I think what's really positive here (besides the very good article) is that these ideas have finally hit mainstream. There's at least acknowledgement of a debate, and I think that will really help to move things forward. About the only point that's missing is that the temporary (I use the term loosely) monopoly provided to creative works should be set so as to balance the production of work with the public interest. We've seen several lengthenings of copyright, but there was no discussion of whether or not these were a good deal for the public at large. Greg London's Bounty Hunters (http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters) gives a good picture of this side of the issue.
Comcast: Sorry, our video-on-demand has used up all of the bandwidth. You can't watch that video-over-ip site now. Have you thought about getting a digital dvr from comcast? And while you're at it, why not a digital phone? We know you've been having problems with Skype...
In these times, I keep thinking how we survived the cold war against an adversary that at least had a GDP that was an appreciable fraction of our own and nuclear weapons. We didn't need ID cards to make it through that.
Now there are some mullahs in a cave halfway around the world who'd like to blow up a few buildings, and the g-men talk about how the sky is falling. We need to take drastic action to protect ourselves, they say. They're either cowards or up to something more sinister and cynical. Lately, I don't care which. I just want it to stop.
This is an excellent idea. If the site-dependent salt you add to the password before hashing is defined in some stable way, this could allow you to have a "master password" that doesn't depend on a local encrypted password file.
I'm imagining a firefox plugin that prompts you for your password when you go to a site. You type in the master password, it gets salt from the source, hashes it, then sends the hash to the site as you "password". The best part is if you sign up for an account for site a on one machine and then go to another, you can use the same "master password" to log in to the site. Pretty spiffy, and solves the problem that all password-managers have -- they're computer-specific.
With frequency hopping, this is absolutely possible. The tech was developed to prevent jamming, and it's now cheap to implement using software defined radios. Inexpensive devices could absolutely pick out one signal from all the cross-talk.
I could understand a single-operator-per-wavelength for an emergency spectrum. Keep the emergency equipment as simple as possible, sure. But open the rest of it up!
Well, I guess it'll never happen. There's too much money in the media monopolies and too much technical stupidity in everyone else... It's a shame that a good solution like freq hopping can't come along and democratize broadcast. It would combine the good features of current broadcast (high bandwidth, multiple destinations simultaneously) with the good features of then net (many many signals to choose from, no need to wait for the weather broadcast...).
I agree very much that the SSN as an identifier is silly.
The bill that needs to happen would be one that makes the credit agency (Visa, the mortgage company, etc) who gave credit to the identity thief liable for their actions. This bill puts more liability on the thief, but does little to encourage Visa et al. to use a secure method of identification. Public key exists and is reasonably secure. If the credit card companies could be arsed to use it, we could be free of identity theft.
All aboard the hype-train! Next stop, RDF station.
That's certainly too cruel. Apple always makes some nice advances to their system and especially their system libraries. There are some nice things they're talking about with the new version, but I think the greatest trick is to get $100+ from mac fans every two years or so. The short cycle seems a bit exhausting.
There are lots of exciting new things in linux: HAL, DBUS, UDEV, etc. These have changed the way hardware is detected and activated, mostly for the best.
But many of the new tools that deal with this stuff are GUI programs like network manager. Now, network manager is a good program, but wouldn't it be cool for it to coordinate with ifup/ifdown? You know, update the classic commands so they use the new systems. I think there could be either a new generation of CLI tools or a re-vamping of the old.
I'd also like to see more development of client/daemon type programs, where large pieces of the execution are separated from the GUI/CLI interface. This could make a lot of programs more fault-tolerant. Like bit torrent clients that could continue to download when the user logs out, etc.
I'm headed to the annual "Vegan food and wifi jamboree" at the co-op where I expect to "win" a new Prius.
Of course I have to bring my laptop. Don't worry, just because I'm sitting at the table next to you doesn't mean I'm using my machine to crack the crypto on your key while we enjoy our roasted yams. I'm just writing my tract about municipal wifi and organic gardening.
Oh, yeah? You own a Prius? In red? I always liked red. Man, you have the only red one here...
Yeah, but performance is not the top concern anymore. The three big questions are (1) How much power does it draw? (2) How much heat does it make? (3) How loud is it?
The market is worried about how "livable" computers are. That's why laptop sales have grown so much.
AMD x2's are good chips (I have one and like it fine), but the market will turn on efficiency questions not performance.
Myth uses a series of tests to try to flag commercials (spikes in audio volume, the presence of all-black frames, logo detection, scene-change detection, etc), then skips the flagged portions during playback. On some shows, it flags the commercials perfectly. For instance, on Iron Chef, commercial breaks start with the iron chef logo shrinking to nothing on a black screen and breaks return with the logo growing from nothing to full screen. Myth nails this, so it just looks like the logo goes out and then comes in:)
On Law and Order, the black screen "481st trial part" screen can sometimes set it off and a chunk of show is flagged. If that happens, you have to turn off autoskip and just fast-forward through the commercials.
They'll have to give up their entertainment monopoly in parts of the country that don't enjoy broadband yet. Then those people won't watch Must See TV, which is interference the way NBC measures it.
Scrap the FCC. Use frequency hopping spread-spectrum devices to avoid interference. Create grid networks for data. Forget telephone, television, etc. Just let me get data. Look, I'd even accept a tiered pricing model: one price for low-latency traffic (voice, games), one price for high-latency traffic (large data downloads).
The "intelligent" network with its walled gardens gets on my nerves.
Wouldn't a simple solution be to send traffic through https? The protocol exists, all major browsers support it. Some low-end machines might have trouble doing all of the cryptography in addition to page rendering, but multicores and dedicated crypto hardware are both becoming common and could change that.
After all, encrypted traffic looks like a stream of random numbers to the ISP, right? Hard to modify.
Mod the parent UP! This is the time when I agree that they should make stupidity more painful.
"That's just completely incoherent - the law of conservation of energy is that the total energy in a closed system is constant OVER TIME. How can it possibly leave out time?"
Hell effing yes. dE/dt = flux through the boundary, that's conservation of energy. If the system is isolated, the righthand side is zero, but it is still a statement about energy AND TIME.
Rock on, you crazy thermo-knowing poster. Rock on.
Well, given the terrible times of late, with the global warming and such, its clear that we're experiencing Hell on Earth.
However, there's conservation of infernal-ness, so Hell is experiencing "Earth on Hell", which is great if you're damned. These small nice gestures represent a gradual cooling of the hellfire and a nice-streak developing. It also has occasional impact on our life up here in the form of Microsoft distributing Linux.
I'm a bit skeptical of information in that article after reading the DCT description that described it as a rounding trick. What, is frequency-space too hard of a concept? Doesn't everyone get some Fourier analysis in college these days? You need to know it to be informed about a lot of modern data analysis.
If you haven't read Bounty Hunters by Greg London, you really should give it a go.
He describes the struggle of society to reward creators in analogy to paying bounty hunters to track criminals. It's a good analogy, and the analysis in section three is good. He spends time talking about making copyright have the proper length so that artists create, but not so long that society pays too much. I must admit that before reading it, I was skeptical that copyright could ever work or had anything to offer. He convinced me that it can be a good system, but there must be fairness in the term of protection.
The last flesh-and-blood discussion about copyright I had was very illuminating. I publish in science, and generally see copyright as getting in the way; I believe ideas that I come up with make me more valuable, rather than having external value (they could be useful for others to learn, then they've increased the value of their labor). But I spoke with a friend who writes fiction. Naturally, she had a different bend. She wanted to be compensated for her work and she didn't want any other writer writing substandard work with her characters, diluting her vision. There were just different issues between knowledge-based creative product and entertainment-based creative product. I would write more about how I disagreed with her, and thought her fears were unfounded, but it seems unfair to do that without a chance to respond
Monopoly rights on thoughts are some of the most important things facing our society now. We've developed a system where the physical reproduction of these things (text, music, images) is dirt cheap, nearly free, and it is forcing us to reconsider exactly what copyright and patents mean. The "Intellectual Property" crowd has a lot of money, and I think they are dangerous. We need to forge a new compromise between creators and society that maximizes creative output. That will require negotiating the "price" of that work in terms of monopoly protections.
In poetry, this sort of formatting is common. But the formatting implies emphasis, inflection, and so on. All of the readers know this, consciously or not. So their perception of what the text says will be different. Block text adds little emphasis (although short paragraphs convey faster action).
Also, while it is true that people stumble on the text above or below a line, this effect can be helpful if you're skimming. It would be a pain to skim a ten (block paragraph) page of text in this poetry format. Not only would there be a lot more scrolling, but you can't just "image" a paragraph at a time to find the piece you're looking for. I'll admit, the modern way of formatting text may not be the best, but it is so entrained that'd be tough to change without all sorts of unintended consequences.
Identity theft is a problem because it works now by blaming the victim. Hold the institution that issued the fraudulent credit accountable and they'll do a better job of securing proper transactions. Seriously, set out what damages I can collect if a bank issues a loan to "me" who isn't me. Once this happens, banks will be much more interested in strong methods for identifying clients and overall bank security could improve as a secondary effect.
A "semi-secret" ID number is a bad tool for ID. You don't need to be an expert in cryptography to realize that a password sent around is plain-text is bogus.
The deeper issue is why identity theft is my problem. Shouldn't the credit agencies etc. be very very liable for loaning money to someone who is not me? It seems like they are part of the fraud whether they were willing participants or not. I should be able to collect damages when their negligent checking of my identity harms my credit score. Identity theft is a con job, where the perp convinces Visa (or whoever) that they are me. Usually, when cons happen, BOTH the conman and the victim are liable for damage caused. Suppose I conned you into thinking I was a cop and told you to drive me around while I robbed banks. You would still be accessory to my crime even if you claimed you didn't know better. Visa wants to (and currently is) claiming that they are not accessory to the theft of my credit score. That's not right.
The SSN is just a proxy for the fact that there are different standards for people citizens and corporate citizens.
Save yourself sanity. Don't use devices that only have windows drivers running through NDISwrapper. You'll get only a tiny fraction of the functionality, it'll break all the time. My experience has been that devices with in-kernel drivers are worth whatever premium. Always get the intel wireless on your laptop.
NDIS is the lowest level of hardware "support" in Linux. If Stallman warns about binary blobs or nonfree drivers because you don't know what the code is and the drivers stop working after the company stops maintaining them... just image how terrible it is when you are using another OS's buggy binary-only driver. You have that mental image. Now add demons pouring acid down your throat. You're approaching the reality of NDISwrapper. I think half-broken internet access is worse than no access. You just get tempted to believe that you can really get whatever from the net, only to find that when you count on connectivity, it breaks.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what's really positive here (besides the very good article) is that these ideas have finally hit mainstream. There's at least acknowledgement of a debate, and I think that will really help to move things forward. About the only point that's missing is that the temporary (I use the term loosely) monopoly provided to creative works should be set so as to balance the production of work with the public interest. We've seen several lengthenings of copyright, but there was no discussion of whether or not these were a good deal for the public at large. Greg London's Bounty Hunters (http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters) gives a good picture of this side of the issue.
Comcast: Sorry, our video-on-demand has used up all of the bandwidth. You can't watch that video-over-ip site now. Have you thought about getting a digital dvr from comcast? And while you're at it, why not a digital phone? We know you've been having problems with Skype...
In these times, I keep thinking how we survived the cold war against an adversary that at least had a GDP that was an appreciable fraction of our own and nuclear weapons. We didn't need ID cards to make it through that.
Now there are some mullahs in a cave halfway around the world who'd like to blow up a few buildings, and the g-men talk about how the sky is falling. We need to take drastic action to protect ourselves, they say. They're either cowards or up to something more sinister and cynical. Lately, I don't care which. I just want it to stop.
That's awesome! But I think they might have intended it to be
Apache License PINE
Of course, since they don't spell it out, we're free to make it whatever we want...
This is an excellent idea. If the site-dependent salt you add to the password before hashing is defined in some stable way, this could allow you to have a "master password" that doesn't depend on a local encrypted password file.
I'm imagining a firefox plugin that prompts you for your password when you go to a site. You type in the master password, it gets salt from the source, hashes it, then sends the hash to the site as you "password". The best part is if you sign up for an account for site a on one machine and then go to another, you can use the same "master password" to log in to the site. Pretty spiffy, and solves the problem that all password-managers have -- they're computer-specific.
With frequency hopping, this is absolutely possible. The tech was developed to prevent jamming, and it's now cheap to implement using software defined radios. Inexpensive devices could absolutely pick out one signal from all the cross-talk.
...).
I could understand a single-operator-per-wavelength for an emergency spectrum. Keep the emergency equipment as simple as possible, sure. But open the rest of it up!
Well, I guess it'll never happen. There's too much money in the media monopolies and too much technical stupidity in everyone else... It's a shame that a good solution like freq hopping can't come along and democratize broadcast. It would combine the good features of current broadcast (high bandwidth, multiple destinations simultaneously) with the good features of then net (many many signals to choose from, no need to wait for the weather broadcast
I agree very much that the SSN as an identifier is silly.
The bill that needs to happen would be one that makes the credit agency (Visa, the mortgage company, etc) who gave credit to the identity thief liable for their actions. This bill puts more liability on the thief, but does little to encourage Visa et al. to use a secure method of identification. Public key exists and is reasonably secure. If the credit card companies could be arsed to use it, we could be free of identity theft.
All aboard the hype-train! Next stop, RDF station.
That's certainly too cruel. Apple always makes some nice advances to their system and especially their system libraries. There are some nice things they're talking about with the new version, but I think the greatest trick is to get $100+ from mac fans every two years or so. The short cycle seems a bit exhausting.
It's worth looking at
h p?test=all&lang=hipe&lang2=hipe
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.p
for the general performance of erlang. It compares unfavorably in those tests to lisp and clean, two other functional programming languages.
There are lots of exciting new things in linux: HAL, DBUS, UDEV, etc. These have changed the way hardware is detected and activated, mostly for the best.
But many of the new tools that deal with this stuff are GUI programs like network manager. Now, network manager is a good program, but wouldn't it be cool for it to coordinate with ifup/ifdown? You know, update the classic commands so they use the new systems. I think there could be either a new generation of CLI tools or a re-vamping of the old.
I'd also like to see more development of client/daemon type programs, where large pieces of the execution are separated from the GUI/CLI interface. This could make a lot of programs more fault-tolerant. Like bit torrent clients that could continue to download when the user logs out, etc.
Well, that's very interesting, but I have to go.
I'm headed to the annual "Vegan food and wifi jamboree" at the co-op where I expect to "win" a new Prius.
Of course I have to bring my laptop. Don't worry, just because I'm sitting at the table next to you doesn't mean I'm using my machine to crack the crypto on your key while we enjoy our roasted yams. I'm just writing my tract about municipal wifi and organic gardening.
Oh, yeah? You own a Prius? In red? I always liked red. Man, you have the only red one here...
Yeah, but performance is not the top concern anymore. The three big questions are
(1) How much power does it draw?
(2) How much heat does it make?
(3) How loud is it?
The market is worried about how "livable" computers are. That's why laptop sales have grown so much.
AMD x2's are good chips (I have one and like it fine), but the market will turn on efficiency questions not performance.
Myth uses a series of tests to try to flag commercials (spikes in audio volume, the presence of all-black frames, logo detection, scene-change detection, etc), then skips the flagged portions during playback. On some shows, it flags the commercials perfectly. For instance, on Iron Chef, commercial breaks start with the iron chef logo shrinking to nothing on a black screen and breaks return with the logo growing from nothing to full screen. Myth nails this, so it just looks like the logo goes out and then comes in :)
On Law and Order, the black screen "481st trial part" screen can sometimes set it off and a chunk of show is flagged. If that happens, you have to turn off autoskip and just fast-forward through the commercials.
They'll have to give up their entertainment monopoly in parts of the country that don't enjoy broadband yet. Then those people won't watch Must See TV, which is interference the way NBC measures it.
Scrap the FCC. Use frequency hopping spread-spectrum devices to avoid interference. Create grid networks for data. Forget telephone, television, etc. Just let me get data. Look, I'd even accept a tiered pricing model: one price for low-latency traffic (voice, games), one price for high-latency traffic (large data downloads).
The "intelligent" network with its walled gardens gets on my nerves.
Wouldn't a simple solution be to send traffic through https? The protocol exists, all major browsers support it. Some low-end machines might have trouble doing all of the cryptography in addition to page rendering, but multicores and dedicated crypto hardware are both becoming common and could change that.
After all, encrypted traffic looks like a stream of random numbers to the ISP, right? Hard to modify.
Mod the parent UP! This is the time when I agree that they should make stupidity more painful.
"That's just completely incoherent - the law of conservation of energy is that the total energy in a closed system is constant OVER TIME. How can it possibly leave out time?"
Hell effing yes. dE/dt = flux through the boundary, that's conservation of energy. If the system is isolated, the righthand side is zero, but it is still a statement about energy AND TIME.
Rock on, you crazy thermo-knowing poster. Rock on.
Well, given the terrible times of late, with the global warming and such, its clear that we're experiencing Hell on Earth.
However, there's conservation of infernal-ness, so Hell is experiencing "Earth on Hell", which is great if you're damned. These small nice gestures represent a gradual cooling of the hellfire and a nice-streak developing. It also has occasional impact on our life up here in the form of Microsoft distributing Linux.
I'm a bit skeptical of information in that article after reading the DCT description that described it as a rounding trick. What, is frequency-space too hard of a concept? Doesn't everyone get some Fourier analysis in college these days? You need to know it to be informed about a lot of modern data analysis.
For the lazy, or the mathematically disinclined, that's 64 zunes. Imagine if you had them all in one room. Woo. What a party.
If you haven't read Bounty Hunters by Greg London, you really should give it a go.
He describes the struggle of society to reward creators in analogy to paying bounty hunters to track criminals. It's a good analogy, and the analysis in section three is good. He spends time talking about making copyright have the proper length so that artists create, but not so long that society pays too much. I must admit that before reading it, I was skeptical that copyright could ever work or had anything to offer. He convinced me that it can be a good system, but there must be fairness in the term of protection.
The last flesh-and-blood discussion about copyright I had was very illuminating. I publish in science, and generally see copyright as getting in the way; I believe ideas that I come up with make me more valuable, rather than having external value (they could be useful for others to learn, then they've increased the value of their labor). But I spoke with a friend who writes fiction. Naturally, she had a different bend. She wanted to be compensated for her work and she didn't want any other writer writing substandard work with her characters, diluting her vision. There were just different issues between knowledge-based creative product and entertainment-based creative product. I would write more about how I disagreed with her, and thought her fears were unfounded, but it seems unfair to do that without a chance to respond
Monopoly rights on thoughts are some of the most important things facing our society now. We've developed a system where the physical reproduction of these things (text, music, images) is dirt cheap, nearly free, and it is forcing us to reconsider exactly what copyright and patents mean. The "Intellectual Property" crowd has a lot of money, and I think they are dangerous. We need to forge a new compromise between creators and society that maximizes creative output. That will require negotiating the "price" of that work in terms of monopoly protections.
In poetry, this sort of formatting is common. But the formatting implies emphasis, inflection, and so on. All of the readers know this, consciously or not. So their perception of what the text says will be different. Block text adds little emphasis (although short paragraphs convey faster action).
Also, while it is true that people stumble on the text above or below a line, this effect can be helpful if you're skimming. It would be a pain to skim a ten (block paragraph) page of text in this poetry format. Not only would there be a lot more scrolling, but you can't just "image" a paragraph at a time to find the piece you're looking for. I'll admit, the modern way of formatting text may not be the best, but it is so entrained that'd be tough to change without all sorts of unintended consequences.
Amen.
Identity theft is a problem because it works now by blaming the victim. Hold the institution that issued the fraudulent credit accountable and they'll do a better job of securing proper transactions. Seriously, set out what damages I can collect if a bank issues a loan to "me" who isn't me. Once this happens, banks will be much more interested in strong methods for identifying clients and overall bank security could improve as a secondary effect.
Rock.
Windows Powers Hell ?
I guess I always suspected it was true, but the beastie mascot of BSD made me wonder if there wasn't room for a little UNIX in Hades too.
A "semi-secret" ID number is a bad tool for ID. You don't need to be an expert in cryptography to realize that a password sent around is plain-text is bogus.
The deeper issue is why identity theft is my problem. Shouldn't the credit agencies etc. be very very liable for loaning money to someone who is not me? It seems like they are part of the fraud whether they were willing participants or not. I should be able to collect damages when their negligent checking of my identity harms my credit score. Identity theft is a con job, where the perp convinces Visa (or whoever) that they are me. Usually, when cons happen, BOTH the conman and the victim are liable for damage caused. Suppose I conned you into thinking I was a cop and told you to drive me around while I robbed banks. You would still be accessory to my crime even if you claimed you didn't know better. Visa wants to (and currently is) claiming that they are not accessory to the theft of my credit score. That's not right.
The SSN is just a proxy for the fact that there are different standards for people citizens and corporate citizens.
Save yourself sanity. Don't use devices that only have windows drivers running through NDISwrapper. You'll get only a tiny fraction of the functionality, it'll break all the time. My experience has been that devices with in-kernel drivers are worth whatever premium. Always get the intel wireless on your laptop.
... just image how terrible it is when you are using another OS's buggy binary-only driver. You have that mental image. Now add demons pouring acid down your throat. You're approaching the reality of NDISwrapper. I think half-broken internet access is worse than no access. You just get tempted to believe that you can really get whatever from the net, only to find that when you count on connectivity, it breaks.
NDIS is the lowest level of hardware "support" in Linux. If Stallman warns about binary blobs or nonfree drivers because you don't know what the code is and the drivers stop working after the company stops maintaining them
Who is this PC World joker, anyway?