen accounts with a dozen random PHPBB forums? At least you have the freedom to choose among the secure providers, rather than being forced into whatever authentication is supported by whatever random forum you actually want to post on.
I did point this out in a first draft, but I was trying to cut it down to be "concise".
I think it's only the people who don't train themselves to work with a lot of "simple" yet strong passwords
no, not here, where I post unpopular opinions as AC because of mods that over-react to any *gasp* different opinion as if it were flamebait and trolling
Offtopic, but you're still going to be modded. What's the point of being anonymous here, then, and having your posts start out modded lower?
Passwords are still the single best method of authentication, because they live in my mind and are only released on demand.
They have other problems, though:
A key may be kept physically secured, and never transmitted over the wire. A password, on the other hand, must sooner or later be transmitted, at least to a local terminal. If you don't trust the local terminal, all is lost -- not so, with certain kinds of physical tokens.
Now, it's great that you think your password could never be coerced from your mind. (*cough* torture *cough* blackmail...)
But it would be a hell of a lot harder, I think, to train yourself to be able to perform public-key encryption in your head -- or even a simple hashing algorithm.
It's up to me to ensure they are used correctly and securely. Sad that people don't want that responsibility anymore.
It's not so much that people don't want it, as that they can't handle it -- and that computers are much better at this.
Someone else mentioned some OpenID providers which support authentication based on browser-side certs -- that is, a private key lives in your browser. This would be impossible to phish, in the traditional sense -- even if you make a page that looks identical to a login page, your browser knows it isn't. And even if you mistakenly try to authenticate to the wrong page, you'll give that other page no credentials that would help them authenticate as you.
However, "something held" can be considerably more secure than "something known".
Either way, the point is that TFA represents OpenID as a reduction in security, when, in fact, it allows you to implement whatever security measures you want.
This is a common misconception -- that OpenID is simply single-sign-on in new clothes. It's actually an opportunity to give the user responsibility for their own security, and that's a powerful thing.
I mean this is the way credit cards work. No password whatsoever, and I can present my card, and a purchase is made, no password ever.
Yes. Isn't it encouraging how credit cards are far less secure than my virtual server?
I mean, I don't use a username/password to enter my $500,000 house, or to drive my $100,000 car,
No, but you hopefully are using a key, at least. And I know some of us use combination locks -- which is, you know, entering a passcode to get into your house or car. Or office.
If you don't use either, would you mind posting where you live?
I felt I had to respond to your article about passwords. It's been Slashdotted here:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/10/186203
But I felt it was important enough to write directly, and concisely, because you seem to have missed a fundamental point of OpenID.
OpenID promotes "Single Sign-On": with it, logging on to one OpenID Web site with one password will grant entrance during that session to all Web sites that accept OpenID credentials.
OpenID supports single-sign-on. There is nothing about it which requires you to use the same identity everywhere -- or even the same provider.
But more importantly:
OpenID offers, at best, a little convenience, and ignores the security vulnerability inherent in the process of typing a password into someone else's Web site.
Nothing about OpenID requires a password.
I'll say that again: NOTHING about OpenID requires a password.
What OpenID does is, in proper implementations, it allows us to sign in with any provider we choose. I could choose my own server as a provider -- thus, it's not necessarily "someone else's web site". And I don't have to use passwords -- I can use a password and a "security question", I can use public-key cryptography, or I can hire a secretary to sit at the server in question and only authorize requests when she receives a phone call from me.
Even if we assume everyone continues to use the same password, with the same account, everywhere, it's still better than a conventional login. With the conventional login, every site I log into could steal my password and use it to login as me elsewhere. With OpenID, only my OpenID provider can do that.
One single-point-of-failure is better than N single-point-of-failure.
You can't use Microsoft-issued OpenID at Yahoo, nor Yahoo's at Microsoft.
If true, that seems about on par for a technology in its infancy. Remember email? Used to be, you could only send mail to other people with the same ISP. Now, I can send mail to anyone, on any ISP, so long as I have their address.
So that says more about Yahoo and Microsoft's understanding of the technology than it says about the technology itself.
Yes, they're used as a substitution.
Poorly, yes, but they do also affect gameplay directly, when used properly.
For a really trivial example, try adjusting the crosshairs on your favorite FPS. Most gamers I know like to use a little dot, dead-center in the screen, to show exactly where the bullet is going to go (assuming the gun is accurate). But just try turning it off for a moment -- are you even playing the same game? The difficulty just went up a hell of a lot.
Try that all around -- toggle HUD displays and see what happens.
For a more relevant example, take lighting. People like to say that HDR adds nothing to gameplay -- and to some extent, they're right. But say someone has a sunset to their back -- how are you going to aim at all into that lense flare? Whereas they can see you just fine -- in fact, you're all lit up by the setting sun -- better duck down quick and find some shadow. And maybe sneak up behind them, and reverse that situation.
For an extreme example, the visuals and controls can be designed as a gameplay gimmick -- take the final level of Beyond Good & Evil. (SPOILER: Having your character be as messed up in the head as if she'd been drugged has a profound impact on gameplay, and this was, in fact, the single hardest moment in the game for me.)
And finally, let's take the best game I've played in a long time -- Portal. It's about gameplay, right? Everyone will tell you, it's a whole new paradigm of gameplay about portals.
Well, what if those portals were just blue and orange circles. What if you couldn't see through them. Would the gameplay be at all the same? (Play through with the developer commentary if you need it spelled out for you.) What if it wasn't for the visual cue of white-ish walls to show you where you can legally place a portal?
And would it be the same game without GlaDOS? Or the theme song?
Yes, I realize GlaDOS wasn't that impressive visually -- I'm talking about her voice. My point is that everything about the game has the potential to change the way it's played. And you will never know how little or how much until you actually get people to play it. Honestly, did anyone at Id imagine rocket jumping, before someone else discovered it?
And yes, it does suck when visuals are used as a substitution for gameplay. With few exceptions, the visuals do not make up for the gameplay.
(I'll make an exception for Final Fantasy, which are worth watching, even if they're more like a season of anime with a crappy RPG minigame squeezed in.)
But that is not a reason to immediately dismiss any eye candy as completely useless, without giving it a moment's thought.
You appear to have linked to yet another Google technology which is used internally, which they've open sourced because they've found it useful.
It's no more relevant to this discussion than what filesystem they're using. (And, for the record, they rolled their own FS anyway.)
Remember: I said "support open standards". I didn't say "exclusively uses open standards for everything, including stuff the public was never meant to see."
Are you running on OpenFirmware? Have you flashed your BIOS with Coreboot?
No? Then how is Google any worse? I'd call this better -- at least they've given us some source to play with. I still wish Apple would give me the firmware to my fucking keyboard.
//Personally, I don't consider tags a replacement for folders
I consider them to be a superset, though I do wish they were hierarchical. Writing an open-source Gmail replacement is at #3 or #4 on my list of weekend projects. Unfortunately, the first one is taking more weekends than I anticipated...
Steal the key, copy it, put key back to avoid getting caught... something like that.
Or, copy the key in the 2-3 minutes (or 20-30 seconds) you have access to it.
Then use the copy to go wherever you want!
More importantly, to use whenever you want, making it that much harder, if they ever find out someone's been snooping, to figure out where the breach in security was.
Think: 2 minutes or so, you have access to the key -- maybe you're a janitor, and the guy left his office open to go down the hall to the bathroom. Then, two months later, you use the key to do something nasty. But they never know how you did it, so there's no way they can stop you from doing it again -- unless they catch you, personally, of course.
The fundamental difference is about opt-in vs opt-out.
In the real world, you didn't opt-in. As far as we know, you didn't choose to be born, or where to be born, or who your parents would be. This is fundamental to the truths we hold to be self-evident; that all are created equal, and should thus be granted equal rights at birth -- that only through your own actions, after birth, can you limit your rights.
However, on the Internet, you absolutely did opt-in, in the most fundamental way -- there is no basic human necessity to use a computer, let alone place information on a publicly accessible webserver. Therefore, we can assume that when people opt-in to these communities, they've had the opportunity to learn about how ROBOTS.TXT works -- or simply to assume that Google will index everything.
I'm not sure the change is that fundamental, though. How much opportunity do we have in the real world? There is enough empty space, both in civilization and outside it. Structures are easy to build. It is therefore possible for most people to be able to hide themselves.
I would argue that, within a city (the only place "street view" has a point), people are generally citizens, who have generally chosen to play by the rules -- and one of these rules is, quite simply, that the street (and anything it can see) is public property and fair game.
Briefly:
When Google started scanning books and offering them online, it was behaving like a net company, assuming that if it went to a library, everything was available to them unless specifically prohibited, just like on a website. But the real world doesn't work like the web, and Google got sued by publishers.
Well, except the real world does work that way. I don't know about you, but my public library includes a copy machine. I don't know if I've seen scanners on their computers, but I have seen printers, and I wouldn't be surprised.
I have never, in my life, gone up and asked for permission to copy a single page. Nor have I seen anyone else ask.
In other words, it's a question of magnitude, and possibly of commercial interest. I'm not xeroxing the entire book, even once, and I'm certainly not putting ads on each copied page to make a profit.
When Google started offering news stories written by others online, it was behaving like a net company, assuming that if it's on somebody's website, they can use it unless the ROBOTS.TXT says otherwise. But in the real world, those websites were only licensed to display syndicated news stories from the big organizations (Reuters, AP, AFP,...), and Google got rightly sued.
In this case, I would argue that it's the real-world rules which are at fault -- given that it is trivial to block a particular bot from indexing your pages (or even all bots), and it is also trivial to demand that Google stop indexing your site -- there is quite possibly no human involvement from them in such a demand.
If these technical solutions are inadequate, it's certainly not because Google wishes to "pirate" news stories. A simple solution would be to talk to Google, either before or during the suit, about a technical solution -- maybe ask (kindly) that Google respect some new way of using ROBOTS.TXT to allow indexing, for search purposes only, but not syndication.
When Google stated that Gmail wouldn't necessarily delete peoples' emails even if they shut their accounts, they got in trouble. In the real world, emails are considered private by most people, and just because they use Google's service doesn't mean they want Google to keep everything.
This is, again, a case of misunderstanding on the part of people using Gmail. If these aren't in the terms of service, that would be the simple solution.
Take the case of the Craigslist troll. While I might, in good faith, expect that a kinky BDSM photo sent to a prospectiv
...which would imply that no one, when copying the key, would notice that, hold the end down, and copy it?
you don't get an award for being jaded.
Actually, you do.
And BTW, web apps != "the cloud".
Huh? Google web apps, at the very least, can be considered "the cloud", unless you are arguing that the term "cloud computing" has no meaning.
But Google solutions tend to at least support established open standards.
That is: You can archive your Gmail account via IMAP. You can probably download your Google Calendar appointments as an iCal file. While I'm not sure of the best way to automate it, all of your documents in Google Docs are available in OpenDocument.
Still, these are all "some assembly required".
...Or maybe PhysX just sounds a hell of a lot better than PhysL?
Wow, I can't believe I didn't notice... Yes, "Physics" sounds better than "Fizzle"...
they want to use physx because as is clear right now, nobody other than Nvidia can use it 100% accurately yet.
Maybe because NVIDIA acquired AGEIA, which is the company that made the original PhysX cards.
That's a bit like saying "Nobody other than Microsoft can do .NET 100% accurately yet," only moreso, because at least Microsoft is pretending .NET is portable. I'm not sure PhysX was ever meant to be. (Consider the -X ending, implying DirectX, rather than something like PhysicsGL, or PhysL, implying OpenGL -- you know, the actually portable industry standard for graphics.)
Technically speaking, visuals can have a profound effect on gameplay.
That said, I'm also waiting for someone to do something interesting with hardware-accelerated physics.
Each group of journalists could have had their own separate connection to a properly configured router
Implying they could attack each other, still.
Another thing - there's any number of industry-standard authentication & encryption systems out there. IPSEC, 802.1X, Radius, etc.
And if someone didn't even bother to use SSL, what makes you think they'll set all these up on their own computer?
The organizers were just lazy...
For what? Not mandating every journalist use a known-good computer? For not blocking port 80 in favor of 443? For allowing these people on the Internet at all?
Tell me -- given that it's impossible to idiot-proof a single computer, how are you proposing that they idiot-proof an entire network of humans -- humans who can and will make mistakes?
It's not an HDTV conversion
I didn't say that.
it's not shutting off all OTA
I was wrong there, though. Sorry if that made your head hurt *shrug*
You'd think the organizers of the Black Hat convention could properly secure a wired network.
Which they did. They just didn't secure it from the other journalists.
Consider that it is actually impossible to do so, and allow journalists to bring their own laptops. The best you can do is secure a network, not secure the computers on the network, without insisting on admining each such computer -- think Mordac-style.
I'd lay the blame with the Black Hat organizers.
For kicking them? Maybe.
But for allowing it to happen? Not so much.
it may not have much of an effect in places like Africa.
It would, however, have a significant effect here -- and for anyone coming here from Africa.
When did we start trying to fix the rest of the world first? Change starts at home. (Regime change starts at home, too.)
Actually, I'd even go so far as to say that yanking it is a great illustration of why locking down the iPhone -- and having the App Store be the only easy way to get software onto the iPhone, free or not -- is a very dangerous thing.
Why should it have been taken down? At all? What possible reason could Apple have, other than that they think it's stupid?
Today, they think "I Am Rich" is stupid. Tomorrow, maybe it'll be an actually useful app, that just happens to be inconvenient for Apple... Wait, that's already happened.
I did.
What's frightening is that I wasn't that shocked. It seemed perfectly believable -- just somewhat frightening. I was contemplating possible routes to take to continue using Linux instead -- everything from cracking it to angry letters to lawsuits...
Wasn't till I clicked through to TFA -- and even then, only after I noticed that there seemed to be quite a lot of mention of Visa. Were they the only company stupid enough to make a deal with Microsoft about Vista?!... Oh. Oh.
Moral of the story: Always Read TFA.
CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX and even the CW all still broadcast over the air...
I thought that was going to be phased out soon, if it hasn't already? Wasn't this the huge chunk of spectrum that was auctioned off recently?
WoW and GnuChess have different content
Oh, content is all? Fine, if I want to watch some orcs, I'll watch some WoW videos. Leeroy Jenkins!
the only difference between the people running in my park and the Olympics is the speed.
And the people. (Olympic athletes are in top physical condition -- go read my other link!)
And the actual competition. (Are people in your park racing?)
And the fact that running isn't exactly the only event. People play chess in WoW, but WoW is much more than chess.
If I want to watch people running, I can go to my local park and do so for free.
Out of curiosity, does this kind of fallacy have a name yet?
Try this: Why would anyone pay for WoW? If I want to play a game, I can fire up GnuChess for free.
Although, it would still be more interesting to watch what the athletes do in their time off...