I have already posted this:
1) Make a big FAT32 partition with some 2Gb of legal data
2) make a dm-crypt mapping inside the partition, skipping the first 2 Gb
3) Have the hard-disk booting process not mounting it (eg not having dm-crypt compiled) but have a floppy/cdrom/usbkey boot which actually mounts it.
You now can plausibly deny having encrypted data in the first place. It can not be proven that there is encrypted data unless the encryption is broken.
There is no problem for a company to promote proprietary formats and protocols. Unless it is a monopolist. So comparing BitMovers file format with Microsoft Office file formats is outrageous and plain stupid.
But once again Andrew Orlowsky jumps on a few words without understanding what he is speaking about - and does not even mind making up outrageous quotes. Kind of Laura Didio IMHO...
Biometrics are good at identification (= capability of differentiating between a set of individuals) but weak at authentification (= capability of certifying that an individual really is who he pretends to be).
They are a good ide wherever you would use a "login". They are a bad idea wherever you would use a "password".
Under most juridictions law enforcements can have you reveal your passwords or face maximal charges. Thus encrypting without plausible deniability is weak.
Simple setup:
1) Have a big FAT32 (say 100Gb); store some unsensitive data (say 20Gb) and defragment.
2) Now write a small script which creates an encrypting mapping (dm-crypt) inside the partition itself, with an offset > 20Gb, and either now the script by heart or put it on a USB stick.
Now you can deny having encrypted date in the
first place.
Even better: have your script
a) have a 1Mb cryptographically-random data
b) ask you for a master passphrase to "decrypt" this random-data
c) use 256bits sequences at a fix offset as a password.
Even more perverse: in (b) use the "read -t [timeout]" command to get your master passphrase and have it use a random passphrase after the time out.
Even if there are outside proofs that there is sensitive data encrypted somewhere, even if your USB key is seized with the script and the 1Mb random data, you can plausibly claim that you _do not know_ the master passphrase.
Adapt to your own needs; YMMV though
Repeat after me: "Microsoft is a monopoly".
Every time Microsoft makes a choice, it makes this choice for 95% of users worldwide.
Thus Microsoft choices must be regulated to prevent it from abusing its monopoly power.
It's as simple as that.
This is called "predatory pricing" and has been an habit from Microsoft from day one. They managed to escape antitrust though. Until some high-profile gov. representative gets so upset that a simple lunch with good wine isn't sufficient as an "explanation". Hope so at least...
This is no question of free competition or free advertising.
The question is to know wether a NoName-vendor shall have the right to place ads when a user searches for BigBrand(tm).
The very fact that NoName pays $1 for this shows that it extracts at least $1 in sales by being associated with the name "BigBrand".
This is precisely what trade marks laws are supposed to render illegal.
All the rest is pure bullshit.
In France it is illegal to throw out an ad which somewhere mentions the ad of your competitor. Wether this provides adequate advertising and fair competition is out of the scope of the current matter.
The current matter was to decide wether it was fair competition or not for a competitor to gain clicks and potential sales from people looking for "Louis Vuitton". Just as Dell earning sales of its mp3 player when people enter "ipod" as a query. The argument is easy: the very fact that Dell would spend $1 to buy "ipod" adwords shows that they unfairly gain at least $1 of sale value from the "ipod" trademark.
Btw, an earlier/. story claimed that as many as 60% of users failed to distinguish sponsored results from true results.
So this ruling makes perfect sense for which concerns trademark protection and fair competition. Next point, please...
The question is definitely not wether Microsoft could but rather wether they should.
Having a proprietary file format for a software in a dominant position (near monopoly actually) means that the editor can leverage the massive club effect and turn it into additionnal revenues. Other way of saying the same is that no competitor can even think to enter the market without spending as much for interoperability as the monopolist wants. This is a blatant market failure, i.e. a situation which is economically worse for everybody except the monopoly abuser.
Monopoly must adhere special rules of conduct. One of them is that they at least do not erect arbitrary high barrier to entry to the market.
This is why it is economically straightforward that Microsoft should be forced to use properly and exhaustively documented, patent-free file formats. Although a competitor might even choose not to do so (as long as it is not in dominant position itself).
If it costs too much for Microsoft, it is still preferable collectively that they even throw out there existing software and restart from scratch. Yes, even to that point, anything to the contrary is a lie, economically speaking.
Have your computer boot Linux off a 2GB system partition with one 200Go FAT32 partition therafter (FAT32 is vital since it writes the date from the beginning of the partion until you remove anything). Copy some 1GB of holidays photos and documents.
Now have a Linux liveCD (e.g. morphix) and set up an encrypted mapping directly into the FAT32 partition some 1Gb after the beginning. Have a whole linux system plus your precious/secret data here in an encrypted partition. Have the liveCD / USB stick initrd set up the mapping and chroot to the encrypted system. Remove the CD once booted.
Now even if your hardware is seized, your system boots up with a full-featured OS - it's just nearly empty. The point is that to prove your lying an opponent actually needs to show that random space inside the partition acutally isn't random. I believe this unprovable unless he has the key.
Thus you can not be forced to give up the key. Deniability.
No, the only way to beat MS-Office is defintely _not_ to get a better (as in less bloated, more intuitive, less expensive, &c) app.
It is to kill the OEM lock-in to MS-Office. Big OEM like Dell or HP have no financial incentive to ship anything else than MS-Office thanks to illegal, anti-competive volume pricing (you pay a fix price for all your computers, were you shipping MS-Office or anyhting else).
Once OEM have the choice to at least propose OOo for a reduced price, they will. Sparing $50 basically means doubling your margin.
Unfortunately lawyers and politicians (who nominates regulators) are uneducated on the matter.
I really hope that they will publicize the fact that downloading Photoshop instead of TheGimp can send you to jail for 15 years... No pun, I _really_ hope that they will do it.
A Nash equilibrium is when you have no profitable deviation _if your opponents stick to their strategies_ . It is a folk theorem that in an infinitely repeated game any payoff in the convex hull of rational payoffs (including highest payoffs) is a Nash payoff.
The competition however involves your facing an unknown strategy. What they did was construct a profile of strategies which reach a high payoff, and tweak it to allow them to identify each other. The profile of strategies is not even Nash; they did not prove anything, they just fooled the evaluation method.
Sidenote: notes on the repeated PD.
1) If the game lasts one single step, whatever your opponent does it is always better for you to defect. So you defect and so does your opponent.
2) If the game lasts 10542 steps, you know that at the 10542-th step you and your opponent will both defect. So there is no point in cooperating at stage 10541, so you also both defect. And so on. Thus the only sustainable combination of strategies (= Nash) is to defect from day one.
3) If the game has unknown length or is infinite, then cooperating becomes sustainable. Actually any payoff in the convex hull is a Nash payoff.
This is with perfectly rational players; real world players are not however.
Now have finite state automata play the repeated prisoner's dilemma, and define their "size" as their number of states. A finite state automaton of size n can not "count" up to n+1; then even in the finitely repeated PD, if its length is bigger than both lengthes then cooperation becomes sustainable. The actual result (due to A. Neyman http://ratio.huji.ac.il/dp/dp69.pdf, Th1 p9) is that as soon as _one_ of both players is approximately not larger than the exponential of the length of the game, then any payoff in the convex hull of rational payoffs can be approximated.
Similar tight results for push-back automata or Turing machines of bounded Kolmogorov complexity are unknown yet.
The interesting question is to design a Nash pair of strategies which reach the highest payoff but do so with a limited number of allowed lines of code (= Kolmogorov complexity). This is definetely no trivial problem: even if I claim to always cooperate, once I know that my opponent is dumb it may be easy (?) for me to pretend to cooperate but later betray him nonetheless...
[i]2. Gates and Microsoft, as much as people don't want to admit, drove the PC into the mainstream use for end-user consumers. Microsoft followed others such as DEC, Sun, etc., and had something that ran on hardware of the day for academic and commercial reasons, and then took a leap (albeit Apple was already there in small representation, and Xerox just didn't market their workstation as effectively as MS did), and voila! They made a new market of people who found the usefulness of a computer at home.[/i]
Defintely not. IBM did, as their having standardize the hardware drove to its commoditization. Everybody agreed that Mac's were superior to PCs - they did cost more, though.
Microsoft software were far behing MAC - but PC were also way cheaper.
Thus IBM () did bring computing to the masses - Microsoft just profited of it by illegally maintaining and expanding their monopoly on an exploding market they had done [b]nothing[/b] to help develop.
... who pionneered relativity (although Poincarré died soon after and only Einstein devised generalized relativity).
See http://www.google.fr/search?q=poincarr%E9+einstein +relativity and http://christianparty.net/einstein.htm
Please stop once and forever.
The question is not on a business helping another firm squash out one of their common competitor.
It is onb a convicted monopolist trying to fund a purely litigating company under the table.
That makes a BIG difference.
Use a php/cgi script which generates png pictures of any integer (as in many web registration forms). Everytime you want to ssh your box, you load that page under http, it tells you on which port to connect and launchers an sshd on that port (with possibly your username as suid). This is straightforward to implement.
This is scan-proof, but not crack-proof of course. However once an attacker knows you use knocking it will not be long until he knows the "secret" knocking sequence (ie just stands waiting for you to do it yourself).
... but on the "API/protocols disclosure obligation". Even a $1 billion fine would be perceived as a success by MSFT, as it is... less than the profit of one quarter. But being obliged to disclose SMB protocols or Microsoft(R) Office(tm) file formats would let competitors enter the market, which would inevitably ruin the as-yet-never-reached-in-history 83% of margin of this product. This would cost MSFT much more than any guessable fine... although it would be much wiser economically speaking.
Contrary to what the interview claims, there are.
Please refer to Bjarne Stroustrup's page:
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#const raints
In addition, "The compiler checks it, but you could also be doing it at runtime with reflection, and then the system checks it". It is a waste to double-check at runtime what has been guaranteed at compile time.
Open the the first report (http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/b/8/db85 43a5-1e19-42e6-b0e3-d17ae2c2a9d2/IDC20TCO20Paper.p df) comparing Windows to Linux system administration. Go to page 10, scroll down to the summarizing table. Now observe the costs, especially in the column labelled "security".
Yes, you are right, IDC found that securing a Linux box costs $6,609 in software (!), which happens to be more (!!) than on Microsoft Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
I have already posted this: 1) Make a big FAT32 partition with some 2Gb of legal data 2) make a dm-crypt mapping inside the partition, skipping the first 2 Gb 3) Have the hard-disk booting process not mounting it (eg not having dm-crypt compiled) but have a floppy/cdrom/usbkey boot which actually mounts it. You now can plausibly deny having encrypted data in the first place. It can not be proven that there is encrypted data unless the encryption is broken.
There is no problem for a company to promote proprietary formats and protocols. Unless it is a monopolist. So comparing BitMovers file format with Microsoft Office file formats is outrageous and plain stupid. But once again Andrew Orlowsky jumps on a few words without understanding what he is speaking about - and does not even mind making up outrageous quotes. Kind of Laura Didio IMHO...
Biometrics are good at identification (= capability of differentiating between a set of individuals) but weak at authentification (= capability of certifying that an individual really is who he pretends to be). They are a good ide wherever you would use a "login". They are a bad idea wherever you would use a "password".
Under most juridictions law enforcements can have you reveal your passwords or face maximal charges. Thus encrypting without plausible deniability is weak. Simple setup: 1) Have a big FAT32 (say 100Gb); store some unsensitive data (say 20Gb) and defragment. 2) Now write a small script which creates an encrypting mapping (dm-crypt) inside the partition itself, with an offset > 20Gb, and either now the script by heart or put it on a USB stick. Now you can deny having encrypted date in the first place. Even better: have your script a) have a 1Mb cryptographically-random data b) ask you for a master passphrase to "decrypt" this random-data c) use 256bits sequences at a fix offset as a password. Even more perverse: in (b) use the "read -t [timeout]" command to get your master passphrase and have it use a random passphrase after the time out. Even if there are outside proofs that there is sensitive data encrypted somewhere, even if your USB key is seized with the script and the 1Mb random data, you can plausibly claim that you _do not know_ the master passphrase. Adapt to your own needs; YMMV though
Unless they come up with a "distribution deal" with some distribution, possibly a paid-for distribution like Xandros or Lycoris ?
Repeat after me: "Microsoft is a monopoly". Every time Microsoft makes a choice, it makes this choice for 95% of users worldwide. Thus Microsoft choices must be regulated to prevent it from abusing its monopoly power. It's as simple as that.
This is called "predatory pricing" and has been an habit from Microsoft from day one. They managed to escape antitrust though. Until some high-profile gov. representative gets so upset that a simple lunch with good wine isn't sufficient as an "explanation". Hope so at least...
I wonder how many will now use "5f3759df" as their root pwd...
This is no question of free competition or free advertising. The question is to know wether a NoName-vendor shall have the right to place ads when a user searches for BigBrand(tm). The very fact that NoName pays $1 for this shows that it extracts at least $1 in sales by being associated with the name "BigBrand". This is precisely what trade marks laws are supposed to render illegal. All the rest is pure bullshit.
In France it is illegal to throw out an ad which somewhere mentions the ad of your competitor. Wether this provides adequate advertising and fair competition is out of the scope of the current matter.
/. story claimed that as many as 60% of users failed to distinguish sponsored results from true results.
The current matter was to decide wether it was fair competition or not for a competitor to gain clicks and potential sales from people looking for "Louis Vuitton". Just as Dell earning sales of its mp3 player when people enter "ipod" as a query. The argument is easy: the very fact that Dell would spend $1 to buy "ipod" adwords shows that they unfairly gain at least $1 of sale value from the "ipod" trademark.
Btw, an earlier
So this ruling makes perfect sense for which concerns trademark protection and fair competition. Next point, please...
The question is definitely not wether Microsoft could but rather wether they should.
Having a proprietary file format for a software in a dominant position (near monopoly actually) means that the editor can leverage the massive club effect and turn it into additionnal revenues. Other way of saying the same is that no competitor can even think to enter the market without spending as much for interoperability as the monopolist wants. This is a blatant market failure, i.e. a situation which is economically worse for everybody except the monopoly abuser.
Monopoly must adhere special rules of conduct. One of them is that they at least do not erect arbitrary high barrier to entry to the market.
This is why it is economically straightforward that Microsoft should be forced to use properly and exhaustively documented, patent-free file formats. Although a competitor might even choose not to do so (as long as it is not in dominant position itself).
If it costs too much for Microsoft, it is still preferable collectively that they even throw out there existing software and restart from scratch. Yes, even to that point, anything to the contrary is a lie, economically speaking.
Except with plausible deniability.
Have your computer boot Linux off a 2GB system partition with one 200Go FAT32 partition therafter (FAT32 is vital since it writes the date from the beginning of the partion until you remove anything). Copy some 1GB of holidays photos and documents.
Now have a Linux liveCD (e.g. morphix) and set up an encrypted mapping directly into the FAT32 partition some 1Gb after the beginning. Have a whole linux system plus your precious/secret data here in an encrypted partition. Have the liveCD / USB stick initrd set up the mapping and chroot to the encrypted system. Remove the CD once booted.
Now even if your hardware is seized, your system boots up with a full-featured OS - it's just nearly empty. The point is that to prove your lying an opponent actually needs to show that random space inside the partition acutally isn't random. I believe this unprovable unless he has the key.
Thus you can not be forced to give up the key. Deniability.
No, the only way to beat MS-Office is defintely _not_ to get a better (as in less bloated, more intuitive, less expensive, &c) app.
It is to kill the OEM lock-in to MS-Office. Big OEM like Dell or HP have no financial incentive to ship anything else than MS-Office thanks to illegal, anti-competive volume pricing (you pay a fix price for all your computers, were you shipping MS-Office or anyhting else).
Once OEM have the choice to at least propose OOo for a reduced price, they will. Sparing $50 basically means doubling your margin.
Unfortunately lawyers and politicians (who nominates regulators) are uneducated on the matter.
I really hope that they will publicize the fact that downloading Photoshop instead of TheGimp can send you to jail for 15 years ... No pun, I _really_ hope that they will do it.
Except that many will want to draw the $50 billion man in court, while only a politically-driven anti-OSS will launch a suite against Linux.
The competition however involves your facing an unknown strategy. What they did was construct a profile of strategies which reach a high payoff, and tweak it to allow them to identify each other. The profile of strategies is not even Nash; they did not prove anything, they just fooled the evaluation method.
Sidenote: notes on the repeated PD.
1) If the game lasts one single step, whatever your opponent does it is always better for you to defect. So you defect and so does your opponent.
2) If the game lasts 10542 steps, you know that at the 10542-th step you and your opponent will both defect. So there is no point in cooperating at stage 10541, so you also both defect. And so on. Thus the only sustainable combination of strategies (= Nash) is to defect from day one.
3) If the game has unknown length or is infinite, then cooperating becomes sustainable. Actually any payoff in the convex hull is a Nash payoff.
This is with perfectly rational players; real world players are not however.
Now have finite state automata play the repeated prisoner's dilemma, and define their "size" as their number of states. A finite state automaton of size n can not "count" up to n+1; then even in the finitely repeated PD, if its length is bigger than both lengthes then cooperation becomes sustainable. The actual result (due to A. Neyman http://ratio.huji.ac.il/dp/dp69.pdf, Th1 p9) is that as soon as _one_ of both players is approximately not larger than the exponential of the length of the game, then any payoff in the convex hull of rational payoffs can be approximated.
Similar tight results for push-back automata or Turing machines of bounded Kolmogorov complexity are unknown yet.
The interesting question is to design a Nash pair of strategies which reach the highest payoff but do so with a limited number of allowed lines of code (= Kolmogorov complexity). This is definetely no trivial problem: even if I claim to always cooperate, once I know that my opponent is dumb it may be easy (?) for me to pretend to cooperate but later betray him nonetheless ...
[i]2. Gates and Microsoft, as much as people don't want to admit, drove the PC into the mainstream use for end-user consumers. Microsoft followed others such as DEC, Sun, etc., and had something that ran on hardware of the day for academic and commercial reasons, and then took a leap (albeit Apple was already there in small representation, and Xerox just didn't market their workstation as effectively as MS did), and voila! They made a new market of people who found the usefulness of a computer at home.[/i] Defintely not. IBM did, as their having standardize the hardware drove to its commoditization. Everybody agreed that Mac's were superior to PCs - they did cost more, though. Microsoft software were far behing MAC - but PC were also way cheaper. Thus IBM () did bring computing to the masses - Microsoft just profited of it by illegally maintaining and expanding their monopoly on an exploding market they had done [b]nothing[/b] to help develop.
... who pionneered relativity (although Poincarré died soon after and only Einstein devised generalized relativity). See http://www.google.fr/search?q=poincarr%E9+einstein +relativity and http://christianparty.net/einstein.htm
The people who are dumb enough not to understand this are _not_ capable to save as, open a shell, cd , chmod +x and sh it.
Or if they are, they are dumb perverts.
Please stop once and forever. The question is not on a business helping another firm squash out one of their common competitor. It is onb a convicted monopolist trying to fund a purely litigating company under the table. That makes a BIG difference.
... hopefully you still remember the date you got married - thus a basic search by date will do.
Use a php/cgi script which generates png pictures of any integer (as in many web registration forms). Everytime you want to ssh your box, you load that page under http, it tells you on which port to connect and launchers an sshd on that port (with possibly your username as suid). This is straightforward to implement.
This is scan-proof, but not crack-proof of course. However once an attacker knows you use knocking it will not be long until he knows the "secret" knocking sequence (ie just stands waiting for you to do it yourself).
... but on the "API/protocols disclosure obligation". ... less than the profit of one quarter. But being obliged to disclose SMB protocols or Microsoft(R) Office(tm) file formats would let competitors enter the market, which would inevitably ruin the as-yet-never-reached-in-history 83% of margin of this product. This would cost MSFT much more than any guessable fine ... although it would be much wiser economically speaking.
Even a $1 billion fine would be perceived as a success by MSFT, as it is
Contrary to what the interview claims, there are. Please refer to Bjarne Stroustrup's page: http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#const raints
In addition, "The compiler checks it, but you could also be doing it at runtime with reflection, and then the system checks it". It is a waste to double-check at runtime what has been guaranteed at compile time.
Open the the first report (http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/b/8/db85 43a5-1e19-42e6-b0e3-d17ae2c2a9d2/IDC20TCO20Paper.p df) comparing Windows to Linux system administration.
...
Go to page 10, scroll down to the summarizing table.
Now observe the costs, especially in the column labelled "security".
Yes, you are right, IDC found that securing a Linux box costs $6,609 in software (!), which happens to be more (!!) than on Microsoft Windows.
This speaks for itself