The article pushes blatant misinformation. Kerckhoff said that a cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is known by the enemy. ("Il faut qu'il n'exige pas le secret, et qu'il puisse sans inconvénient tomber entre les mains de l'ennemi" )
Relying on obscurity for your security is poor engineering, in particular for a mass market system. Taking advantage of obscurity for "one of a kind" systems to gain an additional security advantage is fair game. There's nothing new here, this has been done for decades and centuries. Problems arise when people think this is the golden ticket to keeping the barbarian hordes outside the castle wall.
Well... taking that a bit further, you are responsible for filtering all content that the Burmese/Myanmar government deems to be in violation of their internal laws. I don't think you would be willing to implement that amount of filtering.
If the Europeans have an issue with it, it should probably be their responsibility to filter it.
It was given to the children to enable them to learn. Same thing as with text books.
If you asked a seven year old on a rainy Monday morning if he would rather have his text books, or the $200 (or equivalent in candy) that the text books cost, then the kid will take the candy, 9 out of 10.
So according to your reasoning, we should give all kids the choice of money/candy or textbooks/schooling, and make it really easy for kids or corrupt government to translate their XO's into cash? Is this what you meant?
The "Give 1, Get 1" program is in many ways a great initiative, that could allow this program to gradually become self financing, at least considerably less expensive. It also drives manufacturing scale, reducing unit cost, at least initially.
There will be plenty of takers for the foreseeable future. The program caters to peoples vanity, allowing the giver to flaunt their generosity. Nothing appeals more to the western world than gadgets and vanity, and if our obsessions can fuel third world education, then that would be the best thing since sliced bread.
Governments could also benefits from a relatively low-cost rugged PC. Try to get a reasonably equipped, rugged piece of hardware for $400. You can't.
However, the laptops for sale should be of a different colour, for instance red. This would alleviate one of the biggest concerns of the program --- that stolen green laptops became a major source of revenue to corrupt government officials, or to parents who found a few dollars more tempting than their child's education. The goods will eventually end up in the hand of westerners who act like Santa Claus but are actually stealing from the kids --- a disturbing thought.
Selling the standard green laptop is a gigantic mistake. By all means keep the production line the same, but please change (at least) the colour of the enclosure for the resale variant. Help keep the green XO in the hands of its intended users.
Is this a trick question?
The solution is simple. Use the left hand. (Or right, if you are lefty.)
Takes about a day to learn, and requires no change in hardware.
In order to reduce stress after recovery, switch hands on a regular basis.
TMD
1. Averaging. Average position data over a long time. Will immensely increase accuracy, because errors (and selective availability) tends to even out over time. However, I believe the precision of the end result is not completely deterministic.
2. DGPS Get another GPS. Put other GPS in a fixed, known location. Connect to this GPS to your actual positioning GPS, by means of radio, cable, wireless ethernet or similar. Both GPS's should be roughly in the same geographical region, and "see" the same satellites. Any significant positioning error introduced by timing issues (or selective availability) in the GPS system will be the same for both units. Hence, the fixed GPS will calculate a delta, wich will be added by the mobile GPS.
3. Y-code Obtain key for use in military GPS, allowing GPS to decrypt/use y-code to correct the errors introduced in P-code. Increases resolution to 'bout 11m. (Note: this method is, post 2000, not interesting in most areas of the world, since selective availability has been turned off.)
Is that so?
Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei, or the National Socialist Labour party, was commonly referred to as NSDAP and it's members referred to as the "Nazi's".
The ideology, besides being very nationalistic, had a strong focus on the state and socialist values, and the (perceived) common good. "Arbeit und brot!"
Besides both being broken implementation of a faulty protocol, communism (extreme socialism) and nazism appears to have so much in common, that it is amazing they are (by some) considered opposite sides of the spectrum.
I guess the real lesson is that most systems are implementation dependent, since some moderate socialist democracies turned out to be (almost) decent places to live. And with respect to a national ID card, it's not what you have but how you use it.
A card (and associated "protocols") can be used to prevent identity theft and increase personal safety, or it can be implemented in a way that facilitates identity theft, besides fostering paranoia.
Nope.
Raw socket capability makes little difference, in particularly because one can always add this capability to Win98/95 at ones leasure. This is what much of all this funky firewall, socks proxy or IP sec software does to begin with in order to provide desired capabilities.
Remember, these systems (win9x) have no security, and no way of preventing either - a) The user, or - b) A malicious piece of code to modify IP stack and/or other system components.
The "badness" of this was mostly a publicity stunt from mr Gibson.
Just one little thing that seems to be easily forgotten...
The purpose of steganography is information hiding . An information hiding method that reveals more than random noise to an observer is broken.
The only thing that can be deducted from a properly encoded steganographic message is the presence of (seemingly) random noise modulated on top of an information carrier. Claim: Encryption is a requirement in order to properly implement information hiding, otherwise one simply ends up with two images/message on top of each other.
There is no way anybody that is serious about information hiding (and we all know who that could be...) will resort to simply mixing two picture sources using [choose your favourite modulation scheme here]. This is also why it is so easy to detect and remove a known watermark from documents. (And certain unknown ones as well, as demonstrated by Felten & Co)
So, while scanning the net can be useful for detecting broken applications of steganography, it will hardly reveal interesting information.
(note: "Application" here refers to "method" or "usage" and not necessarily to the software performing the modulation.)
The following contains, among other stuff, a summary of the authors experience with Microsoft Project 98. It may contain harsh language and bad attitude. Parental discretion is advised.
"The network is the computer".... (TM)
It's hardly news to anyone that information exchange, collaboration and project management is an increasingly important area.
More interestingly, this is also an area where Microsoft is very weak. Microsoft NetMeeting? Don't get me started! At least there are a fair number of alternatives. (And some of them open source.)
MS Project? If anybody seriously bothered to compete with Microsoft Project, it would likely die a horrible death. Unfortunately this hasn't happened yet.
Part of the reason is, as always, the infamous integration into the MS product line. "You bought MS-Office. Now you have to buy MS-Project." -- or -- "You bought a Green and Yellow tractor. Now you have to buy the Green and Yellow airplane that goes with it. Otherwise you will fall down. And don't ask stupid questions, because then we will blow up your runway."
Another reason for the lack of competition in this market segment is that MS Project is considered to be mostly a toy. In industry I rarely encounter anybody using MS project as anything more than a mediocre Gantt Chart drawing program. There are of course believers who consider this to be the pinnacle of project management, but my expectations of a project management application goes a little bit beyond this.
Try to set up 300-600 tasks in MS-Project 98, for a few months worth of project. Attempt to do some resource leveling, critical path analysis etc. What happens?
a) It will crash immediately.
b) It'll spend 2 hours of CPU power, and you'll then get a screen full of nonsense and sub-optimal resource allocation.
c) It will corrupt your file.
d) It could be any combination of a, b or c.
Try to share the data with your coworkers, on the web. You think MS-Project (98) will let you export a Gantt chart in any human readable format? Bwwahhhhaha... think again. You have to print it as Postscript, convert it to PDF and then post it on the web.
Now, if the software really contributed to the solution, instead of being part of the problem, it would let you delegate responsibilities, and collaborate amongst multiple Project Managers/developers/workers/supervisors etc. And it would do this over the web, so that your *NIX developers didn't have to crank up Vmware to get an update. NOW were talking.
Industrial strength project management software is not cheap, but the lower end of the market appears to be somewhat lacking competition. If SUN approached this segment (which is indeed the segment they are addressing with StarOffice) they would stand a pretty good chance of setting a standard. Heck... would I object to installing StarOffice to get my hands on a half decent piece of PM software? Not at all!
Conclusion: I think there is an opportunity here, and I think the cost of executing on that opportunity is relatively small. I also believe that the benefits are greater for SUN than for other types of office software. Heavily networked applications are closer to their core competencies, and will to a greater extent contribute to driving the demand for network computing.
Disclaimer. I have not yet used MS-Project 2000 so my assumptions and conclusions might be inaccurate, biased, unfair, annoying and un-American. According to MS, Project 2000 will solve any problem anybody could possibly have dreamt of having. Just like the last version, except that the new one will additionally make coffee for the development team.
I seem to remember that Noise Killer used to be a fairly popular product back in the 80's. (At least in Europe) This temperature controlled fan voltage regulator could turn most PC "tractors" quiet.
Most computer fans are dimensioned for:
A) Extremely high temperatures and
B) Power supply maximum load.
Regulating the speed according to temperature makes a lot of sense, since these extremes are rarely encountered. In most systems this would also prolong the life of the fan.
Looking at their webpage , I find them quite expensive, and wonder if anybody has found less pricy alternatives?
Other than that, using a resistor to control fan speed can be tempting, but because of the relatively high start current of the fan, the fan might never be able to get started. A voltage regulator is therefore a much better choice.
However, I did at one point successfully use a 100ohm resistor to slow down a small, particularly noisy fan at the front of an old CD-R. To ensure that the fan would start, I simply mounted a 1000uF capacitor in parallel with the fan, which gave it the kick it needed to start.
In my MBA program (Queen's MBA for Science & Technology) which is Canadian, eh, this is relatively common. Most of our exams are "open laptop" which means you can utilize the laptop for problem solving. Of those exams, most of the 'case' exams are "open Internet". (We are allowed to plug in the Ethernet cables) The deliverables are usually transferred to the professor by email, or simply printed and handed in.
This has worked great so far. Laptops are mandatory anyway (will be included in tuition starting next year, I believe), but I realize there is a significant difference between an MBA and an undergraduate degree. My point is, when all students are on a roughly equal technological platform, both in terms of possessing the same technology, and being able to use it, I believe computer based exams are fair, powerful and closer to a "real life" situation. We are testing the ability to utilize resources (similar to what is available in real life) and analyze a problem, then suggest recommendations within the time constraints.
One problem that was brought up was the possibility for cheating. On 'case analysis' type exams, cheating is relatively hard to do. Besides, in a small group the honour system does work fairly well. I have never heard of anybody cheating on an exam, or even planning to do so.
On many exams, however, a laptop is simply not a meaningful way of testing knowledge/learning. And that's why my good ol' pencil still has chew marks on it.
Slashdot Mirror
The article pushes blatant misinformation. Kerckhoff said that a cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is known by the enemy. ("Il faut qu'il n'exige pas le secret, et qu'il puisse sans inconvénient tomber entre les mains de l'ennemi" )
Relying on obscurity for your security is poor engineering, in particular for a mass market system. Taking advantage of obscurity for "one of a kind" systems to gain an additional security advantage is fair game.
There's nothing new here, this has been done for decades and centuries. Problems arise when people think this is the golden ticket to keeping the barbarian hordes outside the castle wall.
Well... taking that a bit further, you are responsible for filtering all content that the Burmese/Myanmar government deems to be in violation of their internal laws.
I don't think you would be willing to implement that amount of filtering.
If the Europeans have an issue with it, it should probably be their responsibility to filter it.
It was given to the children to enable them to learn. Same thing as with text books.
If you asked a seven year old on a rainy Monday morning if he would rather have his text books, or the $200 (or equivalent in candy) that the text books cost, then the kid will take the candy, 9 out of 10.
So according to your reasoning, we should give all kids the choice of money/candy or textbooks/schooling, and make it really easy for kids or corrupt government to translate their XO's into cash? Is this what you meant?
There will be plenty of takers for the foreseeable future. The program caters to peoples vanity, allowing the giver to flaunt their generosity. Nothing appeals more to the western world than gadgets and vanity, and if our obsessions can fuel third world education, then that would be the best thing since sliced bread.
Governments could also benefits from a relatively low-cost rugged PC. Try to get a reasonably equipped, rugged piece of hardware for $400. You can't.
However, the laptops for sale should be of a different colour, for instance red. This would alleviate one of the biggest concerns of the program --- that stolen green laptops became a major source of revenue to corrupt government officials, or to parents who found a few dollars more tempting than their child's education. The goods will eventually end up in the hand of westerners who act like Santa Claus but are actually stealing from the kids --- a disturbing thought.
Selling the standard green laptop is a gigantic mistake. By all means keep the production line the same, but please change (at least) the colour of the enclosure for the resale variant. Help keep the green XO in the hands of its intended users.
So NTT transfers 14 TB/s over a single 100 mile fibre. (=112,000 Gb/s) And Siemens manages to transfer about one thousand of this (107Gb/s). In what way is this a record, or even interesting? http://techfreep.com/ntt-sets-download-record-at-1 4-terabytes-per-second.htm
Is this a trick question? The solution is simple. Use the left hand. (Or right, if you are lefty.) Takes about a day to learn, and requires no change in hardware. In order to reduce stress after recovery, switch hands on a regular basis. TMD
Three ways to increase accuracy of a GPS:
1. Averaging.
Average position data over a long time. Will immensely increase accuracy, because errors (and selective availability) tends to even out over time. However, I believe the precision of the end result is not completely deterministic.
2. DGPS Get another GPS. Put other GPS in a fixed, known location. Connect to this GPS to your actual positioning GPS, by means of radio, cable, wireless ethernet or similar. Both GPS's should be roughly in the same geographical region, and "see" the same satellites. Any significant positioning error introduced by timing issues (or selective availability) in the GPS system will be the same for both units. Hence, the fixed GPS will calculate a delta, wich will be added by the mobile GPS.
3. Y-code
Obtain key for use in military GPS, allowing GPS to decrypt/use y-code to correct the errors introduced in P-code. Increases resolution to 'bout 11m. (Note: this method is, post 2000, not interesting in most areas of the world, since selective availability has been turned off.)
Is that so?
Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei, or the National Socialist Labour party, was commonly referred to as NSDAP and it's members referred to as the "Nazi's".
The ideology, besides being very nationalistic, had a strong focus on the state and socialist values, and the (perceived) common good. "Arbeit und brot!"
Besides both being broken implementation of a faulty protocol, communism (extreme socialism) and nazism appears to have so much in common, that it is amazing they are (by some) considered opposite sides of the spectrum.
I guess the real lesson is that most systems are implementation dependent, since some moderate socialist democracies turned out to be (almost) decent places to live. And with respect to a national ID card, it's not what you have but how you use it.
A card (and associated "protocols") can be used to prevent identity theft and increase personal safety, or it can be implemented in a way that facilitates identity theft, besides fostering paranoia.
Nope.
Raw socket capability makes little difference, in particularly because one can always add this capability to Win98/95 at ones leasure. This is what much of all this funky firewall, socks proxy or IP sec software does to begin with in order to provide desired capabilities.
Remember, these systems (win9x) have no security, and no way of preventing either - a) The user, or - b) A malicious piece of code to modify IP stack and/or other system components.
The "badness" of this was mostly a publicity stunt from mr Gibson.
Just one little thing that seems to be easily forgotten...
The purpose of steganography is information hiding . An information hiding method that reveals more than random noise to an observer is broken. The only thing that can be deducted from a properly encoded steganographic message is the presence of (seemingly) random noise modulated on top of an information carrier. Claim: Encryption is a requirement in order to properly implement information hiding, otherwise one simply ends up with two images/message on top of each other.
There is no way anybody that is serious about information hiding (and we all know who that could be...) will resort to simply mixing two picture sources using [choose your favourite modulation scheme here].
This is also why it is so easy to detect and remove a known watermark from documents. (And certain unknown ones as well, as demonstrated by Felten & Co)
So, while scanning the net can be useful for detecting broken applications of steganography, it will hardly reveal interesting information. (note: "Application" here refers to "method" or "usage" and not necessarily to the software performing the modulation.)
"The network is the computer".... (TM)
It's hardly news to anyone that information exchange, collaboration and project management is an increasingly important area.
More interestingly, this is also an area where Microsoft is very weak. Microsoft NetMeeting? Don't get me started! At least there are a fair number of alternatives. (And some of them open source.)
MS Project? If anybody seriously bothered to compete with Microsoft Project, it would likely die a horrible death. Unfortunately this hasn't happened yet.
Part of the reason is, as always, the infamous integration into the MS product line. "You bought MS-Office. Now you have to buy MS-Project." -- or -- "You bought a Green and Yellow tractor. Now you have to buy the Green and Yellow airplane that goes with it. Otherwise you will fall down. And don't ask stupid questions, because then we will blow up your runway."
Another reason for the lack of competition in this market segment is that MS Project is considered to be mostly a toy. In industry I rarely encounter anybody using MS project as anything more than a mediocre Gantt Chart drawing program. There are of course believers who consider this to be the pinnacle of project management, but my expectations of a project management application goes a little bit beyond this.
Try to set up 300-600 tasks in MS-Project 98, for a few months worth of project. Attempt to do some resource leveling, critical path analysis etc. What happens?
a) It will crash immediately.
b) It'll spend 2 hours of CPU power, and you'll then get a screen full of nonsense and sub-optimal resource allocation.
c) It will corrupt your file.
d) It could be any combination of a, b or c.
Try to share the data with your coworkers, on the web. You think MS-Project (98) will let you export a Gantt chart in any human readable format? Bwwahhhhaha... think again. You have to print it as Postscript, convert it to PDF and then post it on the web.
Now, if the software really contributed to the solution, instead of being part of the problem, it would let you delegate responsibilities, and collaborate amongst multiple Project Managers/developers/workers/supervisors etc. And it would do this over the web, so that your *NIX developers didn't have to crank up Vmware to get an update. NOW were talking.
Industrial strength project management software is not cheap, but the lower end of the market appears to be somewhat lacking competition. If SUN approached this segment (which is indeed the segment they are addressing with StarOffice) they would stand a pretty good chance of setting a standard. Heck... would I object to installing StarOffice to get my hands on a half decent piece of PM software? Not at all!
Conclusion: I think there is an opportunity here, and I think the cost of executing on that opportunity is relatively small. I also believe that the benefits are greater for SUN than for other types of office software. Heavily networked applications are closer to their core competencies, and will to a greater extent contribute to driving the demand for network computing.
Disclaimer. I have not yet used MS-Project 2000 so my assumptions and conclusions might be inaccurate, biased, unfair, annoying and un-American. According to MS, Project 2000 will solve any problem anybody could possibly have dreamt of having. Just like the last version, except that the new one will additionally make coffee for the development team.
I seem to remember that Noise Killer used to be a fairly popular product back in the 80's. (At least in Europe) This temperature controlled fan voltage regulator could turn most PC "tractors" quiet.
Most computer fans are dimensioned for:A) Extremely high temperatures and
B) Power supply maximum load.
Regulating the speed according to temperature makes a lot of sense, since these extremes are rarely encountered. In most systems this would also prolong the life of the fan.
Looking at their webpage , I find them quite expensive, and wonder if anybody has found less pricy alternatives?
Other than that, using a resistor to control fan speed can be tempting, but because of the relatively high start current of the fan, the fan might never be able to get started. A voltage regulator is therefore a much better choice.
However, I did at one point successfully use a 100ohm resistor to slow down a small, particularly noisy fan at the front of an old CD-R. To ensure that the fan would start, I simply mounted a 1000uF capacitor in parallel with the fan, which gave it the kick it needed to start.
In my MBA program (Queen's MBA for Science & Technology) which is Canadian, eh, this is relatively common. Most of our exams are "open laptop" which means you can utilize the laptop for problem solving. Of those exams, most of the 'case' exams are "open Internet". (We are allowed to plug in the Ethernet cables) The deliverables are usually transferred to the professor by email, or simply printed and handed in.
This has worked great so far. Laptops are mandatory anyway (will be included in tuition starting next year, I believe), but I realize there is a significant difference between an MBA and an undergraduate degree. My point is, when all students are on a roughly equal technological platform, both in terms of possessing the same technology, and being able to use it, I believe computer based exams are fair, powerful and closer to a "real life" situation. We are testing the ability to utilize resources (similar to what is available in real life) and analyze a problem, then suggest recommendations within the time constraints.
One problem that was brought up was the possibility for cheating. On 'case analysis' type exams, cheating is relatively hard to do. Besides, in a small group the honour system does work fairly well. I have never heard of anybody cheating on an exam, or even planning to do so.
On many exams, however, a laptop is simply not a meaningful way of testing knowledge/learning. And that's why my good ol' pencil still has chew marks on it.