By current knowledge the spaceshuttle is "unsafe", because a very serious accident happened. But by current knowledge your car is "unsafe" too, because in all likelihood, very serious accidents happened with your (model/year) car too.
It's a mere matter of "acceptable risk" and "public opinion". If NASA decides the risk is "acceptable" and the "opinion" is that people would like to see Hubble repaired instead of chances reduced to 0% that there will happen an accident: Hubble will be repaired!
If one thinks of the future, with a more advanced spaceship, there will always be a risk that is accepted, and there will always be public opinion to make that risk a go or no go for launch.
I hope many people will see this picture, and wonder about the question: why not send the Space Shuttle back up now to safe Hubble, instead of waiting 10 years for who knows what ?
ISP's provide a service, allowing people infected with a virus to spread that virus to hundreds and thousands of other people on the internet.
ISP's provide a general service, which includes that possibility. Fuel includes the possibility of it being in a car while the car has an accident and it being partly ""responsible"" (I wouldn't call it that).
Terrible analogy. Unlike the gas station, the ISP is continuously providing you with the service that allows you to cause harm (i.e. send viruses).
Hrmm without fuel, a car doesn't drive, hence can't (in any practical sense) cause accidents. Same as the ISP, it 'includes that possibility'.
Really? I very rarely see anyone mention the blocking of viruses by ISP as a solution. Please point out a few of these people that recommend the same thing.
There was a large research by the XS4All ISP in the Netherlands with a huge percentage(85%!) of the people saying a blunt yes to the question whether they think ISP's are responsible for keeping them safe. I would say that qualifies.
I am not blaming the ISP's for stupidity of their users. I am blaming the ISP's for allowing their stupid users to spew viruses across the internet, when it could EASILY be foiled with a very simple filter. Hell, just block port 25 outgoing entirely, and make them send mail through your mail servers or proxies, and do the filtering there, even easier.
Please think and know that that's impossible. Virusses spread within hours, even before an ISP has a chance to update their scanners because there is no update to apply yet... This is a great sense of false security and if applied, should only be applied as a second line of defense, not the last line. Hence, ISP's shouldn't be held responsible. They may be helpful but can never be expected to be responsible.
How in earth are ISP's responsible for the actions of an individual ?
What you are suggesting is like suggesting that we should file class actions against fuel companies for people causing accidents with cars, or against companies selling glas mugs for hooligans acting violently while being drunk with beer drunk from their mugs.
The thing you are suggesting has been and is suggested by a lot of people. People who tend to think that ISP's carry the key to security.
The only ones who do carry that key are the people at 'the wheel'. The people that run their OS'es and load up the virusses, by accident perhaps but accidents happen.
If you're going to blame anyone than at least blame Microsoft for putting out an unsafe OS, which is much more closer to the source - compare that if you want to the car that was unsafe while delivered from the factory. But that does never leave out the fact that people themselves are responsible for checking up on the device they run, or let it be checked up by professionals. And let's face it, in the end the real guilty party is the people who write the virusses and spread them.
... if it really is something interesting, it's engine will probably been given a Loebner prize. Other than that, it's just a bunch of flashy marketing talk and some sleek graphics.
As a comparison just play a cool game on the C64 and tell me why that has to be any worse than the sleekest, most graphically attracting game on the pc with the most boring gameplay.
I could imagine something like this (were there life instead of water):
Hello there, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome.
So... let's start with this press conference...
Once upon a time there was this big... gigantically big black void, called the galaxy. In this big.... unbelievably big void there were small lightbulbs. Tiny... real tiny lightbulbs compared to the gigantic big void, called suns. Next to these small lightbulbs were even smaller drops of dirt. Tiny... small drops of dirt, called planets.
And yesterday, on one of those tiny tiny tiny drops of dirt, we found an even tinier thingie... a tiny tiny animal. Just like those you see in the zoo. Those nice animals with their furry coat, that make you laugh, ha ha.
But this tiny tiny animal is actually about as big as your house... multiplied by two-hundred.
And now that animal can come and eat you alive ! It has huge teeth and great claws, and will happily eat you!
Now... that was the story of our discovery. Good night everybody and sleep tight !
It sure sounds as if NASA didn't really want to find water so soon, coz' they are now busy explaining why there needs to be a lot of follow up research to find even more water on Mars. They must actually fear that instead of this being scientific good news, it will be bad news for funding. Maybe they can better go the way ESA went and start searching life directly...
Reading this I suddenly remember that very thing about my soundcard: Creative Soundblaster Live with the EMU-101. I specifically bought it for just the purpose of (later on) getting more value for my money. Creative marketed it with specifically telling the great things they could add with new software for the 101. So far the only new feature I have seen was some equalizer developed for it. Best thing about that? It wasn't made by Creative.
...for some devices is what makes me not buy those devices in the first place. Forget the less technical: they won't ask for the features most of us ask for (or when they do, they can find out about updating on the net). The main type of devices I am unpleased about are the mainstream DVD-players. Lack of features, wrongly implemented features, plain old hangups.... Who ever invented a DVD-player that can't do MP3 in random order ? Why should I want to see a JPEG building up on the screen while you could double-buffer it ?
Sure, sometimes it's just lack of hardware support. But it's also just lazyness I guess.
I have a Yamada DV-6000 now (divx-capable), which has regular firmware updates. Simply burn a CD-Rom and stuff it in the drive. If you are careful (and don't go updating your drive in the middle of a lightning storm or anything) you will gain more functionality for the same price. Easy as that.
... for example in (2) : (zooming in, no time yet to read everything, IANAL) ICANN was originally established to assist in the transition of the Internet domain name system from one of a single domain name registrar to one with multiple companies competing to provide domain name registration services to Internet users "in a manner that will permit market mechanisms to support competition and consumer choice in the technical management of the [domain name system]." ICANN's ongoing role is to provide technical coordination of the Internet's domain name system by encouriging coordination among various constituent groups using the Internet.
I read a few things here:
1. Verisign acknowledges that ICANN serves in (a coordinating role of) the technical management of the DNS. Therefore, IMHO, it surely must acknowledge that ICANN has to act against the sitefinder service to protect that technical interest. The disadvantages have been clearly written out by lot's of experts in the field, ICANN simply gives them 1 voice - coordinates if you will.
2. Verisign acknowledges that ICANN should 'support consumer choice'. What Verisign has done clearly states a breach of consumer choice (having 99.99999999999% of the domain names in for example the.COM-domain automatically redirected to 1 site is hardly a choice at all).
In short: by Verisign's own words, ICANN is doing something right.
... there wouldn't need to be a ban on "free speech". People would be allowed to place anything they like on the internet, and act in anyway as they see fit.
In this ideal world, people would not be thinking of (let alone placing !) the things outlawed by our world, and would have much other things on their minds.
As this is not an ideal world, alas, people will have to learn to draw a line at someplace whilst not restricting that which should not be banned.
The fear that is underlying here is the fear of an endless circle in which we are drawn, leading to more and more "purity" and causing a minority of people to more and more decide what the majority of people can and cannot see by their *own* "pure rules". In some countries this is called "dictatorship".
For example, if this minority were Bill Gates, it could probably be a ban on Linux-related stuff.
Instead of constantly shouting on what should be banned and what not, we should give ourselves a chance to think about it: Sites that a majority of the people, by their *own* knowledge - not by some knowledge put forward by mass-media et al, dislike should be possible to ban.
RSA has studied solutions to prevent the readers from hanging on a "malicious" RFID-blocker. Such a solution is named in their paper:
It is conceivable that expensive, special-purpose readers could filter out blocker tags.
For example, if a few readers working together could estimate the location of the tags, they
could ignore a multitude of fake identifiers originating from a single location. Of course,
existing readers are not capable of this hypothetical technique. If they will also sell said solution, is something that needs to be watched I guess...
It is like calling someone by their name. Two people answer - that's perfectly ok, but you can't determine who's who: that's your problem, not theirs. You are not really interfering, you are simply "doing as you are told". In this case a binary tree is followed down and the RFID-blocker tag responds truthfully to the question "who has the next bit in tree 010X ?".
You are not jamming the radiosignal that the other RFID is transmitting. (which would indeed be illegal, as it probably jams a whole lot more than just the RFID in your bag).
In the RSA paper, there is a section on this very thing (in fact a lot of things discussed here are put forward in that paper). Basically it says that in a forseeable future, you may want to actually have certain RFID-tags 'alive' so your home appliances, like a washing machine or microwave, can use the tag to, for example, autodetermine a program that has to be run on said product. All sorts of interesting stuff presents itself here.
The trick is that you want to block (certain) RFID's at certain (private) places, and you will always have the last say in the 'who is scanning my stuff'-question.
This RSA-technique tries to have both. Now if there is a good standardization of RFID-numbers (like 1000xxxxxxxx = clothing, 1100xxxxxxxx is food etc.), you can practically shut every part of the binary RFID-tree out that you don't want anyone to scan.
If we harnass this technique instead of plain dismissing it, we could actually get somewhere. But I agree that standardization and privacy-protection, not commerce, should be first and foremost of the agenda of RFID-introduction.
It's not blocking the signal. If you read closely, you will see it's actually 'over-answering' the signal. Instead of answering back with 1 unique RFID, it answers back with hundreds of unique RFID's. The original RFID still gets transmitted and theoretically received, but because the system cannot decide which RFID it wants to read, it blocks by (software) design.
Here is the original paper on RSA's idea of blocking the RSA tags. I posted a link to this a few months ago, after heise.de posted an article on that very thing.
"This would lead to a "big crunch" where the universe ultimately implodes. "This looks like the least likely scenario at present," says Riess." This can't be, coz' even Red Dwarf had an episode about that!
"This would lead to a "big crunch" where the universe ultimately implodes. "This looks like the least likely scenario at present," says Riess."
This can't be, coz' even Red Dwarf had an episode about that!
Thinking of this, navigating a powerline would be quite easy once you're there. It simply takes a rough point where the powerlines are. Make the plane fly over that point at a safe height, so you're sure it went over the powerlines at least once. The powerpeak on the plane's internal coil would be logged including the lat./long. where it occured. Then make it circle back until it "hits" the powerline again. Flying towards point 1 would keep you adjacent to the powerlines, so your UAV should be powering up in 'no time' (really, I don't know the physics of the actual powering up, and whether that could be possible, but leave it as a nice thought-experiment:)
Seriously, from a developer viewpoint, that is all wrong. I have worked on projects in which there was simply too much logging going on that you couldn't tell head from toe anymore. When a problem arrived, scanning the logfiles proved very cumbersome indeed. Every developer had his own stuff logged, which sometimes proved interesting, sometimes proved utter crap (noone wants to know variable XYZ is increased by 1 for 24943 times).
You should develop a well-thought logging strategy that increases the logging verbosity on a problem-basis, not simply log everything that happens and hoping you get some useful information.
Slashdot Mirror
By current knowledge the spaceshuttle is "unsafe", because a very serious accident happened. But by current knowledge your car is "unsafe" too, because in all likelihood, very serious accidents happened with your (model/year) car too.
It's a mere matter of "acceptable risk" and "public opinion". If NASA decides the risk is "acceptable" and the "opinion" is that people would like to see Hubble repaired instead of chances reduced to 0% that there will happen an accident: Hubble will be repaired!
If one thinks of the future, with a more advanced spaceship, there will always be a risk that is accepted, and there will always be public opinion to make that risk a go or no go for launch.
I hope many people will see this picture, and wonder about the question: why not send the Space Shuttle back up now to safe Hubble, instead of waiting 10 years for who knows what ?
ISP's provide a service, allowing people infected with a virus to spread that virus to hundreds and thousands of other people on the internet.
ISP's provide a general service, which includes that possibility. Fuel includes the possibility of it being in a car while the car has an accident and it being partly ""responsible"" (I wouldn't call it that).
Terrible analogy. Unlike the gas station, the ISP is continuously providing you with the service that allows you to cause harm (i.e. send viruses).
Hrmm without fuel, a car doesn't drive, hence can't (in any practical sense) cause accidents. Same as the ISP, it 'includes that possibility'.
Really? I very rarely see anyone mention the blocking of viruses by ISP as a solution. Please point out a few of these people that recommend the same thing.
There was a large research by the XS4All ISP in the Netherlands with a huge percentage(85%!) of the people saying a blunt yes to the question whether they think ISP's are responsible for keeping them safe. I would say that qualifies.
I am not blaming the ISP's for stupidity of their users. I am blaming the ISP's for allowing their stupid users to spew viruses across the internet, when it could EASILY be foiled with a very simple filter. Hell, just block port 25 outgoing entirely, and make them send mail through your mail servers or proxies, and do the filtering there, even easier.
Please think and know that that's impossible. Virusses spread within hours, even before an ISP has a chance to update their scanners because there is no update to apply yet... This is a great sense of false security and if applied, should only be applied as a second line of defense, not the last line. Hence, ISP's shouldn't be held responsible. They may be helpful but can never be expected to be responsible.
How in earth are ISP's responsible for the actions of an individual ?
What you are suggesting is like suggesting that we should file class actions against fuel companies for people causing accidents with cars, or against companies selling glas mugs for hooligans acting violently while being drunk with beer drunk from their mugs.
The thing you are suggesting has been and is suggested by a lot of people. People who tend to think that ISP's carry the key to security.
The only ones who do carry that key are the people at 'the wheel'. The people that run their OS'es and load up the virusses, by accident perhaps but accidents happen.
If you're going to blame anyone than at least blame Microsoft for putting out an unsafe OS, which is much more closer to the source - compare that if you want to the car that was unsafe while delivered from the factory.
But that does never leave out the fact that people themselves are responsible for checking up on the device they run, or let it be checked up by professionals. And let's face it, in the end the real guilty party is the people who write the virusses and spread them.
... if it really is something interesting, it's engine will probably been given a Loebner prize. Other than that, it's just a bunch of flashy marketing talk and some sleek graphics.
As a comparison just play a cool game on the C64 and tell me why that has to be any worse than the sleekest, most graphically attracting game on the pc with the most boring gameplay.
It's all about the contents baby.
I could imagine something like this (were there life instead of water):
Hello there, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome. So... let's start with this press conference...
Once upon a time there was this big... gigantically big black void, called the galaxy. In this big.... unbelievably big void there were small lightbulbs. Tiny... real tiny lightbulbs compared to the gigantic big void, called suns. Next to these small lightbulbs were even smaller drops of dirt. Tiny... small drops of dirt, called planets.
And yesterday, on one of those tiny tiny tiny drops of dirt, we found an even tinier thingie... a tiny tiny animal. Just like those you see in the zoo. Those nice animals with their furry coat, that make you laugh, ha ha.
But this tiny tiny animal is actually about as big as your house... multiplied by two-hundred. And now that animal can come and eat you alive ! It has huge teeth and great claws, and will happily eat you!
Now... that was the story of our discovery. Good night everybody and sleep tight !
I guess they shouldn't make that a horror-writer.
It sure sounds as if NASA didn't really want to find water so soon, coz' they are now busy explaining why there needs to be a lot of follow up research to find even more water on Mars.
They must actually fear that instead of this being scientific good news, it will be bad news for funding.
Maybe they can better go the way ESA went and start searching life directly...
...it's just VMWare ESX Server for Solaris then ?
It's probably an interesting tool for hosting companies that wish to sell Solaris ('root')-servers...
Reading this I suddenly remember that very thing about my soundcard: Creative Soundblaster Live with the EMU-101. I specifically bought it for just the purpose of (later on) getting more value for my money. Creative marketed it with specifically telling the great things they could add with new software for the 101. So far the only new feature I have seen was some equalizer developed for it.
Best thing about that? It wasn't made by Creative.
...for some devices is what makes me not buy those devices in the first place. Forget the less technical: they won't ask for the features most of us ask for (or when they do, they can find out about updating on the net).
The main type of devices I am unpleased about are the mainstream DVD-players. Lack of features, wrongly implemented features, plain old hangups.... Who ever invented a DVD-player that can't do MP3 in random order ? Why should I want to see a JPEG building up on the screen while you could double-buffer it ?
Sure, sometimes it's just lack of hardware support. But it's also just lazyness I guess.
I have a Yamada DV-6000 now (divx-capable), which has regular firmware updates. Simply burn a CD-Rom and stuff it in the drive. If you are careful (and don't go updating your drive in the middle of a lightning storm or anything) you will gain more functionality for the same price. Easy as that.
Big companies still have this lesson to learn.
Convince all ISP's of the world to switch over their root-servers and we're done :)
... for example in (2) : (zooming in, no time yet to read everything, IANAL)
.COM-domain automatically redirected to 1 site is hardly a choice at all).
ICANN was originally established to assist in the transition of the Internet domain name system from one of a single domain name registrar to one with multiple companies competing to provide domain name registration services to Internet users "in a manner that will permit market mechanisms to support competition and consumer choice in the technical management of the [domain name system]." ICANN's ongoing role is to provide technical coordination of the Internet's domain name system by encouriging coordination among various constituent groups using the Internet.
I read a few things here:
1. Verisign acknowledges that ICANN serves in (a coordinating role of) the technical management of the DNS. Therefore, IMHO, it surely must acknowledge that ICANN has to act against the sitefinder service to protect that technical interest. The disadvantages have been clearly written out by lot's of experts in the field, ICANN simply gives them 1 voice - coordinates if you will.
2. Verisign acknowledges that ICANN should 'support consumer choice'. What Verisign has done clearly states a breach of consumer choice (having 99.99999999999% of the domain names in for example the
In short: by Verisign's own words, ICANN is doing something right.
of Verisign against ICANN put down here.
... there wouldn't need to be a ban on "free speech". People would be allowed to place anything they like on the internet, and act in anyway as they see fit.
In this ideal world, people would not be thinking of (let alone placing !) the things outlawed by our world, and would have much other things on their minds.
As this is not an ideal world, alas, people will have to learn to draw a line at someplace whilst not restricting that which should not be banned.
The fear that is underlying here is the fear of an endless circle in which we are drawn, leading to more and more "purity" and causing a minority of people to more and more decide what the majority of people can and cannot see by their *own* "pure rules". In some countries this is called "dictatorship".
For example, if this minority were Bill Gates, it could probably be a ban on Linux-related stuff.
Instead of constantly shouting on what should be banned and what not, we should give ourselves a chance to think about it: Sites that a majority of the people, by their *own* knowledge - not by some knowledge put forward by mass-media et al, dislike should be possible to ban.
RSA has studied solutions to prevent the readers from hanging on a "malicious" RFID-blocker. Such a solution is named in their paper:
It is conceivable that expensive, special-purpose readers could filter out blocker tags. For example, if a few readers working together could estimate the location of the tags, they could ignore a multitude of fake identifiers originating from a single location. Of course, existing readers are not capable of this hypothetical technique.
If they will also sell said solution, is something that needs to be watched I guess...
It is like calling someone by their name. Two people answer - that's perfectly ok, but you can't determine who's who: that's your problem, not theirs. You are not really interfering, you are simply "doing as you are told".
In this case a binary tree is followed down and the RFID-blocker tag responds truthfully to the question "who has the next bit in tree 010X ?".
You are not jamming the radiosignal that the other RFID is transmitting. (which would indeed be illegal, as it probably jams a whole lot more than just the RFID in your bag).
In the RSA paper, there is a section on this very thing (in fact a lot of things discussed here are put forward in that paper).
Basically it says that in a forseeable future, you may want to actually have certain RFID-tags 'alive' so your home appliances, like a washing machine or microwave, can use the tag to, for example, autodetermine a program that has to be run on said product. All sorts of interesting stuff presents itself here.
The trick is that you want to block (certain) RFID's at certain (private) places, and you will always have the last say in the 'who is scanning my stuff'-question.
This RSA-technique tries to have both. Now if there is a good standardization of RFID-numbers (like 1000xxxxxxxx = clothing, 1100xxxxxxxx is food etc.), you can practically shut every part of the binary RFID-tree out that you don't want anyone to scan.
If we harnass this technique instead of plain dismissing it, we could actually get somewhere. But I agree that standardization and privacy-protection, not commerce, should be first and foremost of the agenda of RFID-introduction.
It's not blocking the signal. If you read closely, you will see it's actually 'over-answering' the signal. Instead of answering back with 1 unique RFID, it answers back with hundreds of unique RFID's. The original RFID still gets transmitted and theoretically received, but because the system cannot decide which RFID it wants to read, it blocks by (software) design.
Here is the original paper on RSA's idea of blocking the RSA tags.
I posted a link to this a few months ago, after heise.de posted an article on that very thing.
"This would lead to a "big crunch" where the universe ultimately implodes. "This looks like the least likely scenario at present," says Riess."
This can't be, coz' even Red Dwarf had an episode about that!
"This would lead to a "big crunch" where the universe ultimately implodes. "This looks like the least likely scenario at present," says Riess."
This can't be, coz' even Red Dwarf had an episode about that!
Erm... who pays the powerbill ?
Thinking of this, navigating a powerline would be quite easy once you're there. It simply takes a rough point where the powerlines are. Make the plane fly over that point at a safe height, so you're sure it went over the powerlines at least once. The powerpeak on the plane's internal coil would be logged including the lat./long. where it occured. Then make it circle back until it "hits" the powerline again. Flying towards point 1 would keep you adjacent to the powerlines, so your UAV should be powering up in 'no time' (really, I don't know the physics of the actual powering up, and whether that could be possible, but leave it as a nice thought-experiment :)
a few powerlines to powerup the UAV again, to increase the range drastically. Would take some plotting, but you could get far I guess.
I mean, with the latest research on electromagnetical radiation in my mind, and this being a high-level electromagnetical field, I certainly do not want to take the risk to get back from that site with a rotten brain...
Seriously, from a developer viewpoint, that is all wrong.
I have worked on projects in which there was simply too much logging going on that you couldn't tell head from toe anymore. When a problem arrived, scanning the logfiles proved very cumbersome indeed. Every developer had his own stuff logged, which sometimes proved interesting, sometimes proved utter crap (noone wants to know variable XYZ is increased by 1 for 24943 times).
You should develop a well-thought logging strategy that increases the logging verbosity on a problem-basis, not simply log everything that happens and hoping you get some useful information.