To summarise: you don't need *the* correct password, you just need *a* correct password. There's more than one here, which is a bit of a waste.
A simple example: ROT-26 encryption can be decrypted by ROT-52 encryption.
US intelligence sorely needs people who can read between the lines Within the lines, surely?
Re:Don't think this is going to work to well...
on
Build Your Own Stun Gun
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not sure that the effect of touching a finger to a wire is representative. The effect will only be produced by the positive-earth potential rather than the positive-negative potential, and would be a lot less than you'd expect.
For example, when I was a kid I decided to dissect a light switch - with the mains power on! It was only after two minor shocks that I remembered to put rubber gloves on. If touching a wire could have the same effect as the main blast of the current, I wouldn't be here today:(
Well, of course! Isn't it obvious? I mean, Microsoft has been known to remove functionality from IE because it was too exploitable*. Given how little functionality IE has anyway, this must have been quite a sacrifice. And obviously if the most responsible, ethical company in the industry does it, so should we. It's so clear.
*I was thinking of the removal of username/password/server format due to its effect on URL parsing machinery. What were *you* thinking of?
Well, this is the country where, I'm told, homemade machine guns are legal as long as none of the parts were imported from out of state. I'd have thought that lasers were small fry...
I think it's actually quite an impressive piece of bull. It's sheer craftsmanship how they've managed to summarise every conceivable (or not) difficulty in just one paragraph.
Not joking. This reads like it was written by a pro.
Fair point, but the protocol itself, barring software patents, isn't actually proprietary - it's the implementation that's 'owned' by Microsoft.
I see what you're getting at, but a 100% purist approach to openness, whether of standard or source, will hand the entire industry to Microsoft on a silver platter. For example, I don't know of any open source Flash browser plugins, and it sure as hell isn't an open standard. However, if there was no support for Flash in Mozilla, half the 'Joe Sixpack' population would refuse to use it on that basis - people value their Flash games.
People won't come to see open standards as being essential until MS's monopolies are broken - if there's really only one company in the market, why would Aunt Tilly need interoperability? In the meantime, I'm willing to countenance an imperfectly open implementation if it leads to the real thing in future.
Re the copying of proprietary protocols: ever heard of lock-in? Perhaps fuelled by anticompetative monopoly behaviour? Thanks God for the Samba team is all I can say.
Re open protocols: They're a good thing to have, but they tend to get shat on by the patent people. I'll stick with open source as long as the European Commission is busy playing hob with democracy and common sense.
I understand your sentiment but I'd argue that filesharing doesn't preclude CD buying; in fact it facilitates it. Filesharing is a music education of the sort you can't normally get without borrowing your parents' vinyl collections; I recently bought a CD from a band called the Yellowjackets that I would never normally have heard of in a million years. I'm also turning into a major The Smiths fan.
I think you're saying that the fact that some people abuse rights is what loses them for us. That's a fair point, and quite possibly true. On the other hand, as a matter of semantics, if they can be legally taken away from us then technically they're priveleges not rights.
Who defines theft? In this particular situation we can't rely on the government to define morality for us, as the government does the will of the party in power, and the party in power has a vested interest in creating law in support of those, like the RIAA, who give it cash.
I do believe that filesharing is immoral. But I believe it is immoral to about the same degree that kicking a door open rather than pushing it open is immoral - the marginal damage is negligibly small. And, if the profits of the recording industry are as damaged as they say, the system itself (their business model) could be said to be broken - unsustainable in a free market. In that case, the system needs to be fundamentally changed, as opposed to litigating against those who have individually done so little damage.
If, on the other hand, the RIAA is merely keen to get as much money from lawsuits as possible, regardless of how negligibly small the effect may be on sales, then I have no sympathy. I'll keep kicking the door open, especially if my hands are full (metaphor alert: I'm a student in debt).
Note: this applies only to filesharing. I do not support commercial piracy, as this invalidates the above argument by competing with the recording industries on their own turf by unfair means.
You have some good points, but I feel you're not fully exploring the world you imagine. In this world, the pop star wouldn't be able to make millions singing someone's song without permission - their album would be freely copyable too.
Having said this, I'm not sure abolition of copyright is entirely the way forward - I think supporting people who do something genuinely creative enriches us all.
However, I would say that there is evidence to show that the illegal-downloaders aren't really denting the market that much. The only people who compete on the same playing field as the original publishers of the music are the commercial pirates.
My solution? Keep copyright but restrict it to commercial reproduction (if you're giving it away free then it's legal). Keep patents (and possibly even software patents) but make it illegal to submit blatantly obvious claims - if you ask for a patent on electronic shopping baskets you deserve to be litigated into the ground.
Does anyone else have thoughts on the optimum balance?
On the other hand, I am slightly disturbed by the transplanting of potentially toxic drug-production genes into, say, wheat. That seems like asking for trouble.
Rubber Pellet Guns on the other hand have an accurate range of about 30m and would probably bounce off.
It's interesting how acronyms get so horribly abused
Also, government systems are renowned for being comparatively insecure (I think there was a slashdot article about a month ago). If I've gone to all that trouble to encrypt my stuff, I would prefer not to have some civil service luddite with a password of "password" spread the info.
My argument would be that if those users downloaded just one legal track, that would be enough to confirm any belief that they were going to be used for legal purposes.
I know I use my uni's filesharing hub to download linux distros, as the Computer Dept gets shirty about downloading from outside the uni. And there are plans, if the hub ever gets shut down, to start meeting up and swapping CDs as an alternative. If filesharing software is banned, CD burners will take up a lot of the slack. Should we ban those too?
Semi-serious question
on
SimChurch
·
· Score: 3, Funny
So do they consecrate the server as holy ground or what? I'm not even gonna think about baptisms.
I have a sister who I'm willing to send anywhere, the further the better. Unfortunately I have no idea if she'd fit in the containers. Would it be acceptable to split her into many sections and send each separately? I'm sure she'd enjoy it really...
I do block ads, for the reason that I only have dialup and don't like hanging around whilst some overused server two continents away decides how much it's going to slow down my connection today.
The internet was designed by geeks for geeks. If businesses want to try to use it to advertise their products then good on them, but I'm not going to put up with their distracting eye-candy as I feel it adds absolutely no value to my life. For the same reason, I refrain from conscientiously reading through ads in any magazines I buy.
Any (legal) tricks they want to try to get me to view their stuff, such as paying popular sites to waste their clients' bandwidth with big images, is fine by me. However, they shouldn't expect me to refrain from evading these methods wherever possible
To the people who are trying to ban commercial-skipping video recorders and others: people have the right to not view your ads!
I would strongly disagree. The anonymity of the internet is part of its charm - it caters for security freaks as well as information nudists.
As someone who falls into the first camp, I would point out that any strengthening of online personal accountability would only inconvenience those people who follow the rules most of the time anyway, as any criminal will easily be able to steal an ID. Actually, if any attempt was made to de-anonymise the net, I would strongly consider attempting this myself.
The net was built by geeks for geeks. Anyone else is pretty much just jumping on the bandwagon. And geeks like their privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
To summarise: you don't need *the* correct password, you just need *a* correct password. There's more than one here, which is a bit of a waste. A simple example: ROT-26 encryption can be decrypted by ROT-52 encryption.
US intelligence sorely needs people who can read between the lines
Within the lines, surely?
I'm not sure that the effect of touching a finger to a wire is representative. The effect will only be produced by the positive-earth potential rather than the positive-negative potential, and would be a lot less than you'd expect.
:(
For example, when I was a kid I decided to dissect a light switch - with the mains power on! It was only after two minor shocks that I remembered to put rubber gloves on. If touching a wire could have the same effect as the main blast of the current, I wouldn't be here today
Well, of course! Isn't it obvious? I mean, Microsoft has been known to remove functionality from IE because it was too exploitable*. Given how little functionality IE has anyway, this must have been quite a sacrifice. And obviously if the most responsible, ethical company in the industry does it, so should we. It's so clear.
*I was thinking of the removal of username/password/server format due to its effect on URL parsing machinery. What were *you* thinking of?
Well, this is the country where, I'm told, homemade machine guns are legal as long as none of the parts were imported from out of state. I'd have thought that lasers were small fry...
I think it's actually quite an impressive piece of bull. It's sheer craftsmanship how they've managed to summarise every conceivable (or not) difficulty in just one paragraph. Not joking. This reads like it was written by a pro.
And me and my buzzsaw intend to make sure it stays that way!
Fair point, but the protocol itself, barring software patents, isn't actually proprietary - it's the implementation that's 'owned' by Microsoft. I see what you're getting at, but a 100% purist approach to openness, whether of standard or source, will hand the entire industry to Microsoft on a silver platter. For example, I don't know of any open source Flash browser plugins, and it sure as hell isn't an open standard. However, if there was no support for Flash in Mozilla, half the 'Joe Sixpack' population would refuse to use it on that basis - people value their Flash games. People won't come to see open standards as being essential until MS's monopolies are broken - if there's really only one company in the market, why would Aunt Tilly need interoperability? In the meantime, I'm willing to countenance an imperfectly open implementation if it leads to the real thing in future.
Re the copying of proprietary protocols: ever heard of lock-in? Perhaps fuelled by anticompetative monopoly behaviour? Thanks God for the Samba team is all I can say.
Re open protocols: They're a good thing to have, but they tend to get shat on by the patent people. I'll stick with open source as long as the European Commission is busy playing hob with democracy and common sense.
As a home computer user, I've never yet had a hard drive crash. About how paranoid do my fellow /.ers feel I should be about this?
I understand your sentiment but I'd argue that filesharing doesn't preclude CD buying; in fact it facilitates it. Filesharing is a music education of the sort you can't normally get without borrowing your parents' vinyl collections; I recently bought a CD from a band called the Yellowjackets that I would never normally have heard of in a million years. I'm also turning into a major The Smiths fan.
I think you're saying that the fact that some people abuse rights is what loses them for us. That's a fair point, and quite possibly true. On the other hand, as a matter of semantics, if they can be legally taken away from us then technically they're priveleges not rights.
Who defines theft? In this particular situation we can't rely on the government to define morality for us, as the government does the will of the party in power, and the party in power has a vested interest in creating law in support of those, like the RIAA, who give it cash.
I do believe that filesharing is immoral. But I believe it is immoral to about the same degree that kicking a door open rather than pushing it open is immoral - the marginal damage is negligibly small. And, if the profits of the recording industry are as damaged as they say, the system itself (their business model) could be said to be broken - unsustainable in a free market. In that case, the system needs to be fundamentally changed, as opposed to litigating against those who have individually done so little damage.
If, on the other hand, the RIAA is merely keen to get as much money from lawsuits as possible, regardless of how negligibly small the effect may be on sales, then I have no sympathy. I'll keep kicking the door open, especially if my hands are full (metaphor alert: I'm a student in debt).
Note: this applies only to filesharing. I do not support commercial piracy, as this invalidates the above argument by competing with the recording industries on their own turf by unfair means.
You have some good points, but I feel you're not fully exploring the world you imagine. In this world, the pop star wouldn't be able to make millions singing someone's song without permission - their album would be freely copyable too.
Having said this, I'm not sure abolition of copyright is entirely the way forward - I think supporting people who do something genuinely creative enriches us all.
However, I would say that there is evidence to show that the illegal-downloaders aren't really denting the market that much. The only people who compete on the same playing field as the original publishers of the music are the commercial pirates. My solution? Keep copyright but restrict it to commercial reproduction (if you're giving it away free then it's legal). Keep patents (and possibly even software patents) but make it illegal to submit blatantly obvious claims - if you ask for a patent on electronic shopping baskets you deserve to be litigated into the ground. Does anyone else have thoughts on the optimum balance?On the other hand, I am slightly disturbed by the transplanting of potentially toxic drug-production genes into, say, wheat. That seems like asking for trouble.
Rubber Pellet Guns on the other hand have an accurate range of about 30m and would probably bounce off. It's interesting how acronyms get so horribly abused
Also, government systems are renowned for being comparatively insecure (I think there was a slashdot article about a month ago). If I've gone to all that trouble to encrypt my stuff, I would prefer not to have some civil service luddite with a password of "password" spread the info.
My argument would be that if those users downloaded just one legal track, that would be enough to confirm any belief that they were going to be used for legal purposes. I know I use my uni's filesharing hub to download linux distros, as the Computer Dept gets shirty about downloading from outside the uni. And there are plans, if the hub ever gets shut down, to start meeting up and swapping CDs as an alternative. If filesharing software is banned, CD burners will take up a lot of the slack. Should we ban those too?
So do they consecrate the server as holy ground or what? I'm not even gonna think about baptisms.
Yay! First time I've seen this phrase in the wild since I did my Critical Thinking A/S level :)
I have a sister who I'm willing to send anywhere, the further the better. Unfortunately I have no idea if she'd fit in the containers. Would it be acceptable to split her into many sections and send each separately? I'm sure she'd enjoy it really...
I program in bytecode, you insensitive clod!
I do block ads, for the reason that I only have dialup and don't like hanging around whilst some overused server two continents away decides how much it's going to slow down my connection today.
The internet was designed by geeks for geeks. If businesses want to try to use it to advertise their products then good on them, but I'm not going to put up with their distracting eye-candy as I feel it adds absolutely no value to my life. For the same reason, I refrain from conscientiously reading through ads in any magazines I buy.
Any (legal) tricks they want to try to get me to view their stuff, such as paying popular sites to waste their clients' bandwidth with big images, is fine by me. However, they shouldn't expect me to refrain from evading these methods wherever possible
To the people who are trying to ban commercial-skipping video recorders and others: people have the right to not view your ads!
I would strongly disagree. The anonymity of the internet is part of its charm - it caters for security freaks as well as information nudists.
As someone who falls into the first camp, I would point out that any strengthening of online personal accountability would only inconvenience those people who follow the rules most of the time anyway, as any criminal will easily be able to steal an ID. Actually, if any attempt was made to de-anonymise the net, I would strongly consider attempting this myself.
The net was built by geeks for geeks. Anyone else is pretty much just jumping on the bandwagon. And geeks like their privacy.
"My job went to India and all I got was this lousy desktop theme"
Too late, it's been hammered.