In the course of prosecuting piracy we have found servers containing over 20,000 titles of pirated software, movies, music and games. The value of the copyrighted material on servers like this is frequently in the millions of dollars.
The way I read this, the means used to calculating the final value is something along the lines of adding the retail value of each of those 20,000 titles for the total. This method seems a bit suspect. I wonder, if I made a piece of semi-useful software, put a $1mill price tag on it and made sure it was reasonably easy to pirate, could I just wait a while and then start successfully suing anyone who copied it for everything they've got?
I can't help feeling there needs to be some sort of independent agency that would assess the actual value of pirated goods. The copyright owners are clearly biased and I doubt most courts have the competence to do it.
To any technological solution, there will be a technological exploit. And to every exploit, there will be a new solution. I doubt this will ever stop.
Inmates staging a prison revolt, however, rarely have access to sophisticated retinal spoofing devices. They will gouge out a guard's eyeball and hold it up to the scanner. When the scanner detects that there is no bloodflow in the eyeball, it refuses access and sounds the alarm.
Someone who is determined and has ready access to funds and equipment will always be able to circumvent security. This doesn't mean that raising the threshold isn't a good thing.
I agree completely that a HUGE part of the problem is that the U.S. government fails at forward thinking foreign policy.
You are assuming that they are acting from stupidity. I rather expect that they are acting with great skill and that this is an important step to achieving their goal.
Think of it the same way you would a social security number.
The thing is, anyone who does this is completely ignorant of how passports work. This is not a trait one would expect to find in a nation's visa officials.
Imagine that! The government knowing who has a passport! And even...who has flown somewhere! Oooh, creepy! I feel violated!!!
And indeed you should. The people to be least trusted in any given nation are those in government. That kind of position will tend to attract just the sort of people you don't want to have there. It remains essential that they are not given sufficient powers to totally screw over everyone without being found out.
As far as I am aware, one of the most effective routes to obtaining a fake ID is to actually apply for one through official channels. Why fake one when can have the govt print you one for only a nominal fee?
Only really if it's mandatory. I don't mind having better IDs for when I actually want to be able to identify myself. I do mind having government agents tracking my movements 24/7.
Having been flagged both offtopic and funny, I suspect my posting is being regarded as an attempt at a joke. It isn't. One of the primary objectives of having a QA system is to enable you to produce a consistent level of quality, and to be able to repeatably go through your development process with the same quality on your end result. This quality doesn't have to be good, just consistent.
A company with clueless programmers but sterling QA procedures (that are being actively used) is going to produce a crappy product that has predictable quality.
As to the last part of my previous posting, this company will probably produce a product for which all the major functions actually work, but it may be incredibly awkward to access them and the GUI might crash every now and then (but probably not in a way that corrupts your data). If having a product that enables you to get the job done is more important to the customer than having one that has an excellent GUI, then they may not mind this too much.
My argument is that the tool is so easy to abuse, its abuse is so difficult to detect, and the potential consequences to the individual are so grievous, that the tool should be outlawed.
I don't think cops should walk around with guns as a matter of course. And, in Norway, they don't.
I'd think that you would have more to worry about from someone picking your pocket in the airport where your credit card number is concerned
If someone picks my pocket, I am likely to notice it before long. As far as I'm aware, they don't customarily replace picked wallets. This means I have ample opportunity to cancel my cards before things get completely out of hand. If someone can obtain my credit card number without my knowledge, however, it's anyone's guess how long it will take me to figure out it's been compromised. The second rule of security is "make sure that if anyone manages to break in, you'll know it happened". Automatic surveillance makes this impossible for those that it targets.
the guy sitting in the row behind you is more likely to be spying on your laptop screen
Again, if I pick up that people around me seem unnaturally interested in what is going on on my computer screen, I can start taking precautions. If, on the other hand, the activity gets silently recorded and stored for 10 years, I have absolutely no control whatsoever and just have to trust in the mythical beasts of corporate security and employee integrity to safeguard me. I prefer not to have to.
Do you do a lot of super secret work for your company on your laptop on an airplane? Does the company you work for know that your running around with their most important secrets displayed on your screen for anyone sitting near you to check out?
It doesn't have to be super secret to be damaging, there just has to be enough of it. If you can reliably spy on a company's employees as they are sitting on your aircraft, you can obtain a lot of information about them that, while individually trivial, combine to become very interesting.
Security guards are absolutely useless for anything.
Even a security guard will understand the concept of "bring us a copy of last week's surveillance tapes and there's $1,000 in it for you".
I think you grossly overestimate the number of people who care about what you or anyone else is doing (outside of the realm of the illegal)
I don't believe in having a programmer do the formal QA of his own code. He's already fixed the bugs that pop up when it's being used in the way he uses it and I even suspect that we subcounsciously avoid using it in ways that we suspect may touch upon flakey bits of code.
Having the programmer do the QA on something written by an altogether different programmer is something else entirely though. Programmers tend to be more expensive than testers though, so it might get a tad on the costly side.
You can have a wonderful process,..., and still have a product that's a piece of crap.
Certainly, but it is predictably, reliably and consistently a piece of crap. Your customers have some guarantee that it's not going to get significantly worse than that.
And, of course, if your product is crappy in ways your customers don't really care about, then it's not even a problem.
In an ideal world (for them), companies will charge a lot for their product and have astronomical profit margins. In most current markets, however, competition prevents this from happening, and in stead they are forced to charge a fair market price. Again in most cases, a "fair market price" is just enough to cover their expenses plus a small profit.
Assuming that the airline industry enjoys healthy competition (I have no idea if this is the case), then what determines your fare price is largely the average airline's expenses. If any single airline's expenses were to decrease because of in-flight surveillance, then they would initially have a higher profit because they'd still be charging somewhere around the industry average. In time, however, the other airlines are likely to catch on and introduce surveillance themselves in order to compete. Once the average airline is doing this, then market pressure will cause the average price to decrease.
So cheaper fares may not happen in the short term, but should eventually.
If you have no quality assurance, then people can't expect your code to retain its quality even if it's kick-ass today. So you risk suckering people into investing into tie-in with your code only to screw them over later when you decided it was time to "rewrite everything" and it turns out afterwards that nothing works anymore.
It does if the company is prepared to take the risk onto itself. If they have proper routines for validating the correctness of the OSS libraries they are using, this isn't a problem.
What they'd basically say is "Apache provides no warranty for the parts of this software that they have developed. We, ACMEsoft Inc., however, guarantee that it will work."
What possible logic would require a video to be held for ten years in the absence of a complaint?
Within a 10 year time span, facial recognition and other video analysis software is going to sufficiently advanced, this airline will be sitting on a gold mine of information it can sell to the highest bidder. Marketing companies are going to be prepared to kill for a 10 year log of the behaviour of their targets.
If they are clever (and those who aren't will tend to go out of business), they will use the information they can get from the tapes to increase their profits. This should serve to decrease fares.
The more someone knows about your habits, the more effectively they can market product to you.
If you're going to step on board their property, you've got to follow their rules--it's that simple.
You seem to be making two rather strange assumptions here.
First, you are saying that because they're a private organisation we have no right to criticize them. Why not? We are the consumers and we are the citizens. We can criticize whoever we bloody well want.
Second, you seem to be suggesting that because something is the law, that law is automatically correct and should also not be questioned. Why is that? If we, the citizens, find that is should be illegal to do surveillance even on private property, then we can change that. If we want to discuss whether or not it should be changed, we most certainly should.
You seem to be assuming that all the other places are ok. They are not. The correct direction for our society to go is less automated surveillance, not more.
If I open my wallet while in that aircraft, and if they have good cameras, then any schmuck working in security for that airline can zoom in and learn my credit card numbers. Is this ok?
If I use my laptop to get some work done while in flight, then the airline can use their surveillance capability to conduct industrial espionage against my company, simply by recording everything that happens on my computer screen and keyboard. Is this ok? And again, even if the airline isn't breaking the law, any old (underpaid) security officer employed by them can easily sell on the images to my employer's competitors.
The contents of their sketch pad isn't compelling evidence in the same way as pictures are. They could have just drawn anything, so it's all down to how credible they can make themselves look.
If someone sent your wife a drawing of you having sex with another woman, she probably wouldn't divorce you (the baby eating bishop of Bath and Wells aside). If they sent her a photo of the same, however, you might be in a spot of trouble.
Eventually, as CGI improves, photos will probably be losing their power as objective evidence. When you can easily produce photo-realistic fake images of anyone doing anything to anyone just spending a couple of hours with your $50 photo shop package, people will start taking it less seriously.
When 99% of the target audience all use one single OS (one OS to fool them all and in the darkness bill them), there can be some doubt as to the marginal benefit from supporting any other OSes.
A classic example of how screwed up pronounciation (or spelling, whichever you prefer) is in English is the fabricated word ghoti. Which, of course, is pronounced like the word "fish". "gh" like in laugh, "o" like in women and "ti" like in station.
On the other hand, it can be very handy for poetry, which thrives on creative language.
(Stops and rolls down the window) (Offtopic, who, me? I'm sorry, officer, I didn't notice the original topic):-)
Slashdot Mirror
In the course of prosecuting piracy we have found servers containing over 20,000 titles of pirated software, movies, music and games. The value of the copyrighted material on servers like this is frequently in the millions of dollars.
The way I read this, the means used to calculating the final value is something along the lines of adding the retail value of each of those 20,000 titles for the total. This method seems a bit suspect. I wonder, if I made a piece of semi-useful software, put a $1mill price tag on it and made sure it was reasonably easy to pirate, could I just wait a while and then start successfully suing anyone who copied it for everything they've got?
I can't help feeling there needs to be some sort of independent agency that would assess the actual value of pirated goods. The copyright owners are clearly biased and I doubt most courts have the competence to do it.
If you want a reason why insanely high res is good in and of itself you should (re?)watch Bladerunner :-)
To any technological solution, there will be a technological exploit. And to every exploit, there will be a new solution. I doubt this will ever stop.
Inmates staging a prison revolt, however, rarely have access to sophisticated retinal spoofing devices. They will gouge out a guard's eyeball and hold it up to the scanner. When the scanner detects that there is no bloodflow in the eyeball, it refuses access and sounds the alarm.
Someone who is determined and has ready access to funds and equipment will always be able to circumvent security. This doesn't mean that raising the threshold isn't a good thing.
I agree completely that a HUGE part of the problem is that the U.S. government fails at forward thinking foreign policy.
You are assuming that they are acting from stupidity. I rather expect that they are acting with great skill and that this is an important step to achieving their goal.
Think of it the same way you would a social security number.
The thing is, anyone who does this is completely ignorant of how passports work. This is not a trait one would expect to find in a nation's visa officials.
As far as I'm aware, it's not too difficult to make biometric scanners that are capable of detecting whether the subject is alive.
Given some work, they can probably even detect if the subject is under duress.
Imagine that! The government knowing who has a passport! And even...who has flown somewhere! Oooh, creepy! I feel violated!!!
And indeed you should. The people to be least trusted in any given nation are those in government. That kind of position will tend to attract just the sort of people you don't want to have there. It remains essential that they are not given sufficient powers to totally screw over everyone without being found out.
As far as I am aware, one of the most effective routes to obtaining a fake ID is to actually apply for one through official channels. Why fake one when can have the govt print you one for only a nominal fee?
That's one one thing dead people are useful for.
Maybe this is a privacy concern.
Only really if it's mandatory. I don't mind having better IDs for when I actually want to be able to identify myself. I do mind having government agents tracking my movements 24/7.
Having been flagged both offtopic and funny, I suspect my posting is being regarded as an attempt at a joke. It isn't. One of the primary objectives of having a QA system is to enable you to produce a consistent level of quality, and to be able to repeatably go through your development process with the same quality on your end result. This quality doesn't have to be good, just consistent.
A company with clueless programmers but sterling QA procedures (that are being actively used) is going to produce a crappy product that has predictable quality.
As to the last part of my previous posting, this company will probably produce a product for which all the major functions actually work, but it may be incredibly awkward to access them and the GUI might crash every now and then (but probably not in a way that corrupts your data). If having a product that enables you to get the job done is more important to the customer than having one that has an excellent GUI, then they may not mind this too much.
My argument is that the tool is so easy to abuse, its abuse is so difficult to detect, and the potential consequences to the individual are so grievous, that the tool should be outlawed.
I don't think cops should walk around with guns as a matter of course. And, in Norway, they don't.
I'd think that you would have more to worry about from someone picking your pocket in the airport where your credit card number is concerned
If someone picks my pocket, I am likely to notice it before long. As far as I'm aware, they don't customarily replace picked wallets. This means I have ample opportunity to cancel my cards before things get completely out of hand. If someone can obtain my credit card number without my knowledge, however, it's anyone's guess how long it will take me to figure out it's been compromised. The second rule of security is "make sure that if anyone manages to break in, you'll know it happened". Automatic surveillance makes this impossible for those that it targets.
the guy sitting in the row behind you is more likely to be spying on your laptop screen
Again, if I pick up that people around me seem unnaturally interested in what is going on on my computer screen, I can start taking precautions. If, on the other hand, the activity gets silently recorded and stored for 10 years, I have absolutely no control whatsoever and just have to trust in the mythical beasts of corporate security and employee integrity to safeguard me. I prefer not to have to.
Do you do a lot of super secret work for your company on your laptop on an airplane? Does the company you work for know that your running around with their most important secrets displayed on your screen for anyone sitting near you to check out?
It doesn't have to be super secret to be damaging, there just has to be enough of it. If you can reliably spy on a company's employees as they are sitting on your aircraft, you can obtain a lot of information about them that, while individually trivial, combine to become very interesting.
Security guards are absolutely useless for anything.
Even a security guard will understand the concept of "bring us a copy of last week's surveillance tapes and there's $1,000 in it for you".
I think you grossly overestimate the number of people who care about what you or anyone else is doing (outside of the realm of the illegal)
It only takes one of them.
I don't believe in having a programmer do the formal QA of his own code. He's already fixed the bugs that pop up when it's being used in the way he uses it and I even suspect that we subcounsciously avoid using it in ways that we suspect may touch upon flakey bits of code.
Having the programmer do the QA on something written by an altogether different programmer is something else entirely though. Programmers tend to be more expensive than testers though, so it might get a tad on the costly side.
You can have a wonderful process, ..., and still have a product that's a piece of crap.
Certainly, but it is predictably, reliably and consistently a piece of crap. Your customers have some guarantee that it's not going to get significantly worse than that.
And, of course, if your product is crappy in ways your customers don't really care about, then it's not even a problem.
In an ideal world (for them), companies will charge a lot for their product and have astronomical profit margins. In most current markets, however, competition prevents this from happening, and in stead they are forced to charge a fair market price. Again in most cases, a "fair market price" is just enough to cover their expenses plus a small profit.
Assuming that the airline industry enjoys healthy competition (I have no idea if this is the case), then what determines your fare price is largely the average airline's expenses. If any single airline's expenses were to decrease because of in-flight surveillance, then they would initially have a higher profit because they'd still be charging somewhere around the industry average. In time, however, the other airlines are likely to catch on and introduce surveillance themselves in order to compete. Once the average airline is doing this, then market pressure will cause the average price to decrease.
So cheaper fares may not happen in the short term, but should eventually.
If you have no quality assurance, then people can't expect your code to retain its quality even if it's kick-ass today. So you risk suckering people into investing into tie-in with your code only to screw them over later when you decided it was time to "rewrite everything" and it turns out afterwards that nothing works anymore.
It does if the company is prepared to take the risk onto itself. If they have proper routines for validating the correctness of the OSS libraries they are using, this isn't a problem.
What they'd basically say is "Apache provides no warranty for the parts of this software that they have developed. We, ACMEsoft Inc., however, guarantee that it will work."
This is indemnification in EULAspeak.
What possible logic would require a video to be held for ten years in the absence of a complaint?
Within a 10 year time span, facial recognition and other video analysis software is going to sufficiently advanced, this airline will be sitting on a gold mine of information it can sell to the highest bidder. Marketing companies are going to be prepared to kill for a 10 year log of the behaviour of their targets.
plus increased fares for storing all these files?
If they are clever (and those who aren't will tend to go out of business), they will use the information they can get from the tapes to increase their profits. This should serve to decrease fares.
The more someone knows about your habits, the more effectively they can market product to you.
If you're going to step on board their property, you've got to follow their rules--it's that simple.
You seem to be making two rather strange assumptions here.
First, you are saying that because they're a private organisation we have no right to criticize them. Why not? We are the consumers and we are the citizens. We can criticize whoever we bloody well want.
Second, you seem to be suggesting that because something is the law, that law is automatically correct and should also not be questioned. Why is that? If we, the citizens, find that is should be illegal to do surveillance even on private property, then we can change that. If we want to discuss whether or not it should be changed, we most certainly should.
You seem to be assuming that all the other places are ok. They are not. The correct direction for our society to go is less automated surveillance, not more.
If I open my wallet while in that aircraft, and if they have good cameras, then any schmuck working in security for that airline can zoom in and learn my credit card numbers. Is this ok?
If I use my laptop to get some work done while in flight, then the airline can use their surveillance capability to conduct industrial espionage against my company, simply by recording everything that happens on my computer screen and keyboard. Is this ok? And again, even if the airline isn't breaking the law, any old (underpaid) security officer employed by them can easily sell on the images to my employer's competitors.
The contents of their sketch pad isn't compelling evidence in the same way as pictures are. They could have just drawn anything, so it's all down to how credible they can make themselves look.
If someone sent your wife a drawing of you having sex with another woman, she probably wouldn't divorce you (the baby eating bishop of Bath and Wells aside). If they sent her a photo of the same, however, you might be in a spot of trouble.
Eventually, as CGI improves, photos will probably be losing their power as objective evidence. When you can easily produce photo-realistic fake images of anyone doing anything to anyone just spending a couple of hours with your $50 photo shop package, people will start taking it less seriously.
The fact that they will videotape the flight only means that they will catch you picking your nose when no one is looking.
...
And then, two months later, I will start getting blackmail demands from a disgruntled former wage slave
When 99% of the target audience all use one single OS (one OS to fool them all and in the darkness bill them), there can be some doubt as to the marginal benefit from supporting any other OSes.
A classic example of how screwed up pronounciation (or spelling, whichever you prefer) is in English is the fabricated word ghoti. Which, of course, is pronounced like the word "fish". "gh" like in laugh, "o" like in women and "ti" like in station.
:-)
On the other hand, it can be very handy for poetry, which thrives on creative language.
(Stops and rolls down the window)
(Offtopic, who, me? I'm sorry, officer, I didn't notice the original topic)