If the "value" of pirated software was anything like what the industry claimed, everyone with a CD burner would simply make a copy of AutoCAD (retails for around $17k) every month and retire early.
The fact that CZs are thermal insulators and diamonds are conductors is only the tip of the iceburg. CZ has virtually nothing in common with diamond, other than a similar appearance. Of course that's all it takes to make CZ a nice diamond replacement in cheap jewelry, but they are fundamentally different in so many ways; they are made of different elements, they have different crystal structures, density, refractive index, hardness, cleavage properties...
I think you're missing the point. The article made it pretty clear that it's not a matter of these tools making it impossible for forensics people to investigate, it just makes it so time-consuming and expensive that it's not feasible to actually do it in the vast majority of cases. Yeah, if the government thinks that you have the secret plans for China's new invisible tank on your computer, they will probably dissect your your hard drive in a clean room and carefully examine every nanometer of it with a high-precision magnetic probe. But no one is willing to go through the time and expense of doing that to try to catch someone who stole a few hundred credit card numbers.
I think you are missing the point. The article isn't about people who never want anyone else to see their data - it's about people who want to break into a computer, steal a bunch of credit card numbers (or whatever) and then mess with the victim's system in a way that will make it hard for investigators to track down the thief BUT also won't immediatly allert the victim that anything has changed on their computer.
Things like TrueCrypt that offer "plausible deniability" are only useful if you are trying to hide information from a nice, civilized justice system that is willing to say "I can't prove that you aren't hiding more data, so I guess I'll have to let you go." If you are dealing with someone who is willing to torture you for information, TrueCrypt's hidden volumes simply gives your captor an incentive to say "Since I can't be sure that you don't have more data hidden somewhere, I'm going to continue to torture you and see if I can get you to reveal any more keys."
Re:How many people have the computing power ...
on
A Mighty Number Falls
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Then I suppose I won't expect my 1024 bit encryption to keep my data safe from the NSA, in the same way that I won't expect my home alarm system to protect me from a strike team of navy SEALS.
There is no justification in my mind for a site like this to be allowed to exist, particularly not by a convicted criminal who has an axe to grind. There is no justification in my mind for a site like this to be allowed to exist, particularly not by a convicted criminal who has an axe to grind.
But I'm equally outraged that this information is available to the general public in the first place. You should force people to make a real effort to get it, and even then, I would suggest that the information on informants in cases of violent crimes or drug dealing should be kept sealed. Get a lawyer, and convince a judge that you need to know who snitched in that ten million dollar drug bust. Please! The information comes from public trial transcripts. It's well-established that if the government sends someone to jail, they have to make the evidence upon which they convicted public. The government can't just say "Someone said he committed the crime. We're not going to tell you who." I hope you are able to appreciate why this is a good idea.
Getting your name and address plastered all over the internet as a result is a sure fire way to get yourself (and maybe your family, too) killed. This is a non-issue. Since the information comes from trial transcripts, it is already available to the person who was convicted (since it was their trial and all) or anyone that the convicted person might care to share it with.
First, hard drive manufacturers have always calculated drive space differently than the rest of the entire computing world. Yeah, that sounds so much better than "computer scientists have always assigned the metric prefixes different definitions than the rest of the world."
The metric prefixes have had well-established meanings for over 200 years. If you asked someone from 1850 what a megabyte was, he would tell you that it was 10^6 bytes - even though he wouldn't know what a byte is. Exactly who is it that "corrupted an established and well-understood notation"?
If the auto industry decided to define a gallon as exactly 4 liters because it was more convenient for them when doing math, would you accuse the gas station of ripping you off when they advertise a gallon but "only" sell you 3.79 liters?
"Look at when breast implants were first appearing. They used silicon, and thought it was completely safe, but after some of the implants starting rupturing, they found out that some of the side effects can be horrendous."
No, a few opportunist lawyers managed to whip people into a lawsuit frenzy by claiming that any and all medical ailments suffered by a recipient of silicon breast implants must have been caused by the implants.
The successful lawsuits against Dow and the other companies involved in silicon breast implants are a perfect example of "style over facts". There was zero evidence that the implants were causing problems, but when the juries saw a woman on the witness stand crying about how a big heartless corporation had ruined her health, the juries switched off their brains and ruled against the "big, evil company."
Ok, you've got your chip. Now you have to build a laptop around it. I would be astounded if the power upply could be had for under $5. That leaves you with $2 to pay for your screen, keyboard, the case, some sort of data I/O port, and labor.
I don't think parent misunderstood PKE, I think you misunderstood his comment.
The danger is that a "man in the middle" (in this case your person C) might intercept person A's key on its way to person B, and replace it with their own key. C can now decrypt person A's transmissions to person B, since person A will be encrypting messages using C's key rather than B's key. C simply decrypts the message, listens to it, and re-transmits it to person B using B's real (intercepted) key. The man in the middle can read all the messages going back and forth between A and B, and A and B will never know it unless they meet up later and discover that each person was using the wrong key to encrypt messages to the other person.
"If I could go back in time when I was starting university I for sure would tell my 18 year old self to have fun programming in their spare time, but to train as an electrician, plumber or mechanic, so they will actually have some job security, good working conditions and some actual spare time to have fun programming in."
I have noticed that many educated, professional people tend to glamorize the "skilled trades." As someone with many family members who are electricians and plumbers, I often have to wonder if the people who dream of "job security and a 40 hour work week" have any knowledge of what a tradesman's work day is actually like.
They typically get up extremely early (5:00 am or so) and work very hard all day, often in dangerous conditions. There is virtually no chance of meaningful career advancement. Union shops are typically more concerned with "time in grade" than actual skill or talent, and you will get to watch as the best, highest-paying jobs get assigned to people with inferior skills simply because those particular workers have been around longer. Eventually you will be one of the old-timers who gets to work the slightly higher-paying jobs, and that's pretty much the extent of your prospects of advancement. The job security that you seem to imagine does not actually exist - as a plumber or electrician you can look forward to spending weeks at a time unemployed, then working 80+ hours/week for two consecutive weeks. Often you will have to travel long distances and live away from your family for days at a time in order to be close to the job site.
I suppose it's one of those "the grass is always greener on the other side" things, but the rosy image that most slashdotters seem to have of a tradesman's life is very inaccurate.
"The result is Universities being forced to provide remedial math classes for science students who haven't done math for two years."
And why would the students bother with it if they know that the University will allow them to take a remedial course? I don't mean to seem harsh, but if the Universities simply told the students "Oh, you don't know math? Then I don't think this is the place for you," the students would suddenly have a much greater interest in taking senior-level math.
The only requirement that I'm aware of is that the police can't search in a way that's unlikely to produce the item they're supposed to be looking for. For example, they couldn't search the files on your hard drive if they're supposed to be looking for illegal guns.
If the police have a warrant to search your house for illegal guns but find your stash of illegal drugs instead, they can still charge you for the drugs.
Actually, the fact that the guy apparently had 4000 CDs of porn but only had a "few thousand" images of illegal porn makes me wonder if he was collecting it intentionally or not. 4000 CDs should have been enough to hold many tens of millions of images. Was the guy just automatically downloading and burning every image posted to alt.binaries.*, and some illegal porn happened to get mixed in?
Of course "young adults" aren't actual adults yet, and they don't have all the legal rights and responsibilities that accompany adulthood. But these are people who are expected to begin living as free adults who will participate in democratic government very soon. They should be receiving training on what it means to be an adult in a free society, and what it means to exercise one's rights.
If you always just shrug and say "Eh, they're not adults yet...who cares?" when the government arbitrarily tramples what are supposed to be cherished, fundamental freedoms, you can't expect the teenagers to just magically start living like free adults who appreciate their rights and responsibilities when they turn 18.
We should be training our teenagers to ask government officials question like "Do you really have the authority to do this? What is the basis of your authority? Is your authority legitimate? If I feel you are abusing your authority how do I, as a citizen who participates in our government, go about having your authority revoked?"
It's ridiculous to tell teenagers in a civics class that governmental authority is comes from the will of the people, and that all citizens have a right to free speech, (or do they even tell kids that in school any more?) but then smack them down and say "You have no rights!" any time a petty school administrator feels like bossing them around. Which do you think will influence them more - what their teacher tells them in a lecture, or the way that they are actually forced to live?
It says that the laser wavelength is 1 micron (into the infrared). Since glass isn't transparent to that wavelength, you can't reflect it with a mirror.
The article says that the laser's wavelength is 1 micron. The outer surface of the human eye isn't transparent to that wavelength, so you wouldn't have to worry about eye damage.
Slashdot Mirror
If the "value" of pirated software was anything like what the industry claimed, everyone with a CD burner would simply make a copy of AutoCAD (retails for around $17k) every month and retire early.
The fact that CZs are thermal insulators and diamonds are conductors is only the tip of the iceburg. CZ has virtually nothing in common with diamond, other than a similar appearance. Of course that's all it takes to make CZ a nice diamond replacement in cheap jewelry, but they are fundamentally different in so many ways; they are made of different elements, they have different crystal structures, density, refractive index, hardness, cleavage properties...
Yes, there are surely many challenges associated with trouble-shooting PCs that arise because of their complex nature. But things like
1) Support personnel who don't speak comprehensible English
2) Support personnel who don't actually have any clue how to fix anything
3) Support personnel who are only concerned about getting you off the phone as quickly as possible
do not have anything to do with the nature of computers.
I think you're missing the point. The article made it pretty clear that it's not a matter of these tools making it impossible for forensics people to investigate, it just makes it so time-consuming and expensive that it's not feasible to actually do it in the vast majority of cases. Yeah, if the government thinks that you have the secret plans for China's new invisible tank on your computer, they will probably dissect your your hard drive in a clean room and carefully examine every nanometer of it with a high-precision magnetic probe. But no one is willing to go through the time and expense of doing that to try to catch someone who stole a few hundred credit card numbers.
I think you are missing the point. The article isn't about people who never want anyone else to see their data - it's about people who want to break into a computer, steal a bunch of credit card numbers (or whatever) and then mess with the victim's system in a way that will make it hard for investigators to track down the thief BUT also won't immediatly allert the victim that anything has changed on their computer.
Things like TrueCrypt that offer "plausible deniability" are only useful if you are trying to hide information from a nice, civilized justice system that is willing to say "I can't prove that you aren't hiding more data, so I guess I'll have to let you go." If you are dealing with someone who is willing to torture you for information, TrueCrypt's hidden volumes simply gives your captor an incentive to say "Since I can't be sure that you don't have more data hidden somewhere, I'm going to continue to torture you and see if I can get you to reveal any more keys."
Then I suppose I won't expect my 1024 bit encryption to keep my data safe from the NSA, in the same way that I won't expect my home alarm system to protect me from a strike team of navy SEALS.
The metric prefixes have had well-established meanings for over 200 years. If you asked someone from 1850 what a megabyte was, he would tell you that it was 10^6 bytes - even though he wouldn't know what a byte is. Exactly who is it that "corrupted an established and well-understood notation"?
If the auto industry decided to define a gallon as exactly 4 liters because it was more convenient for them when doing math, would you accuse the gas station of ripping you off when they advertise a gallon but "only" sell you 3.79 liters?
"Look at when breast implants were first appearing. They used silicon, and thought it was completely safe, but after some of the implants starting rupturing, they found out that some of the side effects can be horrendous."
No, a few opportunist lawyers managed to whip people into a lawsuit frenzy by claiming that any and all medical ailments suffered by a recipient of silicon breast implants must have been caused by the implants.
The successful lawsuits against Dow and the other companies involved in silicon breast implants are a perfect example of "style over facts". There was zero evidence that the implants were causing problems, but when the juries saw a woman on the witness stand crying about how a big heartless corporation had ruined her health, the juries switched off their brains and ruled against the "big, evil company."
Ok, you've got your chip. Now you have to build a laptop around it. I would be astounded if the power upply could be had for under $5. That leaves you with $2 to pay for your screen, keyboard, the case, some sort of data I/O port, and labor.
I don't think parent misunderstood PKE, I think you misunderstood his comment.
The danger is that a "man in the middle" (in this case your person C) might intercept person A's key on its way to person B, and replace it with their own key. C can now decrypt person A's transmissions to person B, since person A will be encrypting messages using C's key rather than B's key. C simply decrypts the message, listens to it, and re-transmits it to person B using B's real (intercepted) key. The man in the middle can read all the messages going back and forth between A and B, and A and B will never know it unless they meet up later and discover that each person was using the wrong key to encrypt messages to the other person.
"If I could go back in time when I was starting university I for sure would tell my 18 year old self to have fun programming in their spare time, but to train as an electrician, plumber or mechanic, so they will actually have some job security, good working conditions and some actual spare time to have fun programming in."
I have noticed that many educated, professional people tend to glamorize the "skilled trades." As someone with many family members who are electricians and plumbers, I often have to wonder if the people who dream of "job security and a 40 hour work week" have any knowledge of what a tradesman's work day is actually like.
They typically get up extremely early (5:00 am or so) and work very hard all day, often in dangerous conditions. There is virtually no chance of meaningful career advancement. Union shops are typically more concerned with "time in grade" than actual skill or talent, and you will get to watch as the best, highest-paying jobs get assigned to people with inferior skills simply because those particular workers have been around longer. Eventually you will be one of the old-timers who gets to work the slightly higher-paying jobs, and that's pretty much the extent of your prospects of advancement. The job security that you seem to imagine does not actually exist - as a plumber or electrician you can look forward to spending weeks at a time unemployed, then working 80+ hours/week for two consecutive weeks. Often you will have to travel long distances and live away from your family for days at a time in order to be close to the job site.
I suppose it's one of those "the grass is always greener on the other side" things, but the rosy image that most slashdotters seem to have of a tradesman's life is very inaccurate.
"The result is Universities being forced to provide remedial math classes for science students who haven't done math for two years."
And why would the students bother with it if they know that the University will allow them to take a remedial course? I don't mean to seem harsh, but if the Universities simply told the students "Oh, you don't know math? Then I don't think this is the place for you," the students would suddenly have a much greater interest in taking senior-level math.
The only requirement that I'm aware of is that the police can't search in a way that's unlikely to produce the item they're supposed to be looking for. For example, they couldn't search the files on your hard drive if they're supposed to be looking for illegal guns.
If the police have a warrant to search your house for illegal guns but find your stash of illegal drugs instead, they can still charge you for the drugs.
Actually, the fact that the guy apparently had 4000 CDs of porn but only had a "few thousand" images of illegal porn makes me wonder if he was collecting it intentionally or not. 4000 CDs should have been enough to hold many tens of millions of images. Was the guy just automatically downloading and burning every image posted to alt.binaries.*, and some illegal porn happened to get mixed in?
Of course "young adults" aren't actual adults yet, and they don't have all the legal rights and responsibilities that accompany adulthood. But these are people who are expected to begin living as free adults who will participate in democratic government very soon. They should be receiving training on what it means to be an adult in a free society, and what it means to exercise one's rights. If you always just shrug and say "Eh, they're not adults yet...who cares?" when the government arbitrarily tramples what are supposed to be cherished, fundamental freedoms, you can't expect the teenagers to just magically start living like free adults who appreciate their rights and responsibilities when they turn 18.
We should be training our teenagers to ask government officials question like "Do you really have the authority to do this? What is the basis of your authority? Is your authority legitimate? If I feel you are abusing your authority how do I, as a citizen who participates in our government, go about having your authority revoked?"
It's ridiculous to tell teenagers in a civics class that governmental authority is comes from the will of the people, and that all citizens have a right to free speech, (or do they even tell kids that in school any more?) but then smack them down and say "You have no rights!" any time a petty school administrator feels like bossing them around. Which do you think will influence them more - what their teacher tells them in a lecture, or the way that they are actually forced to live?
I must have missed the part of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms where it says that the right to free speech doesn't apply to people under 18.
This sort of device has been around for at least 50+ years - the only big deal about this one is that it's small, and the sample needs little prep.
It says that the laser wavelength is 1 micron (into the infrared). Since glass isn't transparent to that wavelength, you can't reflect it with a mirror.
The article says that the laser's wavelength is 1 micron. The outer surface of the human eye isn't transparent to that wavelength, so you wouldn't have to worry about eye damage.
Yeah...and I love how they say that "humans have three choices: colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct."
I suppose that's true, in the same sense that for any action I have the choice of "doing it, not doing it, or dying".
Are you serious? What's to stop the customer from simply leaving the goods on the side of the road and refusing to pay?