Another interesting measure could of course be the amount of data present between Earth and Mars. Incidentally, this would be dependent on the relative positions of the two planets in their orbits, as well as data transfer rate. That could make for some interesting storage capabilities... a storage medium that grows and shrinks over the course of a few years. Hmmm.
Also, there's this interesting question: let's say a data stream of arbitrary length shorter than the quantity defined above is transmitted from Mars towards Earth (or the other way around, but let's stick to M-to-E for now). This is received on Earth at some time delta-T later. Is the data transmitted at time T_r - dT, where T_r is time of reception? If it is, how do you prove it? (Remember, having a computer say "lock confirmed, message commencing" doesn't cut it.)
Anyone got a good definition of teraquads in terms of kilobits?
And for those who don't get it, the above is more of a joke than anything else...
I know exactly what you mean on the new keyboard layouts! I can live with the "ergonomic" keyboards even though I personally still prefer the straight ones, but when they rearrange my function keys, now, that's where I draw the line!
Given that I spend many hours a day on the computer, mostly using the keyboard and screen for human-machine interaction, I am extremely picky about what I hook up to the PC. PS/2 or USB is not my biggest concern (I currently have a PS/2 keyboard and a USB mouse), but a keyboard that doesn't "feel" right will get thrown out very quickly.
It took until I got myself another one before I got over mourning the loss of my first Keytronic standard (straight, 105-key) keyboard. Good feel, good quality, and reasonably priced. Someone else apparently liked it as much as I did...
In a situation where free speech exists, however under threat, people need to stand behind their speech/.../
Which they would still be perfectly free to do. But anonymity should be an option. It cannot be that with an infrastructure that only allows distribution of signed documents, and getting such a signing key requires you to prove your identity. (Besides the fact that far from everyone has a credit card. I know several people who for various reasons don't have one, so only having that method of verification obviously wouldn't work. It would be reasonable as one option among others, though.)
I am not against letting each end user decide on their own whether they would want to see unsigned hits to their searches, and when opting to see them at the same time being warned about the legal consequences of downloading files they do not have the rights to download. But different countries have different laws, and a person may very well have perfectly legitimate reasons to want to distribute something without revealing his identity. That should be respected in a technological system, just as it is respected in copyright law (at least in Sweden, this seems to be regulated in SFS 1960:729 chapter 4, which says [among other things not really relevant to this discussion] that copyright does not require that the author is known by name or even pseudonym).
As for Rosa Parks, I have no idea who that is so I cannot comment.
Yes, 2^64 is a pretty large number. Your math depends on the fact that the password is padded to a 64-bit length before being hashed, though. What if it is padded to some other length, or indeed not padded at all? (This could for example be done using a stream cipher. Encrypt the password, followed by a known fixed-length string. The hash is the encrypted known string. I'm not saying such a scheme would be secure, though.)
However, how many use the entire eight-bit character set in their completely random passwords? I don't know anyone who does. So you really don't have to try the entire range. I recall that English has about 1.3 bits of entropy per character - that would make a random word have about 1.3n bits of entropy. Eight characters would then make for 1351 (2^[1.3 * 8]) combinations.
I am sure the above is flawed, and a random encryption key is a very different beast in the first place, but the point is still valid: in order to crack a password represented as 64 bits, you don't have to try 2^64 combinations. If that was so, we would all just move to 16-bit Unicode for representing passwords and the problem would be over with.
Or, throw a piece of wire into the air, hook it up to a small transmitter, transmit, and bam - you're seriously disrupting Internet service in the area, completely legal (given that you are authorized to transmit on the frequency in question - Part 15 systems have to tolerate any interference received). Along with the fact that BPL is showing promise of using spectrum allocated to government use (think "Homeland Security", boys and girls), you could probably have a pretty good backdrop for a terrorist attack...
The problem is that just about every part of the HF spectrum is used by someone. Some is phone (analog or digital), some is digital transmissions. You can't expect to be able to negotiate your way around the laws of physics. As has already been pointed out, any unshielded, sufficiently long (in terms of wave lengths) wire will radiate - as well as pick up electromagnetic radiation. If BPL gets deployed, there will be widespread harmful interference to licensed users of the HF spectrum, including the government, military and amateurs (who are often involved in emergency communications in support of disaster relief).
If you need a definition of "amateur" in this context, the International Amateur Radio Union at http://www.iaru.org/rel030703att3.html quotes the ITU Radio Regulations as defining amateur radio as "[a] radiocommunication service for the purpose of self-training, intercommunication and technical investigations carried out by amateurs, that is, by duly authorised persons interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest." (The web page also gives some other appropriate definitions along with some explanations.)
Plus at least some of the proposed systems use frequencies all the way up to 80 MHz. All of a sudden a quarter wave is less than a meter. Clearly a disaster waiting to happen. (And I doubt we'd need to wait for very long, either.)
And, as has been pointed out, the interference potential goes both ways.
I read (think it was in Hints & Kinks 15, but I am not sure) about someone who put up a tower. Nothing else. A neighbor complained to the local authorities that it was interfering with broadcasts and someone came over to check it out. Turned out there were no antennas in the tower that could cause any interference. Duh.......
From what I understand, someone also pulled the plug on BPL in Austria. BBC also made some measurements and concluded that it had the potential to seriously disrupt short wave radio broadcasting - so what wouldn't happen to the much weaker signals regularly used by amateurs as well as others (like air traffic, military or for emergency communications)?
I suppose that the problem in that case, at least in the US, would be that a GNU/Linux system could be considered to be "a device to circumvent copy control". Otherwise, it's a good idea.
So everyone will be required to have a working Wine installation? Maybe I had better get to work on mine, I have been trying for some time and still haven't managed to get a fairly basic VB application to work...
I'm curious: wouldn't that kind of content recognition kind of require that you already have a copy of what you are looking for, or at the very least somehow know its "content profile" (if I may call it that)?
Seems somewhat counterintuitive to me at least.
Sure, it might work for finding the same file on multiple hosts. But even that is doubtful (at least I would rather know when I am downloading different parts of a file from different hosts, that I am downloading parts of the same file), and an ordinary hashing algorithm like SHA1 would definitely work better for such a purpose.
Nothing I described in any way limited what you could do with your computer.
Maybe I misread something, but that's not how I read your words. You are talking about putting legal limitations in place so that only properly signed content can get distributed through peer-to-peer networks and then outlaw the distribution (and thereby effectively also the use) of clients that do not include such checks. That would seem to be a limitation on what one can do with their computer to me at least. Maybe I am missing something?
By the way, peer-to-peer networks do not "broadcast" content. They allow someone who has a piece of digital information to share it with someone who doesn't, but wants it. That's more like having someone ask a question and then you answer it. If you ask a question you have to expect an answer. Pretty simple.
As for the copyrighted == non-distributable section, that was not directed at you specifically. My apologizes if I did not make that as clear as I should have or intended.
This is all beside the fact that another good thing about peer-to-peer networking is that content can be untraceable. Once a few people have downloaded and made available for download a file, regardless of its content, it's pretty hard to find out who first distributed it unless the originator or author steps forth. Which in itself helps guarantee free speech.
(I also put up both OpenOffice 1.1 and the Linux kernel for download from my Gnutella node. Within days several people had downloaded copies of both (not necessarily the same people, obviously). It certainly proved my point, that peer-to-peer networks have perfectly legal uses, and can help take some of the load off the official distribution servers. Before anyone comments that the files may have been altered, that's when the cryptographic hashes come in handy. Downloading a file of a few hundred bytes certainly puts less load on a host's Internet connection than downloading tens of megabytes. Given appropriate checks of public key authenticity by the recipient, the hash files can easily get distributed over the same P2P network as the data they are used to verify.)
So are we back to "you can do anything with your computer, as long as we say that it is OK"?
It is interesting to see how many even here make the implicit assumption that "copyrighted" means "non-distributable". Those two are entirely different beasts and need to be treated as such.
Actually, most people I have seen creating their web pages have been using WYSIWYG tools. I have a few friends who like myself like to get back to basics and craft the markup themselves, but most of the people I know still use WYSPRWYVWS (What You See Probably Resembles What Your Visitor Will See) tools - one of them just recently said, when I pointed out that a small web page had a dozen-or-so errors when run through the W3C validator, that "yeah?". "So does www.${big_computer_company}.com on their front page."
The problem is laziness, not lack of ability. I use XHTML 1.1 these days, and check to make sure the pages I create are valid. I also check how they appear in text only browsers (using Lynx), and make sure that the content is accessible to such users as well. (Obviously images and more advanced formatting is a different matter, but a <h1> is always a <h1>.) If people creating content for the web in general would go through half the trouble, a lot of pain and unnecessary guessing code could probably be weed out from the web browsers, not just Mozilla (or technically, Gecko). And yes, WYSIWYG tools should be capable of creating standards-compliant HTML, too.
Neither does hand-crafting HTML have to be hard, or divert attention much from the content. Especially not if you have a decently designed CSS style sheet. I personally find it a lot easier and more intuitive to write
than to click through half a dozen dialog boxes to do the same thing (insert a right-justified floating image). Most web sites have a standard basic outline, but you never hear people complain that it diverts attention from the content (if it does, they need to think about what can be done to it), and HTML code is little different. There is a header, the content, and a footer. The lion's share of just about any properly written HTML/XHTML document is going to be the content. So where is the big difference? Writing the tags myself also gives me a moment in between paragraphs to reflect over the content, which can hardly be considered a bad thing.
This will probably get modded -1 flamebait, but I'll take the chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't there a similarly higher number of people who can do the counting, too?
Like in the song with Jan Johansen and Pernilla Wahlgren?
"Let your Spirit fly, on the mountains high, spread your wings like an angel in heaven above..."
Personally, I think I'd download it and keep the stuff in a more local place. Why give the aliens the benefit of the doubt?
Another interesting measure could of course be the amount of data present between Earth and Mars. Incidentally, this would be dependent on the relative positions of the two planets in their orbits, as well as data transfer rate. That could make for some interesting storage capabilities... a storage medium that grows and shrinks over the course of a few years. Hmmm.
Also, there's this interesting question: let's say a data stream of arbitrary length shorter than the quantity defined above is transmitted from Mars towards Earth (or the other way around, but let's stick to M-to-E for now). This is received on Earth at some time delta-T later. Is the data transmitted at time T_r - dT, where T_r is time of reception? If it is, how do you prove it? (Remember, having a computer say "lock confirmed, message commencing" doesn't cut it.)
Anyone got a good definition of teraquads in terms of kilobits?
And for those who don't get it, the above is more of a joke than anything else...
Myself, I am still waiting for them to sue me over use of their code with a license...
Mod parent up, it's funny!
We should be happy about it - at that rate in a few days there won't be any code claimed by SCO left in Linux!
I know exactly what you mean on the new keyboard layouts! I can live with the "ergonomic" keyboards even though I personally still prefer the straight ones, but when they rearrange my function keys, now, that's where I draw the line!
Given that I spend many hours a day on the computer, mostly using the keyboard and screen for human-machine interaction, I am extremely picky about what I hook up to the PC. PS/2 or USB is not my biggest concern (I currently have a PS/2 keyboard and a USB mouse), but a keyboard that doesn't "feel" right will get thrown out very quickly.
It took until I got myself another one before I got over mourning the loss of my first Keytronic standard (straight, 105-key) keyboard. Good feel, good quality, and reasonably priced. Someone else apparently liked it as much as I did...
Which they would still be perfectly free to do. But anonymity should be an option. It cannot be that with an infrastructure that only allows distribution of signed documents, and getting such a signing key requires you to prove your identity. (Besides the fact that far from everyone has a credit card. I know several people who for various reasons don't have one, so only having that method of verification obviously wouldn't work. It would be reasonable as one option among others, though.)
I am not against letting each end user decide on their own whether they would want to see unsigned hits to their searches, and when opting to see them at the same time being warned about the legal consequences of downloading files they do not have the rights to download. But different countries have different laws, and a person may very well have perfectly legitimate reasons to want to distribute something without revealing his identity. That should be respected in a technological system, just as it is respected in copyright law (at least in Sweden, this seems to be regulated in SFS 1960:729 chapter 4, which says [among other things not really relevant to this discussion] that copyright does not require that the author is known by name or even pseudonym).
As for Rosa Parks, I have no idea who that is so I cannot comment.
Yes, 2^64 is a pretty large number. Your math depends on the fact that the password is padded to a 64-bit length before being hashed, though. What if it is padded to some other length, or indeed not padded at all? (This could for example be done using a stream cipher. Encrypt the password, followed by a known fixed-length string. The hash is the encrypted known string. I'm not saying such a scheme would be secure, though.)
However, how many use the entire eight-bit character set in their completely random passwords? I don't know anyone who does. So you really don't have to try the entire range. I recall that English has about 1.3 bits of entropy per character - that would make a random word have about 1.3n bits of entropy. Eight characters would then make for 1351 (2^[1.3 * 8]) combinations.
I am sure the above is flawed, and a random encryption key is a very different beast in the first place, but the point is still valid: in order to crack a password represented as 64 bits, you don't have to try 2^64 combinations. If that was so, we would all just move to 16-bit Unicode for representing passwords and the problem would be over with.
Or, throw a piece of wire into the air, hook it up to a small transmitter, transmit, and bam - you're seriously disrupting Internet service in the area, completely legal (given that you are authorized to transmit on the frequency in question - Part 15 systems have to tolerate any interference received). Along with the fact that BPL is showing promise of using spectrum allocated to government use (think "Homeland Security", boys and girls), you could probably have a pretty good backdrop for a terrorist attack...
The problem is that just about every part of the HF spectrum is used by someone. Some is phone (analog or digital), some is digital transmissions. You can't expect to be able to negotiate your way around the laws of physics. As has already been pointed out, any unshielded, sufficiently long (in terms of wave lengths) wire will radiate - as well as pick up electromagnetic radiation. If BPL gets deployed, there will be widespread harmful interference to licensed users of the HF spectrum, including the government, military and amateurs (who are often involved in emergency communications in support of disaster relief).
If you need a definition of "amateur" in this context, the International Amateur Radio Union at http://www.iaru.org/rel030703att3.html quotes the ITU Radio Regulations as defining amateur radio as "[a] radiocommunication service for the purpose of self-training, intercommunication and technical investigations carried out by amateurs, that is, by duly authorised persons interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest." (The web page also gives some other appropriate definitions along with some explanations.)
Plus at least some of the proposed systems use frequencies all the way up to 80 MHz. All of a sudden a quarter wave is less than a meter. Clearly a disaster waiting to happen. (And I doubt we'd need to wait for very long, either.)
And, as has been pointed out, the interference potential goes both ways.
I read (think it was in Hints & Kinks 15, but I am not sure) about someone who put up a tower. Nothing else. A neighbor complained to the local authorities that it was interfering with broadcasts and someone came over to check it out. Turned out there were no antennas in the tower that could cause any interference. Duh. .... ..
From what I understand, someone also pulled the plug on BPL in Austria. BBC also made some measurements and concluded that it had the potential to seriously disrupt short wave radio broadcasting - so what wouldn't happen to the much weaker signals regularly used by amateurs as well as others (like air traffic, military or for emergency communications)?
..
Anyone know what the halflife of a search warrant is?
delete 4
4 lobby "politicians":rem"will outlaw line 3"
5 if int(rnd(1))=1 then goto 4
6 goto 1
I suppose that the problem in that case, at least in the US, would be that a GNU/Linux system could be considered to be "a device to circumvent copy control". Otherwise, it's a good idea.
Now let's see, what do we do about the DMCA?
So everyone will be required to have a working Wine installation? Maybe I had better get to work on mine, I have been trying for some time and still haven't managed to get a fairly basic VB application to work...
I'm curious: wouldn't that kind of content recognition kind of require that you already have a copy of what you are looking for, or at the very least somehow know its "content profile" (if I may call it that)?
Seems somewhat counterintuitive to me at least.
Sure, it might work for finding the same file on multiple hosts. But even that is doubtful (at least I would rather know when I am downloading different parts of a file from different hosts, that I am downloading parts of the same file), and an ordinary hashing algorithm like SHA1 would definitely work better for such a purpose.
Maybe I misread something, but that's not how I read your words. You are talking about putting legal limitations in place so that only properly signed content can get distributed through peer-to-peer networks and then outlaw the distribution (and thereby effectively also the use) of clients that do not include such checks. That would seem to be a limitation on what one can do with their computer to me at least. Maybe I am missing something?
By the way, peer-to-peer networks do not "broadcast" content. They allow someone who has a piece of digital information to share it with someone who doesn't, but wants it. That's more like having someone ask a question and then you answer it. If you ask a question you have to expect an answer. Pretty simple.
As for the copyrighted == non-distributable section, that was not directed at you specifically. My apologizes if I did not make that as clear as I should have or intended.
This is all beside the fact that another good thing about peer-to-peer networking is that content can be untraceable. Once a few people have downloaded and made available for download a file, regardless of its content, it's pretty hard to find out who first distributed it unless the originator or author steps forth. Which in itself helps guarantee free speech.
(I also put up both OpenOffice 1.1 and the Linux kernel for download from my Gnutella node. Within days several people had downloaded copies of both (not necessarily the same people, obviously). It certainly proved my point, that peer-to-peer networks have perfectly legal uses, and can help take some of the load off the official distribution servers. Before anyone comments that the files may have been altered, that's when the cryptographic hashes come in handy. Downloading a file of a few hundred bytes certainly puts less load on a host's Internet connection than downloading tens of megabytes. Given appropriate checks of public key authenticity by the recipient, the hash files can easily get distributed over the same P2P network as the data they are used to verify.)
So are we back to "you can do anything with your computer, as long as we say that it is OK"?
It is interesting to see how many even here make the implicit assumption that "copyrighted" means "non-distributable". Those two are entirely different beasts and need to be treated as such.
Well, there's always the Interplanetary Internet.
That's not conspiracy. Who took my tin foil hat?
What?! Do you seriously mean that SCO doesn't 0wn the POSIX standards?
Actually, most people I have seen creating their web pages have been using WYSIWYG tools. I have a few friends who like myself like to get back to basics and craft the markup themselves, but most of the people I know still use WYSPRWYVWS (What You See Probably Resembles What Your Visitor Will See) tools - one of them just recently said, when I pointed out that a small web page had a dozen-or-so errors when run through the W3C validator, that "yeah?". "So does www.${big_computer_company}.com on their front page."
The problem is laziness, not lack of ability. I use XHTML 1.1 these days, and check to make sure the pages I create are valid. I also check how they appear in text only browsers (using Lynx), and make sure that the content is accessible to such users as well. (Obviously images and more advanced formatting is a different matter, but a <h1> is always a <h1>.) If people creating content for the web in general would go through half the trouble, a lot of pain and unnecessary guessing code could probably be weed out from the web browsers, not just Mozilla (or technically, Gecko). And yes, WYSIWYG tools should be capable of creating standards-compliant HTML, too.
Neither does hand-crafting HTML have to be hard, or divert attention much from the content. Especially not if you have a decently designed CSS style sheet. I personally find it a lot easier and more intuitive to write
than to click through half a dozen dialog boxes to do the same thing (insert a right-justified floating image). Most web sites have a standard basic outline, but you never hear people complain that it diverts attention from the content (if it does, they need to think about what can be done to it), and HTML code is little different. There is a header, the content, and a footer. The lion's share of just about any properly written HTML/XHTML document is going to be the content. So where is the big difference? Writing the tags myself also gives me a moment in between paragraphs to reflect over the content, which can hardly be considered a bad thing.This will probably get modded -1 flamebait, but I'll take the chance.