"For every little file move or copying of files, I HAD to get root access and type in a command. "
No you didn't. You just clap your hands three times and swish your butt in your seat, and the root access requirement is bypassed forever. Unfortunately it only works for those with at least two digits of IQ.
This is incredibly cheering news. There are still people in government capable of responding quickly and effectively to try to corral a potentially devastating epidemic.
After all the news about the TSA saving us by groping four year old girls, this is practically redemptive news. Not everyone in government is a fool, even after the thirty year decline.
Has anyone noticed how newspaper vendors have implemented paywalls around the physical papers. Airport staff, on pain of death, will never leave one flight's passenger's left-behind newspapers for the next flight's passengers. Two readers and the economy would be destroyed. "Protecting our economy" by ensuring inefficiencies remain is why our country doesn't function any more.
I'm surprised to hear that therapists record sessions. I hope this is revealed to the patient, and I hope the patient has a way of opting out.
Introducing telecomm (especially computer telecomm) into the mix potentially enables the therapist's bosses to listen in (legally, they are the therapist's employer, right?), along with people in the IT department, along with anyone able to successfully attack the connection.
Whether it's already being done or not, it's a privacy disaster. And if this is used for those behind bars, I'd be really surprised if the authorities didn't listen in, legally or illegally. That in itself should make this illegal for use with those whose movements are constrained.
No psychiatrist willing to put their patients in a position this vulnerable should keep their license. Even if the entire session is fully encrypted, the patient has no ability to tell whether the psychiatrist is recording, has other people in the room, etc...
Fleischmann and Pons had the misfortune of not understanding how to reproduce their experiments. There's been a great deal of work since, but many people are happy to consider themselves sophisticated by turning this into a joke. I don't understand why.
Note that this is a completely separate issue from whether Rossi is a scam artist.
Here is a talk given at SRI in October 2011 that suggests you should be less brief and more open.
The talk has been uploaded as eight videos and the link is to the first. They suggest there is more here than just smoke, in the opinion of many sophisticated people. Whether Rossi can actually commercialize any of this is the question, but it does appear that something interesting is going on, that Fleischmann and Pons found it, but that they had the misfortune to not realize what was required to replicate their experiments.
I bought two Toshiba Satellites with Windows 7. There were problems with the software on one, but after going through support hellp with Toshiba, I just let it be. I reformatted the drive to support Ubuntu Linux on dual boot. A few months ago, one of the Toshiba's began telling me my copy of Windows, the original installed Windows 7 on the Toshiba's purchased at Amazon, was counterfeit. The Windows side of the machine is even more useless than it was to begin with.
That's the best reason I know of to use Windows XP. The next best reason is it probably can't kill you unless it gets out of the computer.
Here's the problem in a nutshell. We have access to information and analysis from gazillions of people, but most of us pay attention only to those who are presented as the default choices. Those who are presented as the default choices inevitably represent the opinions of those who own them.
This is the herding mentality responsible for financial bubbles -- people follow those who are perceived as successful regardless of the lead cow's intelligence and common sense or lack thereof. (Goldman Sachs. QED.)
The challenge is to restore diversity in what is heard, not just diversity in what is available to be heard. That, unfortunately, is a distributed problem, and cannot be solved by just adding a few voices.
Unfortunately, if you are an American over 18, you are part of the political class. That goes double if you've received a college education or learned enough about computers to be interested in Slashdot.
Vote, please, but recognize that American democracy has been corrupted by unlimited money for campaign advertising.
Further action is needed, and it will be an inconvenience. Fortunately for you and me, taking action requires far less effort and courage than that displayed by those in countries where protest is a life-threatening act. But it does require action.
Work to re-create a level playing field in politics -- work to ensure that every candidate gets public funding if they agree to give up private funding, work to make the public's airwaves free for political advertisers, so that media companies are forced to share the air as a condition of licensing, and work to prevent unlimited expenditures and their corrupting effect on our political system.
Slashdot libertarians might want to think a bit, and compare the statements of people like Ralph Nader over the past forty years with the statements made by those who have won office.
I think you're right that auditing is a non-solution. But that only means that the counts must be easily verifiable by average persons, when motivated. The trick is to provide a solution where the average motivated person has access to enough information -- correct information -- to confirm things for themselves. The glories of redundancy will then take over, because there will often be people who are inclined to check.
As long as the signed ballot images can be confirmed to match the ballots -- and that should be a task for multiple observers at the close of a polling place -- the ballot images will enable multiple parties to come up with vote counts (and the specification of how those vote counts were arrived at.)
I only wish you were right that my previous comment was group-think. It's not. The group think is that because we bank at ATMs, we can use computers and the internet for voting. You're right that such ideas are based on the trust of the familiar. That's not good enough for voting.
And that's why, in addition to hand counting of the ballots at the precinct, there ought to be (at least) a digital image backup enabling complete redundant counting off the images.
The best approach would be to generate the image collection, on unchangeable media, at the precinct at the close of polls. This should probably be generated from an independent scanning station, so that the ballots can be shuffled prior to scanning. This copy should be created at the precinct, because that is where workers can check the permanent copy against the ballots themselves. Read about the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, which has taken baby steps towards this destination.
This is a naturally distributed problem -- it would be easy for poll workers to do a 100% hand check of a permanent record of 500 images, though it might be hard to do this for a stack of 50,000 images once the ballots have been collected to a single point.
The remaining question becomes "how do I know that the digitally signed collection I receive matches that which was generated at the precinct on election night?" That, unfortunately, continues to depend on key management, as far as I can tell.
I hope all of the people thinking it would be very cool and convenient to vote via smart phones (or the internet, or the telephone, or the mail system) will notice that smart phones might not yet be perfect.
Voting is a classic example of a situation where the requirements cry out for appropriate technology.
The requirements are unique: you must not be able to prove how you voted, you must not be able to sell your vote or be coerced by anyone, you should be able to have complete confidence that your vote was counted properly along with everyone else's.
The technology that is required is completely straightforward -- people have to go to protected locations, create physically countable and non-traceable artifacts that represent their uncoerced opinions, deposit these artifacts into a locked box at the location, and know that the contents of the locked box are properly reflected in the results.
The best way to accomplish the last step is to count the contents in public before the contents are moved, and to generate and digitally sign images of the artifacts so that anyone who wants to confirm your count is an accurate representation of the contents is able to do that.
All attempts to modernize voting for convenience's sake are misguided. All opinions that making a simple approach more complex to speed up the distribution of results are misguided. Something that is convenient but cannot be checked is not appropriate for voting. And any time a computer scientist tells you how secure something is, introduce them to real people and the way they protect their passwords.
Yes, the DOE loan is for the Delaware plant. This fact is well-known: http://www.examiner.com/electric-car-in-national/fisker-automotive-grabs-529-million-from-the-doe
And that omission, soulskill, is either incompetent or dishonest.
OK, this is all wonderful stuff, I suppose. But surely I'm not the only person who is taken aback by reading the article only to find such titles as "the Media Lab’s Sony Corporation Career Development Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences."
I still haven't got used to stadiums being named after corporations; it's a bit of a shock to see that assistant professors are now so named. Do they have to wear decals?
I think an always-on, human-sized internet video connection between a refugee camp and one or more "Western" schools or public locations would be of dramatic help in humanizing the refugee crises of Africa. I'd love to see the Times Square jumbotron showing a refugee camp instead of an advertisement.
Or perhaps you've been lulled into blissful slumber by a cost-plus contract, and are interested in straw-man arguments about NASA? There are lots of uses, even military uses, for a product like this where you don't need to worry about a high-rad field. How many lives could be saved if the portion of the military budget that pays for "military-grade" lobbying and products were diverted, say, to American fire and police departments? How many lives could be saved if it were diverted to food distribution and famine relief?
Slashdot Mirror
CEO Meg Whitman wants to use the savings for new products? Oh, come on.
She just needs more cash to pay her household staff. You can't have people talking, you know.
"For every little file move or copying of files, I HAD to get root access and type in a command. "
No you didn't. You just clap your hands three times and swish your butt in your seat, and the root access requirement is bypassed forever. Unfortunately it only works for those with at least two digits of IQ.
This is incredibly cheering news. There are still people in government capable of responding quickly and effectively to try to corral a potentially devastating epidemic.
After all the news about the TSA saving us by groping four year old girls, this is practically redemptive news. Not everyone in government is a fool, even after the thirty year decline.
Has anyone noticed how newspaper vendors have implemented paywalls around the physical papers. Airport staff, on pain of death, will never leave one flight's passenger's left-behind newspapers for the next flight's passengers. Two readers and the economy would be destroyed. "Protecting our economy" by ensuring inefficiencies remain is why our country doesn't function any more.
This TED talk is much more interesting: http://www.ted.com/talks/john_la_grou_plugs_smart_power_outlets_1.html
The developer points out, quite rightly, that supplying voltage to all outlets at all times is a child-risk and a fire hazard.
I'm so glad the problems in safely disposing of nuclear waste have been solved!
I'm surprised to hear that therapists record sessions. I hope this is revealed to the patient, and I hope the patient has a way of opting out.
Introducing telecomm (especially computer telecomm) into the mix potentially enables the therapist's bosses to listen in (legally, they are the therapist's employer, right?), along with people in the IT department, along with anyone able to successfully attack the connection.
Whether it's already being done or not, it's a privacy disaster. And if this is used for those behind bars, I'd be really surprised if the authorities didn't listen in, legally or illegally. That in itself should make this illegal for use with those whose movements are constrained.
This is truly a privacy disaster in the making.
No psychiatrist willing to put their patients in a position this vulnerable should keep their license. Even if the entire session is fully encrypted, the patient has no ability to tell whether the psychiatrist is recording, has other people in the room, etc...
Oh, goodness, they must be terrified. You must have been some activist.
Cute, but SRI doesn't seem to think it's open and shut, either. See this talk from SRI researcher Mike McCubre. The link is to part one of eight.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCcQtwIwAQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DEtweR_qGHEc&ei=fQ0TT6z8IMaC2wWRo4mFCg&usg=AFQjCNEqRT16r7o-A8LmurcqxagfDk6ZFg&sig2=1gh_88fhHkJO_cXlDbGHsA
Fleischmann and Pons had the misfortune of not understanding how to reproduce their experiments. There's been a great deal of work since, but many people are happy to consider themselves sophisticated by turning this into a joke. I don't understand why.
Note that this is a completely separate issue from whether Rossi is a scam artist.
Here is a talk given at SRI in October 2011 that suggests you should be less brief and more open.
The talk has been uploaded as eight videos and the link is to the first. They suggest there is more here than just smoke, in the opinion of many sophisticated people. Whether Rossi can actually commercialize any of this is the question, but it does appear that something interesting is going on, that Fleischmann and Pons found it, but that they had the misfortune to not realize what was required to replicate their experiments.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCcQtwIwAQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DEtweR_qGHEc&ei=fQ0TT6z8IMaC2wWRo4mFCg&usg=AFQjCNEqRT16r7o-A8LmurcqxagfDk6ZFg&sig2=1gh_88fhHkJO_cXlDbGHsA
I'll take my royalties at my Post Office Box.
I bought two Toshiba Satellites with Windows 7. There were problems with the software on one, but after going through support hellp with Toshiba, I just let it be. I reformatted the drive to support Ubuntu Linux on dual boot. A few months ago, one of the Toshiba's began telling me my copy of Windows, the original installed Windows 7 on the Toshiba's purchased at Amazon, was counterfeit. The Windows side of the machine is even more useless than it was to begin with.
That's the best reason I know of to use Windows XP. The next best reason is it probably can't kill you unless it gets out of the computer.
"A previous crypto scheme that allowed operations on encrypted data multiplied computing time by a factor of a trillion. This one adds only 15-26%."
So, basically you're saying that both schemes slow things down, right?
--PHB
Here's the problem in a nutshell. We have access to information and analysis from gazillions of people, but most of us pay attention only to those who are presented as the default choices. Those who are presented as the default choices inevitably represent the opinions of those who own them.
This is the herding mentality responsible for financial bubbles -- people follow those who are perceived as successful regardless of the lead cow's intelligence and common sense or lack thereof. (Goldman Sachs. QED.)
The challenge is to restore diversity in what is heard, not just diversity in what is available to be heard. That, unfortunately, is a distributed problem, and cannot be solved by just adding a few voices.
I believe in you too! Quit immediately and form your own IT outsourcing company. You are worth millions.
Point taken.
Unfortunately, if you are an American over 18, you are part of the political class. That goes double if you've received a college education or learned enough about computers to be interested in Slashdot.
Vote, please, but recognize that American democracy has been corrupted by unlimited money for campaign advertising.
Further action is needed, and it will be an inconvenience. Fortunately for you and me, taking action requires far less effort and courage than that displayed by those in countries where protest is a life-threatening act. But it does require action.
Work to re-create a level playing field in politics -- work to ensure that every candidate gets public funding if they agree to give up private funding, work to make the public's airwaves free for political advertisers, so that media companies are forced to share the air as a condition of licensing, and work to prevent unlimited expenditures and their corrupting effect on our political system.
Slashdot libertarians might want to think a bit, and compare the statements of people like Ralph Nader over the past forty years with the statements made by those who have won office.
I think you're right that auditing is a non-solution. But that only means that the counts must be easily verifiable by average persons, when motivated. The trick is to provide a solution where the average motivated person has access to enough information -- correct information -- to confirm things for themselves. The glories of redundancy will then take over, because there will often be people who are inclined to check.
As long as the signed ballot images can be confirmed to match the ballots -- and that should be a task for multiple observers at the close of a polling place -- the ballot images will enable multiple parties to come up with vote counts (and the specification of how those vote counts were arrived at.)
I only wish you were right that my previous comment was group-think. It's not. The group think is that because we bank at ATMs, we can use computers and the internet for voting. You're right that such ideas are based on the trust of the familiar. That's not good enough for voting.
And that's why, in addition to hand counting of the ballots at the precinct, there ought to be (at least) a digital image backup enabling complete redundant counting off the images.
The best approach would be to generate the image collection, on unchangeable media, at the precinct at the close of polls. This should probably be generated from an independent scanning station, so that the ballots can be shuffled prior to scanning. This copy should be created at the precinct, because that is where workers can check the permanent copy against the ballots themselves. Read about the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, which has taken baby steps towards this destination.
This is a naturally distributed problem -- it would be easy for poll workers to do a 100% hand check of a permanent record of 500 images, though it might be hard to do this for a stack of 50,000 images once the ballots have been collected to a single point.
The remaining question becomes "how do I know that the digitally signed collection I receive matches that which was generated at the precinct on election night?" That, unfortunately, continues to depend on key management, as far as I can tell.
I hope all of the people thinking it would be very cool and convenient to vote via smart phones (or the internet, or the telephone, or the mail system) will notice that smart phones might not yet be perfect.
Voting is a classic example of a situation where the requirements cry out for appropriate technology.
The requirements are unique: you must not be able to prove how you voted, you must not be able to sell your vote or be coerced by anyone, you should be able to have complete confidence that your vote was counted properly along with everyone else's.
The technology that is required is completely straightforward -- people have to go to protected locations, create physically countable and non-traceable artifacts that represent their uncoerced opinions, deposit these artifacts into a locked box at the location, and know that the contents of the locked box are properly reflected in the results.
The best way to accomplish the last step is to count the contents in public before the contents are moved, and to generate and digitally sign images of the artifacts so that anyone who wants to confirm your count is an accurate representation of the contents is able to do that.
All attempts to modernize voting for convenience's sake are misguided. All opinions that making a simple approach more complex to speed up the distribution of results are misguided. Something that is convenient but cannot be checked is not appropriate for voting. And any time a computer scientist tells you how secure something is, introduce them to real people and the way they protect their passwords.
Yes, the DOE loan is for the Delaware plant. This fact is well-known: http://www.examiner.com/electric-car-in-national/fisker-automotive-grabs-529-million-from-the-doe
And that omission, soulskill, is either incompetent or dishonest.
OK, this is all wonderful stuff, I suppose. But surely I'm not the only person who is taken aback by reading the article only to find such titles as "the Media Lab’s Sony Corporation Career Development Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences."
I still haven't got used to stadiums being named after corporations; it's a bit of a shock to see that assistant professors are now so named. Do they have to wear decals?
Give me a rep-rap over a corporation any day.
Hook this up to a robot and use the generated power to power the robot. Name the robot Perpetua.
I think an always-on, human-sized internet video connection between a refugee camp and one or more "Western" schools or public locations would be of dramatic help in humanizing the refugee crises of Africa. I'd love to see the Times Square jumbotron showing a refugee camp instead of an advertisement.
Or perhaps you've been lulled into blissful slumber by a cost-plus contract, and are interested in straw-man arguments about NASA? There are lots of uses, even military uses, for a product like this where you don't need to worry about a high-rad field. How many lives could be saved if the portion of the military budget that pays for "military-grade" lobbying and products were diverted, say, to American fire and police departments? How many lives could be saved if it were diverted to food distribution and famine relief?