I know it is bad form to reply to one's own post, but I would like to point to the "Clinton era" encryption strategy with a (faulty) back door. That was the "clipper chip", and you can read about it here.
The point is... whatever the backdoor mechanism the government mandates, it will be vulnerable to third-party abuse.
As the convenience for the government to wiretap increases, the ease for a third party (inside or outside the government) to abuse such a mechanism also increases.
There was a debate back in the Clinton era as to whether or not encryption on the Internet needed a "back door" for the FBI. I had thought that the argument regarding the potential problems safeguarding these "master keys" had won out. Having the FBI spying on you with a warrant is one thing, but having organized crime, a private investigator, or some rogue arm of government (quite a few of those these days it seems),... that's another thing entirely.
If you trust the government not to abuse this, then consider whether you trust the government to be able to effectively safeguard access to this. Ignoring social engineering (e.g. $), how likely is the government to have every bit of this infrastructure protected against stealthful 3rd party break-ins?
Suddenly blackmail is going to get a lot easier.
It took many decades for the Internet to flower and change the world with its freedoms. It is taking far less for the governments of the world to deflower the Internet and sow the seeds of thought control.
A standards war would appear to have some upsides for the MPAA, but consumers will likely choose "none of the above."
First, the more easily cracked format will be able to be face-savingly abandoned, whichever that turns out to be. If there had been DVD and DVD-2 formats, (don't bring up the original DiVX, I mean functionally equivalent formats), as soon as DVD had been breached, you'd have seen the studios latch on to DVD-2. Now we all know that any copy protection is defeatable, but the MPAA is merely concerned with stalling the inevitable.
Second, owners of the losing format will be counted on to repurchase their media at some point. Imagine if you'd purchased a library of Betamax movies back in the day. Chances are, at some point, you'd have considered buying some of them again in VHS, (pre-DVD of course.) The MPAA profit structure is all about reselling you the same old crap every time they up the resolution; of course they'd love to resell you the same movie twice simply because the high-def horse you picked never made it around the track.
In the end, the winning format will be an unencumbered format, namely the hard drive or whatever general purpose storage medium is around in three years. Think about it... these high-def movies will look just great compressed down with a modern codec, and will take up very little of tomorrow's multi-terrabyte drives. Why the hell would consumers want to handle stacks of plastic disks when they can have a jukebox?
The MPAA will give the consumers what they don't want: a standards war, copy protection, and high prices. The consumers will respond with piracy. In the end, you can't sell someone something they don't want to buy.
I think I follow you. In my thinking I was considering the observed properties of a circle, not the mathematical absolute of a circle.
Say I observe a spherical object which is impossibly perfect, matching the mathematical properties of a sphere. Now let's say the observed value of pi changes within that sphere, and as a result I observe the volume of the sphere growing while the surface area of the sphere remains constant.
You are saying: congratulations, you've changed the sphere into a non-euclidean space, but pi is still 3.14..., you're going to need another interpretation of pi for this new non-euclidean space.
You might also say I'm "tripping balls", but I digress.
Why can't other constants, like say pi, be variable as well?
Allow pi to vary, and you have the warping of space. How is that so strange?
What assume constants are constant?
(I really am curious, not trolling.)
Anything that is stored and retained for the "possibility" that the government may need it, can and will be exploited by organized crime, ie. the mob.
Forcing ISPs to archive all this data would be, in essense, a huge boon for every would-be extortionist who can either hack or bribe their way to the data.
Now I'm making a distinction between organized crime syndicates and the actual government, which might seem unnecessary, but I'll point that out to be fair.
The advances in the Java IDE space over the last four years have been fantastic. Whether you are a fan of Netbeans, Eclipse, another IDE, or even if you don't use Java, this competition should be a nice reminder of how a working market produces innovative products at a nice pace. (AMD vs. Intel is another example.)
It is a sad reminder of Microsoft's (criminal) monopoly, and the governments unwillingness to intervene, that for the vast majority of consumers, there has been very little of this "competitive energy" in the Operating System space. Sure, they can buy an Apple, but even there... only one manufacturer for OS-X.
I'm running a nice 3-d enhanced desktop (Xgl) in Linux, but I see Windows users have another six months, minimum, to see anything comperable.
Imagine what the tech world would be like if the Operating System market was as competitive as NetBeans vs. Eclipse.
There just has to be better uses of our intelligence community's time.
Are you fucking kidding me? I'd say it is critical to secure computers in government.
The real news here is that our government is stupid enough to buy computers from China. Are we going to have Russia building our ICBMs for us now? There are just some things you have to do yourself.
There are a number of modded up posts on here where folks basically say, "hey it's why they have patents." The idea is, shareholders expect Microsoft to do whatever they need to to make money. Here's why that may be viewed as wrong:
Microsoft is not a "normal" company, in a legal sense. They are a monopoly. In American law, (when enforced), monopolies have certain restrictions to encourage a healthy business climate (i.e. competition.) Therefore, Microsoft suing to prevent competition should invite the eyes of regulators.
Next, software patents are widely considered b*llshit. This has been discussed to death on here. I think if Linux was breaking Microsoft's copyrights or trademarks, you'd see a different reaction from those not suckling Microsoft's teat. Patents on double-clicking are quite different than verbatim copying someone's code.
And last but not least, threatening to sue as part of a campaign in the press is quite different than actually suing. If I go out and talk to the press and say, "I may sue so and so for such and such", I am implying that there is something there to sue for. If I'm full of hot air, and I'm just doing this to hurt the reputation or business of another entity, I am on shakey ethical and legal ground.
I say to Ballmer: go for it. Let's see how the EU (which is apparently not in Microsoft's pocket like the US DOJ) reacts. I don't think it will be pretty.
While I wish no ill will on Raph, Star Wars Galaxies is a textbook example of a misguided project.
Star Wars is one of the most regonized and highly regarded franchises among video game consumers. Players have high expectations, and why shouldn't they? There's enough material there for an engaging and interesting MMO. One has to wonder, how could you mess up a Star Wars MMO?
Well, here's how:
1. Launch a buggy game your beta testers tell you is nowhere near ready. 2. Have no player-controlled starships. Space is just like "zoning" in EQ. 3. Have no class balance, and then screw up class balance. Make sure your producer's favorite class (pet handler) is insanely powerful at launch. 4. Make sure entire classes, (droid manufacturer), are completely foobar. 5. Totally mismanage player relations, eventually cutting off public access to the forums to hide discontentment. Be sure to have a privately run, but public web site up for the producer where he talks about how players are sheep, more or less. 6. Planets aren't even frickin' round, and they have edges which are just high mountains. 7. Make sure questing is so stupid players don't even bother to read the templated instructions for what you are doing, and instead focus on the one or two variables per template. (Go here, blow up nest, run back.) 8. Make sure PvP is totally hosed at launch. 9. Don't bother to react to major economy-ruining bugs for days, even after reports flood forums, so that money is completely devalued. 10. Make the #1 fantasy of every player, becoming a Jedi, completely out of reach to smart players who maybe, like, have a job, and within the reach of mindless drones who play your game 24/7.
Anyways, the game was fscked all along, and the final news that the combat/professions system needed another overhaul was just the coup-de-grace.
Cyberspace is a world within a world, with a very different set of parameters than life outside your window. You are comparing a meat-world situation with activity in computers and on networks. Therefore, you are proving exactly my point about the gap between a laymen's understanding of the technology and its true nature.
When will the courts realize the bloody obvious fact that bits on a hard drive are evidence of nothing! Until computers are not able to be remotely hijacked with all tracks erased, there's no way to prove who put the bits there!!!
As more and more traditional forms of evidence (audio tapes, photos, DNA records, VOTES for god sakes) become digitized, the more we need to be skeptical of them.
And don't bring up digital signatures so long as keyloggers exist.
Microsoft has a lot of cash to burn. And what better way to spend that cash than to lose a few software patent disputes? The rewards are clear:
1. FUD in the marketplace concerning patents, giving CIOs worry about using open/free software. 2. A way to fund patent trolls who *may* turn their attention to open/free software (if they perceive money to be made from folks like Sun/OpenOffice.) 3. Precidents set on absurd patents whose licensing costs prohibit free softwar from entering a domain.
I'm not saying this particular example is applicable, but losing a few key patent cases may actually help more than harm Microsoft.
If I were Google I would use my massive market capitalization to acquire two companies that would help insure the success of this push:
1. Novell for a "secured" distribution and the experience to back it. Novell is shipping AppArmor in OpenSuse 10.1, and it's quite nice (and finally open as well as free). Another alternative might be Red Hat, for its pioneering work in SELinux.
2. VMWare, for control of "VMWare Player". Users aren't going to uninstall Windows overnight, but they may be happy to launch a Google "machine within a machine". If you haven't tried VMWare Player, check it out, especially the Browser Applicance. Yes, hardware based virtualization is coming, but most people won't be throwing their old hardware away for quite some time, as it is adequate for web browsing and word processing. One of the first things a Google acquired VMWare should do is expand their platform to the Macintosh.
I think those two acquisitions would cement a way to deliver and secure a Linux platform.
> "It looks like Microsoft is seriously trying to make the lives of us web developers easier."
Microsoft often moves to support standards, but then tweaks their behavior in such a way that the net result favors their implementation. This behavior even has a name. Yes, I see that the Microsoft employee says their implementation is consistent with other browsers, but for how long? And how consistent is it now, really?
You're welcome to be upbeat about Microsoft's intensions, but history has shown otherwise. Fool me once, fool me twice, and that sort of thing.
>"Of course you'll still need to use the Microsoft.XMLHTTP ActiveX object if you want to support IE6 and older"
Which means developers will likely not find this any easier, as they will still need to support IE6, and they will also need to handle any "oops, not so identical" behavior that might come along in the IE 7+ implementations.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is ... whatever the backdoor mechanism the government mandates, it will be vulnerable to third-party abuse.
As the convenience for the government to wiretap increases, the ease for a third party (inside or outside the government) to abuse such a mechanism also increases.
... that's another thing entirely.
There was a debate back in the Clinton era as to whether or not encryption on the Internet needed a "back door" for the FBI. I had thought that the argument regarding the potential problems safeguarding these "master keys" had won out. Having the FBI spying on you with a warrant is one thing, but having organized crime, a private investigator, or some rogue arm of government (quite a few of those these days it seems),
If you trust the government not to abuse this, then consider whether you trust the government to be able to effectively safeguard access to this. Ignoring social engineering (e.g. $), how likely is the government to have every bit of this infrastructure protected against stealthful 3rd party break-ins?
Suddenly blackmail is going to get a lot easier.
It took many decades for the Internet to flower and change the world with its freedoms. It is taking far less for the governments of the world to deflower the Internet and sow the seeds of thought control.
A standards war would appear to have some upsides for the MPAA, but consumers will likely choose "none of the above."
First, the more easily cracked format will be able to be face-savingly abandoned, whichever that turns out to be. If there had been DVD and DVD-2 formats, (don't bring up the original DiVX, I mean functionally equivalent formats), as soon as DVD had been breached, you'd have seen the studios latch on to DVD-2. Now we all know that any copy protection is defeatable, but the MPAA is merely concerned with stalling the inevitable.
Second, owners of the losing format will be counted on to repurchase their media at some point. Imagine if you'd purchased a library of Betamax movies back in the day. Chances are, at some point, you'd have considered buying some of them again in VHS, (pre-DVD of course.) The MPAA profit structure is all about reselling you the same old crap every time they up the resolution; of course they'd love to resell you the same movie twice simply because the high-def horse you picked never made it around the track.
In the end, the winning format will be an unencumbered format, namely the hard drive or whatever general purpose storage medium is around in three years. Think about it... these high-def movies will look just great compressed down with a modern codec, and will take up very little of tomorrow's multi-terrabyte drives. Why the hell would consumers want to handle stacks of plastic disks when they can have a jukebox?
The MPAA will give the consumers what they don't want: a standards war, copy protection, and high prices. The consumers will respond with piracy. In the end, you can't sell someone something they don't want to buy.
VIIV is 64 to an idiotic marketing department.
And in other news...
Grass is green;
Oil is overpriced;
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
They have legal shrooms there too, you know. I'd say that's more likely.
I think I follow you. In my thinking I was considering the observed properties of a circle, not the mathematical absolute of a circle.
Say I observe a spherical object which is impossibly perfect, matching the mathematical properties of a sphere. Now let's say the observed value of pi changes within that sphere, and as a result I observe the volume of the sphere growing while the surface area of the sphere remains constant.
You are saying: congratulations, you've changed the sphere into a non-euclidean space, but pi is still 3.14..., you're going to need another interpretation of pi for this new non-euclidean space.
You might also say I'm "tripping balls", but I digress.
Why can't other constants, like say pi, be variable as well? Allow pi to vary, and you have the warping of space. How is that so strange? What assume constants are constant? (I really am curious, not trolling.)
Anything that is stored and retained for the "possibility" that the government may need it, can and will be exploited by organized crime, ie. the mob.
Forcing ISPs to archive all this data would be, in essense, a huge boon for every would-be extortionist who can either hack or bribe their way to the data.
Now I'm making a distinction between organized crime syndicates and the actual government, which might seem unnecessary, but I'll point that out to be fair.
So, let's say we get a group together some weekend, buy some beer, and reinvent DNS in a way that obliterates the value of all these registrations.
... oh, yeah. Nevermind.
Then we'd just need to get Firefox, and of course IE to
The advances in the Java IDE space over the last four years have been fantastic. Whether you are a fan of Netbeans, Eclipse, another IDE, or even if you don't use Java, this competition should be a nice reminder of how a working market produces innovative products at a nice pace. (AMD vs. Intel is another example.)
... only one manufacturer for OS-X.
It is a sad reminder of Microsoft's (criminal) monopoly, and the governments unwillingness to intervene, that for the vast majority of consumers, there has been very little of this "competitive energy" in the Operating System space. Sure, they can buy an Apple, but even there
I'm running a nice 3-d enhanced desktop (Xgl) in Linux, but I see Windows users have another six months, minimum, to see anything comperable.
Imagine what the tech world would be like if the Operating System market was as competitive as NetBeans vs. Eclipse.
Are you fucking kidding me? I'd say it is critical to secure computers in government.
The real news here is that our government is stupid enough to buy computers from China. Are we going to have Russia building our ICBMs for us now? There are just some things you have to do yourself.
Microsoft is not a "normal" company, in a legal sense. They are a monopoly. In American law, (when enforced), monopolies have certain restrictions to encourage a healthy business climate (i.e. competition.) Therefore, Microsoft suing to prevent competition should invite the eyes of regulators.
Next, software patents are widely considered b*llshit. This has been discussed to death on here. I think if Linux was breaking Microsoft's copyrights or trademarks, you'd see a different reaction from those not suckling Microsoft's teat. Patents on double-clicking are quite different than verbatim copying someone's code.
And last but not least, threatening to sue as part of a campaign in the press is quite different than actually suing. If I go out and talk to the press and say, "I may sue so and so for such and such", I am implying that there is something there to sue for. If I'm full of hot air, and I'm just doing this to hurt the reputation or business of another entity, I am on shakey ethical and legal ground.
I say to Ballmer: go for it. Let's see how the EU (which is apparently not in Microsoft's pocket like the US DOJ) reacts. I don't think it will be pretty.
While I wish no ill will on Raph, Star Wars Galaxies is a textbook example of a misguided project.
Star Wars is one of the most regonized and highly regarded franchises among video game consumers. Players have high expectations, and why shouldn't they? There's enough material there for an engaging and interesting MMO. One has to wonder, how could you mess up a Star Wars MMO?
Well, here's how:
1. Launch a buggy game your beta testers tell you is nowhere near ready.
2. Have no player-controlled starships. Space is just like "zoning" in EQ.
3. Have no class balance, and then screw up class balance. Make sure your producer's favorite class (pet handler) is insanely powerful at launch.
4. Make sure entire classes, (droid manufacturer), are completely foobar.
5. Totally mismanage player relations, eventually cutting off public access to the forums to hide discontentment. Be sure to have a privately run, but public web site up for the producer where he talks about how players are sheep, more or less.
6. Planets aren't even frickin' round, and they have edges which are just high mountains.
7. Make sure questing is so stupid players don't even bother to read the templated instructions for what you are doing, and instead focus on the one or two variables per template. (Go here, blow up nest, run back.)
8. Make sure PvP is totally hosed at launch.
9. Don't bother to react to major economy-ruining bugs for days, even after reports flood forums, so that money is completely devalued.
10. Make the #1 fantasy of every player, becoming a Jedi, completely out of reach to smart players who maybe, like, have a job, and within the reach of mindless drones who play your game 24/7.
Anyways, the game was fscked all along, and the final news that the combat/professions system needed another overhaul was just the coup-de-grace.
RIP; lesson learned for Lucusfilm.
"First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you, <-- you are here
then you win."
- Gandhi
Of course we don't expect Microsoft to fight cleanly, so comparisons where "total cost" = "marketshare" are par for the course.
Cyberspace is a world within a world, with a very different set of parameters than life outside your window. You are comparing a meat-world situation with activity in computers and on networks. Therefore, you are proving exactly my point about the gap between a laymen's understanding of the technology and its true nature.
When will the courts realize the bloody obvious fact that bits on a hard drive are evidence of nothing! Until computers are not able to be remotely hijacked with all tracks erased, there's no way to prove who put the bits there!!!
As more and more traditional forms of evidence (audio tapes, photos, DNA records, VOTES for god sakes) become digitized, the more we need to be skeptical of them.
And don't bring up digital signatures so long as keyloggers exist.
Translation: Until next week, if you run Windows there are at least seven ways to pwn you.
You've just been trolled by a Fark.com cliche.
Follow-up article suggested in subject.
"Waaaaa! We didn't think of it first!!! Waaaa! We can't embrace change!!!! Waaa!"
Microsoft has a lot of cash to burn. And what better way to spend that cash than to lose a few software patent disputes? The rewards are clear:
1. FUD in the marketplace concerning patents, giving CIOs worry about using open/free software.
2. A way to fund patent trolls who *may* turn their attention to open/free software (if they perceive money to be made from folks like Sun/OpenOffice.)
3. Precidents set on absurd patents whose licensing costs prohibit free softwar from entering a domain.
I'm not saying this particular example is applicable, but losing a few key patent cases may actually help more than harm Microsoft.
If I were Google I would use my massive market capitalization to acquire two companies that would help insure the success of this push:
1. Novell for a "secured" distribution and the experience to back it. Novell is shipping AppArmor in OpenSuse 10.1, and it's quite nice (and finally open as well as free). Another alternative might be Red Hat, for its pioneering work in SELinux.
2. VMWare, for control of "VMWare Player". Users aren't going to uninstall Windows overnight, but they may be happy to launch a Google "machine within a machine". If you haven't tried VMWare Player, check it out, especially the Browser Applicance. Yes, hardware based virtualization is coming, but most people won't be throwing their old hardware away for quite some time, as it is adequate for web browsing and word processing. One of the first things a Google acquired VMWare should do is expand their platform to the Macintosh.
I think those two acquisitions would cement a way to deliver and secure a Linux platform.
Microsoft often moves to support standards, but then tweaks their behavior in such a way that the net result favors their implementation. This behavior even has a name. Yes, I see that the Microsoft employee says their implementation is consistent with other browsers, but for how long? And how consistent is it now, really?
You're welcome to be upbeat about Microsoft's intensions, but history has shown otherwise. Fool me once, fool me twice, and that sort of thing.
>"Of course you'll still need to use the Microsoft.XMLHTTP ActiveX object if you want to support IE6 and older"
Which means developers will likely not find this any easier, as they will still need to support IE6, and they will also need to handle any "oops, not so identical" behavior that might come along in the IE 7+ implementations.
Rape as an MMRPG game mechanic? I think that's incredibly poor taste.
Plus it gives Jack Thompson something else to shit himself about.
Damn now I have to condone virtual rape just for the gleeful joy of seeing Jack Thompson soil himself over something new.