A private home or car is considered to be a private, exclusive area unless you explicitly know otherwise. A website is the exact opposite-it's like a storefront, or a restaurant, which a reasonable person would presume to be open to the public unless explicitly marked or set up otherwise.
All stores and restaurants have private areas -- the stock room, the kitchen, etc.-- that are *not* open to the public. If you're found in one of those employee-only areas then at best you'll be politely asked to leave -- at worst they'll call the cops. A website can be the same way, with public and private areas served up from the same domain.
And if you leave the door to your store unlocked after closing time, and I wander in, yes, that's totally acceptable, and I'm not trespassing unless I stay after you explicitly tell me to leave. Until you do, I'm making a reasonable assumption that a normally public place (a website on the public Internet, or a store) is open to the public (no access control mechanism is in place, or the front door of the store is not locked).
I am neither a lawyer nor a cop (IANALNAC?) but that fits my definition of trespassing pretty well. Most stores and restaurants are open maybe nine or ten hours a day. That means they're closed more often than they're open. The only reasonable assumption you can make is that you're not welcome unless you're obviously invited to come in.
If you check the law I think you'll find that businesses are not public spaces at all. Rather, they are private spaces into which the public is invited to enter. There are many cues we can use to determine if we are allowed in. Some of them are overt (does the sign say "Open" or "Closed"?) and some of them are subtle (are the lights on?) but nobody would deny that it's usually obvious when the invitation is being made and when it's not. The same holds true for a website. Anyone competent enough to find an unpublicized page on a website is also competent to know that they aren't welcome there. You wouldn't tolerate someone snooping behind every unlocked door in real life so why make excuses for it when it happens on the Internet?
When *I* was in high school, myself and four or five of the top students had access to the full Windows 3.1 shell interface instead of the very restrictive toy shell the other students were forced to use. No hacking was necessary -- the teacher set it up for us. We even had his admin password so we could fix problems for other students.
I think the teacher was a bit overwhelmed by the school's new-fangled Pentium computers and appreciated the help. Actually, I think between us, we students probably did most of the network administration tasks he was supposed to do. None of us abused the privilege and nobody ever got accused of hacking.
What I don't think they've fully thought out is the end-game. Possible options:
1) Google pays them. Google then starts getting invoices from every ISP around, from the little mom-and-pops to the tier-1s demanding a cut of the pie.
2) Google cuts them off so that the above doesn't happen. These ISPs customers start screaming "Why am I paying you for access to the Internet, when you aren't providing it?" and they start switching to other providers that aren't pulling this.
I don't think you've thought out what would happen if Google took option #2. If they started to selectively block certain ISPs then they would be facing a *huge* antitrust lawsuit. You can't use your dominance in one market to unfairly influence competition in another.
A better option for Google would be to start charging the customers of these ISPs. After all, isn't that what any corporation does when faced with rising costs? They pass those costs right on to the customer so it doesn't affect their bottom line. Suddenly "free access to Google" would be a real selling feature for any ISP that *doesn't* try to extract money from Google. In the end you'd have the same effect: customers would switch to ISPs that are more favorable to Google, but they'd definitely have a strong defense against any antitrust charges.
Why is the law based on what a person expects? Which person are we talking about here? I think it's fair to say that the average computer user considers e-mail to be like regular mail, where reading the contents requires that you "open" the e-mail. Heck, every e-mail program I can think of uses that metaphor! But I know that e-mail is more like a post-card, with the contents right out there in the open for anyone to see. Because of that, I don't expect a whole lot of privacy. Does that mean I deserve less protection under the law?
This shows the flaw in the idea that some information (to and from addresses, etc) is on the "outside" of the envelope while the contents are on the "inside". There is no "inside" when it comes to e-mail! Anyone who has access to the "outside" information has access to everything. What does it matter if the average user expects their e-mail to behave like regular mail when the reality is more like a postcard? Making the law fit people's perceptions seems like trying to impose some kind of schizophrenic world-view on our law-enforcement officers. They can't both read the e-mail headers and ignore the contents, that's a recipe that's just asking for abuse.
We need a reality check, people, and the solution seems painfully obvious to me: if you want privacy then use end-to-end encryption. It's the only way to be (reasonably) sure that no-one is reading your mail except for the intended recipient.
Never assume your adversary is incompetent. If they can easily find and block all IP addresses used by this program, then why would they choose not to? I can think of one possibility, and it doesn't bode well for people who are using this program under the belief that it will protect their anonymity.
We all know that monitoring *all* Internet traffic into and out of a country (especially one as populous as China) is a futile task. But suppose you could identify which fraction of those connections are specifically trying to evade government controls? Wouldn't it make sense to focus your attention on those connections? And instead of blocking them out right, why not trace them back to their source? Even if you can't decrypt the traffic, you can at least identify those "subversives" that could be in need of "reeducation". And remember that just because you choose to block those connections *right now* doesn't mean you can't start blocking them at some point in the future.
What you describe is not so much security through obscurity as simply security through not being worth the effort to crack. In some sense that's true of *every* security solution. Not every bank vault needs to be Fort Knox, not every e-mail needs to be protected by 4096 bit encryption. You match the level of security to the value of the target. So what you really have is a low-security solution protecting a low-value target, which is fine so long as you really don't value your bike (or your porn collection) very highly.
In a world without copyright, the GPL (and most other open-source licenses) would need to be turned on its head. Instead of granting permission to distribute copies (provided certain conditions are met), it would have to restrict your rights (except when certain conditions are met). What's the difference? The latter case is essentially a EULA, taking away rights you would otherwise have. This is still a very grey area in the law because it raises the question: If someone is caught distributing your work, how do you prove that they are bound by the EULA? With the current situation, anyone caught distributing your work *must* have agreed to your license, because nothing else grants them permission to make copies.
I hate the way media conglomerates are abusing copyrights too, but the solution IMHO is to strengthen the fair use provisions of copyright law and update them for the digital age. As several others have pointed out already, abolishing copyright would force authors to seek out other protections for their work. That would probably mean trade secrets which are antithetical to the whole open source concept.
Of course the king can't perform a lobotomy, but he doesn't have to. If he simply resets the chalice after each non-counter has flipped it then the counter won't register an increase in the count, but the non-counter will never flip it again. So the king has effectively decremented the count without the counter ever knowing it.
It [the GPL] needs no testing in law because in law the copyright holder can set whatever (resonable) conditions to allow his / her work to be reproduced or used.
Not exactly. Copyright law sets the conditions under which copies are allowed. Those conditions are refered to as "fair use". Making copies under other conditions is illegal under copyright law.
Copyright owners may choose to allow copies under other conditions according to some license of their choosing. There's no requirement that the license be "reasonable" You'd hope that nobody would agree to an unreasonable license, but it probably happens all the time. Some EULAs seem totally unreasonable to me yet people still use the software.
This is the essential difference between EULAs and the GPL. A EULA grants you a right you didn't have (the right to own a copy of the program) in exchange for agreeing not to exercise your rights under copyright law (no fair use, no modifications, etc.). The GPL on the other hand grants you additional rights (make and distribute copies, make modifications) on the condition that you grant those same rights to anyone who receives it from you. EULAs are fundamentally restrictive but the GPL is liberating.
The article in question is describing a one-time password, but not a one-time pad. A one-time pad must be as long as the message being encrypted.
My bank balance is three digits so I guess that means my one-time password only needs to be three letters/numbers long. That ought to be easy enough to remember.
My friends know I used to be a real die-hard trekker. I stuck with Enterprise through its first two seasons, but this last one finally drove me away. Now I only watch it if I can't find a rerun of the Simpsons -- and with 150 channels on my digital cable it's rare that Simpsons isn't on somewhere.
I really dont see what the big fuss from some politicians about going to Mars. 500 years ago sailors went to the New World (risking their lives) with really no garunteed return on investments.
Remember that Columbus was searching for a passage to India, not a new continent. The existing trade routes from Europe to India were all heavily taxed. But Columbus' trade route, if he had found one, would have allowed much cheaper access to those goods, which would have meant much higher profits for his partners.
My point is that although everybody knew there was no guarantee of success, the chance to make huge profits made the endeavour worthwhile.
That profit motive is missing from today's space program. Even Ray Bradbury only offered an abstract sense of aesthetics as a reason to go to Mars. I hate to say it, but the people who control the purse strings won't be impressed by "aesthetics". They'll want a return on their investment, even if it's not guaranteed.
I never worry about my office building/city/town getting targeted by terrorists.
As someone who works in Ottawa within a four-block radius of both the Parliament Buildings and the US Embassy, I got to say I do worry a little bit about being bombed.
Registering a domain name, whether it's with an official ICANN registrar or new.net or whoever, does not establish a trademark. You need to register it with the government to make it official.
Open source doesn't necessarily mean no charge. The Open Voting Consortium should set themselves up like Red Hat. Give the code away for free but charge for support and services. Part of the deal will be that OVC will be held accountable for the system. That should assuage any election officials and the money can be used to fund more development.
When I was a kid I had a large mural on my bedroom wall that showed the classic photo of the Earth viewed from the surface of the Moon.
I used to see all sorts of things in the rocky landscape. A lot of the things I saw looked liked gremlins to me, which featured prominently in my nightmares. Now that I look back on it, putting the mural on the wall was maybe not a good idea.
At least I had the sense to realize that it was just my imagination. I never once thought there was anything actually living on the Moon.
Your imagery is wrong. There are no dimples, except for the gravitational effect of whatever you put at the Lagrange point.
For one thing, you have to include the centripetal forces exerted on the satellite as it's orbiting. The Lagrange points are places where the centripetal forces exactly cancel the gravitational forces.
The L4 and L5 points are stable. If the satellite drifts out of position then the gravitational and centripetal forces acting on it will nudge it back into position.
But the L1, L2 and L3 points are unstable. If the satellite drifts even slightly then the gravitational and centripetal forces will not be cancelled and they will actually pull it further out of position. Even a very small force, like that exerted by the solar wind, would push it out of position given enough time. So a station at L1 would always need some kind of propulsion system to keep it positioned correctly.
While working at an employer you are learning. Can you guarantee that anything you write has not benefitted from knowledge gained while working for you current employer. So such clauses are covering this benefit.
Of course I can't guarantee that. In fact I can guarantee the exact opposite. Every program I write benefits from my previous experiences. But that does not give my employer any claim over my own ideas or my own work. The experience I gain while working on company time is my own, in exactly the same way that the money they pay me is my own.
One year I ordered several LEGO sets to give away as Christmas presents. But I was working full-time and of course I couldn't be home when the courier tried to deliver it. So when they told me they'd try one last time I asked if they could deliver it to my office instead. They said "Sure" and asked what department I was in so I told them. Boy was my boss confused when $400 worth of LEGOs came addressed to the Paradox development team at Corel.
Snail mail is private because it is contained in an envelope. You expect it to be private because nobody but the intended recipient should be opening it.
E-mail is more like a postcard. There's no envelope to hide the contents from even a casual glance so there can be no expectation of privacy. It has nothing to do with the fact that the recipient bears some of the cost of sending the message.
I tried a gobbledy-gook URL 5 minutes ago and got Verisign's search page. But I tried the same thing less than a minute ago and got IE's search page instead. Has Verisign already backed down?
I don't think softdrink companies could get away with demanding that customers only buy 24 packs at a time. No single can for you.
Imagine what would happen if you could only buy Coke in packs of 12. But each pack has only one Coke Classic and 11 Vanilla Cokes. If you like Classic then you're just going to have to learn to drink a lot of Vanilla.
That seems to be pretty close to what the music industry is doing with their albums.
I'm sorry but, I go to a movie to be entertained, not to admire the cutting edge techniques. When the effects don't work they detract from the story rather than enhance it.
I have been to action movies before and I expect the conflict to help drive the plot. But in Matrix: Revolutions the fight scenes seemed disconnected from the story. You'd think a fight between a guy with super-natural powers and 200 clones would be exciting, but frankly I was bored half-way through.
I also expect a denouement where most of the issues raised in the film are resolved. Instead, I left the movie feeling like it was time to use the bathroom and get a snack while they changed the reels. It's been a long intermission.
BTW, any good company will resecure their systems after any consultancy and scour it for software; some firms can't be trusted.
If you feel you need to bring in an outside consultant to secure the network for you then what good is checking up on them afterwards? If you aren't competent enough to secure your own network in the first place, how do you expect to find anything suspicious in the consultant's work?
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A private home or car is considered to be a private, exclusive area unless you explicitly know otherwise. A website is the exact opposite-it's like a storefront, or a restaurant, which a reasonable person would presume to be open to the public unless explicitly marked or set up otherwise.
All stores and restaurants have private areas -- the stock room, the kitchen, etc.-- that are *not* open to the public. If you're found in one of those employee-only areas then at best you'll be politely asked to leave -- at worst they'll call the cops. A website can be the same way, with public and private areas served up from the same domain.
And if you leave the door to your store unlocked after closing time, and I wander in, yes, that's totally acceptable, and I'm not trespassing unless I stay after you explicitly tell me to leave. Until you do, I'm making a reasonable assumption that a normally public place (a website on the public Internet, or a store) is open to the public (no access control mechanism is in place, or the front door of the store is not locked).
I am neither a lawyer nor a cop (IANALNAC?) but that fits my definition of trespassing pretty well. Most stores and restaurants are open maybe nine or ten hours a day. That means they're closed more often than they're open. The only reasonable assumption you can make is that you're not welcome unless you're obviously invited to come in.
If you check the law I think you'll find that businesses are not public spaces at all. Rather, they are private spaces into which the public is invited to enter. There are many cues we can use to determine if we are allowed in. Some of them are overt (does the sign say "Open" or "Closed"?) and some of them are subtle (are the lights on?) but nobody would deny that it's usually obvious when the invitation is being made and when it's not. The same holds true for a website. Anyone competent enough to find an unpublicized page on a website is also competent to know that they aren't welcome there. You wouldn't tolerate someone snooping behind every unlocked door in real life so why make excuses for it when it happens on the Internet?
When *I* was in high school, myself and four or five of the top students had access to the full Windows 3.1 shell interface instead of the very restrictive toy shell the other students were forced to use. No hacking was necessary -- the teacher set it up for us. We even had his admin password so we could fix problems for other students.
I think the teacher was a bit overwhelmed by the school's new-fangled Pentium computers and appreciated the help. Actually, I think between us, we students probably did most of the network administration tasks he was supposed to do. None of us abused the privilege and nobody ever got accused of hacking.
What I don't think they've fully thought out is the end-game. Possible options:
1) Google pays them. Google then starts getting invoices from every ISP around, from the little mom-and-pops to the tier-1s demanding a cut of the pie.
2) Google cuts them off so that the above doesn't happen. These ISPs customers start screaming "Why am I paying you for access to the Internet, when you aren't providing it?" and they start switching to other providers that aren't pulling this.
I don't think you've thought out what would happen if Google took option #2. If they started to selectively block certain ISPs then they would be facing a *huge* antitrust lawsuit. You can't use your dominance in one market to unfairly influence competition in another.
A better option for Google would be to start charging the customers of these ISPs. After all, isn't that what any corporation does when faced with rising costs? They pass those costs right on to the customer so it doesn't affect their bottom line. Suddenly "free access to Google" would be a real selling feature for any ISP that *doesn't* try to extract money from Google. In the end you'd have the same effect: customers would switch to ISPs that are more favorable to Google, but they'd definitely have a strong defense against any antitrust charges.
Why is the law based on what a person expects? Which person are we talking about here? I think it's fair to say that the average computer user considers e-mail to be like regular mail, where reading the contents requires that you "open" the e-mail. Heck, every e-mail program I can think of uses that metaphor! But I know that e-mail is more like a post-card, with the contents right out there in the open for anyone to see. Because of that, I don't expect a whole lot of privacy. Does that mean I deserve less protection under the law?
This shows the flaw in the idea that some information (to and from addresses, etc) is on the "outside" of the envelope while the contents are on the "inside". There is no "inside" when it comes to e-mail! Anyone who has access to the "outside" information has access to everything. What does it matter if the average user expects their e-mail to behave like regular mail when the reality is more like a postcard? Making the law fit people's perceptions seems like trying to impose some kind of schizophrenic world-view on our law-enforcement officers. They can't both read the e-mail headers and ignore the contents, that's a recipe that's just asking for abuse.
We need a reality check, people, and the solution seems painfully obvious to me: if you want privacy then use end-to-end encryption. It's the only way to be (reasonably) sure that no-one is reading your mail except for the intended recipient.
Never assume your adversary is incompetent. If they can easily find and block all IP addresses used by this program, then why would they choose not to? I can think of one possibility, and it doesn't bode well for people who are using this program under the belief that it will protect their anonymity. We all know that monitoring *all* Internet traffic into and out of a country (especially one as populous as China) is a futile task. But suppose you could identify which fraction of those connections are specifically trying to evade government controls? Wouldn't it make sense to focus your attention on those connections? And instead of blocking them out right, why not trace them back to their source? Even if you can't decrypt the traffic, you can at least identify those "subversives" that could be in need of "reeducation". And remember that just because you choose to block those connections *right now* doesn't mean you can't start blocking them at some point in the future.
What you describe is not so much security through obscurity as simply security through not being worth the effort to crack. In some sense that's true of *every* security solution. Not every bank vault needs to be Fort Knox, not every e-mail needs to be protected by 4096 bit encryption. You match the level of security to the value of the target. So what you really have is a low-security solution protecting a low-value target, which is fine so long as you really don't value your bike (or your porn collection) very highly.
In a world without copyright, the GPL (and most other open-source licenses) would need to be turned on its head. Instead of granting permission to distribute copies (provided certain conditions are met), it would have to restrict your rights (except when certain conditions are met). What's the difference? The latter case is essentially a EULA, taking away rights you would otherwise have. This is still a very grey area in the law because it raises the question: If someone is caught distributing your work, how do you prove that they are bound by the EULA? With the current situation, anyone caught distributing your work *must* have agreed to your license, because nothing else grants them permission to make copies. I hate the way media conglomerates are abusing copyrights too, but the solution IMHO is to strengthen the fair use provisions of copyright law and update them for the digital age. As several others have pointed out already, abolishing copyright would force authors to seek out other protections for their work. That would probably mean trade secrets which are antithetical to the whole open source concept.
Of course the king can't perform a lobotomy, but he doesn't have to. If he simply resets the chalice after each non-counter has flipped it then the counter won't register an increase in the count, but the non-counter will never flip it again. So the king has effectively decremented the count without the counter ever knowing it.
Copyright owners may choose to allow copies under other conditions according to some license of their choosing. There's no requirement that the license be "reasonable" You'd hope that nobody would agree to an unreasonable license, but it probably happens all the time. Some EULAs seem totally unreasonable to me yet people still use the software.
This is the essential difference between EULAs and the GPL. A EULA grants you a right you didn't have (the right to own a copy of the program) in exchange for agreeing not to exercise your rights under copyright law (no fair use, no modifications, etc.). The GPL on the other hand grants you additional rights (make and distribute copies, make modifications) on the condition that you grant those same rights to anyone who receives it from you. EULAs are fundamentally restrictive but the GPL is liberating.
My friends know I used to be a real die-hard trekker. I stuck with Enterprise through its first two seasons, but this last one finally drove me away. Now I only watch it if I can't find a rerun of the Simpsons -- and with 150 channels on my digital cable it's rare that Simpsons isn't on somewhere.
My point is that although everybody knew there was no guarantee of success, the chance to make huge profits made the endeavour worthwhile.
That profit motive is missing from today's space program. Even Ray Bradbury only offered an abstract sense of aesthetics as a reason to go to Mars. I hate to say it, but the people who control the purse strings won't be impressed by "aesthetics". They'll want a return on their investment, even if it's not guaranteed.
No. The first formulation is correct. Comments can be insightful and funny, but still not worth reading.
Registering a domain name, whether it's with an official ICANN registrar or new.net or whoever, does not establish a trademark. You need to register it with the government to make it official.
Open source doesn't necessarily mean no charge. The Open Voting Consortium should set themselves up like Red Hat. Give the code away for free but charge for support and services. Part of the deal will be that OVC will be held accountable for the system. That should assuage any election officials and the money can be used to fund more development.
I used to see all sorts of things in the rocky landscape. A lot of the things I saw looked liked gremlins to me, which featured prominently in my nightmares. Now that I look back on it, putting the mural on the wall was maybe not a good idea.
At least I had the sense to realize that it was just my imagination. I never once thought there was anything actually living on the Moon.
For one thing, you have to include the centripetal forces exerted on the satellite as it's orbiting. The Lagrange points are places where the centripetal forces exactly cancel the gravitational forces.
The L4 and L5 points are stable. If the satellite drifts out of position then the gravitational and centripetal forces acting on it will nudge it back into position.
But the L1, L2 and L3 points are unstable. If the satellite drifts even slightly then the gravitational and centripetal forces will not be cancelled and they will actually pull it further out of position. Even a very small force, like that exerted by the solar wind, would push it out of position given enough time. So a station at L1 would always need some kind of propulsion system to keep it positioned correctly.
See this link for more info.
One year I ordered several LEGO sets to give away as Christmas presents. But I was working full-time and of course I couldn't be home when the courier tried to deliver it. So when they told me they'd try one last time I asked if they could deliver it to my office instead. They said "Sure" and asked what department I was in so I told them. Boy was my boss confused when $400 worth of LEGOs came addressed to the Paradox development team at Corel.
E-mail is more like a postcard. There's no envelope to hide the contents from even a casual glance so there can be no expectation of privacy. It has nothing to do with the fact that the recipient bears some of the cost of sending the message.
I tried a gobbledy-gook URL 5 minutes ago and got Verisign's search page. But I tried the same thing less than a minute ago and got IE's search page instead. Has Verisign already backed down?
Imagine what would happen if you could only buy Coke in packs of 12. But each pack has only one Coke Classic and 11 Vanilla Cokes. If you like Classic then you're just going to have to learn to drink a lot of Vanilla.
That seems to be pretty close to what the music industry is doing with their albums.
I have been to action movies before and I expect the conflict to help drive the plot. But in Matrix: Revolutions the fight scenes seemed disconnected from the story. You'd think a fight between a guy with super-natural powers and 200 clones would be exciting, but frankly I was bored half-way through.
I also expect a denouement where most of the issues raised in the film are resolved. Instead, I left the movie feeling like it was time to use the bathroom and get a snack while they changed the reels. It's been a long intermission.
If you feel you need to bring in an outside consultant to secure the network for you then what good is checking up on them afterwards? If you aren't competent enough to secure your own network in the first place, how do you expect to find anything suspicious in the consultant's work?