From now on, please, people who can tag, tag all electronic voting stories "pencil".
Yes, we are geeks, and love complex systems, and efficiency... and they should be completely avoided for voting.
People are mystified by computers. They will defer to the geek in the room on nearly anything computer-related. Any anonymous voting system with a degree of automation is instantly more vulnerable to compromise than the simple ballot box.
We love trying to find ways around it, because that too is in our nature - but we just end up designing systems that are more complex, and therefore more difficult to audit. Cryptography? How many even among the hardcore truly understand that well enough to audit it?
Pencil. Paper. Box. Even a high-school graduate can understand it, and understand the ways it might be compromised.
Increased ocean temperatures == releases of methane hydrate == more atmospheric methane == increased ocean temperatures.
Who knows, maybe this is the reason for the Fermi paradox. Civilized race starts burning sequestered hydrocarbons and ends up broiling themselves when they accidentally turn their planet into something like Venus.
You missed the part where after their drinking session the tenth man turns to the other nine and says
"I earned my money because all you fellows worked for me hard and well for a long time. I have over 90% of the wealth in this drinking group yet I don't pay 90% of the bar tab, even though I could afford to pay for it all, and not miss it. But now I have a new set of drinking buddies in China, where the beer is much cheaper. I only drank with you because I needed to keep you sweet so you'd work for me! What, you thought we were friends or something? Suckers!"
And then he gets on his private jet, leaving the others wondering how they are going to afford their bar tab.
It sounds as if they want to require you to have an ID card to have a CRB Check.
CRB Checks are required to work with vulnerable groups, including children. As a minority, people requiring CRB Checks probably outnumber immigrants and perverts by a large factor. And they can justify it with a well-placed "think of the Children!".
My wife may be forced to have an ID card if this is the case. Most of the people affected by this will be teachers, medical personnel, and carers. Way to go, UK Gov... crap on the people who prop up your society.
Untrue. The BBC is funded solely through the license fee, sales of it's programmes abroad, and sales of other materials.
It receives no government funds. It is no more answerable to the government than any other media organisation. It pays it's taxes. It also has a unique lack of pressure from external commercial interests.
everyone that purchases a TV in Britain [has] to support the BBC, whether they actually watch it or not.
Yes, this is true. But the BBC in turn provides such an excellent benchmark that all the other FTA broadcasters in the UK have to raise their game, so it arguably has a positive effect on your viewing even if you don't watch it. Just the reduction in commercial break sizes (a maximum average of 12 minutes, versus about 18 minutes in the USA) is worth the license fee, which is very small compared to the costs of equivalent offerings.
Imagine if the USA had an equivalent, independent, federally mandated institution (PBS is federally funded and thus is not independent). It could either produce about 4 times as much content or cost half the money.. and still produce twice as much content. And that's compared to....
8 national TV channels, including two dedicated childrens channels and a news channel.
Interactive TV
HD programming
10 national radio stations
National radio for the smaller parts of the Union (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland)
More than 40 local radio stations
The BBC website (including the news, and TV on demand via iPlayer)
With all that CPU grunt, and a GPU for 3D overlays, Augmented Reality apps would be a natural fit for this phone, but it doesn't have a magnetometer (listed) like the iPhone and the HTC Android phones.
There's no accelerometer either:-(
It's not enough on it's own to put me off it, but dammit, it smarts a little to not have all the toys that the others have:-)
There is a fixed-point version of the Vorbis codec called Tremor. Floating point is nice but not required.
My piddly little iRiver T20 plays OGG just fine, and it's about 4 years old and runs off a single 900 mAh AAA battery for many hours. This has a 1320 mAh battery and processors that must be several generations better in terms of power consumption.
If you really needed floating point, you could probably leverage the integrated GPU anyway.
Why try to take open source software instead of downloading it when you need it?
It might not be publically available ; if GS based any of their internal code on GPL code that would qualify as "Open Source", distribution of the software would require distribution of the source. As a programmer he may well have had the software distributed to him, so taking a copy of the source could be legal (strictly speaking, GS should offer it to recipients of the software), and GS wouldn't be able to restrict what he did with it.
It sounds like maybe he wanted to keep it around for possible later reference. Not uncommon, but not innocent either.
We've probably all done it ; I've certainly written some bits of code that I could rewrite from scratch if I had to but don't want to. Unless it included patented algorithms (which isn't possible in my legal jurisdiction), this is just a labour saving device - the hard work is already done, it just saves some time retyping the code from memory. It would be difficult to prove. It's even harder to stop someone doing it. Whether you think it's innocent or not... well, that depends on where you draw the line between code-in-my-head and code-on-my-drive.
It's just frickin wasteful. I think articles like this are subsidised by drive manufacturers.
Hard disks are so large now, that the standard drive that's fitted to most systems is usually large enough to store all business data that system will ever need to. The only applications that produce enough data to saturate modern drives are video and transaction databases.
The only real reason for physical destruction is to preserve the revenue streams of hard drive manufacturers.
We're now being encouraged to physically destroy flash media at work by incineration or trauma. The flash media only ever contains encrypted data, so it's sufficient to only destroy the key blocks, then the data should be indistinguishable from random noise, and the drive reusable after a reformat. These "special" encrypted flash drives cost £64 for 2GB, when a standard drive of that capacity costs less than £5. McAffee must be laughing all the way to the bank.
The whole concept of a secure card is crap unless it verifies against an external DB.
Not necessarily so ; it's definitely possible to have a card system that deliberately eschews a central database entirely, and just rely on digital signatures for security. The difficulty of providing security in such a system would be approximately equivalent, and mostly related to securing the signing keys, but it would be much less costly because of the lack of a need to maintain and administer the central database.
The article doesn't mention whether the edited card created would pass a digital signature check - if such a check has been incorporated, it would almost certainly not pass inspection by a terminal that checked signatures.
It's not certain that the scheme has been well designed though. The article mentions that the "benefit entitlement" status on the card was adjusted. In a system that I had designed (and I do have some smartcard experience), the benefit entitlement indication would consist of a valid signature of data on the card by a private key held by the benefits agency, dated to expire at the appropriate reassessment interval. Such an indicator would not be so trivially simple to forge, especially if you changed the keys regularly - which would be easy and sensible for a rolling entitlement scheme.
That's beside the point in my opinion ; I agree with many others that the whole raison d'etre of the scheme is the compilation of the database itself. I would support a scheme without this database, and with the strong cryptography described above, simply because properly designed and administered it would cut down enormously on fraud, and provide a step towards a useful PKI framework standard for the UK. But this scheme does not seem to be designed with the best of intentions or any kind of integrity in design.
Alas, MS hasn't stopped updating their bag of tricks to keep people using Outlook.
The latest trick seems to be provide external access to Exchange via XMLRPC calls, tunnelled through something called Intelligent Application Gateway, which they bought from an Israeli security company. This is essentially the same way that Outlook Web Access works ; Outlook now uses the same mechanism when outside the office network.
Of course, this kills any incentive for your sysadmins to configure the IMAP server, which makes using most other email clients basically impossible. Our mail service migrated from an IMAP server to this recently and I've reluctantly stopped using Thunderbird, even though the IMAP ports are available inside the office, because it's just too irritating to have to manage two email clients.
IAG clients are only supported on Windows, your options for a rich client are limited to Outlook, on Windows. The only other option outside the office is Outlook Web Access.
"Crippled economy" is more like it. It works out cheaper in the short term, because the increased wealth that comes from technological advancement is concentrated in the hands of relatively few (Tycoons, and to a lesser extent, the citizens of rich Western nations). But then you get to the point where your new, foreign, manufacturing base realises that it has all the real wealth - it has the means of production and the skills to use it. Why would it bother subsidizing your decadent Western lifestyle any more, when it can have some of that for itself? At point, prices rise, your imports dwindle, and you discover that no-one in your nation knows how to make anything with any real value. Or possibly that they are just all owned by China now.
This is how things are now ; the output of our thoughts, as solidified in media, are automatically gifted copyright.
What's the distinction between the output of humans versus another intelligent agent, if they are essentially the same in nature, but different in degree?
Let Alpha have it's copyright ; but it personally has to identify breaches of it's copyright and hire itself a lawyer to prosecute them, with it's own money.
But DS piracy is so easy - you just need a flash cart. The ROMs are relatively small compared to modern bandwidth ; when people were posting N64 ROMs for use with UltraHLE they were in a similar size range, and speeds have gone from dial-up to 8Mb/s since then. You can copy your own legitimate ROMs easily too.
Once you have a flash cart, even for a legitimate use (the absolute best thing about it is not having to carry around all your ROM carts), the barrier to casual piracy is extremely low. In fact, why on earth would anyone pay for pirate ROM carts when they can download it in less than 5 minutes? Or clone your entire ROM library to a friends flash card in the school computer lab? It's quicker and easier than piracy in the analogue tape era was, and much less costly.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that cloned DS ROM carts were being produced, but I'd be amazed to find that the copy count was larger than the number of DS ROM downloads.
My wife is a doctor. Lives hinge on the accuracy of her notes.
Her writing is almost completely illegible. Seriously, I can't even read a shopping list written by her with any degree of reliability. Even she can't read it.
You can't blame typing either, she hates computers. She's 35, so she should have no excuse.
My writing isn't good, but you can read my cursive. I also used to be a doctor. My writing was never good.
Seriously, I mostly blame ballpoint and fibre-tip pens. Because they allow you to scrawl at extremely high speed with very little care. A pen like this does not require any skill to write with it, it will tolerate a wide range of pressure, movement speeds, angles, etc. A fountain pen requires a narrow range of angle and pressure to write successfully, and with that consistency comes an improvement in your writing - because you are forced to learn to physically control the nib quite precisely just to get the thing to make a mark. We weren't allowed fountain pens in the younger years at school (possibly because the cheap absorbent paper in the exercise books would soak up the ink like a sponge), and I swear my handwriting (and my grades) suffered immensely because of it.
Yes, they are a PITA to maintain, even with ink cartridges. But they produce a superior line and superior handwriting.
The other implement I write well with is a propelling pencil - again, you require control, because otherwise you'll snap that delicate little pencil lead.
Slashdot Mirror
Just what I wanted to say.
From now on, please, people who can tag, tag all electronic voting stories "pencil".
Yes, we are geeks, and love complex systems, and efficiency... and they should be completely avoided for voting.
People are mystified by computers. They will defer to the geek in the room on nearly anything computer-related. Any anonymous voting system with a degree of automation is instantly more vulnerable to compromise than the simple ballot box.
We love trying to find ways around it, because that too is in our nature - but we just end up designing systems that are more complex, and therefore more difficult to audit. Cryptography? How many even among the hardcore truly understand that well enough to audit it?
Pencil. Paper. Box. Even a high-school graduate can understand it, and understand the ways it might be compromised.
Shutter based solutions should be equally viewable by people who are visually impaired all the way up to blind in one eye.
Ok, they only get the 2D experience. But that's all they would have got anyway, if their binocular vision is impaired.
Anaglyphic 3D would look crap to the monocular, but shutter and polarised 3D should look almost as good as the equivalent 2D presentation.
Increased ocean temperatures == releases of methane hydrate == more atmospheric methane == increased ocean temperatures.
Who knows, maybe this is the reason for the Fermi paradox. Civilized race starts burning sequestered hydrocarbons and ends up broiling themselves when they accidentally turn their planet into something like Venus.
You missed the part where after their drinking session the tenth man turns to the other nine and says
"I earned my money because all you fellows worked for me hard and well for a long time. I have over 90% of the wealth in this drinking group yet I don't pay 90% of the bar tab, even though I could afford to pay for it all, and not miss it. But now I have a new set of drinking buddies in China, where the beer is much cheaper. I only drank with you because I needed to keep you sweet so you'd work for me! What, you thought we were friends or something? Suckers!"
And then he gets on his private jet, leaving the others wondering how they are going to afford their bar tab.
It sounds as if they want to require you to have an ID card to have a CRB Check.
CRB Checks are required to work with vulnerable groups, including children. As a minority, people requiring CRB Checks probably outnumber immigrants and perverts by a large factor. And they can justify it with a well-placed "think of the Children!".
My wife may be forced to have an ID card if this is the case. Most of the people affected by this will be teachers, medical personnel, and carers. Way to go, UK Gov... crap on the people who prop up your society.
Untrue. The BBC is funded solely through the license fee, sales of it's programmes abroad, and sales of other materials.
It receives no government funds. It is no more answerable to the government than any other media organisation. It pays it's taxes. It also has a unique lack of pressure from external commercial interests.
everyone that purchases a TV in Britain [has] to support the BBC, whether they actually watch it or not.
Yes, this is true. But the BBC in turn provides such an excellent benchmark that all the other FTA broadcasters in the UK have to raise their game, so it arguably has a positive effect on your viewing even if you don't watch it. Just the reduction in commercial break sizes (a maximum average of 12 minutes, versus about 18 minutes in the USA) is worth the license fee, which is very small compared to the costs of equivalent offerings.
Imagine if the USA had an equivalent, independent, federally mandated institution (PBS is federally funded and thus is not independent). It could either produce about 4 times as much content or cost half the money .. and still produce twice as much content. And that's compared to....
And that's all commercial free , with a mandate to inform, educate, and entertain.
Not having been inflicted with it yet... wouldn't it just work to either
i) Repartition the drive
or
ii) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/thumbdrive
?
With all that CPU grunt, and a GPU for 3D overlays, Augmented Reality apps would be a natural fit for this phone, but it doesn't have a magnetometer (listed) like the iPhone and the HTC Android phones.
There's no accelerometer either :-(
It's not enough on it's own to put me off it, but dammit, it smarts a little to not have all the toys that the others have :-)
There is a fixed-point version of the Vorbis codec called Tremor. Floating point is nice but not required.
My piddly little iRiver T20 plays OGG just fine, and it's about 4 years old and runs off a single 900 mAh AAA battery for many hours. This has a 1320 mAh battery and processors that must be several generations better in terms of power consumption.
If you really needed floating point, you could probably leverage the integrated GPU anyway.
Yuck.... we have mandatory full-disk encryption here, and that would totally destroy it's bootleader.
Go a step further - if you have enough RAM, copy the file to a RAM disk and let the disk spin down.
Why try to take open source software instead of downloading it when you need it?
It might not be publically available ; if GS based any of their internal code on GPL code that would qualify as "Open Source", distribution of the software would require distribution of the source. As a programmer he may well have had the software distributed to him, so taking a copy of the source could be legal (strictly speaking, GS should offer it to recipients of the software), and GS wouldn't be able to restrict what he did with it.
It sounds like maybe he wanted to keep it around for possible later reference. Not uncommon, but not innocent either.
We've probably all done it ; I've certainly written some bits of code that I could rewrite from scratch if I had to but don't want to. Unless it included patented algorithms (which isn't possible in my legal jurisdiction), this is just a labour saving device - the hard work is already done, it just saves some time retyping the code from memory. It would be difficult to prove. It's even harder to stop someone doing it. Whether you think it's innocent or not... well, that depends on where you draw the line between code-in-my-head and code-on-my-drive.
It's just frickin wasteful. I think articles like this are subsidised by drive manufacturers.
Hard disks are so large now, that the standard drive that's fitted to most systems is usually large enough to store all business data that system will ever need to. The only applications that produce enough data to saturate modern drives are video and transaction databases.
The only real reason for physical destruction is to preserve the revenue streams of hard drive manufacturers.
We're now being encouraged to physically destroy flash media at work by incineration or trauma. The flash media only ever contains encrypted data, so it's sufficient to only destroy the key blocks, then the data should be indistinguishable from random noise, and the drive reusable after a reformat. These "special" encrypted flash drives cost £64 for 2GB, when a standard drive of that capacity costs less than £5. McAffee must be laughing all the way to the bank.
Remember folks, this is why you pay your high end executives lots of money....
They pay themselves lots of money. Presumably because they fear that no-one will employ them again after making mistakes.
what animal will grace the cover?
A leech.
.. because if you can install a hypervisor, you can use it to virtualise devices, which means you can use it to produce digital copies of media.
I thought that said "Davros".
It's fairly appropriate.
The whole concept of a secure card is crap unless it verifies against an external DB.
Not necessarily so ; it's definitely possible to have a card system that deliberately eschews a central database entirely, and just rely on digital signatures for security. The difficulty of providing security in such a system would be approximately equivalent, and mostly related to securing the signing keys, but it would be much less costly because of the lack of a need to maintain and administer the central database.
The article doesn't mention whether the edited card created would pass a digital signature check - if such a check has been incorporated, it would almost certainly not pass inspection by a terminal that checked signatures.
It's not certain that the scheme has been well designed though. The article mentions that the "benefit entitlement" status on the card was adjusted. In a system that I had designed (and I do have some smartcard experience), the benefit entitlement indication would consist of a valid signature of data on the card by a private key held by the benefits agency, dated to expire at the appropriate reassessment interval. Such an indicator would not be so trivially simple to forge, especially if you changed the keys regularly - which would be easy and sensible for a rolling entitlement scheme.
That's beside the point in my opinion ; I agree with many others that the whole raison d'etre of the scheme is the compilation of the database itself. I would support a scheme without this database, and with the strong cryptography described above, simply because properly designed and administered it would cut down enormously on fraud, and provide a step towards a useful PKI framework standard for the UK. But this scheme does not seem to be designed with the best of intentions or any kind of integrity in design.
Alas, MS hasn't stopped updating their bag of tricks to keep people using Outlook.
The latest trick seems to be provide external access to Exchange via XMLRPC calls, tunnelled through something called Intelligent Application Gateway, which they bought from an Israeli security company. This is essentially the same way that Outlook Web Access works ; Outlook now uses the same mechanism when outside the office network.
Of course, this kills any incentive for your sysadmins to configure the IMAP server, which makes using most other email clients basically impossible. Our mail service migrated from an IMAP server to this recently and I've reluctantly stopped using Thunderbird, even though the IMAP ports are available inside the office, because it's just too irritating to have to manage two email clients.
IAG clients are only supported on Windows, your options for a rich client are limited to Outlook, on Windows. The only other option outside the office is Outlook Web Access.
The problem is, that someone will spin that as
"64% of people were FURIOUS that this nasty little toe-rag was hacking consoles and cheating the companies out of their God-given profits!!!"
It's now 82% furious, by the way.
"knowledge-based economy"
Spin of the most epic order, isn't it?
"Crippled economy" is more like it. It works out cheaper in the short term, because the increased wealth that comes from technological advancement is concentrated in the hands of relatively few (Tycoons, and to a lesser extent, the citizens of rich Western nations). But then you get to the point where your new, foreign, manufacturing base realises that it has all the real wealth - it has the means of production and the skills to use it. Why would it bother subsidizing your decadent Western lifestyle any more, when it can have some of that for itself? At point, prices rise, your imports dwindle, and you discover that no-one in your nation knows how to make anything with any real value. Or possibly that they are just all owned by China now.
This is how things are now ; the output of our thoughts, as solidified in media, are automatically gifted copyright.
What's the distinction between the output of humans versus another intelligent agent, if they are essentially the same in nature, but different in degree?
Let Alpha have it's copyright ; but it personally has to identify breaches of it's copyright and hire itself a lawyer to prosecute them, with it's own money.
Even better ; if all the cracking groups publicly announced that "We played your new game, and it's not worth cracking because it's shite".
But that won't happen because the crack is the game to them...
But DS piracy is so easy - you just need a flash cart. The ROMs are relatively small compared to modern bandwidth ; when people were posting N64 ROMs for use with UltraHLE they were in a similar size range, and speeds have gone from dial-up to 8Mb/s since then. You can copy your own legitimate ROMs easily too.
Once you have a flash cart, even for a legitimate use (the absolute best thing about it is not having to carry around all your ROM carts), the barrier to casual piracy is extremely low. In fact, why on earth would anyone pay for pirate ROM carts when they can download it in less than 5 minutes? Or clone your entire ROM library to a friends flash card in the school computer lab? It's quicker and easier than piracy in the analogue tape era was, and much less costly.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that cloned DS ROM carts were being produced, but I'd be amazed to find that the copy count was larger than the number of DS ROM downloads.
My wife is a doctor. Lives hinge on the accuracy of her notes.
Her writing is almost completely illegible. Seriously, I can't even read a shopping list written by her with any degree of reliability. Even she can't read it.
You can't blame typing either, she hates computers. She's 35, so she should have no excuse.
My writing isn't good, but you can read my cursive. I also used to be a doctor. My writing was never good.
Seriously, I mostly blame ballpoint and fibre-tip pens. Because they allow you to scrawl at extremely high speed with very little care. A pen like this does not require any skill to write with it, it will tolerate a wide range of pressure, movement speeds, angles, etc. A fountain pen requires a narrow range of angle and pressure to write successfully, and with that consistency comes an improvement in your writing - because you are forced to learn to physically control the nib quite precisely just to get the thing to make a mark. We weren't allowed fountain pens in the younger years at school (possibly because the cheap absorbent paper in the exercise books would soak up the ink like a sponge), and I swear my handwriting (and my grades) suffered immensely because of it.
Yes, they are a PITA to maintain, even with ink cartridges. But they produce a superior line and superior handwriting.
The other implement I write well with is a propelling pencil - again, you require control, because otherwise you'll snap that delicate little pencil lead.