But I seriously doubt that governments around the world, including the US, were going to continue to allow such a widely used piece of software circumvent existing law enforcement capabilities.
Skype has been wire tap-able by national agencies for a long time. You don't see the government bemoaning their in-ability to break skype encryption do you? The reason they aren't bitching about this is because they already broke the encryption (and blamed it on the Chinese) years ago.
You can design your encryption such that it does not compress well (or at all), and force the codec to pass it pretty much uncompressed. Codecs do that anyway with bits of speech that don't compress wells. In round bald generalizations, consonant sounds don't compress much compared to vowel sounds, etc.
So worse case, by breaking the speech up into chirps and clicks you chew up more bandwidth.
Not saying MS couldn't detect and block such attempts, but to do so they would have to come right out and outlaw client side encryption on their network rather sneaking around inserting recording agents in the path.
The problem with audio stream encryption is that it will be before the compression codec.
Why wouldn't it be possible to encrypt AFTER the codec. Bits is bits, No?
Also CB radio by law was never authorized to send encrypted messages. It was always illegal just as it is illegal for ham radio operators to use encryption. Manufacturing something that has as its only use a function that violates the law is bound to be unprofitable if not outright illegal.
True, as one of the parties you have the right to record (in most jurisdictions), but the patent wasn't about client side recording.
This isn't about the availability of user-side recording, which I believe is already in Skype clients.
TFA says:
The patent does not mention an eavesdropping module that is integrated into the client software. However, it describes recording agents that can be placed in a multitude of devices, including routers. There is also the note of a recording agent software that represents “a software module that logically and/or physically sits between the call server and the network.” According to Microsoft, the agent will have access “to each communication sent to and from the call server,” which clearly refers to the general infrastructure of a VoIP service and network.
So two levels of intercept are explained here, one that might live an a router (potentially any router in the path) and the second runs on the server. Since the server in skype could be any one of the supernodes Microsoft can start silently record any calls to or from any party instantly upon presentation of a warrant. (To cast them in the least evil light).
The much hyped end to end encryption of skype is thereby gutted. (It had already been cracked years ago according to some reports).
Plus you are a liar. After a few months paralyzed in a bed with someone else having to feed you and wipe your ass everyday you would jump at the first doctor that offered a small device to allow you to walk once again.
Go ahead and convince us that you'd lie there for years till you died just to "protect your body".
Paralyzed people who's muscles can be controlled to a functional state, would be nice. Perhaps a suit that would enable people to walk. Dunno.
Yeah, its too bad all the 7th graders here decided to trash Sony rather than see the value of this for all the paralyzed people in the world. Even worse are the fully functioning people who insist that if it came to pass that they were paralyzed they would remain so rather than strap on a device that allows them to once again control their own limbs. Such big talk from someone who has never rolled a day in a wheelchair.
Concrete is perhaps the most striking example, used extensively until the fall of Rome, lost to time, and only (independently) rediscovered in the 18th century, and which is again, a fundamental building block of nearly all modern buildings, and very, very extensively used.
I'm sorry, but you have totally misstated the history of cement. It was not lost to time upon the fall of Rome, and continued to be used in Europe, China, India, from medieval times right up to modern times.
The only thing that happened in the 18th century was someone wrote down a formula, but that formula was well known by the building trades throughout medieval times and in continuous use in various places in the world. Further the trend to poor grades of cement began DURING Roman times, not after.
I refer you to Lea's Chemistry of Cement and Concrete By Peter Hewlett.
There is an unfortunate tendency to believe any technology tried and abandoned centuries ago represents a lost art, knowledge of the ancients, somehow lost to modern man due to the collapse of a particular society. When in fact those technologies were never cost effective even when they were in use, and required the enslavement of huge numbers of people. Surviving examples such as the Pyramids, the Colosseum, are pointed to as examples of every day miracles of the ancients, when in fact much of roman architecture simply fell down due to bad mortar and was incorporate into other buildings, or used as rubble fill.
How did the survive long enough to build wooden structures to tell what seasons to sow?
Look, (puts on Gieco hat), its not hard to know when to plant. Snow melts. Ground gets warm enough to dig in with bare hands. Wild plants start growing all by themselves. Even a Cave Man could do it.
The very earth under your feet tells you when its time to sow. Nobody needs an observatory.
Societies and governments have collapsed, but civilization persisted, machines still ran, farmers still planted, and clock makers still made clocks. Nothing was un-invented. Various disasters made small localities uninhabitable, often with loss of life, but people moved on, their education (such as it was) and capabilities intact, and civilization always survived. At no time did mankind say you know what, this isn't working, lets all go back to caves and rocks, and rules of behavior, and to hell with this whole mess.
The right to free speech precludes you being charged a fee every time you climb up on a soap box or stand on the street corner waving your "the end is near" sign. Nobody is obligated to provide you with the soap box or the sign but you still can shout your message even without the tools.
But since you can't get on the internet EVEN if you do have the tools unless you pay someone else (carrier or ISP), it can never be a RIGHT, unless someone supplies the network for free, or as a tax supported facility like sidewalks.
So not the same thing at all as the right to arms. Anything that requires the participation of another party or the access to that other party's property or labor can ever be a right. (At least not since the Thirteenth Amendment).
The United Nations has proposed to make Internet access a human right.
That's as far as I got before I rolled my eyes. Is the UN paying for it? It seems the people who call for things like internet access to be a basic human "right" are A) unable to pay for it themselves and want someone else to, or B) people who advocate for those previously mentioned, but also expect someone else to pay for it.
My kingdom for a mod point!
Further, there is inherent in this declaration of the Right to Internet Access the assumed obligation of someone to build that internet. Its not just a matter of someone having the RIGHT to BUY internet access. After all, a RIGHT (to free speech) is not something you have to pay for each time you open your mouth. Poll taxes were declared illegal, in part because they interfered with the RIGHT to vote.
So its a small step from the Right to internet access to mandating a government provided internet, computers, etc.
I would submit that your substitution of your causes is no more valid than the GP's.
After all, if drilling persists in other areas of PA, but not in Pittsburgh itself, then the GPs attribution of causes is at least as valid as your own.
Boinc is merely a recent example in a long line of examples of computational networks serving what in the long run are problems not worth solving unless the cost of doing so approaches zero.
Now if Facebook somehow snuck such a computational client onto every visitors computer then it might actually serve a real purpose other than as a sop to the ego of lonely desperate people.
The whole thing has a post-apocalyptic mysticism about it.
Why would anyone suspect that it has to last a long time before anyone would be able to repair it? Were you expecting the end of all human civilization and the rebirth there-of in the next 10 thousand years?
Seriously, all of this nonsense about huge construction projects in ancient times JUST to tell them when to sow is utter nonsense that even the most casual observer knows is demonstrably not true, yet is it mumbled authoritatively by archaeologists as if it were the pinnacle of knowledge.
How did there come to be enough people to build such a project if they did not already have a clear understanding of the seasons and were not already good judges of when to plant?
People who lived off the land for thousands of years knew the seasons. They didn't need huge monuments to tell them when to sow. If they did, they would be dead of starvation long before they built them.
These things were built for religious or political purposes, by a population which was ALREADY SO SUCCESSFUL at farming that they had a great deal of time on their hands waiting for crops to mature, or the next season to arrive, and plenty to eat.
it's made to be maintainable with Bronze Age tech and its purpose and workings are to be as clear as possible to allow even a primitive civilization to take a look at it and figure out what goes where, and what does what.
Bronze Age tech? I don't think so. Have you even looked at all the stainless steal in it?
The most likely fate will be that it will be melted down after the last tourist loses interest.
I'm just glad the Long Now Foundation is getting some publicity! Too many people in the industry have a hard time thinking past the next couple of years. 10k years may seem like a lot when you're dealing with human history, but in other fields (astronomy, geology, archeology), it's an eyeblink.
Astronomy, geology, and archaeology deal with things created in the long past, most of which were not created by people, and those that were human creations served their purpose in their own time. (Someone is sure to mention the Pyramids, which were supposed to protect their dead inhabitants for an unspecified long time, but which were mostly looted often within living memory of the death).
Will future generations even want a 10k year clock? Other than a curiosity, do the Jaipur Sundials serve any purpose? In spite of their size, their accuracy is limited to about two seconds. They were obsolete before they were completed.
Would not a similar fate befall a 10k year clock? Would it not become a quaint, but useless curiosity, inaccurate enough to be useless in short order?
Building something that is obsolete before its even started, won't be maintained, is not even close to state of the art, but is expected to last 10000 years is mostly an exercise in grandiosity. "We thought this was cool, and it would make us cool, and we built it, so now all you wipper-snappers have to maintain it for centuries in our honor."
Actually, I suspect lots of these are snuck into the manuals by tech support staff as jokes.
True some probably did happen, and they couldn't resist putting them in there.
Not all are dumb, suggesting the author's experience from the actual field work, such as:
Seen on materials for a Sony Vaio computer: "Warning! Disconnect telephone lines before opening!"
There is 100 volts pulsed DC on a telephone ring signal, and if you are pawing around inside your computer connected to a dial up modem when someone calls you it can lead to expletives and the possibility that your co-workers will spill hot coffee while laughing at your dance.
Like 2 weeks was enough to cause the massive problems Sony had. Hah.
Two weeks was plenty of time if some of these people participated, or simply supplied account names and passwords to people already well versed in hacking sites and leaving no tracks.
The massive problems were caused by Sony taking the systems off line to secure them. The hackers themselves probably didn't do much damage at all.
Higher ups saw something early? Nah. Its not in the nature of higher ups to know the details of the work their underlings do in this pointy-haired world.
I suspect it is what it looks like, and even if the sacked workers were not directly involved there was probably some private communication on some back channel.
My most generous evaluation upon hearing this was that those who were supposed to be watching the logs and responding to alarms were gone, which makes it Sony's fault. My most pessimistic evaluation is they pissed off their staff and paid the price.
In the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional tense, yes it would, but in the present tense (on-book haventa forewhen presooning returningwenta retrohome) its a toss up.
Slashdot Mirror
But I seriously doubt that governments around the world, including the US, were going to continue to allow such a widely used piece of software circumvent existing law enforcement capabilities.
Skype has been wire tap-able by national agencies for a long time. You don't see the government bemoaning their in-ability to break skype encryption do you? The reason they aren't bitching about this is because they already broke the encryption (and blamed it on the Chinese) years ago.
You can design your encryption such that it does not compress well (or at all), and force the codec to pass it pretty much uncompressed. Codecs do that anyway with bits of speech that don't compress wells. In round bald generalizations, consonant sounds don't compress much compared to vowel sounds, etc.
So worse case, by breaking the speech up into chirps and clicks you chew up more bandwidth.
Not saying MS couldn't detect and block such attempts, but to do so they would have to come right out and outlaw client side encryption on their network rather sneaking around inserting recording agents in the path.
So what?
Also scrambled voice is still close enough to voice to pass thru the codec and be usable and unscrambleable.
The problem with audio stream encryption is that it will be before the compression codec.
Why wouldn't it be possible to encrypt AFTER the codec. Bits is bits, No?
Also CB radio by law was never authorized to send encrypted messages. It was always illegal just as it is illegal for ham radio operators to use encryption. Manufacturing something that has as its only use a function that violates the law is bound to be unprofitable if not outright illegal.
True, as one of the parties you have the right to record (in most jurisdictions), but the patent wasn't about client side recording.
This isn't about the availability of user-side recording, which I believe is already in Skype clients.
TFA says:
The patent does not mention an eavesdropping module that is integrated into the client software. However, it describes recording agents that can be placed in a multitude of devices, including routers. There is also the note of a recording agent software that represents “a software module that logically and/or physically sits between the call server and the network.” According to Microsoft, the agent will have access “to each communication sent to and from the call server,” which clearly refers to the general infrastructure of a VoIP service and network.
So two levels of intercept are explained here, one that might live an a router (potentially any router in the path) and the second runs on the server. Since the server in skype could be any one of the supernodes Microsoft can start silently record any calls to or from any party instantly upon presentation of a warrant. (To cast them in the least evil light).
The much hyped end to end encryption of skype is thereby gutted. (It had already been cracked years ago according to some reports).
You sir, are an idiot.
Plus you are a liar. After a few months paralyzed in a bed with someone else having to feed you and wipe your ass everyday you would jump at the first doctor that offered a small device to allow you to walk once again.
Go ahead and convince us that you'd lie there for years till you died just to "protect your body".
Paralyzed people who's muscles can be controlled to a functional state, would be nice.
Perhaps a suit that would enable people to walk. Dunno.
Yeah, its too bad all the 7th graders here decided to trash Sony rather than see the value of this for all the paralyzed people in the world. Even worse are the fully functioning people who insist that if it came to pass that they were paralyzed they would remain so rather than strap on a device that allows them to once again control their own limbs. Such big talk from someone who has never rolled a day in a wheelchair.
Concrete is perhaps the most striking example, used extensively until the fall of Rome, lost to time, and only (independently) rediscovered in the 18th century, and which is again, a fundamental building block of nearly all modern buildings, and very, very extensively used.
I'm sorry, but you have totally misstated the history of cement. It was not lost to time upon the fall of Rome, and continued to be used in Europe, China, India, from medieval times right up to modern times.
The only thing that happened in the 18th century was someone wrote down a formula, but that formula was well known by the building trades throughout medieval times and in continuous use in various places in the world. Further the trend to poor grades of cement began DURING Roman times, not after.
I refer you to Lea's Chemistry of Cement and Concrete By Peter Hewlett.
There is an unfortunate tendency to believe any technology tried and abandoned centuries ago represents a lost art, knowledge of the ancients, somehow lost to modern man due to the collapse of a particular society. When in fact those technologies were never cost effective even when they were in use, and required the enslavement of huge numbers of people. Surviving examples such as the Pyramids, the Colosseum, are pointed to as examples of every day miracles of the ancients, when in fact much of roman architecture simply fell down due to bad mortar and was incorporate into other buildings, or used as rubble fill.
Yeah, because we all know there won't be any metal laying around once the bombs go off.....
You've bough into the same fallacy.
How did the survive long enough to build wooden structures to tell what seasons to sow?
Look, (puts on Gieco hat), its not hard to know when to plant. Snow melts. Ground gets warm enough to dig in with bare hands. Wild plants start growing all by themselves. Even a Cave Man could do it.
The very earth under your feet tells you when its time to sow.
Nobody needs an observatory.
At no time did civilization collapse.
Societies and governments have collapsed, but civilization persisted, machines still ran, farmers still planted, and clock makers still made clocks. Nothing was un-invented. Various disasters made small localities uninhabitable, often with loss of life, but people moved on, their education (such as it was) and capabilities intact, and civilization always survived. At no time did mankind say you know what, this isn't working, lets all go back to caves and rocks, and rules of behavior, and to hell with this whole mess.
And no reason for it to survive either. There is simply no need of a musical clock in a post-apocalyptic world.
The right to free speech precludes you being charged a fee every time you climb up on a soap box or stand on the street corner waving your "the end is near" sign. Nobody is obligated to provide you with the soap box or the sign but you still can shout your message even without the tools.
But since you can't get on the internet EVEN if you do have the tools unless you pay someone else (carrier or ISP), it can never be a RIGHT, unless someone supplies the network for free, or as a tax supported facility like sidewalks.
So not the same thing at all as the right to arms. Anything that requires the participation of another party or the access to that other party's property or labor can ever be a right. (At least not since the Thirteenth Amendment).
The United Nations has proposed to make Internet access a human right.
That's as far as I got before I rolled my eyes. Is the UN paying for it? It seems the people who call for things like internet access to be a basic human "right" are A) unable to pay for it themselves and want someone else to, or B) people who advocate for those previously mentioned, but also expect someone else to pay for it.
My kingdom for a mod point!
Further, there is inherent in this declaration of the Right to Internet Access the assumed obligation of someone to build that internet. Its not just a matter of someone having the RIGHT to BUY internet access. After all, a RIGHT (to free speech) is not something you have to pay for each time you open your mouth. Poll taxes were declared illegal, in part because they interfered with the RIGHT to vote.
So its a small step from the Right to internet access to mandating a government provided internet, computers, etc.
I would submit that your substitution of your causes is no more valid than the GP's.
After all, if drilling persists in other areas of PA, but not in Pittsburgh itself, then the GPs attribution of causes is at least as valid as your own.
Really. This is a stupid story. You might as well ask why you can't convert your car into a spaceship.
No, that would actually make sense some day.
More like converting all cars into clock just because you happen to notice lots of them show up at certain times of the day.
Boinc is merely a recent example in a long line of examples of computational networks serving what in the long run are problems not worth solving unless the cost of doing so approaches zero.
Now if Facebook somehow snuck such a computational client onto every visitors computer then it might actually serve a real purpose other than as a sop to the ego of lonely desperate people.
The whole thing has a post-apocalyptic mysticism about it.
Why would anyone suspect that it has to last a long time before anyone would be able to repair it?
Were you expecting the end of all human civilization and the rebirth there-of in the next 10 thousand years?
Someone has been watching too many movies.
Saw your fields? Oh, you mean perhaps sow....?
Seriously, all of this nonsense about huge construction projects in ancient times JUST to tell them when to sow is utter nonsense that even the most casual observer knows is demonstrably not true, yet is it mumbled authoritatively by archaeologists as if it were the pinnacle of knowledge.
How did there come to be enough people to build such a project if they did not already have a clear understanding of the seasons and were not already good judges of when to plant?
People who lived off the land for thousands of years knew the seasons. They didn't need huge monuments to tell them when to sow. If they did, they would be dead of starvation long before they built them.
These things were built for religious or political purposes, by a population which was ALREADY SO SUCCESSFUL at farming that they had a great deal of time on their hands waiting for crops to mature, or the next season to arrive, and plenty to eat.
it's made to be maintainable with Bronze Age tech and its purpose and workings are to be as clear as possible to allow even a primitive civilization to take a look at it and figure out what goes where, and what does what.
Bronze Age tech? I don't think so. Have you even looked at all the stainless steal in it?
The most likely fate will be that it will be melted down after the last tourist loses interest.
I'm just glad the Long Now Foundation is getting some publicity! Too many people in the industry have a hard time thinking past the next couple of years. 10k years may seem like a lot when you're dealing with human history, but in other fields (astronomy, geology, archeology), it's an eyeblink.
Astronomy, geology, and archaeology deal with things created in the long past, most of which were not created by people, and those that were human creations served their purpose in their own time. (Someone is sure to mention the Pyramids, which were supposed to protect their dead inhabitants for an unspecified long time, but which were mostly looted often within living memory of the death).
Will future generations even want a 10k year clock? Other than a curiosity, do the Jaipur Sundials serve any purpose? In spite of their size, their accuracy is limited to about two seconds. They were obsolete before they were completed.
Would not a similar fate befall a 10k year clock? Would it not become a quaint, but useless curiosity, inaccurate enough to be useless in short order?
Building something that is obsolete before its even started, won't be maintained, is not even close to state of the art, but is expected to last 10000 years is mostly an exercise in grandiosity. "We thought this was cool, and it would make us cool, and we built it, so now all you wipper-snappers have to maintain it for centuries in our honor."
Actually, I suspect lots of these are snuck into the manuals by tech support staff as jokes.
True some probably did happen, and they couldn't resist putting them in there.
Not all are dumb, suggesting the author's experience from the actual field work, such as:
Seen on materials for a Sony Vaio computer: "Warning! Disconnect telephone lines before opening!"
There is 100 volts pulsed DC on a telephone ring signal, and if you are pawing around inside your computer
connected to a dial up modem when someone calls you it can lead to expletives and the possibility that
your co-workers will spill hot coffee while laughing at your dance.
Like 2 weeks was enough to cause the massive problems Sony had. Hah.
Two weeks was plenty of time if some of these people participated, or simply supplied account names and passwords
to people already well versed in hacking sites and leaving no tracks.
The massive problems were caused by Sony taking the systems off line to secure them. The hackers themselves
probably didn't do much damage at all.
Higher ups saw something early? Nah.
Its not in the nature of higher ups to know the details of the work their underlings do in this pointy-haired world.
I suspect it is what it looks like, and even if the sacked workers were not directly involved there was
probably some private communication on some back channel.
My most generous evaluation upon hearing this was that those who were supposed to be watching the logs and responding to alarms were gone, which makes it Sony's fault. My most pessimistic evaluation is they pissed off their staff and paid the price.
In the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional tense, yes it would, but in the present tense (on-book haventa forewhen presooning returningwenta retrohome) its a toss up.