That sort of attack could probably be used against online Nethack servers such as nethack.alt.org. You could predict what set of items you'd get if you generated a character at a specific value of time(NULL). You'd also be able to predict the future for that character. You'd try out sequences of moves on your PC, and then send the sequence that got you the best results.
Unfortunately extra non-determinism would be introduced by bones files, and you'd get a new random sequence if you logged out. The server admin could also stop this attack quite easily by sourcing random data (or just the seed) from/dev/urandom. (They might already be doing that.)
You probably feel that my claim that piracy is a victimless crime is inaccurate, and you are right about that. I wrote that without considering the reason why I don't pirate software any more: specifically that I wouldn't want anyone to pirate my software. Do as you would be done by, etc. The analogy with marijuana prohibition is not complete because of that.
What appeals to me about the analogy with prohibition laws is (a) the disparity between the punishment and the crime, and (b) the fact that almost anyone could technically be prosecuted for piracy. It's very hard to eliminate all "pirate media" from your home, so strong anti-piracy laws with massive penalties are an excellent tool for ruining people's lives. I know people who never paid for their copies of Windows and Microsoft Office, but nevertheless do not approve of piracy. They are simply unaware that they are technically pirates.
The parallels are striking: (1) Both are essentially unenforceable laws, (2) Which many people are guilty of breaking. (3) Both are victimless crimes. (4) They can be used as "catch all" laws in cases where no actual crime has been committed. (5) Demonisation tactics have been used in both cases, from "Reefer Madness" to the "You wouldn't steal a $PHYSICAL_OBJECT" ads. (6) There is a massive disparity between the penalties and the harm caused in both cases: a conviction can ruin your life, get you fired or thrown out of college, and unable to get a job.
The only difference is that people choose to be involved with drugs, whereas people can be pirates without even realising it. Evidence of piracy might be a small violation of an EULA, or an MP3 file that your friend sent you and you forgot to delete. Future police forces might be able to arrest, charge and convict almost anyone for piracy, ruining their lives before they can say "police state".
He should link this up to a network of CCTV cameras. The appropriate database software would give him the ability to not only track a person's movements, but also watch what they were doing at any specific time. A powerful search engine could be used to find meetings between people, digging up CCTV and audio recordings of those meetings. No need to solve the problem of automatically recognising people using CCTV images: the Bluetooth devices that they carry provide that capability.
The next step would be to scale the network up to cover an entire city or country. Perhaps he might like to consider using an RFID scanner in addition to the Bluetooth one, so that RFID chips being carried by people could also be used to identify them. Just in case the people decide they want some privacy. When RFID chips are widely used for stock control, it will be difficult to avoid buying things that contain them, and they can't be turned off. Robust identification could be provided by the "cloud" of RFID chips carried by each person.
It's amazing when you think of what is now technically possible, given a sufficiently large budget.
You can see a present day example of Newspeak in the redefinition of words such as "liberal". In this topic, there is at least one example of someone using the new definition. It's quite amazing (1) how that word has been redefined to mean something bad, and (2) how many people have bought into the redefinition by using it. That's the power of television, I guess.
The meta-conspiracy theory says that Governments now encourage conspiracy theories in order to decrease the "signal to noise" ratio outside of official media channels.
The result is that independent media is totally unreliable because every fact is swamped by a million paranoid half-truths and lies. But the official media is also unreliable due to bias. So, (1) people have no reliable source of information, and (2) almost any criticism of the Government can be dismissed as the ravings of a crazy conspiracy theorist.
The problem is... where totalitarian dictatorships went wrong in the past, is that they try and shut people up. That causes trouble. There's really no need to to quieten and remove dissidents. No-one really cares.
Indeed yes. You don't need to "disappear" the dissenters. You just need to make them look like crazy paranoids, and in many cases, they are perfectly capable of doing that for themselves.
Jesus Christ, you know nothing about public key encryption.... To break or spoof public key encryption, you need to get one of the Certificate Authorities to sign a fake key (which they might do for the gov't)
Wasn't that what the grandparent poster was talking about?
How else could a man-in-the-middle attack be performed?
Don't be so quick to assume ignorance. SSL is a well-understood technology, but unfortunately it does rely on the CAs being trustworthy...
But I don't know if anyone, even the BOFH, would be immune to a sufficiently targeted attack. (Although naturally a targeted attack against the BOFH would be a fatal mistake...)
There has to be a cut-off point. It could be zero (anyone may smoke) or infinity (WAR ON SMOKING!). But something in the range 16..21 seems to be generally accepted by the community, as balancing the rights of adults to make their own choices against the need to protect children from bad choices.
Looking for an exact logical justification for a partial prohibition is probably a futile quest. You might as well ask why some addictive substances are permitted while others are prohibited. In many cases, there isn't a good reason. It's just about the general perception of what is morally right, which is ultimately based on both society and superstition.
Indeed, control of the network is how trusted computing will be forced on us. TC advocates always point out that the system is opt-in, that you can choose not to use the TC chip, but what is the point of that when doing so means that you cannot go online?
I wrote about this before here. It's an important issue but I think people aren't really listening. I think it all sounds a bit far-fetched, especially to techies. Central control of the Internet? The source of every packet being verified in transit to ensure it originates from a licensed "trusted" computer? Trusted status (and Internet connectivity) lost as soon as you install a non-approved application? But the technology exists, and so does the political and corporate will to implement it. All that's needed is a way to justify the costs and inconvenience to the public, and we already know what they're going to say. It'll have something to do with thinking of the children and the war on terror. The "trusted Internet" will be promoted as a salvation from online criminals, and the fact that it will have other useful side effects such as enabling central control of information distribution will not be mentioned.
I suppose it all sounds a bit like "OMG DRM the sky is falling!" But if we don't think about these issues and how we will prevent them from threatening our freedom, then we will just end up blindly accepting them. I think widespread use of free software is key because hardware and software monocultures are the greatest threat. If the trusted Internet is not compatible with sufficient computers, it will be prohibitively expensive to implement.
But I think that the move to "games console-style" PCs that only run whitelisted software will be more likely to be forced on consumers by future Internet connection requirements, rather than by CPU manufacturers. ("For your protection against viruses and malware, your ISP now has a legal obligation to refuse to allow your computer to connect to the Internet unless you are only running software approved by the Digital Restrictions Ministry.")
Then you throw in, he has no alibi. Surely, someone as active on the internet could go and say - here's all these postings, whatever, I was making at the time.... but he doesn't... you see...
Very strange, that.
You'd think he'd try to create an alibi by programming a computer to send emails and check code into version control while he did the crime. In fact, given his intelligence, you'd expect him to go to a great deal of effort to create a "perfect alibi", and certainly work hard to avoid leaving any loose ends that might bother the detectives - like a missing car seat. If Reiser bought those books in order to plan the murder, why did he do it so badly?
It doesn't add up, if you ask me, but maybe there is more evidence that we know nothing about.
You seem to have misinterpreted my post as "Game consoles are bad", when in fact the message was "Don't give up your free software, because widespread use of free software makes it harder for the authorities to take your online freedom away from you".
Whitelisted by a Government authority, in accordance with laws intended to keep the Internet free of terrorists, paedophiles, pirates, spammers, political dissidents, and other undesirables. "Opting in" to such a system might be a future requirement for an Internet connection. This might sound far fetched, but look at the amount of money Microsoft has spent filling Vista with DRM crap, the willingness of network providers like AT&T to accommodate illegal surveillance, and the level of general cluelessness about how to secure computers and networks. The will to implement the "trusted Internet" is out there, and if the necessary changes are made slowly enough, the gullible public will buy into it.
This is a good reason to ensure that Linux is as widely used as possible. It's also a good reason to avoid replacing your real computers with games consoles, because as you rightly point out, games consoles already implement this.
You can find some classic full episodes on Google Video. I recommend searching for "MST3K 0820 Space Mutiny". Generally the show is good, but you do have to be in the mood for laughing at an awful sci-fi movie, and some episodes are much better than others. You might also enjoy "Prince of Space", "Puma Man", and "Overdrawn at the memory bank", my personal favourites.
I think this is at least partly because of Comcast. Bram wants his company's protocol to be obviously distinct from the sort of p2p used by pirates, so that Comcast et al. can block one but not the other. (For many reasons, this is a difficult problem, but software companies are often more than willing to jump through hoops to satisfy the content industry.)
One of the great selling points of BitTorrent versus other peer to peer protocols is that it is open and there are plenty of third-party clients. That is one of the reasons why BT has eclipsed KaZaa and Limewire and the rest, where you needed the official bloated and spyware-ridden client in order to search for files. (Yes, reverse engineering was carried out, and third party clients were made, but it was not encouraged and few people used them.)
But BT isn't KaZaa, and distributing spyware isn't Bram's business. His business is selling BT-based solutions to other companies as a way to reduce costs. Therefore it doesn't matter to him what client the pirates use, because pirates are not his customers. So there is no risk to him in forking the protocol. And in fact there could be significant benefits: what if you could only run officially whitelisted software on an Internet-connected PC? Software for piracy would not be on the whitelist, but Bram's content-industry approved software would be.
Legalising drugs would not destroy the black market. Wrong. The black market survives because it can charge vastly inflated prices for items due to the inherent risks of the trade and the restricted supply. Your local drug dealers do not want drugs to be legalised, because they would be out of business: unable to compete with large corporations such as tobacco and alcohol companies who are absolute experts at distributing intoxicants to customers at minimum cost.
All drugs would be legalised. Clearly there are some drugs that should not be legalised. I don't know of anyone who would argue in favour of legalising Rohypnol, for example. But if a drug is widely used, and the profits from this use are putting billions of $s into organised crime every year, then surely keeping it illegal is as foolish as prohibiting alcohol again?
Legalising drugs would give children easier access to drugs. Wrong. The market would be regulated to minimise this possibility. Currently the market is unregulated, so there is nothing to stop children gaining access to harmful substances. Destroying the black market and replacing it with a legal and regulated market would prevent this.
If you still think drugs shouldn't be legal, well, you are entitled to your opinion. Many people feel that drug use is immoral in some sense, although for some reason they do not apply this objection to the drugs that they personally enjoy (alcohol, caffeine, etc.). But keeping popular drugs illegal does more harm than good, by funding organised crime and creating a vast and unregulated black market that can supply anything (even Rohypnol) to anyone (even children).
This has been posted elsewhere in the discussion, but you might like to read what academics think of Wolfram's magnum opus: here. It seems that people who do understand it think that it is not particularly original, repeating many known results from previous work (without citations), and also saying things that are actually wrong.
The ideas about the Universe as a giant cellular automaton are particularly bizarre, I think, but then I have always had trouble with seeing myself as being equivalent to a computer program. It's all reminiscent of the Hitch-hiker's Guide, actually, since Wolfram is effectively saying that you can extrapolate all possible states of the Universe from a piece of fairy cake, then build an artificial Universe that is equivalent to the real one. Then, presumably, you can do any scientific research from the comfort of your office, and still be able to go to parties in the evening. Sounds great, if unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not yet known if it will be possible to emulate the required hardware to run the OS.
Run away! They're using reverse psychology!
"Let's tell the nerds that they can't run MULTICS on simulated hardware, and see how long it takes them to do it!"
That sort of attack could probably be used against online Nethack servers such as nethack.alt.org. You could predict what set of items you'd get if you generated a character at a specific value of time(NULL). You'd also be able to predict the future for that character. You'd try out sequences of moves on your PC, and then send the sequence that got you the best results.
/dev/urandom. (They might already be doing that.)
Unfortunately extra non-determinism would be introduced by bones files, and you'd get a new random sequence if you logged out. The server admin could also stop this attack quite easily by sourcing random data (or just the seed) from
You probably feel that my claim that piracy is a victimless crime is inaccurate, and you are right about that. I wrote that without considering the reason why I don't pirate software any more: specifically that I wouldn't want anyone to pirate my software. Do as you would be done by, etc. The analogy with marijuana prohibition is not complete because of that.
What appeals to me about the analogy with prohibition laws is (a) the disparity between the punishment and the crime, and (b) the fact that almost anyone could technically be prosecuted for piracy. It's very hard to eliminate all "pirate media" from your home, so strong anti-piracy laws with massive penalties are an excellent tool for ruining people's lives. I know people who never paid for their copies of Windows and Microsoft Office, but nevertheless do not approve of piracy. They are simply unaware that they are technically pirates.
The parallels are striking:
(1) Both are essentially unenforceable laws,
(2) Which many people are guilty of breaking.
(3) Both are victimless crimes.
(4) They can be used as "catch all" laws in cases where no actual crime has been committed.
(5) Demonisation tactics have been used in both cases, from "Reefer Madness" to the "You wouldn't steal a $PHYSICAL_OBJECT" ads.
(6) There is a massive disparity between the penalties and the harm caused in both cases: a conviction can ruin your life, get you fired or thrown out of college, and unable to get a job.
The only difference is that people choose to be involved with drugs, whereas people can be pirates without even realising it. Evidence of piracy might be a small violation of an EULA, or an MP3 file that your friend sent you and you forgot to delete. Future police forces might be able to arrest, charge and convict almost anyone for piracy, ruining their lives before they can say "police state".
He should link this up to a network of CCTV cameras. The appropriate database software would give him the ability to not only track a person's movements, but also watch what they were doing at any specific time. A powerful search engine could be used to find meetings between people, digging up CCTV and audio recordings of those meetings. No need to solve the problem of automatically recognising people using CCTV images: the Bluetooth devices that they carry provide that capability.
The next step would be to scale the network up to cover an entire city or country. Perhaps he might like to consider using an RFID scanner in addition to the Bluetooth one, so that RFID chips being carried by people could also be used to identify them. Just in case the people decide they want some privacy. When RFID chips are widely used for stock control, it will be difficult to avoid buying things that contain them, and they can't be turned off. Robust identification could be provided by the "cloud" of RFID chips carried by each person.
It's amazing when you think of what is now technically possible, given a sufficiently large budget.
You can see a present day example of Newspeak in the redefinition of words such as "liberal". In this topic, there is at least one example of someone using the new definition. It's quite amazing (1) how that word has been redefined to mean something bad, and (2) how many people have bought into the redefinition by using it. That's the power of television, I guess.
The meta-conspiracy theory says that Governments now encourage conspiracy theories in order to decrease the "signal to noise" ratio outside of official media channels.
The result is that independent media is totally unreliable because every fact is swamped by a million paranoid half-truths and lies. But the official media is also unreliable due to bias. So, (1) people have no reliable source of information, and (2) almost any criticism of the Government can be dismissed as the ravings of a crazy conspiracy theorist.
The problem is... where totalitarian dictatorships went wrong in the past, is that they try and shut people up. That causes trouble. There's really no need to to quieten and remove dissidents. No-one really cares.
Indeed yes. You don't need to "disappear" the dissenters. You just need to make them look like crazy paranoids, and in many cases, they are perfectly capable of doing that for themselves.
Jesus Christ, you know nothing about public key encryption.... To break or spoof public key encryption, you need to get one of the Certificate Authorities to sign a fake key (which they might do for the gov't)
Wasn't that what the grandparent poster was talking about?
How else could a man-in-the-middle attack be performed?
Don't be so quick to assume ignorance. SSL is a well-understood technology, but unfortunately it does rely on the CAs being trustworthy...
You've definitely got anger issues.
Seriously man, you need to chill out. Here, take one of these. The first one is free...
Could be worse...
But I don't know if anyone, even the BOFH, would be immune to a sufficiently targeted attack. (Although naturally a targeted attack against the BOFH would be a fatal mistake...)
Did anyone ever make a graphical frontend for Nethack that works with an online service like nethack.alt.org or devnull.net?
I know that text mode is the only true way, but still, it would be nice for non-purists...
There has to be a cut-off point. It could be zero (anyone may smoke) or infinity (WAR ON SMOKING!). But something in the range 16..21 seems to be generally accepted by the community, as balancing the rights of adults to make their own choices against the need to protect children from bad choices.
Looking for an exact logical justification for a partial prohibition is probably a futile quest. You might as well ask why some addictive substances are permitted while others are prohibited. In many cases, there isn't a good reason. It's just about the general perception of what is morally right, which is ultimately based on both society and superstition.
Indeed, control of the network is how trusted computing will be forced on us. TC advocates always point out that the system is opt-in, that you can choose not to use the TC chip, but what is the point of that when doing so means that you cannot go online?
I wrote about this before here. It's an important issue but I think people aren't really listening. I think it all sounds a bit far-fetched, especially to techies. Central control of the Internet? The source of every packet being verified in transit to ensure it originates from a licensed "trusted" computer? Trusted status (and Internet connectivity) lost as soon as you install a non-approved application? But the technology exists, and so does the political and corporate will to implement it. All that's needed is a way to justify the costs and inconvenience to the public, and we already know what they're going to say. It'll have something to do with thinking of the children and the war on terror. The "trusted Internet" will be promoted as a salvation from online criminals, and the fact that it will have other useful side effects such as enabling central control of information distribution will not be mentioned.
I suppose it all sounds a bit like "OMG DRM the sky is falling!" But if we don't think about these issues and how we will prevent them from threatening our freedom, then we will just end up blindly accepting them. I think widespread use of free software is key because hardware and software monocultures are the greatest threat. If the trusted Internet is not compatible with sufficient computers, it will be prohibitively expensive to implement.
But I think that the move to "games console-style" PCs that only run whitelisted software will be more likely to be forced on consumers by future Internet connection requirements, rather than by CPU manufacturers. ("For your protection against viruses and malware, your ISP now has a legal obligation to refuse to allow your computer to connect to the Internet unless you are only running software approved by the Digital Restrictions Ministry.")
Then you throw in, he has no alibi. Surely, someone as active on the internet could go and say - here's all these postings, whatever, I was making at the time.... but he doesn't... you see...
Very strange, that.
You'd think he'd try to create an alibi by programming a computer to send emails and check code into version control while he did the crime. In fact, given his intelligence, you'd expect him to go to a great deal of effort to create a "perfect alibi", and certainly work hard to avoid leaving any loose ends that might bother the detectives - like a missing car seat. If Reiser bought those books in order to plan the murder, why did he do it so badly?
It doesn't add up, if you ask me, but maybe there is more evidence that we know nothing about.
There is also Beamer, which appears to look even better than Prosper. I am planning to try using it next time I need to do a presentation.
Powerpoint? Ha! Come back when you support "math mode".. oh, and try to make the slides look the same on any computer.
You seem to have misinterpreted my post as "Game consoles are bad", when in fact the message was "Don't give up your free software, because widespread use of free software makes it harder for the authorities to take your online freedom away from you".
Whitelisted by a Government authority, in accordance with laws intended to keep the Internet free of terrorists, paedophiles, pirates, spammers, political dissidents, and other undesirables. "Opting in" to such a system might be a future requirement for an Internet connection. This might sound far fetched, but look at the amount of money Microsoft has spent filling Vista with DRM crap, the willingness of network providers like AT&T to accommodate illegal surveillance, and the level of general cluelessness about how to secure computers and networks. The will to implement the "trusted Internet" is out there, and if the necessary changes are made slowly enough, the gullible public will buy into it.
This is a good reason to ensure that Linux is as widely used as possible. It's also a good reason to avoid replacing your real computers with games consoles, because as you rightly point out, games consoles already implement this.
You can find some classic full episodes on Google Video. I recommend searching for "MST3K 0820 Space Mutiny". Generally the show is good, but you do have to be in the mood for laughing at an awful sci-fi movie, and some episodes are much better than others. You might also enjoy "Prince of Space", "Puma Man", and "Overdrawn at the memory bank", my personal favourites.
You can also find some episodes on Google Video. (Most, if not all, seem to be copies of the DAP releases.)
I think this is at least partly because of Comcast. Bram wants his company's protocol to be obviously distinct from the sort of p2p used by pirates, so that Comcast et al. can block one but not the other. (For many reasons, this is a difficult problem, but software companies are often more than willing to jump through hoops to satisfy the content industry.)
One of the great selling points of BitTorrent versus other peer to peer protocols is that it is open and there are plenty of third-party clients. That is one of the reasons why BT has eclipsed KaZaa and Limewire and the rest, where you needed the official bloated and spyware-ridden client in order to search for files. (Yes, reverse engineering was carried out, and third party clients were made, but it was not encouraged and few people used them.)
But BT isn't KaZaa, and distributing spyware isn't Bram's business. His business is selling BT-based solutions to other companies as a way to reduce costs. Therefore it doesn't matter to him what client the pirates use, because pirates are not his customers. So there is no risk to him in forking the protocol. And in fact there could be significant benefits: what if you could only run officially whitelisted software on an Internet-connected PC? Software for piracy would not be on the whitelist, but Bram's content-industry approved software would be.
- Legalising drugs would not destroy the black market. Wrong. The black market survives because it can charge vastly inflated prices for items due to the inherent risks of the trade and the restricted supply. Your local drug dealers do not want drugs to be legalised, because they would be out of business: unable to compete with large corporations such as tobacco and alcohol companies who are absolute experts at distributing intoxicants to customers at minimum cost.
- All drugs would be legalised. Clearly there are some drugs that should not be legalised. I don't know of anyone who would argue in favour of legalising Rohypnol, for example. But if a drug is widely used, and the profits from this use are putting billions of $s into organised crime every year, then surely keeping it illegal is as foolish as prohibiting alcohol again?
- Legalising drugs would give children easier access to drugs. Wrong. The market would be regulated to minimise this possibility. Currently the market is unregulated, so there is nothing to stop children gaining access to harmful substances. Destroying the black market and replacing it with a legal and regulated market would prevent this.
If you still think drugs shouldn't be legal, well, you are entitled to your opinion. Many people feel that drug use is immoral in some sense, although for some reason they do not apply this objection to the drugs that they personally enjoy (alcohol, caffeine, etc.). But keeping popular drugs illegal does more harm than good, by funding organised crime and creating a vast and unregulated black market that can supply anything (even Rohypnol) to anyone (even children).This has been posted elsewhere in the discussion, but you might like to read what academics think of Wolfram's magnum opus: here. It seems that people who do understand it think that it is not particularly original, repeating many known results from previous work (without citations), and also saying things that are actually wrong.
The ideas about the Universe as a giant cellular automaton are particularly bizarre, I think, but then I have always had trouble with seeing myself as being equivalent to a computer program. It's all reminiscent of the Hitch-hiker's Guide, actually, since Wolfram is effectively saying that you can extrapolate all possible states of the Universe from a piece of fairy cake, then build an artificial Universe that is equivalent to the real one. Then, presumably, you can do any scientific research from the comfort of your office, and still be able to go to parties in the evening. Sounds great, if unlikely.
Perhaps surprisingly, these problems have been solved. The manufacturers of the laser turntable have some interesting information on the subject. It seems to be an analogue pickup with computer-controlled tracking of the groove - apparently this is good enough to work on warped records. Clever stuff.