Now, if there is a patent system, then I can file a patent for my better mousetrap, and receive legal protection for the exclusive right to market it, for a limited time, and in exchange for disclosing the details of how my better mousetrap works to the general public. So now it's a win-win situation - I as the inventor get rewarded, and the general public gets the benefits of my invention.
Yep, that's what's good about patents. What's bad about the current system in the US, is we started allowing "Business Process" patents, where you didn't even have to show that the process was in use or even prove that it could be in use. Same with software patents. You don't have to disclose your source code. To get a software copyright, you don't have to disclose your source code. So, with software patents, and to a lessor extent, business process patents, if you die during the patent period without disclosing your secrets, the public is the loser. You've had the benefit of a patent, without allowing the public to see your designs and methods.
Any form of exclusive protection for software should require full disclosure. Source code and makefiles that build to the shipped object code, or the copyright/patent is void.
botnets evolve themselves out of business?
on
Botnet on Botnet Action
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If botnet A installs patches 1,2 & 3, and botnet B simultaneously installs patches 4, 5, & 6, could the target machines be completely immunized after the next reboot?
It can try the alternative password as if there is a failure. If aLt256! doesn't work, try AlT256!. If that works, let the person in. No need to actually "know" the password, and not a lot of additional work.
The reason password systems don't do this, is now there are two possible passwords that an attacker could guess, instead of one. I don't think that's much of a vulnerability.
Robert Heinlein alreay had this idea with the "Shipstone", which was basically an infinite power source. The company that discovered it wouldn't sell them, you had to rent them. People who tried to reverse engineer them got sucked into the black hole that was inside.
But, Bob didn't invent the idea. It was invented by James Watt, the man that didn't invent the steam engine, but who did popularize it and make it practical. He also made you pay for one of his engineers to go with the engine. This is why the lead engineer from "Star Trek" TOS is Scottish (Scotty).
Blame it on computers. No, really, it's the computer geeks fault. See, used to be, engineers had little ideal how things really failed. Now with computer data collection and modeling, they can reliably predict exactly how long something will last and make it last just a little longer than the warrantee period.
I'll bet you could buy a 50 year, or at least a 25 year washing machine, but you'd have to import it from Scandinavia. It'd be made of stainless steel, and you'd have to replace the belts and seals every five years or so, so stock up now while they are still made. Expect to pay at least $3000, where the equivalent Whirlpool model would be $1000.
accidently had the caps lock key on when they tried to access it
I've often wondered how much security exactly is lost if the password systems would just allow a case inverted pASSWORD, and warn the user if the password was typed in ALL CAPS. (Some keyboards put everything in caps when caps lock is even if you press the shift key, some invert the sense of the shift key) Thus if the user's password is aLt256!, the system would allow AlT256!, and warn about ALT256!.
If your password system has billions or trillions of potential passwords, allowing two possible passwords instead of one doesn't seem like it would open too much up.
I think Windows does warn about the caps lock key being down, but it can look. A remote application like a website doesn't have access to the keyboard to check that sort of thing.
Well, yes, that's why I gave the formula, so anyone could plug in better numbers if they had them.
In business sometimes you don't have hard numbers, so yes, you do "Just Make Them Up!" We call it a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess)
What happens is the executives either don't have the real numbers yet, or won't release them because they are a trade secret, or VP X doesn't like VP Y and is gunning for his job, so he won't give you the real numbers. So you make your best estimate and present the VPs with a paper that lists all the assumptions and formulas. If VP X knows that factor Z is really twice as high as you estimated, all he has to do is plug it in to your formula, and viola, he has the real result. Alas, since VP Y didn't give the correct number for factor W the project is still doomed, but hey, what can you do? (:-)
Google was just an example of a huge company that provides data collection and crunching services. Substitute your favorite computer services company if you'd like, and yes, large non-computer companies do contract out for computing services during crunch time.
FedEx pays IBM beaucoup bucks to keep a data center ready just in case their main center is destroyed by a tornado or the New Madrid fault. (at least they did a few years ago) One has to imagine that IBM sells the computing services to others with the understanding that if FedEx needs them, they get them.
Unfortunatly for the NYSE, wild swings in stock prices happen so unpredictably, and are over so soon, that this kind of outsourcing doesn't really make sense. I don't know what Visa and MasterCard do. I'm sure they have to deal with peak loads and have a plan in place either inhouse or out.
Fast forward to the time of warfare. The brave dudes ran ahead, got killed in a spectacular fashion, had songs written about them, while the procrastinators went home and had more offspring. After about 6000 years of this, procrastination looks pretty good.
no webserver is expected to survive if you way overload it. you can't really blame Intuit/Turbotax on this one.
I do size load estimation for Unix servers for a living. Yes, I can blame Intuit for this one. They should have contracted with a company like Google to cache all the returns, then feed them to their servers a few at a time. Their software could have even done encryption so that Google wouldn't have access to the actual data. There are ways to handle super large peak loads.
Nope, they just worked it out with the IRS so that people could file late.
I know people just assume that the IRS would be unreasonable, but Tax software takes so much of the load and expense off the IRS that they will do anything cost free to get people to use eFiling. Intuit might give people a refund off of the cost of eFiling if they paid extra. (in the form of a coupon for next year)
You could try to sue, but Intuit and the IRS are being so reasonable that I don't think you could win.
I'm using my poor memory here but there are something like 180 million filers, 60% of which use Tax software or professional help (almost all the professionals use Tax software)
TurboTax should know it's market share, let's pretend it's 75%. That's 180,000,000 *.60 *.75 *.20 = 16.2 million on the last day. Let's say most, 75%, wait until the last half of the day, that's 8.1 million in the last 12 hours. That's 187 per second.
On NPR they gave a figure that the TurboTax servers were processing like 40 per second.
I do peak load extimation for Unix servers for a living. Somebody at TurboTax screwed up big time, real big time. They should have doubled the number of servers they thought they might have needed. They should have contracted with a company like Google to cache the returns, then process them batchwise as fast as they could.
99% of buildings are square because it's cheap and easy to build them that way. Also, when you push your cheap couch or bookshelf against the wall in a round building, there is perceived "wasted" space.
The kid was making a proper observation about the world around him, but was drawing an incorrect conclusion. Buildings aren't built that way because it's better, they are built that way because it's cheaper.
B.t.w. Kudus to you for helping out at your local schools.
I still have my Heathkit H89. Not sure what the serial number is, but it came with the shims, rather than a connector for the external floppies. I even have a spare CPU and terminal board in need of repair.
When my wife asks why I keep it around, I tell her it's the cost of admittance into the "Old Programmer's Home", when I retire.
B.t.w. Mine did emit smoke the first time I turned it on. I quickly turned it off and inspected it for damage and didn't find anything. I worked with the 2nd power on. Years later, I was working on a different problem (bad 5v regulator on the CPU board) and I found a burnt out trace on the PC board between the +5v and ground lines. It was a self correcting design flaw.
There's another design flaw. If you power the machine up with the external hard sectored floppies unterminated/unpowered, and a boot disk in the internal bay, the internal floppy drive will go into write mode, and most likely overwrite the boot sector.
It sounds like what you are saying is that someone wants to download X, but there are few sources of X. There are many sources of Y, which is really X, renamed. Your tool would download the proper header info from the X source and the majority of the data from the Y sources.
Some of the former communist countries were the worst offenders on the environmental front, so I have no idea how you could see my post as a *defense* of socialism.
To answer your question, no, that doesn't make it Ok. Why would you think it does? Guily conscience perhaps?
It's a new world order. We need new laws to reflect that. New law is what would make certain activities ok, by declaring them to be "not copyright infringement." Other activities would still be "copyright infringement."
People have shared ideas, songs, and stories with their friends for years. Your friends used to be just the people who lived within a few miles of you. With electronic communication, people who share your interest could live around the world and you can still share ideas. According to the US constitution, our law should "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". The law isn't there to compensate the creators, the purpose of copyright and patent law is to have promote progress.
Then again, they would probably build up a heck of a static charge themselves just with the wind flowing over them.
Ben there, done that.
When I was in high school, I suspended an aluminum sheet about 6" by 50' about 30' in the air insulated with ceramic antenna insulators. I had a wire to a Leyden jar on the ground. I managed to make a neon bulb flash a few times with the charge before the wind brought the whole thing crashing down. I read about a Soviet Engineer who used a larger tower to spin a 1/3 hp electorstatic motor. Yep, this thing would generate considerable power just from the static charge it could build up. It would also attract lightning like nothing else...
Get ready for passionate Socialists arguing, that it is "not the same as stealing" -- as if that's relevant, as if being "not exactly stealing" makes it acceptable somehow.
The communists don't have a monopoly on the "not the same as stealing" = acceptable philosophy. The Capitolists have been using it for years.
If we destroy the land for the future generations to make a quick buck, that's not exactly stealing, so it's acceptable. (Just about every country has done this at some time)
If we tax Peter to pay Paul, it's not exactly stealing, and thus acceptable.
If I find a bag with $1,000,000 in it, I should try to find the owner, but if I find $20 on the ground, it's not exactly stealing, so it's acceptable to keep it.
If my car pollutes the air just a little bit, it's not exactly stealing, so it's acceptable.
When you copy a song file without permission, you are reducing it's value to the owner a tiny bit. When you pollute, you are reducing the value of the environment a (hopefully) tiny bit. Both are not exactly stealing, but both are wrong.
You say this like it's a new thing. Clothing designers have always had their designs copied, sometimes before they themselves even offer the designs for sale to the general public.
Welcome to the real world. Fiction (Mostly SF) has been saying "What if you could effortlessly duplicate anything?" for years now. It's time for real world ideas on how to deal with a world where almost nothing is scarce. Are we going to attempt to legislate artificial scarcity, or maximum abundance and a fair way to compensate creators? Imagine a futuristic system that scanned the cultural zeitgiest and paid creators based on how often their creations were used. It wouldn't matter if it was a copy or an original, the creator would still get paid. Cue the naysayers and discuss...
I learned more from reading "Realm of Algebra" by Isaac Asimov than I did in 1 year of 8th grade Algebra class, so yes there is a short cut. Or to put things in a different perspective, reading a good book on a subject is all it should take to learn it, the standard classroom method is the long way around the barn.
It's not the trackpad per se, it's the extra distance. Look at a real keyboard. The keys start about 2cm from the edge. That's the way laptops used to be. Now, all the machines with decent specs, have these trackpads and extra distance. But you're right, he could glue a piece of wood or plastic that was just the right thickness over the trackpad to make it go away. (and disable it in software)
Still modern laptop keyboard are compromises. The beauty of the Model 100 keyboard was that it had full sized keys with travel. People like journalists loved them.
If you have an XO, and you are not a child registered to use it, it will be very obvious that it is stolen.
Excellent point, but many years ago, my dad had some ham radio equipment stolen from his car when it was parked in our driveway. About a year after that, the stuff was found because it was tossed in the bushes. Once the theives got the stuff under the street lights, they realized that it wasn't CB, and thus was usless to them. My point is that people steal stuff all the time that they can't use, then destroy it when they figure out what they have.
Couldn't the original problem be rectified by the OLPC people publicly stating something like: "Lime green cased machines are licensed for the children. Red cases are for teachers/ developers, black cases are for everyone else." Since even swapping the case on a machine that costs between $100 and $200 would be prohibitive in the long run, that could keep the theft problem in check. (You'd still have the problem of one child stealing the laptop from another)
Allowing these to be sold by Amazon for $200, will disincentivize governments from buying them for $100 and trying to sell in bulk at a profit. If you know you can get a clean machine for $200 are you going to pay $100 + $n for a "dirty" machine? (where $n is large enough to make it worth their hassle)
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Any form of exclusive protection for software should require full disclosure. Source code and makefiles that build to the shipped object code, or the copyright/patent is void.
If botnet A installs patches 1,2 & 3, and botnet B simultaneously installs patches 4, 5, & 6, could the target machines be completely immunized after the next reboot?
It can try the alternative password as if there is a failure. If aLt256! doesn't work, try AlT256!. If that works, let the person in. No need to actually "know" the password, and not a lot of additional work.
The reason password systems don't do this, is now there are two possible passwords that an attacker could guess, instead of one. I don't think that's much of a vulnerability.
Robert Heinlein alreay had this idea with the "Shipstone", which was basically an infinite power source. The company that discovered it wouldn't sell them, you had to rent them. People who tried to reverse engineer them got sucked into the black hole that was inside.
But, Bob didn't invent the idea. It was invented by James Watt, the man that didn't invent the steam engine, but who did popularize it and make it practical. He also made you pay for one of his engineers to go with the engine. This is why the lead engineer from "Star Trek" TOS is Scottish (Scotty).
Blame it on computers. No, really, it's the computer geeks fault. See, used to be, engineers had little ideal how things really failed. Now with computer data collection and modeling, they can reliably predict exactly how long something will last and make it last just a little longer than the warrantee period.
I'll bet you could buy a 50 year, or at least a 25 year washing machine, but you'd have to import it from Scandinavia. It'd be made of stainless steel, and you'd have to replace the belts and seals every five years or so, so stock up now while they are still made. Expect to pay at least $3000, where the equivalent Whirlpool model would be $1000.
If your password system has billions or trillions of potential passwords, allowing two possible passwords instead of one doesn't seem like it would open too much up.
I think Windows does warn about the caps lock key being down, but it can look. A remote application like a website doesn't have access to the keyboard to check that sort of thing.
Well, yes, that's why I gave the formula, so anyone could plug in better numbers if they had them.
In business sometimes you don't have hard numbers, so yes, you do "Just Make Them Up!" We call it a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess)
What happens is the executives either don't have the real numbers yet, or won't release them because they are a trade secret, or VP X doesn't like VP Y and is gunning for his job, so he won't give you the real numbers. So you make your best estimate and present the VPs with a paper that lists all the assumptions and formulas. If VP X knows that factor Z is really twice as high as you estimated, all he has to do is plug it in to your formula, and viola, he has the real result. Alas, since VP Y didn't give the correct number for factor W the project is still doomed, but hey, what can you do? (:-)
Google was just an example of a huge company that provides data collection and crunching services. Substitute your favorite computer services company if you'd like, and yes, large non-computer companies do contract out for computing services during crunch time.
FedEx pays IBM beaucoup bucks to keep a data center ready just in case their main center is destroyed by a tornado or the New Madrid fault. (at least they did a few years ago) One has to imagine that IBM sells the computing services to others with the understanding that if FedEx needs them, they get them.
Unfortunatly for the NYSE, wild swings in stock prices happen so unpredictably, and are over so soon, that this kind of outsourcing doesn't really make sense. I don't know what Visa and MasterCard do. I'm sure they have to deal with peak loads and have a plan in place either inhouse or out.
Fast forward to the time of warfare. The brave dudes ran ahead, got killed in a spectacular fashion, had songs written about them, while the procrastinators went home and had more offspring. After about 6000 years of this, procrastination looks pretty good.
Nope, they just worked it out with the IRS so that people could file late.
I know people just assume that the IRS would be unreasonable, but Tax software takes so much of the load and expense off the IRS that they will do anything cost free to get people to use eFiling. Intuit might give people a refund off of the cost of eFiling if they paid extra. (in the form of a coupon for next year)
You could try to sue, but Intuit and the IRS are being so reasonable that I don't think you could win.
I'm using my poor memory here but there are something like 180 million filers, 60% of which use Tax software or professional help (almost all the professionals use Tax software)
.60 * .75 * .20 = 16.2 million on the last day. Let's say most, 75%, wait until the last half of the day, that's 8.1 million in the last 12 hours. That's 187 per second.
TurboTax should know it's market share, let's pretend it's 75%. That's 180,000,000 *
On NPR they gave a figure that the TurboTax servers were processing like 40 per second.
I do peak load extimation for Unix servers for a living. Somebody at TurboTax screwed up big time, real big time. They should have doubled the number of servers they thought they might have needed. They should have contracted with a company like Google to cache the returns, then process them batchwise as fast as they could.
Also you don't have any information to trade in a plea bargain. A real criminal might be able to finger an associate.
99% of buildings are square because it's cheap and easy to build them that way. Also, when you push your cheap couch or bookshelf against the wall in a round building, there is perceived "wasted" space.
The kid was making a proper observation about the world around him, but was drawing an incorrect conclusion. Buildings aren't built that way because it's better, they are built that way because it's cheaper.
B.t.w. Kudus to you for helping out at your local schools.
I still have my Heathkit H89. Not sure what the serial number is, but it came with the shims, rather than a connector for the external floppies. I even have a spare CPU and terminal board in need of repair.
When my wife asks why I keep it around, I tell her it's the cost of admittance into the "Old Programmer's Home", when I retire.
B.t.w. Mine did emit smoke the first time I turned it on. I quickly turned it off and inspected it for damage and didn't find anything. I worked with the 2nd power on. Years later, I was working on a different problem (bad 5v regulator on the CPU board) and I found a burnt out trace on the PC board between the +5v and ground lines. It was a self correcting design flaw.
There's another design flaw. If you power the machine up with the external hard sectored floppies unterminated/unpowered, and a boot disk in the internal bay, the internal floppy drive will go into write mode, and most likely overwrite the boot sector.
Isn't this rsync meets bitTorrent?
It sounds like what you are saying is that someone wants to download X, but there are few sources of X. There are many sources of Y, which is really X, renamed. Your tool would download the proper header info from the X source and the majority of the data from the Y sources.
Some of the former communist countries were the worst offenders on the environmental front, so I have no idea how you could see my post as a *defense* of socialism.
To answer your question, no, that doesn't make it Ok. Why would you think it does? Guily conscience perhaps?
It's a new world order. We need new laws to reflect that. New law is what would make certain activities ok, by declaring them to be "not copyright infringement." Other activities would still be "copyright infringement."
People have shared ideas, songs, and stories with their friends for years. Your friends used to be just the people who lived within a few miles of you. With electronic communication, people who share your interest could live around the world and you can still share ideas. According to the US constitution, our law should "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". The law isn't there to compensate the creators, the purpose of copyright and patent law is to have promote progress.
When I was in high school, I suspended an aluminum sheet about 6" by 50' about 30' in the air insulated with ceramic antenna insulators. I had a wire to a Leyden jar on the ground. I managed to make a neon bulb flash a few times with the charge before the wind brought the whole thing crashing down. I read about a Soviet Engineer who used a larger tower to spin a 1/3 hp electorstatic motor. Yep, this thing would generate considerable power just from the static charge it could build up. It would also attract lightning like nothing else...
If we destroy the land for the future generations to make a quick buck, that's not exactly stealing, so it's acceptable. (Just about every country has done this at some time)
If we tax Peter to pay Paul, it's not exactly stealing, and thus acceptable.
If I find a bag with $1,000,000 in it, I should try to find the owner, but if I find $20 on the ground, it's not exactly stealing, so it's acceptable to keep it.
If my car pollutes the air just a little bit, it's not exactly stealing, so it's acceptable.
When you copy a song file without permission, you are reducing it's value to the owner a tiny bit. When you pollute, you are reducing the value of the environment a (hopefully) tiny bit. Both are not exactly stealing, but both are wrong.
You say this like it's a new thing. Clothing designers have always had their designs copied, sometimes before they themselves even offer the designs for sale to the general public.
Welcome to the real world. Fiction (Mostly SF) has been saying "What if you could effortlessly duplicate anything?" for years now. It's time for real world ideas on how to deal with a world where almost nothing is scarce. Are we going to attempt to legislate artificial scarcity, or maximum abundance and a fair way to compensate creators? Imagine a futuristic system that scanned the cultural zeitgiest and paid creators based on how often their creations were used. It wouldn't matter if it was a copy or an original, the creator would still get paid. Cue the naysayers and discuss...
I learned more from reading "Realm of Algebra" by Isaac Asimov than I did in 1 year of 8th grade Algebra class, so yes there is a short cut. Or to put things in a different perspective, reading a good book on a subject is all it should take to learn it, the standard classroom method is the long way around the barn.
It's not the trackpad per se, it's the extra distance. Look at a real keyboard. The keys start about 2cm from the edge. That's the way laptops used to be. Now, all the machines with decent specs, have these trackpads and extra distance. But you're right, he could glue a piece of wood or plastic that was just the right thickness over the trackpad to make it go away. (and disable it in software)
Still modern laptop keyboard are compromises. The beauty of the Model 100 keyboard was that it had full sized keys with travel. People like journalists loved them.
Couldn't the original problem be rectified by the OLPC people publicly stating something like: "Lime green cased machines are licensed for the children. Red cases are for teachers/ developers, black cases are for everyone else." Since even swapping the case on a machine that costs between $100 and $200 would be prohibitive in the long run, that could keep the theft problem in check. (You'd still have the problem of one child stealing the laptop from another)
Mod parent up. He's absolutely right.
Allowing these to be sold by Amazon for $200, will disincentivize governments from buying them for $100 and trying to sell in bulk at a profit. If you know you can get a clean machine for $200 are you going to pay $100 + $n for a "dirty" machine? (where $n is large enough to make it worth their hassle)