PDFs can require users to be connected to the Internet in order to read them,
No, they can't, PDF is nothing but a data format. Some broken PDF viewers (especially those from Adobe) may do this, but since PDF is an open format, there will always be some other viewers that don't promote spying on their users. Basically, this is the same nonsense as the "no printing" option.
The vulnerability is described in MS05-009 which refers to CAN-2004-0597. This is a buffer overflow in libpng which was fixed in early August last year. So Microsoft needed six months to fix a publicly known vulnerability.
This is actually a major reason why the EU council put software patents on the agenda of its Feb 17 meeting: in the morning, the German minister is not yet formally bound by the Bundestag decision.
I don't believe that these two events are directly related. The German representative (whoever that will be) is not bound by the decision of the Bundestag anyway.
The Spanish Senate has just voted against Software Patents. This should hopefully require the Spanish EU representative to vote against any attempts by the Council of Ministers to ignore the will of the European Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee.
Since the Spanish government opposes software patents and voted against them last May this decision won't change the majorities in the EU council. It would be much more important if both the German and Dutch government finally respected the decisions of their parliaments.
In general, the only thing that is different between this license and the BSD license is that you are not allowed to make a profit on the sale of any software you develop
Of course you can, section 2.1 of the CDDL grants you a distribution license that does not exclude selling the software for profit. Everything else would be a violation of section 1 of the OSI's open source definition.
The FSF and OSI have very different goals that happen to be the same in practice most of the time, but not all.
Do you know that the OSI definition is based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which are of course very strongly influenced by the Free Software movement?
OSI takes a much more pragmatic approach, so licenses that restrict freedom to some extent, but still provide the basic benefits of Open Source (access to use and modify code) are OSI compliant, but classified as Non-Free by the FSF.
The reason that OSI seems to be more pragmatic is that it provides a certification process based on fixed terms. The FSF doesn't do that, so they can act in a much more flexible way.
One example is the earlier versions of the Apple Public Source License (APSL version 1.x). This was OSI approved, but classified as non-free by the FSF. Similar issues arise with the (original) Artistic License.
It is interesting to see that both issues don't exist with the latest versions of these licenses.
I have been a computer technician for years, and I have never ever seen a computer with the opera browser myself.
The recovery system of most Thinkpads (the "blue button" thingy) contains a pre-installed version of Opera. But that didn't keep me from erasing the whole thing as one of my first actions when I got it.
This goes beyond just scamming the software companies... this is almost similar to a Nigerian 419 scam in a way.
I don't think it is a scam. It is too well-written and the article expresses a good knowledge of PGP and anonymous communication on the net. The "piece" thingy is probably to show that they actually have the mentioned sources available.
I must say that I find it a bit scary that the black hats have access to the PIX sources while the white hats have not. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some zero-day exploits in the next time.
The purpose of Internet Explorer is to download third party files (by viewing Web pages).
Sure, but there is a huge difference between simple files and programs, even if Microsoft always tried to wash this distinction away.
Mr Gates's claim that vulnerabilites exist because of such downloads is therefore nonsensical; it's like saying we could end deaths due to automobile accidents by banning automobiles.
It suddenly gets an interesting spin when you think in terms of trusted computing. Then, in theory, the Internet Explorer could have security holes which still would not lead to execution of arbitrary code. Of course, in practice, this will not work, as today's software is still trying to catch up with such simple errors as buffer overflows.
Furthermore, the joke is forgiveably wrong about the "... I know where I am!" part. It is impossible to know exactly where you are because a zero error in position violates the UP. This is trivially shown by plugging in zero for delta-x. The inequality is violated.
For simplicity, let us model Mr Heisenberg as a free particle. He says that he knew exactly where he was so the wavefunction of the position is zero everywhere except at his exact position. The wavefunction has to be normalized which results in a delta function.
In quantum mechanics, a transformation between position and momentum is a Fourier transform. The Fourier transform of a delta function is a constant, which means the momentum could be everything from -infinity to +infinity with the same probability. The uncertainty of momentum is therefore inifinity.
So it is perfectly possible within quantum mechanics to have a certain position and totally uncertain momentum, like in the joke. What about the uncertainty relation, then? As shown above, the product reads zero times infinity, which requires further investigation. The delta function is not an ordinary function (it's a distribution), so we have to use complex analysis to deal with it. I won't go into the details here but the result is certainly not zero. In fact, the minimum uncertainty product is reached when the wavefunction is a Gaussian wavepacket.
"Position and momentum" is a particular example of a pair, as is "different components of angular momentum" (L_x and L_z, say). I can't remember how 'spin' fits into things, though...
Spin is an intrinsic property of certain types of matter. It shows the algebraic properties of an angular momentum and adding it to the orbital angular momentum gives the total angular momentum. Or, in operator formalism: J = L + S.
[*]Pedantry: Yes, I know Heisenberg talked about matrices, Schrodinger about operators.
No problem, as matrices are linear operators. The problem with matrices is that they are only useful for operators with a discrete spectrum.
As with every new Mozilla release, several security issues have been fixed, including some problems leading to remote code execution. Sadly, there has been no advisory so far.
A list of the fixes can be found here. Note that this list is probably incomplete.
*coughLinuxATINVIDIAalltheotherproprietaryhardware drivesinLinuxcough* In other words, Linux is no better in this regard, get over it.
Last time I checked, the kernel was licensed under the GPL. The availability of proprietary software (whether drivers or not) doesn't render a system non-free. You could even run proprietary software under GNU/Hurd if you were that masochistic.
If you can make a raw copy of the media, you can pirate it without loss of quality, even if you can only play the copies in an SVP device.
This won't work for pay-per-use style restrictions if the medium may only be viewed within a certain timeframe or the device has a counter for each medium already played on it.
Additionally, a hardware decoder will prevent modification of the content. For example, I wouldn't be able anymore to extract the audio track of a concert DVD and burn it on a CD (which I'm permitted to do by local law). Or we could be forced to watch commercials without the possibility to skip them.
Grover's algorithm requires O(2^(n/2)) oracle calls and therefore does not run in polynomial time. So all you need is to double your keysize and you should be safe.
As an example in cryptography, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer would be able to break your RSA, DSA, DES3 or any other symmetric or non-symmetric cypher instantaneously if the author of the quantum program knew what they were looking for.
Symmetric ciphers are not generally broken by quantum computers. An attack based on Grover's algorithm would halve the key size, but a 256-bit key would still be as hard to break as a 128-bit key on classical computers.
Given the patent fiasco of the internet (just add "e" to anything and receive a free patent), now is the time to create prior art for quantum computing and publish all the ideas for adding "q" to everything. Only by striking first and getting innovation in the public domain can we have true open and unencumbered standards.
Sure, people will build preliminary quantum computation elements, and will perform simple operations. But to have a system comparable to existing computers will take a really, really long time.
There's no need for such a device. A quantum computer is only useful for certain tasks, e.g. factorizing large numbers. Instead of a full quantum computer, a much more reasonable device would be a classical computer with a quantum coprocessor. The quantum part could be controlled by the classical processor without any drawbacks.
The quantum coprocessor doesn't have to be extremely powerful. For example, a 2048-bit number can be factorized on a 100-MHz quantum computer with 10,000 qubits in about two hours.
That, and the fact that we are yet to develop a good enough quantum error correction system.
If you have a truly secure system, obscurity may increase the security somewhat.
If the system is totally secure, additional obscurity will not increase security as it is already totally secure.
Obscurity requires one to trust the architects of the protocol and the software. Downloading the software without any means to verify its integrity, requiring one of the most insecure browsers or recommending an out-dated version of Sun's JRE does not help me to trust them.
It's more convenient than Web interface and has no arbitrary limits...it's a quantum computing module for Perl! There's also libquantum for C users, and QCF for Matlabbers.
I don't know about QCF, but Quantum::Entanglement and libquantum take a different approach. The perl module gives a rather abstract layer without simulating the physics of a quantum computer at all. libquantum has been designed as a gate-level simulator which allows the analysis and optimization of complex quantum circuits.
Here, the simulation goes all the way down to the quantum-mechanical description of a quantum computer. This is a computationally a harder task which explains the heavy hardware. This is nothing new and has been done before (e.g. here).
No. The law delegates the interpretation of this word to the university that granted the degree. During the Nazi time German universities used this option to revoke degrees for political and racial reasons. When World War II was over these revocations were declared invalid.
I thought that a degree/diploma is something you get for things you did in your past, as in certain clases taken, grades acheived.... not a revokable license. If I go off in life and really suck, can I lose my high school diploma?
In Germany a doctorate is not a degree in the same sense as a diploma. A diploma allows you to enter certain professions related to that degree. A doctorate, however, does not grant such rights.
The university law of the state of Baden-Württemberg (where he got his degree) says that any degree can be revoked if a person acts "unworthy" afterwards. It is important to note that Schön did not manipulate his doctoral thesis but the descision was based on the forgeries he committed later. However, he can sue against the decision.
Slashdot Mirror
PDFs can require users to be connected to the Internet in order to read them,
No, they can't, PDF is nothing but a data format. Some broken PDF viewers (especially those from Adobe) may do this, but since PDF is an open format, there will always be some other viewers that don't promote spying on their users. Basically, this is the same nonsense as the "no printing" option.
The vulnerability is described in MS05-009 which refers to CAN-2004-0597. This is a buffer overflow in libpng which was fixed in early August last year. So Microsoft needed six months to fix a publicly known vulnerability.
This is actually a major reason why the EU council put software patents on the agenda of its Feb 17 meeting: in the morning, the German minister is not yet formally bound by the Bundestag decision.
I don't believe that these two events are directly related. The German representative (whoever that will be) is not bound by the decision of the Bundestag anyway.
The Spanish Senate has just voted against Software Patents. This should hopefully require the Spanish EU representative to vote against any attempts by the Council of Ministers to ignore the will of the European Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee.
Since the Spanish government opposes software patents and voted against them last May this decision won't change the majorities in the EU council. It would be much more important if both the German and Dutch government finally respected the decisions of their parliaments.
In general, the only thing that is different between this license and the BSD license is that you are not allowed to make a profit on the sale of any software you develop
Of course you can, section 2.1 of the CDDL grants you a distribution license that does not exclude selling the software for profit. Everything else would be a violation of section 1 of the OSI's open source definition.
This is true, but XML documents themselves are also considerably more open than their binary counterparts.
<Byte Offset="0x1234">83</Byte>
<Byte Offset="0x1235">117</Byte>
<Byte Offset="0x1236">114</Byte>
<Byte Offset="0x1237">101</Byte>
<Byte Offset="0x1238">63</Byte>
Unfortunately, most people think that reverse DNS is either dead or not-needed so they normally don't even think about using it.
So most people do not want to send e-mails to AOL customers?
From their Standards for E-Mail Delivery:
AOL's mail servers will reject connections from any IP address that does not have reverse DNS (a PTR record).
The FSF and OSI have very different goals that happen to be the same in practice most of the time, but not all.
Do you know that the OSI definition is based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which are of course very strongly influenced by the Free Software movement?
OSI takes a much more pragmatic approach, so licenses that restrict freedom to some extent, but still provide the basic benefits of Open Source (access to use and modify code) are OSI compliant, but classified as Non-Free by the FSF.
The reason that OSI seems to be more pragmatic is that it provides a certification process based on fixed terms. The FSF doesn't do that, so they can act in a much more flexible way.
One example is the earlier versions of the Apple Public Source License (APSL version 1.x). This was OSI approved, but classified as non-free by the FSF. Similar issues arise with the (original) Artistic License.
It is interesting to see that both issues don't exist with the latest versions of these licenses.
I have been a computer technician for years, and I have never ever seen a computer with the opera browser myself.
The recovery system of most Thinkpads (the "blue button" thingy) contains a pre-installed version of Opera. But that didn't keep me from erasing the whole thing as one of my first actions when I got it.
This goes beyond just scamming the software companies... this is almost similar to a Nigerian 419 scam in a way.
I don't think it is a scam. It is too well-written and the article expresses a good knowledge of PGP and anonymous communication on the net. The "piece" thingy is probably to show that they actually have the mentioned sources available.
I must say that I find it a bit scary that the black hats have access to the PIX sources while the white hats have not. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some zero-day exploits in the next time.
video lan client has a great codec for wmv - no problemo.
[00000226] main decoder error: no suitable decoder module for fourcc `WMV3'.
VLC probably does not support this sound or video format.
The purpose of Internet Explorer is to download third party files (by viewing Web pages).
Sure, but there is a huge difference between simple files and programs, even if Microsoft always tried to wash this distinction away.
Mr Gates's claim that vulnerabilites exist because of such downloads is therefore nonsensical; it's like saying we could end deaths due to automobile accidents by banning automobiles.
It suddenly gets an interesting spin when you think in terms of trusted computing. Then, in theory, the Internet Explorer could have security holes which still would not lead to execution of arbitrary code. Of course, in practice, this will not work, as today's software is still trying to catch up with such simple errors as buffer overflows.
Furthermore, the joke is forgiveably wrong about the "... I know where I am!" part. It is impossible to know exactly where you are because a zero error in position violates the UP. This is trivially shown by plugging in zero for delta-x. The inequality is violated.
For simplicity, let us model Mr Heisenberg as a free particle. He says that he knew exactly where he was so the wavefunction of the position is zero everywhere except at his exact position. The wavefunction has to be normalized which results in a delta function.
In quantum mechanics, a transformation between position and momentum is a Fourier transform. The Fourier transform of a delta function is a constant, which means the momentum could be everything from -infinity to +infinity with the same probability. The uncertainty of momentum is therefore inifinity.
So it is perfectly possible within quantum mechanics to have a certain position and totally uncertain momentum, like in the joke. What about the uncertainty relation, then? As shown above, the product reads zero times infinity, which requires further investigation. The delta function is not an ordinary function (it's a distribution), so we have to use complex analysis to deal with it. I won't go into the details here but the result is certainly not zero. In fact, the minimum uncertainty product is reached when the wavefunction is a Gaussian wavepacket.
"Position and momentum" is a particular example of a pair, as is "different components of angular momentum" (L_x and L_z, say). I can't remember how 'spin' fits into things, though ...
Spin is an intrinsic property of certain types of matter. It shows the algebraic properties of an angular momentum and adding it to the orbital angular momentum gives the total angular momentum. Or, in operator formalism: J = L + S.
[*]Pedantry: Yes, I know Heisenberg talked about matrices, Schrodinger about operators.
No problem, as matrices are linear operators. The problem with matrices is that they are only useful for operators with a discrete spectrum.
As with every new Mozilla release, several security issues have been fixed, including some problems leading to remote code execution. Sadly, there has been no advisory so far.
A list of the fixes can be found here. Note that this list is probably incomplete.
*coughLinuxATINVIDIAalltheotherproprietaryhardware drivesinLinuxcough*
In other words, Linux is no better in this regard, get over it.
Last time I checked, the kernel was licensed under the GPL. The availability of proprietary software (whether drivers or not) doesn't render a system non-free. You could even run proprietary software under GNU/Hurd if you were that masochistic.
If you can make a raw copy of the media, you can pirate it without loss of quality, even if you can only play the copies in an SVP device.
This won't work for pay-per-use style restrictions if the medium may only be viewed within a certain timeframe or the device has a counter for each medium already played on it.
Additionally, a hardware decoder will prevent modification of the content. For example, I wouldn't be able anymore to extract the audio track of a concert DVD and burn it on a CD (which I'm permitted to do by local law). Or we could be forced to watch commercials without the possibility to skip them.
Grover's algorithm requires O(2^(n/2)) oracle calls and therefore does not run in polynomial time. So all you need is to double your keysize and you should be safe.
As an example in cryptography, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer would be able to break your RSA, DSA, DES3 or any other symmetric or non-symmetric cypher instantaneously if the author of the quantum program knew what they were looking for.
Symmetric ciphers are not generally broken by quantum computers. An attack based on Grover's algorithm would halve the key size, but a 256-bit key would still be as hard to break as a 128-bit key on classical computers.
Given the patent fiasco of the internet (just add "e" to anything and receive a free patent), now is the time to create prior art for quantum computing and publish all the ideas for adding "q" to everything. Only by striking first and getting innovation in the public domain can we have true open and unencumbered standards.
There are already lots of patents on quantum computing:
5,530,263
5,768,297
6,128,764
6,218,832
and many, many more.
Sure, people will build preliminary quantum computation elements, and will perform simple operations. But to have a system comparable to existing computers will take a really, really long time.
There's no need for such a device. A quantum computer is only useful for certain tasks, e.g. factorizing large numbers. Instead of a full quantum computer, a much more reasonable device would be a classical computer with a quantum coprocessor. The quantum part could be controlled by the classical processor without any drawbacks.
The quantum coprocessor doesn't have to be extremely powerful. For example, a 2048-bit number can be factorized on a 100-MHz quantum computer with 10,000 qubits in about two hours.
That, and the fact that we are yet to develop a good enough quantum error correction system.
Concatenated coding should do the job.
If you have a truly secure system, obscurity may increase the security somewhat.
If the system is totally secure, additional obscurity will not increase security as it is already totally secure.
Obscurity requires one to trust the architects of the protocol and the software. Downloading the software without any means to verify its integrity, requiring one of the most insecure browsers or recommending an out-dated version of Sun's JRE does not help me to trust them.
It's more convenient than Web interface and has no arbitrary limits...it's a quantum computing module for Perl! There's also libquantum for C users, and QCF for Matlabbers.
I don't know about QCF, but Quantum::Entanglement and libquantum take a different approach. The perl module gives a rather abstract layer without simulating the physics of a quantum computer at all. libquantum has been designed as a gate-level simulator which allows the analysis and optimization of complex quantum circuits.
Here, the simulation goes all the way down to the quantum-mechanical description of a quantum computer. This is a computationally a harder task which explains the heavy hardware. This is nothing new and has been done before (e.g. here).
Does the law give any definition of "unworthy"?
No. The law delegates the interpretation of this word to the university that granted the degree. During the Nazi time German universities used this option to revoke degrees for political and racial reasons. When World War II was over these revocations were declared invalid.
I thought that a degree/diploma is something you get for things you did in your past, as in certain clases taken, grades acheived.... not a revokable license. If I go off in life and really suck, can I lose my high school diploma?
In Germany a doctorate is not a degree in the same sense as a diploma. A diploma allows you to enter certain professions related to that degree. A doctorate, however, does not grant such rights.
The university law of the state of Baden-Württemberg (where he got his degree) says that any degree can be revoked if a person acts "unworthy" afterwards. It is important to note that Schön did not manipulate his doctoral thesis but the descision was based on the forgeries he committed later. However, he can sue against the decision.