They've already been on the record that third-party antivirus can be harmful to security: https://www.zdnet.com/article/...
They're not wrong, I've seen some things from McAfee and Symantec that are downright shady.
In theory one could emulate TPM inside a virtual machine, but from what I understand there is a key in the TPM that is machine specific. This is how the remote attestation feature works, by checking to make sure the device is "safe" and the software (e.g. music player that only lets you play it for 30 days) running on it has not been modified. This is actually pretty secure, and no logical trickery will get around it, but it's not perfect.
The fundamental flaw of all DRM/TPM systems is that you have the keys. They might make them hard to get by putting them on a separate chip instead of the RAM but a sufficiently skilled attacker with, say, an electron microscope, might be able to extract them. At that point everything is completely broken. In the traditional "Alice, Bob, and Eve" story, Alice is sending a message to Bob and doesn't want Eve to be able to decrypt it, but Bob and Eve are effectively the same person. This is why no DRM scheme can be perfect, just a major nuisance to law-abiding folk.
because apparently it is no longer a top priority, and they have stopped adding the capacity for it in my neighborhood. My downstairs neighbor has Verizon DSL, but I have been unable to get it because as far as I can tell from what the Verizon rep said they don't have enough DSL jacks for any new accounts. This is a college town. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people who want DSL. Too bad. The rep said that they are no longer adding DSL capacity because they are focusing all improvement on the FiOS network. Not that FiOS is available in this area. We're just screwed. She suggested that I wait until the downstairs neighbor canceled their service. Brilliant. Stuck with Comcast Cable again.
I've had pretty much the opposite result. I ordered Speakeasy and got the modem, then hooked it up and it worked perfectly without any technician visits. Then Verizon had a technician visit and it stopped working, and no les than 6 technician visits (from both Covad and Verizon) later I decided to cancel. I don't know if this was Speakeasy's fault or Covad's fault or Verizon's fault. My bet is it was Verizon, but I am still pissed that it didn't work.
Heck, even if they do masquerade the bot as a valid browser. Just make a present but essentially invisible link on your pages that bots will follow but humans won't be able to see. You can even call it something obvious like block_me.html if you want. Any client who follows that link is almost certainly a bot instead of a human, and therefore should be automatically blocked. There is no easy way for this kind of bot to defend against this strategy, without totally losing their effectiveness. More obvious strategies include monitoring usage patterns for bot-like activity, although this is less reliable and possibly prone to false positives. Either way though, there are ways to tell a bot other than just it's USER-AGENT string.
Indeed. My employer has actually just gotten rid of a bunch of old n-series desktops because they were obsolete. Granted their definition of "obsolete" is anything more than three years old, but still, n-series is not new.
I know how to make a manhole cover that is square (helps prevent theft I believe) and yet won't fall down the hole, without wasting as much space. Make the cover square and the hole itself round, with a diameter just a tiny bit smaller than the length of the side of the cover. That way the wasted space is limited to the corners outside of the circle.
There are probably better ways to keep manhole covers from being stolen (locks?) but this would work.
The point is with the Hi-Def media, it doesn't make as much sense to rip every movie you have and store it on your fileserver for the next year or two. This is awesome news but i am not sure i'll be ripping HD-DVDs/Blu-ray disks like i used to rip DVDs. These things take way too much space. Hollywood would have an edge if they priced the stuff at around 15-20$ - i'd buy one than let a movie take up 30GB on my machine.
Wait 5 years and read that post again. I bet you'll laugh. "Only 24 gigs?" you'll say. "That's nothing!" I guarentee it.
To put it in prespective: My old 486 had a hard disk with less than 400 MB of space. But it also had a CD-ROM drive. Your average CD back then held 650MB. Yes, it had an optical drive that was bigger than its hard disk. Nobody ever thought to even include copy protection on the CD because storing that much data was insane, and transmitting it over the internet even more so. With the advent of MP3 and bigger storage and broadband it became commonplace to trade music online.
My brother got one of the first computers that came equipped with a DVD drive, which has a capacity of 4.7 GB (I'm ignoring the whole multi-layer DVD format for sake of simplicity). It also came with a hard disk that could hold up to 2 Gigabytes. Now your average DVD can be recompressed without too much quality loss to, say, 1.5GB, and modern hard disks will store hundreds of them with ease, and you can download them in an hour or two on a good connection, or maybe a day on an okay one. Are you noticing a recurring theme here?
The truth is that Blu-ray isn't all that big compared to the hard disks of today, especially not when you look at previous optical formats and how big they were in comparison to the hard disks of the era in which they were first made. Heck I could fit a Blu-ray disk or two on my iPod and have some space left over.
Such is the progress of technology (by which I mean mostly storage space and bandwidth, but also compression technology and the processor power to implement it). A digital movie standard such as Blu-ray or HDDVD should be expected to last a decade. They will probably last even longer than that because hi-def technology has matured to the point where users couldn't possibly need higher resolution or more pristine sound effects. Where do you think magnetic storage will be in ten years? Heck, where do you think solid-state storage will be in ten years?
The point is that technology changes, and people invent things like MP3 that let you squeeze more into smaller space. Which means movie format won't stop piracy because it's "too big".
Actually I did read your first reply. And I'm saying that the original poster actually was right. I explained why in my previous post: Having a remote control that can wake a device up from it's off state means that the device is using at least a few watts to drive the infared detection and interpretation circuitry. It also precludes a 120V/10A switch that cuts off the main power supply from the wall, meaning that yes, whatever inefficiencies there are in the power supply also contribute to the overall power usage. An infared remote can't drive a 120V switch without some sort of relay mechanism, which would require some other source of power to operate.
So we see that my original point: "this device has a remote control that can turn it on" implies that "this device uses power even when it's off" still stands. Notice the implication operator. That means that it's certainly possible for a device to draw power when off even if it doesn't have a remote. I'm not contradicting what you said about power supplies being inefficient, because that's true. What I'm saying is that having a remote that can turn the device on means that it has to have this sort of switching power supply (as opposed to a perfectly-efficient-when-off 120V switch) and it also has to be using a few watts to drive the IR circuits.
If you don't get it after that I'm not explaining any further.
there's nothing inherent about a device having a "remote control" that causes such ineffeciency
Actually yes there is, sort of. If the remote can turn the device on from an "off" state than that means it's not really off because it's using at least a few watts to keep the IR recieving circuits active to detect the "on" signal from the remote. I have an old stereo system that has a remote but the remote can't turn it on because it has a hard power switch on the front that cut electricity to the power supply. Older computers were like this as well, which is why the older AT style PCs can't turn themselves on or off, whereas newer PCs have features such as wake-on-LAN or even daily auto power on or keyboard wakeup, but all those features require a slight power drain when the device is off, because to detect those events it can't be truly "off".
You have to apply for a patent, which is checked against other patents, before the right to that knowledge becomes yours. Same for a copyright, if I understand.
Bzzzt! Wrong. Under international treaty everything created is copyrighted, whether or not copyright is registered or even whether or not the material is labeled as copyrighted.
I don't know the full extent of IP law.
No kidding.
the software manufacturer isn't profiting off of your IP itself, just a way to check it against the IP of others.
Now this is where the legal issues might get a little fuzzy, but in my eyes the company is definitely profiting from having an unauthorized copy of the student's essay, probably in violation of copyright law. They may not necessarily be distributing copies of it, I don't know how the service works and whether it shows the possible source of "plagarized" material, which would definitely be violating the students IP rights.
I am an honest student, I've never copied a paper or even given one to another student. I have done some things that this system might consider "suspicious" such as using an old blog entry as a creative writing assignment (with some cleanup) or helping other students find sources, including some that I've already used. It would really bother me that this system keeps my essays forever without my consent, especially if it were without my knowlege. That has nothing to do with my wanting to sell the essays later (I would never do that). I don't condone cheating but I don't necessarily like this system either.
No, I am not a lawyer, but I do have a bit of common sense
But this is IP Law, so common sense doesn't necessarily apply. Because Copyright protects the right to create and distribute copies or derivative works, not to listen to music. Copyright law says "duplicating/distributing this is illegal", not "owning duplicates that we didn't make is illegal", which might imply that if you duplicate it in a country where it is legal, then the copy is legal. Hypothetically, say Ohio forbids the sale of fireworks but doesn't forbid their use, or maybe only forbids their use in big cities. You could legally buy fireworks elsewhere and then use them on--say--your farm, because their use isn't what's illegal, it's the sale.
And that's not the only example. In Pennsylvania, honest-to-god, it's completely legal to smoke cigarettes if you're under 18. It's maybe even legal to try to buy them (I forget), but it's illegal for the store to sell them to you. So in theory if a student found a state where sale (or giving them) to minors was legal but actual consumption by minors was illegal, and brought them to PA, in theory no laws have been broken. Unless you look at import/export laws for tobacco... my point is simply that any sufficiently complicated law doesn't always make sense.
The next question is: who is doing the duplicating, the downloader or the uploader? The large wave of lawsuits target only those who upload or share music on the internet. That probably doesn't imply that downloading is legal--it's probably because targeting sharers is easier--but imagine a band or label who offers their own music on a p2p network. They could hardly sue the IP addresses which downloaded the songs on the grounds that they infringed copyright, anymore than Weird Al's fans could be sued for downloading "Don't Download This Song" off his publicly available website.
That isn't to say that the RIAA won't find some way to go after AllOfMP3.com customers if it wanted to, but they'd be on shakier legal ground than you'd think, and they might have to do something weird like accusing the customers of "customs violations" for importing music improperly. Insanities like this are common and maybe even inevitable when you try to apply laws that control the flow of information in a non-isolated system with non-uniform laws.
The Americans with Disabilities Act has some pretty specific things to say about how to comply with it. For example: An ADA accessible ramp must not have a slope steeper than 1:12. Contractors and stores know whether they comply with it. Where are the specific guidelines for websites? AFAIK there aren't any yet, and that needs to change.
Right. Because I'm sure every family that can't afford to send kids to private schools is poor because the parents are dumb and lazy. And we should condemn their kids for the parents' financial problems by not letting them go to school, because that's the best way to make them self-sufficient and able to get and hold a good job.
On the offchance that you're not just trolling, you ARE being astoundingly naieve about the weaknesses of capitalism. The change you suggest would make the economy and the entire country far worse off than it already is. Certainly there are problems with the public school system, but the solution is not to abolish it.
Meanwhile, students at Drew Elementary, deep in the low-income area of West Philly, don't even have keyboards and mice for the few old iMacs in the library because they can't afford them (I suspect NCLB is to blame for that). I am part of a student organization in Drexel University called Tech Serv and we are preparing to donate around 31 computers to the elementary school, some of them Pentium IIs but it's better than what they had, which was nothing. Most of the machines will be donated with edubuntu, because the school can't afford windows licenses; we're trying hard to find a few machines with windows stickers already on them for the engineering lab, which plans to use Mindstorms to teach kids basic robotics. And meanwhile that school gets $63 million in funding because Microsoft had a nifty idea.
Marijuana is illegal because of the same stupid "think of the children" rhetoric that has inspired this bit of legislation. Funny though; alcahol is legal, despite the fact that people do some pretty awful things after using it.
Not to weaken your argument; I'm no acoustic engineer, but I have to point out that the only reason tires have treads is because of rain or other water on the roadway. Slick tires are used on certain cars (esp Indy cars) because they actually grip the roadway better, but they're useless when the track is wet.
Of course they could. If by "legally anticompetitive" you mean being anticompetitive through the legal system. Lawsuits can be an illegal monopoly abuse too.
We accepted his initial report because he had no reason to lie. Why would he? He's percieved as a Microsoft fanboy, and he'd hardly make up stuff to discredit them. After noticing the general reaction and schadenfreude, and after talking with somebody at Microsoft, he changes his direction, and the 'Slashdot crowd' regains their typical mistrust of him. I see nothing inconsistent with that, and while I don't necessarily think they're right because I generally avoid conspiracy theories, they are at least logical and not as stupid or fickle as you seem to think.
Slashdot Mirror
They've already been on the record that third-party antivirus can be harmful to security: https://www.zdnet.com/article/... They're not wrong, I've seen some things from McAfee and Symantec that are downright shady.
How many Windows PCs do you have that would use 300GB in a month?!? It may be time to set up WSUS...
In theory one could emulate TPM inside a virtual machine, but from what I understand there is a key in the TPM that is machine specific. This is how the remote attestation feature works, by checking to make sure the device is "safe" and the software (e.g. music player that only lets you play it for 30 days) running on it has not been modified. This is actually pretty secure, and no logical trickery will get around it, but it's not perfect. The fundamental flaw of all DRM/TPM systems is that you have the keys. They might make them hard to get by putting them on a separate chip instead of the RAM but a sufficiently skilled attacker with, say, an electron microscope, might be able to extract them. At that point everything is completely broken. In the traditional "Alice, Bob, and Eve" story, Alice is sending a message to Bob and doesn't want Eve to be able to decrypt it, but Bob and Eve are effectively the same person. This is why no DRM scheme can be perfect, just a major nuisance to law-abiding folk.
I've had a try at setting up a torrent for it: http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?page=torrent-details&id=5665e3caf528c853645efe633113c6bab9042718
because apparently it is no longer a top priority, and they have stopped adding the capacity for it in my neighborhood. My downstairs neighbor has Verizon DSL, but I have been unable to get it because as far as I can tell from what the Verizon rep said they don't have enough DSL jacks for any new accounts. This is a college town. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people who want DSL. Too bad. The rep said that they are no longer adding DSL capacity because they are focusing all improvement on the FiOS network. Not that FiOS is available in this area. We're just screwed. She suggested that I wait until the downstairs neighbor canceled their service. Brilliant. Stuck with Comcast Cable again.
I've had pretty much the opposite result. I ordered Speakeasy and got the modem, then hooked it up and it worked perfectly without any technician visits. Then Verizon had a technician visit and it stopped working, and no les than 6 technician visits (from both Covad and Verizon) later I decided to cancel. I don't know if this was Speakeasy's fault or Covad's fault or Verizon's fault. My bet is it was Verizon, but I am still pissed that it didn't work.
Heck, even if they do masquerade the bot as a valid browser. Just make a present but essentially invisible link on your pages that bots will follow but humans won't be able to see. You can even call it something obvious like block_me.html if you want. Any client who follows that link is almost certainly a bot instead of a human, and therefore should be automatically blocked. There is no easy way for this kind of bot to defend against this strategy, without totally losing their effectiveness. More obvious strategies include monitoring usage patterns for bot-like activity, although this is less reliable and possibly prone to false positives. Either way though, there are ways to tell a bot other than just it's USER-AGENT string.
Indeed. My employer has actually just gotten rid of a bunch of old n-series desktops because they were obsolete. Granted their definition of "obsolete" is anything more than three years old, but still, n-series is not new.
I know how to make a manhole cover that is square (helps prevent theft I believe) and yet won't fall down the hole, without wasting as much space. Make the cover square and the hole itself round, with a diameter just a tiny bit smaller than the length of the side of the cover. That way the wasted space is limited to the corners outside of the circle.
There are probably better ways to keep manhole covers from being stolen (locks?) but this would work.
To put it in prespective: My old 486 had a hard disk with less than 400 MB of space. But it also had a CD-ROM drive. Your average CD back then held 650MB. Yes, it had an optical drive that was bigger than its hard disk. Nobody ever thought to even include copy protection on the CD because storing that much data was insane, and transmitting it over the internet even more so. With the advent of MP3 and bigger storage and broadband it became commonplace to trade music online.
My brother got one of the first computers that came equipped with a DVD drive, which has a capacity of 4.7 GB (I'm ignoring the whole multi-layer DVD format for sake of simplicity). It also came with a hard disk that could hold up to 2 Gigabytes. Now your average DVD can be recompressed without too much quality loss to, say, 1.5GB, and modern hard disks will store hundreds of them with ease, and you can download them in an hour or two on a good connection, or maybe a day on an okay one. Are you noticing a recurring theme here?
The truth is that Blu-ray isn't all that big compared to the hard disks of today, especially not when you look at previous optical formats and how big they were in comparison to the hard disks of the era in which they were first made. Heck I could fit a Blu-ray disk or two on my iPod and have some space left over.
Such is the progress of technology (by which I mean mostly storage space and bandwidth, but also compression technology and the processor power to implement it). A digital movie standard such as Blu-ray or HDDVD should be expected to last a decade. They will probably last even longer than that because hi-def technology has matured to the point where users couldn't possibly need higher resolution or more pristine sound effects. Where do you think magnetic storage will be in ten years? Heck, where do you think solid-state storage will be in ten years?
The point is that technology changes, and people invent things like MP3 that let you squeeze more into smaller space. Which means movie format won't stop piracy because it's "too big".
Actually I did read your first reply. And I'm saying that the original poster actually was right. I explained why in my previous post: Having a remote control that can wake a device up from it's off state means that the device is using at least a few watts to drive the infared detection and interpretation circuitry. It also precludes a 120V/10A switch that cuts off the main power supply from the wall, meaning that yes, whatever inefficiencies there are in the power supply also contribute to the overall power usage. An infared remote can't drive a 120V switch without some sort of relay mechanism, which would require some other source of power to operate.
So we see that my original point: "this device has a remote control that can turn it on" implies that "this device uses power even when it's off" still stands. Notice the implication operator. That means that it's certainly possible for a device to draw power when off even if it doesn't have a remote. I'm not contradicting what you said about power supplies being inefficient, because that's true. What I'm saying is that having a remote that can turn the device on means that it has to have this sort of switching power supply (as opposed to a perfectly-efficient-when-off 120V switch) and it also has to be using a few watts to drive the IR circuits.
If you don't get it after that I'm not explaining any further.
Actually, entering "Wuthering Heights"--a book I truly loathed when I was forced to read it in 12th grade--got me an interesting mix of christian-related reading material and a very large number of books on Lisp, Java, AI, web programming, and compilers. So apparently people who hated Wuthering Heights are either computer science majors or hard-core christians. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
No kidding.
Now this is where the legal issues might get a little fuzzy, but in my eyes the company is definitely profiting from having an unauthorized copy of the student's essay, probably in violation of copyright law. They may not necessarily be distributing copies of it, I don't know how the service works and whether it shows the possible source of "plagarized" material, which would definitely be violating the students IP rights.
I am an honest student, I've never copied a paper or even given one to another student. I have done some things that this system might consider "suspicious" such as using an old blog entry as a creative writing assignment (with some cleanup) or helping other students find sources, including some that I've already used. It would really bother me that this system keeps my essays forever without my consent, especially if it were without my knowlege. That has nothing to do with my wanting to sell the essays later (I would never do that). I don't condone cheating but I don't necessarily like this system either.
And that's not the only example. In Pennsylvania, honest-to-god, it's completely legal to smoke cigarettes if you're under 18. It's maybe even legal to try to buy them (I forget), but it's illegal for the store to sell them to you. So in theory if a student found a state where sale (or giving them) to minors was legal but actual consumption by minors was illegal, and brought them to PA, in theory no laws have been broken. Unless you look at import/export laws for tobacco... my point is simply that any sufficiently complicated law doesn't always make sense.
The next question is: who is doing the duplicating, the downloader or the uploader? The large wave of lawsuits target only those who upload or share music on the internet. That probably doesn't imply that downloading is legal--it's probably because targeting sharers is easier--but imagine a band or label who offers their own music on a p2p network. They could hardly sue the IP addresses which downloaded the songs on the grounds that they infringed copyright, anymore than Weird Al's fans could be sued for downloading "Don't Download This Song" off his publicly available website.
That isn't to say that the RIAA won't find some way to go after AllOfMP3.com customers if it wanted to, but they'd be on shakier legal ground than you'd think, and they might have to do something weird like accusing the customers of "customs violations" for importing music improperly. Insanities like this are common and maybe even inevitable when you try to apply laws that control the flow of information in a non-isolated system with non-uniform laws.
What lights?
I have to push the PRAM-a-lot!
The Americans with Disabilities Act has some pretty specific things to say about how to comply with it. For example: An ADA accessible ramp must not have a slope steeper than 1:12. Contractors and stores know whether they comply with it. Where are the specific guidelines for websites? AFAIK there aren't any yet, and that needs to change.
Right. Because I'm sure every family that can't afford to send kids to private schools is poor because the parents are dumb and lazy. And we should condemn their kids for the parents' financial problems by not letting them go to school, because that's the best way to make them self-sufficient and able to get and hold a good job.
On the offchance that you're not just trolling, you ARE being astoundingly naieve about the weaknesses of capitalism. The change you suggest would make the economy and the entire country far worse off than it already is. Certainly there are problems with the public school system, but the solution is not to abolish it.
Meanwhile, students at Drew Elementary, deep in the low-income area of West Philly, don't even have keyboards and mice for the few old iMacs in the library because they can't afford them (I suspect NCLB is to blame for that). I am part of a student organization in Drexel University called Tech Serv and we are preparing to donate around 31 computers to the elementary school, some of them Pentium IIs but it's better than what they had, which was nothing. Most of the machines will be donated with edubuntu, because the school can't afford windows licenses; we're trying hard to find a few machines with windows stickers already on them for the engineering lab, which plans to use Mindstorms to teach kids basic robotics. And meanwhile that school gets $63 million in funding because Microsoft had a nifty idea.
No, you got it wrong! The internet is not like a truck, it's like a series of tubes.
Marijuana is illegal because of the same stupid "think of the children" rhetoric that has inspired this bit of legislation. Funny though; alcahol is legal, despite the fact that people do some pretty awful things after using it.
Not to weaken your argument; I'm no acoustic engineer, but I have to point out that the only reason tires have treads is because of rain or other water on the roadway. Slick tires are used on certain cars (esp Indy cars) because they actually grip the roadway better, but they're useless when the track is wet.
Of course they could. If by "legally anticompetitive" you mean being anticompetitive through the legal system. Lawsuits can be an illegal monopoly abuse too.
We accepted his initial report because he had no reason to lie. Why would he? He's percieved as a Microsoft fanboy, and he'd hardly make up stuff to discredit them. After noticing the general reaction and schadenfreude, and after talking with somebody at Microsoft, he changes his direction, and the 'Slashdot crowd' regains their typical mistrust of him. I see nothing inconsistent with that, and while I don't necessarily think they're right because I generally avoid conspiracy theories, they are at least logical and not as stupid or fickle as you seem to think.