It will come... Hollywood is sitting back and letting the RIAA expiriment with different tactics, because they have a little more time, the problem isn't so severe for them yet. But they're very afraid of what's going to happen.
I doubt they'll be satisfied to stick with the anti-piracy messages they show before movies now.
Putting aside what this guy is doing, I've always been a little surprised that the GOP doesn't side with downloaders on the P2P issue. I think that the fact that they don't shows that they have a very real committment to property rights, and that they don't want to compromise that for political expediency. In that sense, I think it's fairly admirable.
Because on the other hand, Hollywood is one of the main sources of support for the Democrats. The Democrats raise tons of money out there, and movie stars and other prominent Hollywood types are almost all Democratic.
P2P represents an almost ideal way for the Republicans to extract revenge on Hollywood, to "cut off their air supply." But there's almost no support at all for doing that within the party.
I know it will rub a lot of people the wrong way to say that it's possible to interpret protecting the property rights of international corporations as a principled position, but I think that's what's going on.
Then if ICANN wants to run a similar service, or award it to someone else in exchange for payments, Verisign can take all the money in licensing fees.
I mean, why not pimp this out all the way. It's not like ICANN wouldn't take the idea and exploit it for fees now that Verisign has suggested it. It's not like ICANN is accountable to anyone, and those fees would allow them to fly private jets to private islands in the pacific to have their meetings. I'll bet they wouldn't even have to show anyone their books.
They could even put spyware in the pages that come back from non-existent domains. Let's get Gator involved with this. There's a sleazy buck to be made, so you gotta have Gator involved.
It's obvious to everyone who thinks about it that the real problem with the net is that there isn't enough advertising.
It's important for studies to be peer reviewed and duplicated. If this is real, other scientists will say its real, and they'll duplicate the results.
(Here's a little pop-quiz to see if you were paying attention in science class. What's wrong with this Princeton project? The answer is that no one else can duplicate their results. Peer review and duplicable results are key, even with studies coming out of big name institutions.)
There have been quite a few studies on the effects of cell phones, and dramatic evidence that they cause problems has not jumped out at anyone.
And people have been using cell phones for a long time. I got my first one about 10 years ago, and they were already common back then.
There's a doctor named Dean Edell who does a radio show, and he wrote a book called "Eat, Drink, and Be Merry." In that book, he spent a lot of time talking about how bad most medical reporting is. He makes a pretty persuasive case.
Almost everything you hear on the radio or see on tv about supplements, studies, etc., is either totally false or based on weak science.
I don't know anything about this particular study, but I do know that a study that doesn't find anything isn't news, while the opposite story -- we're all going to have our brains turn to mush in our middle years! -- is sensational news.
And its news to say that the evil cell industry has used its vast power to suppress studies (that's a big red flag in this story for me). Apparently the cell companies aren't just evil, they're stupid, because if they did that they'd be sued out of existence. But hey, corporations are evil, and they're lust for immediate profits knows no bounds.
This story got hyped mostly through a link on Drudge. I love Drudge, but you have to read him with a critical eye. He says outright that he'll put questionable stuff out there and let the readers decide. And I've heard him wax paranoiac on the dangers of cloning, he's kind of whacked out on some biological and medical stories.
I've noticed that they've gotten a lot of traction over the past few days by linking file sharing with porn.
A lot of talk radio hosts have been railing against the porn threat, and p2p for making it worse. I heard Diane Feinstein on the radio yesterday talking about the threat to our kids.
Meanwhile, these are some lyrics from a current hit song by lil kim and 50 cent. It's a nice song about a rapper's penis, called "magic stick":
[...]
I'm a freak to the core Get a dose once, you gon' want some more My tongue touch ya girl, ya toes bound to curl This exclusive shit I don't share with the world I have you up early in the mornin, moanin
[...]
Lil' Kim not a whore But I sex a nigga so good, he gotta tell his boys When it, come to sex don't test my skills Cause my head game have you HEAD over heels Give a nigga the chills, have him pay my bills Buy matchin Lambo's with the same color wheels.. and I ain't out shoppin spendin dudes C-notes I'm in the crib givin niggaz deep throat
I think you're right on the money. A lot of stuff should probably turned off for most people, but if you want to open yourself up, it should be an option.
It's also important, I think, to preserve some degree of competition in the broadband market. My cable company, time warner, lets you pick from 4 ISPs when you get a cable modem: time warner, aol, earthlink, Internet Nebraska, a local company. I don't care if AOL blocks stuff, so long as one of the other companies doesn't.
I'd love to see the market provide shelter for people who need it, but I'd like it to provide options for people like me who want to run servers.
No group has done more to sexualize children for profit than the music industry. Go to amazon and pull up a photo of britney spears' first album -- she's wearing a school girl uniform. They have a lot of nerve talking about this now.
MTV actually did a promotional show for the snoop dogg girls gone wild video, the way they'd promote a hollywood movie. Not only is MTV's audience primiarly made up of kids, but the producers of those videos are probably going to go to jail for using minors in their tapes. Not one or two who slipped through -- several dozen young girls.
Don't get me wrong -- I believe in free speech, and I will defend their rights to promote music that sexualizes children, glorifies cop killing, rape, and drug use, and all of the rest of the stuff they promote. I don't like it, but I'll defend their right to do it.
But the sheer disingenuous of these sorts of statements is hard to take. I don't know where they find guys with the chutzpah to make them.
I don't understand why a cryptographic protocol using a blind signature can't be used to make an auditable voting system.
To me it seems like it could be a special case of the digital cash problem that guys like David Chaum worked on. You give everyone a single vote that they can cast -- a blob of data with a blinded digital signature. Then you let them spend them (vote) however they want.
You could even let candidates set up their own sites to collect their own votes. So someone could give Dean or Bush their vote, and then Dean or Bush could turn them into the election commision. It wouldn't be necessary to do that -- a central site makes more sense -- but wouldn't it be secure enough to let the candidates collect their own votes, with a realtime online election commision protecting against double voting?
If DigiCash is secure (and although it's been dead for a long time, I think it was considered secure), it seems like this should be secure.
The article is right when it points out that we have a lot of election fraud now -- it ought to be possible to improve things substantially.
We should probably be trying to explain to everyone that it's necessary to actually install this stuff... IT people who don't are incompetent, and they will bear some of the blame for the next worm.
I don't think it's fair to blame office for that -- the old macos didn't have real file system permissions, and that's why it was insecure. Locking the finder down was the best they could do, but it just wasn't a realistic solution.
I'm not familiar with tivo's season pass, so I'll just describe what this box does.
You schedule recordings from the program guide -- you can page through a grid and pick the shows you want to record. When you select a program, you get a pop-up menu that lets you record the one episode, or the entire series.
If you record the series, it will only record it on that channel, by default, but it will record it all times.
But you can go into another menu (series manager) and change the options -- there you can tell it how many episodes of a given show to keep, whether or not to record it only a specific time, or at all times, etc.
It's pretty good, for the most part, but it's not terribly bright about some things. For example, I like south park, and I want it to record all of the episodes. But it will keep a second copy of the same episode on the disk, even though the program guide has enough information for it to know that it's the same program.
I stopped recording dennis miller live on HBO, for example, because of that problem. When you get HBO here, you get 12 english channels, and they have dennis miller all over the place, with a ton of duplications, especially across the time zones.
The main feature that tivo has that this doesn't, as far as I can tell, is the thing that suggests programs for you. This box only records what I tell it to record, or what I watch.
I'm pretty sure that it doesn't recompress. I have one of these boxes.
First of all, the box, beyond being a DVR, is also a normal digital cable box -- it has all the same functinality. If it does recompress, it would have to decompress the incoming signal then recompress it, all in the same box. I just can't imagine anyone building that. It makes more sense for it to just dump the incoming data stream to the disk, and defer decompression until you're watching it.
Second of all, there's no visible difference between a live digital cable program and a time shifted program, although there isn't much of a difference between live and timeshifted analog cable programs either.
I haven't used a tivo, and I'm sure those are very nice as well (or better, for all I know), but this is a very sweet box.
I've had one of these boxes for two or three weeks, in Lincoln, Nebraska. It's great.
It costs an extra $5 a month, on top of the standard digital cable rate, and there were no hardware or installation charges. There's very tight integration with the program guide - when you browse through channels, you can see whatever you're watching (live or recorded) in a small window, and it's easy to program things.
The digital cable channels look fantastic - you can really tell the difference, especially when you pause the picture.
I've never used or even seen a tivo, so I don't know how this box compares to those, or specifically to the feature that lets you skip commercials. This box has a nice fast forward feature, with three different speeds, and when you drop out of it, the box tries to line you up with a scene change - in practice, it's pretty good at letting you hit the end of the commercial exactly.
At first I thought they were offering this because a DVR would make an ideal pay per view platform, but the box doesn't add anything to the PPV functionality of the old digital cable box. Time Warner has a system they call "iControl" that lets you pause, rewind, fast forward, etc., a PPV program, and the new box uses the same system, instead of its own disk.
Apparently they've been sending out a few software updates to these boxes. I was a very early adopter here - I had to keep calling the cable company, to see if they were out yet, to get mine. The installer told me that there were a lot of glitches early on in the roll out, but I haven't had many problems.
It is possible to trigger a reboot in the box by overloading it - I'm not exactly sure what causes it, but if you're doing several things at once with it, you can sink it. This has happened to me two or three times.
The really cool thing about these boxes is that they have USB and Firewire ports on them. But there's no software support for them. If you could extract video from these things, they'd be perfect.
I think that a lot of the dyanamics he's talking about hold true -- obviously, O'Reilley is a very smart guy.
But it seems to me that he's looking at service industries, and calling them software companies. In order to do that, he has to change the definition of a software company, and as a result he's able to announce this as a shift in the software industry.
My problem with what he says is mostly aesthetic. It's that same old silicon valley rich guy entrepeneur guru bs.
He's making a lot of points that most people know -- web applications are more exciting, in many respects, than desktop applications now. Web applications are being built out of commodity pieces. The data in eBay and the customer good will is worth more than the code. All of those are good points, if not exactly earth shaking.
But the way he's stiched them together is mostly a semantic trick, and he's out there like he's been given stone tablets on some moutaintop.
It's not evil or anything, just a little icky.
Re:What's the best solution for non-tech home user
on
Are You Using 802.1X?
·
· Score: 1
Thanks... that's very helpful.
What's the best solution for non-tech home users?
on
Are You Using 802.1X?
·
· Score: 1
I have a BSD box on my network, and I could do IPSec tunneling if I wasn't so lazy.
But what's the best option for people who don't want to run a windows server, or a unix box, or any flavor of radius? Are there any consumer priced access points that support reasonably secure wireless networking, without an expensive server on the back end?
Most of what I'm seeing here says that you either have to run a unix-like OS, w2k, or xp (ie., not win 9x) on the client, that you need the professional version of xp, some sort of server infrastructure, etc.
Is there anything at all the typical schmo with a linksys access point and a windows 98 client can do?
I've been curious about these databases and how they work. They have to take the images and proces them, presumably into some sort of n-tuple. And then they database that.
But how will they handle changes? I mean, people will probably figure out how the recognition works, and learn how to trick it. If you know the scheme, it probably wouldn't be too hard.
If they have a giant database of these n-tuples, generated from photos, will they have to recrunch every photo in the db when they want to improve the system, or respond to holes that emerge? I guess they'll have a lot of computer power, so it's probably not too bad.
The thing that worries me about this stuff is the possibility that the crooks and terrorists will be able to defeat it trivially, but the average citizen will be tracked everywhere he or she goes.
I wonder if maybe someone could create a network of honeypots, and feed the data into a database that could be accessed in real time by web servers, to deny access.
It would probably impose too much of a performance hit for a popular site, but maybe for smaller stuff -- your bio page, or whatever -- it would be appropriate.
When I ran a small ISP, our experience was the same. The law enforcement people didn't do anything for us.
It was strange, because the FBI had actually sent a couple of agents to our office to introduce themselves, pass out business cards, and the like. But when we had trouble, we called them up and those guys basically said, "there's not much we can do."
When the agents introduced themselves, they gave us a questionaire to fill out, and there was a question about encryption -- had we noticed anyone using it?
The questionaire (which I didn't complete), and the lack of response when we actually needed help, sort of soured me on the beaureau. The agents were nice guys, and I had the feeling that they were sincere when they were talking to us, but the organization itself didn't seem to be too helpful.
I don't really have a problem with them paying more attention to hacks on major e-commerce sites or banks than on my little ISP (which has long since been sold). The reality is that there's so much cracking going on, and it's so hard to track it down, that chasing small incidents isn't really practical. If a big ecommerce site gets cracked, a lot of people get hurt, the situation is really different.
The lesson that I learned is that you're basically alone when you get attacked. No one cares, and no one will help. Your ISP won't do anything, law enforcement won't do anything, and your customers will be incredibly angry with you. The only way to deal with it is to do whatever you can to secure yourself up front.
Sports are about people going out and doing difficult things in front of a crowd. It's not just the atheletes who do that, especially in baseball. The umpires are out there performing too.
Part of the fun of baseball is second guessing the umpire, complaining about a bad call, arguing with your friends about whether or not a call really was bad, etc. Just like part of the fun is seeing whether or not someone is going to hit a home run or strike out, or watching someone pitch, or whatever.
Everyone on the field comes together and interacts in a complicated ecosystem. If they start mucking around with it at such a fundamental level, they're going to break the game more than they already have by their tweaks designed to produce more hits.
Why stop with the umpire? Why not making pitching and hitting robots? Why don't we have modified sony aibo's roaming the outfield, with baskets to catch the balls?
I'm not saying there isn't room for geekery at the ball park. The machines that shoot the hotdogs way up into the stand are pretty cool. But that's the sort of thing that technology should do at a ball park. Leave the game to the people.
The basic idea is that people ought to be free to do what they want to do with their computers. I like Linux because it's been a great vehicle for pursuing that freedom.
But using taxes and regulations to push people toward Linux will diminish the freedom we have to do what we want with our computers. It's like destroying a village in order to save it, it just doesn't make any sense.
Sites like bytemonsoon.com or torrentse.cx use a single tracker for hundreds of different torrent streams, so the fact that the tracker can't do all of that and then handle a really big demand generated by slashdot isn't as damning as it might seem at first.
Slashdot Mirror
It will come... Hollywood is sitting back and letting the RIAA expiriment with different tactics, because they have a little more time, the problem isn't so severe for them yet. But they're very afraid of what's going to happen.
I doubt they'll be satisfied to stick with the anti-piracy messages they show before movies now.
Putting aside what this guy is doing, I've always been a little surprised that the GOP doesn't side with downloaders on the P2P issue. I think that the fact that they don't shows that they have a very real committment to property rights, and that they don't want to compromise that for political expediency. In that sense, I think it's fairly admirable.
Because on the other hand, Hollywood is one of the main sources of support for the Democrats. The Democrats raise tons of money out there, and movie stars and other prominent Hollywood types are almost all Democratic.
P2P represents an almost ideal way for the Republicans to extract revenge on Hollywood, to "cut off their air supply." But there's almost no support at all for doing that within the party.
I know it will rub a lot of people the wrong way to say that it's possible to interpret protecting the property rights of international corporations as a principled position, but I think that's what's going on.
I sort of wish they wouldn't, though...
Verisign should patent this.
Then if ICANN wants to run a similar service, or award it to someone else in exchange for payments, Verisign can take all the money in licensing fees.
I mean, why not pimp this out all the way. It's not like ICANN wouldn't take the idea and exploit it for fees now that Verisign has suggested it. It's not like ICANN is accountable to anyone, and those fees would allow them to fly private jets to private islands in the pacific to have their meetings. I'll bet they wouldn't even have to show anyone their books.
They could even put spyware in the pages that come back from non-existent domains. Let's get Gator involved with this. There's a sleazy buck to be made, so you gotta have Gator involved.
It's obvious to everyone who thinks about it that the real problem with the net is that there isn't enough advertising.
It's important for studies to be peer reviewed and duplicated. If this is real, other scientists will say its real, and they'll duplicate the results.
(Here's a little pop-quiz to see if you were paying attention in science class. What's wrong with this Princeton project? The answer is that no one else can duplicate their results. Peer review and duplicable results are key, even with studies coming out of big name institutions.)
There have been quite a few studies on the effects of cell phones, and dramatic evidence that they cause problems has not jumped out at anyone.
And people have been using cell phones for a long time. I got my first one about 10 years ago, and they were already common back then.
There's a doctor named Dean Edell who does a radio show, and he wrote a book called "Eat, Drink, and Be Merry." In that book, he spent a lot of time talking about how bad most medical reporting is. He makes a pretty persuasive case.
Almost everything you hear on the radio or see on tv about supplements, studies, etc., is either totally false or based on weak science.
I don't know anything about this particular study, but I do know that a study that doesn't find anything isn't news, while the opposite story -- we're all going to have our brains turn to mush in our middle years! -- is sensational news.
And its news to say that the evil cell industry has used its vast power to suppress studies (that's a big red flag in this story for me). Apparently the cell companies aren't just evil, they're stupid, because if they did that they'd be sued out of existence. But hey, corporations are evil, and they're lust for immediate profits knows no bounds.
This story got hyped mostly through a link on Drudge. I love Drudge, but you have to read him with a critical eye. He says outright that he'll put questionable stuff out there and let the readers decide. And I've heard him wax paranoiac on the dangers of cloning, he's kind of whacked out on some biological and medical stories.
For me, all the ads would end up coming across as ads for Debian, regardless of what they said or who paid for them.
I've noticed that they've gotten a lot of traction over the past few days by linking file sharing with porn.
.. and I ain't out shoppin spendin dudes C-notes
A lot of talk radio hosts have been railing against the porn threat, and p2p for making it worse. I heard Diane Feinstein on the radio yesterday talking about the threat to our kids.
Meanwhile, these are some lyrics from a current hit song by lil kim and 50 cent. It's a nice song about a rapper's penis, called "magic stick":
[...]
I'm a freak to the core
Get a dose once, you gon' want some more
My tongue touch ya girl, ya toes bound to curl
This exclusive shit I don't share with the world
I have you up early in the mornin, moanin
[...]
Lil' Kim not a whore
But I sex a nigga so good, he gotta tell his boys
When it, come to sex don't test my skills
Cause my head game have you HEAD over heels
Give a nigga the chills, have him pay my bills
Buy matchin Lambo's with the same color wheels
I'm in the crib givin niggaz deep throat
I think you're right on the money. A lot of stuff should probably turned off for most people, but if you want to open yourself up, it should be an option.
It's also important, I think, to preserve some degree of competition in the broadband market. My cable company, time warner, lets you pick from 4 ISPs when you get a cable modem: time warner, aol, earthlink, Internet Nebraska, a local company. I don't care if AOL blocks stuff, so long as one of the other companies doesn't.
I'd love to see the market provide shelter for people who need it, but I'd like it to provide options for people like me who want to run servers.
One size isn't going to fit everyone.
No group has done more to sexualize children for profit than the music industry. Go to amazon and pull up a photo of britney spears' first album -- she's wearing a school girl uniform. They have a lot of nerve talking about this now.
MTV actually did a promotional show for the snoop dogg girls gone wild video, the way they'd promote a hollywood movie. Not only is MTV's audience primiarly made up of kids, but the producers of those videos are probably going to go to jail for using minors in their tapes. Not one or two who slipped through -- several dozen young girls.
Don't get me wrong -- I believe in free speech, and I will defend their rights to promote music that sexualizes children, glorifies cop killing, rape, and drug use, and all of the rest of the stuff they promote. I don't like it, but I'll defend their right to do it.
But the sheer disingenuous of these sorts of statements is hard to take. I don't know where they find guys with the chutzpah to make them.
I don't understand why a cryptographic protocol using a blind signature can't be used to make an auditable voting system.
To me it seems like it could be a special case of the digital cash problem that guys like David Chaum worked on. You give everyone a single vote that they can cast -- a blob of data with a blinded digital signature. Then you let them spend them (vote) however they want.
You could even let candidates set up their own sites to collect their own votes. So someone could give Dean or Bush their vote, and then Dean or Bush could turn them into the election commision. It wouldn't be necessary to do that -- a central site makes more sense -- but wouldn't it be secure enough to let the candidates collect their own votes, with a realtime online election commision protecting against double voting?
If DigiCash is secure (and although it's been dead for a long time, I think it was considered secure), it seems like this should be secure.
The article is right when it points out that we have a lot of election fraud now -- it ought to be possible to improve things substantially.
We should probably be trying to explain to everyone that it's necessary to actually install this stuff... IT people who don't are incompetent, and they will bear some of the blame for the next worm.
I don't think it's fair to blame office for that -- the old macos didn't have real file system permissions, and that's why it was insecure. Locking the finder down was the best they could do, but it just wasn't a realistic solution.
I'm not familiar with tivo's season pass, so I'll just describe what this box does.
You schedule recordings from the program guide -- you can page through a grid and pick the shows you want to record. When you select a program, you get a pop-up menu that lets you record the one episode, or the entire series.
If you record the series, it will only record it on that channel, by default, but it will record it all times.
But you can go into another menu (series manager) and change the options -- there you can tell it how many episodes of a given show to keep, whether or not to record it only a specific time, or at all times, etc.
It's pretty good, for the most part, but it's not terribly bright about some things. For example, I like south park, and I want it to record all of the episodes. But it will keep a second copy of the same episode on the disk, even though the program guide has enough information for it to know that it's the same program.
I stopped recording dennis miller live on HBO, for example, because of that problem. When you get HBO here, you get 12 english channels, and they have dennis miller all over the place, with a ton of duplications, especially across the time zones.
The main feature that tivo has that this doesn't, as far as I can tell, is the thing that suggests programs for you. This box only records what I tell it to record, or what I watch.
I'm pretty sure that it doesn't recompress. I have one of these boxes.
First of all, the box, beyond being a DVR, is also a normal digital cable box -- it has all the same functinality. If it does recompress, it would have to decompress the incoming signal then recompress it, all in the same box. I just can't imagine anyone building that. It makes more sense for it to just dump the incoming data stream to the disk, and defer decompression until you're watching it.
Second of all, there's no visible difference between a live digital cable program and a time shifted program, although there isn't much of a difference between live and timeshifted analog cable programs either.
I haven't used a tivo, and I'm sure those are very nice as well (or better, for all I know), but this is a very sweet box.
I've had one of these boxes for two or three weeks, in Lincoln, Nebraska. It's great.
It costs an extra $5 a month, on top of the standard digital cable rate, and there were no hardware or installation charges. There's very tight integration with the program guide - when you browse through channels, you can see whatever you're watching (live or recorded) in a small window, and it's easy to program things.
The digital cable channels look fantastic - you can really tell the difference, especially when you pause the picture.
I've never used or even seen a tivo, so I don't know how this box compares to those, or specifically to the feature that lets you skip commercials. This box has a nice fast forward feature, with three different speeds, and when you drop out of it, the box tries to line you up with a scene change - in practice, it's pretty good at letting you hit the end of the commercial exactly.
At first I thought they were offering this because a DVR would make an ideal pay per view platform, but the box doesn't add anything to the PPV functionality of the old digital cable box. Time Warner has a system they call "iControl" that lets you pause, rewind, fast forward, etc., a PPV program, and the new box uses the same system, instead of its own disk.
Apparently they've been sending out a few software updates to these boxes. I was a very early adopter here - I had to keep calling the cable company, to see if they were out yet, to get mine. The installer told me that there were a lot of glitches early on in the roll out, but I haven't had many problems.
It is possible to trigger a reboot in the box by overloading it - I'm not exactly sure what causes it, but if you're doing several things at once with it, you can sink it. This has happened to me two or three times.
The really cool thing about these boxes is that they have USB and Firewire ports on them. But there's no software support for them. If you could extract video from these things, they'd be perfect.
I think that a lot of the dyanamics he's talking about hold true -- obviously, O'Reilley is a very smart guy.
But it seems to me that he's looking at service industries, and calling them software companies. In order to do that, he has to change the definition of a software company, and as a result he's able to announce this as a shift in the software industry.
My problem with what he says is mostly aesthetic. It's that same old silicon valley rich guy entrepeneur guru bs.
He's making a lot of points that most people know -- web applications are more exciting, in many respects, than desktop applications now. Web applications are being built out of commodity pieces. The data in eBay and the customer good will is worth more than the code. All of those are good points, if not exactly earth shaking.
But the way he's stiched them together is mostly a semantic trick, and he's out there like he's been given stone tablets on some moutaintop.
It's not evil or anything, just a little icky.
Thanks... that's very helpful.
I have a BSD box on my network, and I could do IPSec tunneling if I wasn't so lazy.
But what's the best option for people who don't want to run a windows server, or a unix box, or any flavor of radius? Are there any consumer priced access points that support reasonably secure wireless networking, without an expensive server on the back end?
Most of what I'm seeing here says that you either have to run a unix-like OS, w2k, or xp (ie., not win 9x) on the client, that you need the professional version of xp, some sort of server infrastructure, etc.
Is there anything at all the typical schmo with a linksys access point and a windows 98 client can do?
I've been curious about these databases and how they work. They have to take the images and proces them, presumably into some sort of n-tuple. And then they database that.
But how will they handle changes? I mean, people will probably figure out how the recognition works, and learn how to trick it. If you know the scheme, it probably wouldn't be too hard.
If they have a giant database of these n-tuples, generated from photos, will they have to recrunch every photo in the db when they want to improve the system, or respond to holes that emerge? I guess they'll have a lot of computer power, so it's probably not too bad.
The thing that worries me about this stuff is the possibility that the crooks and terrorists will be able to defeat it trivially, but the average citizen will be tracked everywhere he or she goes.
I wonder if maybe someone could create a network of honeypots, and feed the data into a database that could be accessed in real time by web servers, to deny access.
It would probably impose too much of a performance hit for a popular site, but maybe for smaller stuff -- your bio page, or whatever -- it would be appropriate.
When I ran a small ISP, our experience was the same. The law enforcement people didn't do anything for us.
It was strange, because the FBI had actually sent a couple of agents to our office to introduce themselves, pass out business cards, and the like. But when we had trouble, we called them up and those guys basically said, "there's not much we can do."
When the agents introduced themselves, they gave us a questionaire to fill out, and there was a question about encryption -- had we noticed anyone using it?
The questionaire (which I didn't complete), and the lack of response when we actually needed help, sort of soured me on the beaureau. The agents were nice guys, and I had the feeling that they were sincere when they were talking to us, but the organization itself didn't seem to be too helpful.
I don't really have a problem with them paying more attention to hacks on major e-commerce sites or banks than on my little ISP (which has long since been sold). The reality is that there's so much cracking going on, and it's so hard to track it down, that chasing small incidents isn't really practical. If a big ecommerce site gets cracked, a lot of people get hurt, the situation is really different.
The lesson that I learned is that you're basically alone when you get attacked. No one cares, and no one will help. Your ISP won't do anything, law enforcement won't do anything, and your customers will be incredibly angry with you. The only way to deal with it is to do whatever you can to secure yourself up front.
Sports are about people going out and doing difficult things in front of a crowd. It's not just the atheletes who do that, especially in baseball. The umpires are out there performing too.
Part of the fun of baseball is second guessing the umpire, complaining about a bad call, arguing with your friends about whether or not a call really was bad, etc. Just like part of the fun is seeing whether or not someone is going to hit a home run or strike out, or watching someone pitch, or whatever.
Everyone on the field comes together and interacts in a complicated ecosystem. If they start mucking around with it at such a fundamental level, they're going to break the game more than they already have by their tweaks designed to produce more hits.
Why stop with the umpire? Why not making pitching and hitting robots? Why don't we have modified sony aibo's roaming the outfield, with baskets to catch the balls?
I'm not saying there isn't room for geekery at the ball park. The machines that shoot the hotdogs way up into the stand are pretty cool. But that's the sort of thing that technology should do at a ball park. Leave the game to the people.
Actually, I think you're right and I was wrong.
Thanks.
You're exactly right.
The basic idea is that people ought to be free to do what they want to do with their computers. I like Linux because it's been a great vehicle for pursuing that freedom.
But using taxes and regulations to push people toward Linux will diminish the freedom we have to do what we want with our computers. It's like destroying a village in order to save it, it just doesn't make any sense.
What's the deal with the new WPA standard? Are there any cheap access points that are WPA ready? Will Linux support WPA?
I have an old orinico residential gateway, and I'd like to upgrade to a faster system, but I want to wait for WPA.
Sites like bytemonsoon.com or torrentse.cx use a single tracker for hundreds of different torrent streams, so the fact that the tracker can't do all of that and then handle a really big demand generated by slashdot isn't as damning as it might seem at first.