This seems pretty high-profile and has piqued my interest; anyone have a link (ideally translated) to the "Political Satire" that was good enough to land this young woman in prison for a year?
I believe the inventive concepts here are using mesh, instead of conventional, networks, and having many, many dumb sensors relay information to a smart server (this is done some, but not in the diversity of environments which this inquiry explores).
These things have not really been comprehensively explored before.
Heck, we're still waiting for cell phone / WiFi mesh networks, and this is much more aggressive than that.
I hope large amounts of radiation/activity in whatever spectrum these networks will use for cross-node and network-to-server communication won't adversely affect things around it. My gut tells me it probably, unfortunately will.
I believe they used the linux platform as well to orchestrate the battles; in the massive melees they set up a bunch of orc and human models, defined their movement, gave them scripts and defined their objective as 'stay alive, and kill those not of your type', gave them scripts pointing to these objectives, and just *let them do their thing*.
Much of the battle at Helmsdeep, for instance, is AI program vs AI program. Awesome.
*of course, the first time they tried it, the humans broke ranks and just ran away from the orcs. What does that say?
If we take a look at DDOS attacks, we see that any computer or network connected to insecure hosts can be made a target of a massive DDOS; they don't have to be vulnerable to any exploit to be hit.
Fast forward to cell phones and viruses; if an infectious DDOS sleeper trojan that targets cell phones appears, *Anything* which interoperates with the cell phone network can be hit. The article mentions 911 / 110 numbers, but it could be other cell phones, landlines, even sattelites.
I'd hate to see a directed, intentional overload could cause a sattelite to malfunction, but it could happen.
In general for DDOS, it doesn't matter if you have a phone which can't pick up viruses if your neighbor does.
Sorry about the tone of my first response. Itchy trigger finger today I guess, possibly on both of us.
I think we're on the same page as far as the nature of economics, and you bring up some good points along those lines. Perhaps where we disagree is in how drastic the change is in how copyrighted works are viewed and being handled (and what that means), if China's ongoing changes are only economic growth or if some sort of fundamental change in their economy is going on as well, and what the best model for ideas / copyrighted works is.
Where I'm coming from: I'd assert that many formal, systemic methods of modeling (how I personally see economics- sort of 'rigid', though as you say that's probably just how I've been introduced to it) lose relevence during times of fundamental, systemic change.
Where I'm coming from as far as 'copyrighted works aren't necessarilly property' is that there are many ways to view copyrighted works. One way is the approach most of the Western governments have seemingly taken, that ideas=property. I'd say that, though that's a valid approach, it may not be the best, as ideas are non-material, non-intrinsically-scarce items; in fact, they don't have much in common at all with what's conventionally deemed 'property' and perhaps the approach of, for instance, Richard Dawkins and his 'memes' might be a more meaningful, predictive, and non-oppressive way to look at ideas (I'm not pointing the 'oppression' finger at you or Economics in general, but rather at some of the economic models most Western governments have chosen to impliment).
1. "Economic theory is very happy with property rights... property in the abstract including IP, your house, the local park or the outback."
You missed my point, friend. I'm saying that the existence of non-material, non-intrinsically-scarce, copyrighted works challenges the very idea of property.
2. "This is the same 'Western Economic theory' that came up with Marxism (err, Marx was the economist in question) which led to consumism [I believe you meant communism- RD] etc... and that China in its communist heydey, the USSR etc employed orthodox economic theory just as the FED or EU does today."
Perhaps my point is that Classical Economics, as the above poster appeared to be using, has difficulty during periods of transition- doubly applicable to China, as both China itself and the items we're talking about, copyrighted works, are undergoing significant change. If this was a long-established, unchanging-in-nature market item in an economy and system not undergoing rapid evolutionary change, I'd give you your point. As is, I withhold it.
I appreciated your comment on the nature of economics. For your first and last snide comments, however, STFU Troll.
I'd assert that the burden of proof is on your side, in this instance;
Is Communist China, with its unique culture, worldviews, government propaganda, (mostly) friendly rivalry and distance from the West, similar enough to the USA (or insert your own Western country here) that we can blindly use Western norms to critique actions done in a Chinese cultural context?
I doubt it.
Before asserting that my logic is fallacious please confirm that it is.
"No, lower prices do come from rampant copyright-infringement, RTFU",
It seems you're trying to apply canned economic theory to this situation. Is that a good idea? I'd assert that:
1. What people call 'intellectual property' breaks canned or conventional economic theory, and that 2. China, in particular, is hardly the playground of Western Economic Theory.
While I agree with what most folks are saying about the security researcher not following proper exploit discovery etiquette, keep in mind (and this is not flamebait),
He *is* from China, the country who is so frustrated by Microsoft that it's making its own, full-scale flavor of Linux. The country who may see most of the Western, MS-using world as a competitor. A country so big yet secretive that security practices may be subtly different over there.
Disappointed? Sure, you can be disappointed in how this went down. Though it may be an apple judging an orange.
Surprised? I don't think you have the right to be surprised.
There's a large difference between "Windows is insecure by design" and "Windows was not designed to be secure or with security in mind" just as there's a significant difference between saying "Impalas are deathtraps by design" and "Impalas were not designed with safety in mind".
That said, and though the Post's article was a little muddled in general I agree with the spirit of the article in that 1). It's reprehensible that Microsoft apparently didn't have security (a broad term, but the literature to define it is out there) as a guiding design principle when they designed Windows, and 2) As a result of this, Items central to the functioning of Windows do not lend themselves to good security.
Interesting answers- these guys seem like they've thought out a great deal of these issues.
However, did anyone else notice they still use words such as 'piracy' and 'intellectual property' instead of more conceptually correct words such as copyright infringement or copyrighted work?
I have to think that unfortunately this office is still largely a tool for and of the copyright mafia, if these are the terms they think in.
So, I was a little distressed that Woz, the archetype of the computer good guy, invented a way to track things- shadows of the 'digital angel' system, et cetera.
But this is local tracking, not global tracking, and that makes all the difference. It doesn't lend itself to big databases, cross-correlation, et cetera, and all the big evil things which are made possible with global tracking; it just helps you keep track of your own stuff.
I would respond, however, that "[There is] injustice... You can't however, take what isn't yours" Misses the fact that ownership is a social construction, and perhaps p2p file sharing is reconstructing the ownership of music and culture into a more communal nature, just as it was reconstructed in the beginning and middle of the century to be very private and corporate*.
In short, I do think people are 'taking what isn't theirs'; yet I also think that the large-scale phenomenon of p2p and people 'taking what isn't theirs' is redefining what is theirs.
I'd add that it's for the good as well in that, though it's not a perfect solution in that it might hinder artists' ability to make a living on their work, it prevents an equally bad malaise spread by top-down, corporate surface culture production overly concerned with profit, control, and legal remedies for economic/business model problems.
Some see file sharing as evil; some see it as good; I see it as a tradeoff that I'm satisfied with given the current state of things and the alternatives.
Mike
*We certainly haven't viewed copyright the way we view it now; the constitution, for instance, states: Article I, Section 8. The Congress shall have power... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
In others words, to quote a previous slashdot poster,
"Something you have copyright on isn't yours. It's something you have been granted a temporary monopoly on the commercial exploitation on as an incentive from the government for commercial support to advance science, art and culture and to foster innovation."
Nowhere is there a right to profit from one's inventions.
Now, with the way our current economy is set up, one may choose to throw out the constitution's take on copyright, but I would say that 1. Throwing out the constitution and the ideals contained within may be dangerous, and 2. We could have a perfectly fine modern economy without these crazy copyright laws- things work out in unexpected ways and society adapts.
I was happy that Gray covered SETI@Home as I think the nature of SETI is akin to where certain aspects of distributed computing may go in the future. However, I argue that he left some some key parts of SETI economics at the door; most notably, data integrity and security. As I understand it, *over half* of SETI's processing power, bandwidth, and so forth is used to verify data integrity as it's using untrusted hosts to do it's calculations.
This doesn't make SETI a poor supercomputer, but it does change the economics of it. An economic model of computing resources which accounts for work done by untrusted hosts as involving different overhead as that done by trusted hosts would be a much more useful metric to think in terms of.
If a legal structure such as copyright isn't enforceable, it might as well not be part of our legal system, and indeed will be thrown out.
I think often people too often focus on law and morality in a vacuum and forget that, to a large degree, *might makes right* in our society. To some degree our legal system attempts to fairly distribute power in society (often with 'fairly' defined by those who already have power), but it operates under fairly tight constraints on what sort of distribution of power is enforceable. Freenet is huge for the long-term prospects of copyright laws; if Freenet survives they will be forced to radically change in the upcoming years.
This story is interesting but I think it's a little vague; it would be much better to ask what *kind* of internet is a basic human right (i.e. democratic, decentralized, or centralized, top-down, corporate, or other models). The Estonians seem to be answering this question correctly but it's hardly something that an article like this should gloss over.
Could you, or someone familiar with the characteristics of high frequency waves, detail any downsides of using the 5Ghz band?
As I understand it, it'll have shorter range and/or less forgiving of objects in the way (less able to difract around corners as well). Fairly key in home networking!
Slashdot Mirror
Number portability has made me pay silly monthly fees for a service I do not need.
This is me angry at America's cell phone company culture -> RAWWRR!!!..Ow! Why are you wringing me like a wet towel?
I'm a person, not a revenue source!
RD
This seems pretty high-profile and has piqued my interest; anyone have a link (ideally translated) to the "Political Satire" that was good enough to land this young woman in prison for a year?
RD
I believe the inventive concepts here are using mesh, instead of conventional, networks, and having many, many dumb sensors relay information to a smart server (this is done some, but not in the diversity of environments which this inquiry explores).
These things have not really been comprehensively explored before.
Heck, we're still waiting for cell phone / WiFi mesh networks, and this is much more aggressive than that.
RD
This is a really cool idea.
I hope large amounts of radiation/activity in whatever spectrum these networks will use for cross-node and network-to-server communication won't adversely affect things around it. My gut tells me it probably, unfortunately will.
RD
"... Frodo, the free Commodore 64 Emulator for your Palm Pilot"
Lends a new meaning to 'What hass it gots in its pocketses??'
RD
I hope the state of Maine also doubled the size of their Information Security department, as this will be a prime target for malicious hackers.
Don't like someone? Just add them to the database and get the word out. They're ruined. This is new, uncharted, and dangerous territory, Maine.
RD
I believe they used the linux platform as well to orchestrate the battles; in the massive melees they set up a bunch of orc and human models, defined their movement, gave them scripts and defined their objective as 'stay alive, and kill those not of your type', gave them scripts pointing to these objectives, and just *let them do their thing*.
Much of the battle at Helmsdeep, for instance, is AI program vs AI program. Awesome.
*of course, the first time they tried it, the humans broke ranks and just ran away from the orcs. What does that say?
RD
If we take a look at DDOS attacks, we see that any computer or network connected to insecure hosts can be made a target of a massive DDOS; they don't have to be vulnerable to any exploit to be hit.
Fast forward to cell phones and viruses; if an infectious DDOS sleeper trojan that targets cell phones appears, *Anything* which interoperates with the cell phone network can be hit. The article mentions 911 / 110 numbers, but it could be other cell phones, landlines, even sattelites.
I'd hate to see a directed, intentional overload could cause a sattelite to malfunction, but it could happen.
In general for DDOS, it doesn't matter if you have a phone which can't pick up viruses if your neighbor does.
RD
They have done so. It's $32 per device. RD
Hey,
Sorry about the tone of my first response. Itchy trigger finger today I guess, possibly on both of us.
I think we're on the same page as far as the nature of economics, and you bring up some good points along those lines. Perhaps where we disagree is in how drastic the change is in how copyrighted works are viewed and being handled (and what that means), if China's ongoing changes are only economic growth or if some sort of fundamental change in their economy is going on as well, and what the best model for ideas / copyrighted works is.
Where I'm coming from:
I'd assert that many formal, systemic methods of modeling (how I personally see economics- sort of 'rigid', though as you say that's probably just how I've been introduced to it) lose relevence during times of fundamental, systemic change.
Where I'm coming from as far as 'copyrighted works aren't necessarilly property' is that there are many ways to view copyrighted works. One way is the approach most of the Western governments have seemingly taken, that ideas=property. I'd say that, though that's a valid approach, it may not be the best, as ideas are non-material, non-intrinsically-scarce items; in fact, they don't have much in common at all with what's conventionally deemed 'property' and perhaps the approach of, for instance, Richard Dawkins and his 'memes' might be a more meaningful, predictive, and non-oppressive way to look at ideas (I'm not pointing the 'oppression' finger at you or Economics in general, but rather at some of the economic models most Western governments have chosen to impliment).
Respectfully,
Raindance
To respond to each of your attacks,
1. "Economic theory is very happy with property rights... property in the abstract including IP, your house, the local park or the outback."
You missed my point, friend. I'm saying that the existence of non-material, non-intrinsically-scarce, copyrighted works challenges the very idea of property.
2. "This is the same 'Western Economic theory' that came up with Marxism (err, Marx was the economist in question) which led to consumism [I believe you meant communism- RD] etc... and that China in its communist heydey, the USSR etc employed orthodox economic theory just as the FED or EU does today."
Perhaps my point is that Classical Economics, as the above poster appeared to be using, has difficulty during periods of transition- doubly applicable to China, as both China itself and the items we're talking about, copyrighted works, are undergoing significant change. If this was a long-established, unchanging-in-nature market item in an economy and system not undergoing rapid evolutionary change, I'd give you your point. As is, I withhold it.
I appreciated your comment on the nature of economics. For your first and last snide comments, however, STFU Troll.
RD
Just think of what spooky things those virus writers could do with this thing!
RD
I'd assert that the burden of proof is on your side, in this instance;
Is Communist China, with its unique culture, worldviews, government propaganda, (mostly) friendly rivalry and distance from the West, similar enough to the USA (or insert your own Western country here) that we can blindly use Western norms to critique actions done in a Chinese cultural context?
I doubt it.
Before asserting that my logic is fallacious please confirm that it is.
Other than the obvious answer,
"No, lower prices do come from rampant copyright-infringement, RTFU",
It seems you're trying to apply canned economic theory to this situation. Is that a good idea? I'd assert that:
1. What people call 'intellectual property' breaks canned or conventional economic theory, and that
2. China, in particular, is hardly the playground of Western Economic Theory.
RD
While I agree with what most folks are saying about the security researcher not following proper exploit discovery etiquette, keep in mind (and this is not flamebait),
He *is* from China, the country who is so frustrated by Microsoft that it's making its own, full-scale flavor of Linux. The country who may see most of the Western, MS-using world as a competitor. A country so big yet secretive that security practices may be subtly different over there.
Disappointed? Sure, you can be disappointed in how this went down. Though it may be an apple judging an orange.
Surprised? I don't think you have the right to be surprised.
RD
There's a large difference between "Windows is insecure by design" and "Windows was not designed to be secure or with security in mind" just as there's a significant difference between saying "Impalas are deathtraps by design" and "Impalas were not designed with safety in mind".
That said, and though the Post's article was a little muddled in general I agree with the spirit of the article in that
1). It's reprehensible that Microsoft apparently didn't have security (a broad term, but the literature to define it is out there) as a guiding design principle when they designed Windows, and
2) As a result of this, Items central to the functioning of Windows do not lend themselves to good security.
Interesting answers- these guys seem like they've thought out a great deal of these issues.
However, did anyone else notice they still use words such as 'piracy' and 'intellectual property' instead of more conceptually correct words such as copyright infringement or copyrighted work?
I have to think that unfortunately this office is still largely a tool for and of the copyright mafia, if these are the terms they think in.
So, I was a little distressed that Woz, the archetype of the computer good guy, invented a way to track things- shadows of the 'digital angel' system, et cetera.
But this is local tracking, not global tracking, and that makes all the difference. It doesn't lend itself to big databases, cross-correlation, et cetera, and all the big evil things which are made possible with global tracking; it just helps you keep track of your own stuff.
Very cool Woz.
Good point.
... You can't however, take what isn't yours"
... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
I would respond, however, that
"[There is] injustice
Misses the fact that ownership is a social construction, and perhaps p2p file sharing is reconstructing the ownership of music and culture into a more communal nature, just as it was reconstructed in the beginning and middle of the century to be very private and corporate*.
In short, I do think people are 'taking what isn't theirs'; yet I also think that the large-scale phenomenon of p2p and people 'taking what isn't theirs' is redefining what is theirs.
I'd add that it's for the good as well in that, though it's not a perfect solution in that it might hinder artists' ability to make a living on their work, it prevents an equally bad malaise spread by top-down, corporate surface culture production overly concerned with profit, control, and legal remedies for economic/business model problems.
Some see file sharing as evil; some see it as good; I see it as a tradeoff that I'm satisfied with given the current state of things and the alternatives.
Mike
*We certainly haven't viewed copyright the way we view it now; the constitution, for instance, states:
Article I, Section 8. The Congress shall have power
In others words, to quote a previous slashdot poster,
"Something you have copyright on isn't yours. It's something you have been granted a temporary monopoly on the commercial exploitation on as an incentive from the government for commercial support to advance science, art and culture and to foster innovation."
Nowhere is there a right to profit from one's inventions.
Now, with the way our current economy is set up, one may choose to throw out the constitution's take on copyright, but I would say that 1. Throwing out the constitution and the ideals contained within may be dangerous, and 2. We could have a perfectly fine modern economy without these crazy copyright laws- things work out in unexpected ways and society adapts.
I was happy that Gray covered SETI@Home as I think the nature of SETI is akin to where certain aspects of distributed computing may go in the future. However, I argue that he left some some key parts of SETI economics at the door; most notably, data integrity and security. As I understand it, *over half* of SETI's processing power, bandwidth, and so forth is used to verify data integrity as it's using untrusted hosts to do it's calculations.
This doesn't make SETI a poor supercomputer, but it does change the economics of it. An economic model of computing resources which accounts for work done by untrusted hosts as involving different overhead as that done by trusted hosts would be a much more useful metric to think in terms of.
If a legal structure such as copyright isn't enforceable, it might as well not be part of our legal system, and indeed will be thrown out.
I think often people too often focus on law and morality in a vacuum and forget that, to a large degree, *might makes right* in our society. To some degree our legal system attempts to fairly distribute power in society (often with 'fairly' defined by those who already have power), but it operates under fairly tight constraints on what sort of distribution of power is enforceable. Freenet is huge for the long-term prospects of copyright laws; if Freenet survives they will be forced to radically change in the upcoming years.
This story is interesting but I think it's a little vague; it would be much better to ask what *kind* of internet is a basic human right (i.e. democratic, decentralized, or centralized, top-down, corporate, or other models). The Estonians seem to be answering this question correctly but it's hardly something that an article like this should gloss over.
After all... Winter is coming
Could you, or someone familiar with the characteristics of high frequency waves, detail any downsides of using the 5Ghz band?
As I understand it, it'll have shorter range and/or less forgiving of objects in the way (less able to difract around corners as well). Fairly key in home networking!
People are taking this so negatively; just revel in the fact that champaign is so cheap!