"Or perhaps they know that a 5 year old drive is not going to be useful enough to pay the postage... I have some older... I could get them replaced for $30 or so... I could easily hit the used market and pick one up for about the cost of postage"
errmmmm . . . I can understand the logic of buying used for *initial* acquisition (although I myself won't do it for items with moving parts, or with items at higher risk of being abused).
But what's the logic of *replacing* a used item with another equivalent used item, unless the replacement is refurbed / certified etc.? What assurance have you, that you're not just replacing one problem with another?
I'd NEVER buy used storage, except for cases (e.g. swap) where failure != disaster. As for warranties: all other things being equal, longer is better; but I'd much rather lose money than data.
In the last three months, I've had three failures in relatively young, lightly-used Maxtor ATA drives, and I'll never again buy Maxtor. Maybe it's just a statistical fluke. Just the same, my next non-enterprise drive (i.e. non-SCSI) will be to have a try with WD SATA Raptors.
"So if the [illegal kid-porn] image is real, you can get away with it by doing a little image manipulation to [make the digital-alteration detection-test conclude that the image isn't genuine]?"
"Perhaps I am misreading your intent" Yes, but it's still my fault, and this time I see more clearly why: it's because I never made it clear that I'm not thinking about the specifics of Farid.
FORGET Farid, FORGET about the particulars of JPEG versus other formats, etc. I'm talking about the more general, abstract, case.
First, let's dispose of the "perfect knowledge" case, because that's easier. Assume that "the world" has an "undefeatable" way to detect image alteration. Yes, I acknowledge that the very word seems an oxymoron -- how can you prove a negative, how can you prove that someone hasn't found away to defeat detection? But it's irrelevant: I think we can agree that, if "undefeatable" detection WERE available, then no possessor of kid-porn could succeed in falsely claiming that his photos are merely digital fakes.
Now let's take the other case, of detection technology which exists but is imperfect, i.e. defeatable. (btw, for the purposes of this illustration, known-defeatable detection is really no different than the case of the "unproveably perfect" detection technology.) Let's revisit the criminal-trial scenario . ..
-- Mr.X is arrested for having child porn images. -- As I mentioned before, a U.S. court recently ruled that child-porn doesn't violate the Child Online Protection Act, if the porn was actually produced without the involvement of real children. -- Mr. X's defense: "The images are digitally altered, no actual children were involved." -- Prosecutor: "We had the images analyzed by the world's foremost scientific expert, who attests that these images show no sign of digital alteration. Therefore, your claim of digital alteration is not credible, and I believe the images to genuinely portray children, and so should the jury." -- Mr X: "Yes, I know your expert's detection techniques; and so, after creating the altered images, I finished the job by using special techniques designed specifically to defeat those detection techniques." -- Prosecutor: "WHY DID YOU GO TO THAT EXTRA TROUBLE?"
Now, put yourself in the defendant's shoes. How can you answer this last question from the prosecutor, in a way which sounds plausible? If you can't produce such an answer, the jury is now more likely to believe that the prosecutor is right, that the images portray real children. And even if you can produce a plausible-sounding answer, you might then be compelled to *demonstrate* that you're actually capable of doing what you claim to have done (including your claimed counter-detection capability.)
THIS is the novel legal consequence of work LIKE Farid's (in my opinion). The legal landscape has been changed for these kinds of cases, EVEN if the detection technology is imperfect. Defense arguments like Mr. X's haven't been made impossible, but they're a lot more difficult.
"I'm catholic and from Scotland originally, so I'm not really from a computing background"
How does either of those traits make one less likely to be "from a computing background"? For that matter, how does being "working class" make one more likely? (unless one is so teddibly well-bred and silver-spooned, that one regards any activity of remotely non-posh utility as being "working class")
"The only problem that I might see is a license violation for every user that installs these songs onto their iPod. After all, the iPod has a software license, I'm sure, that limits use"
so, does this mean that Real is guilty of INDUCEing users to commit a violation?
Delicious!
"Couldn't you just as well set a low bond, accept a few spams, and fund your ABM Yahoo! mail account that way?"
Well, as President Nixon said to the hidden microphone: 'Yes, we could do that . . . ', then [inaudible to microphone] ' . . . but it would be wrong.';-)
But seriously, at this point I sense that you get my point, to wit, that ABM drive us in the direction of the thing I described fearing, i.e. that using email would require monetary *transactions*, which in turn might someday require sacrificing anonymity.
(and btw it's not hard to imagine an ABM world in which your suggestion is defined as prosecutable fraud by the justice system. And it would be the kind of fraud which prosecutors especially love, i.e. anything that allows them to tack on special Extra Bonus Charges like Fraud Committed With The Aid Of A Federally Regulated Communication Medium, Fraud Involving Making False Statements To A Financial Institution, etc. Those slime-balls live for this kind of stuff.)
1. re: complexity. Imagine this experiment. -- Find a the "best", most representative FAQ page for SPF. Show it to 1,000 *busy* people. Take a stopwatch, and time how long it takes each person to reach the point of saying, "OK, I've got it -- I skipped the details of writing MX records, etc., but I'm confident that I can draw a picture and explain the *idea* to someone else." Plot the distribution-curve of the 1,000 stopwatch values. -- Now do the same for ABM, with a different set of 1,000 busy people. -- Superimpose the two curves. No matter how "fast" the ABM responses, I contend that the ABM curve will be shifted significantly to the right.
Another version of the experiment . .. -- First step is same as above. Then show the same people the ABM FAQ, let them read as much or little as they want, and ask them which proposal (if either) they find to be *significantly* simpler. Count how many say "SPF". -- Do the same with another 1,000 people, except reverse the order. -- I'll bet that SPF gets more "simpler" votes.
2. re: anonymity. You say, "That's the whole point of SPF. There's no anonymity preserved there." We're talking about two different kinds of anonymity. YOU'RE talking about the anonymity of the identity of the sending ACCOUNT. *I'M* talking about the anonymity of the HUMAN BEING using the account. If I'm using a free account, such as Yahoo, using SPF puts no one any closer to knowing who I AM, which some day could be a very different matter if I have to use ABM. And, even if the use of ABM isn't itself a *legal* mandate, that point would make no difference if ABM becomes an ubiquitous de-facto standard.
When I last researched this several years ago, I asked about Fresnel and never got a straight answer (even from the manufacturer). Your link, however, EXPLICITLY says, "yes, that's how it's done." Thanks!
Several years ago I researched this on the web, but never really reached a satisfactory resolution.
There's a type of traffic signal whose illumination is clearly visible only within a narrow angle. As you approach the intersection, you can see all three *lamps/lenses*, but you don't see which lamp (r/y/g) is currently *lit* until you enter within a certain angle of the lamp.
Can anyone *authoritatively* explain how this is done in *this* application?
-- I use webmail, but not for high-volume long-term storage. I download-and-delete my webmail to perm storage, so I don't need massive space, and I'm happy to let my local filter do my spam filtering.
-- I use webmail just for two purposes: (1) to keep a long-term copy a few things I might want when away (e.g., editor, telnet client, etc.); (2) to check my mail when I temporarily can't access my perm mail storage -- and at those times, I'm willing to tolerate the spam if the server doesn't catch it.
Re:What a defeatist attitude......
on
By Road and Rail?
·
· Score: 1
My impression is that it's also usable as a passenger vehicle, in a RORO manner. If that's correct, then I doubt that they'd switch drivers when transitioning between road & rail -- in which case, which "profession" supplies the drivers for passenger transport?
I'm saying, for either of the two answers to that question, I wouldn't be comfortable as a *passenger*. I wouldn't want to be on the road, driven either by someone lacking tractor-trailer experience, or driven by today's typical tractor-trailer highway driver. And I wouldn't want to be on the rail, if driven by someone without rail experience.
even if one assumes that all the prior "there's a hole" posts are wrong . . .
Reason #3: SPF. I didn't even need to read beyond the ABM FAQ's TOC. Just look at the length of the TOC itself. Although there's a TOC item "Will the ABM be complicated to use?", the answer is obvious without reading it.
Now contrast this with SPF: how long does it take you to understand SPF, or to explain its BASIC CONCEPTS to someone else?
Reason #2: ABM doesn't itself kill anonymity, but it makes it easier for government to do so. As one poster has already said:
"There isn't a central database from which funds are collected that has everyone's name and bank information. The only requirement is that you have funds available to back up your email, and like it says, this can be accomplished by paying in person with cash for an anonymous e-mail account."
It's a bitter lesson of the past three years -- or it should be, if you haven't already realized it -- that there are few limits to the extent to which government will regulate (read "criminalize") financial transactions in order to control individuals, in the guise of "fighting terrorism".
If you don't believe this, then go to the service desk in any large grocery chain where they sell money orders, and look on the wall for the sign which describes the maximum anonymous cash transaction which can be performed without triggering a report to the government. (I'll provide additional detail and examples if anyone chooses to dispute this.)
Implement ABM, and just how long do you think it will take for some publicity-hungry politicians to propose that all ABM payments require identification?
Reason #1: The ITU supports it. I have no problem with organizations like IETF. But in view of recent trends of trans-national political authorities (like the EU) taking action contrary to human rights, I'm immediately suspicious of a proposal supported by an organ of the UN ("tin-foil-hat" insults notwithstanding).
Who'll drive it? Two separate workforces of rail drivers and road driers? Not likely. Well, I wouldn't ride it if the driver is NOT an experienced truck driver. And I wouldn't ride it if the driver IS a typical cowboy-aggressive U.S. trucker.
"You couldn't tell a packet to slowdown . . . in theory you could "synchronize" all the transmitters . . . a switch is more like a cloverleaf"
Right, you can't slow down a packet which is literally on the wire between nodes. But I was thinking of something like what's already done today at various levels of network architecture, like TCP windows / pacing / slowdown.
In the case of low-level physical networking, I'd be interested in seeing if the vehicle researchers' algorithms would be an improvement on current network algorithms. And the same idea could be extended to any conceptual network of queues -- such as mail relays, work dispatchers in grid computing, etc. -- with each node, as it approaches congestion, informing its feeders to adjust the feed-rate, which is equivalent to scheduling a series of arrivals.
wider applicability of this? (not meaning to sound like one of those a**holes in today's article about Are-You-Annoying). Forget about vehicles, dogs, pedestrians, etc., and think about a completely different "problem space": how much is this like, and how might it be applied to, architectures for managing traffic flows in nets, LANs, p2p networks, grid computing, email systems, etc.?
The people who carry this question that far (as in the article) are the really annoying ones. They're the corporate-culture-nazis, PHBs, HR-types with w-a-a-a-a-y too much time on their hands.
It's one thing too say that being uber-geek with non-geeks is annoying, or arrogance is annoying, or bad hygiene is annoying.
But some of the quotes are way over the top, talking about how we all must constantly monitor EVERY word and mannerism, in ANY company, or else risk contaminating the entire work environment.
These are the same ass-kissing back-stabbing political types who constantly use language like "proactive", "incentivize", "realign", "laser focus", "customer-centric", "team players", "challenge", etc.
Oh, and my favorite -- there are no "problems", only "issues" and "concerns".
Slashdot Mirror
"Or perhaps they know that a 5 year old drive is not going to be useful enough to pay the postage ... ... I could get them replaced for $30 or so ... I could easily hit the used market and pick one up for about the cost of postage"
I have some older
errmmmm . . . I can understand the logic of buying used for *initial* acquisition (although I myself won't do it for items with moving parts, or with items at higher risk of being abused).
But what's the logic of *replacing* a used item with another equivalent used item, unless the replacement is refurbed / certified etc.? What assurance have you, that you're not just replacing one problem with another?
I'd NEVER buy used storage, except for cases (e.g. swap) where failure != disaster.
As for warranties: all other things being equal, longer is better; but I'd much rather lose money than data.
In the last three months, I've had three failures in relatively young, lightly-used Maxtor ATA drives, and I'll never again buy Maxtor. Maybe it's just a statistical fluke. Just the same, my next non-enterprise drive (i.e. non-SCSI) will be to have a try with WD SATA Raptors.
"So if the [illegal kid-porn] image is real, you can get away with it by doing a little image manipulation to [make the digital-alteration detection-test conclude that the image isn't genuine]?"
Basically, yes. See The Porn-A-Kid Brief.
"Perhaps I am misreading your intent"
.
Yes, but it's still my fault, and this time I see more clearly why:
it's because I never made it clear that I'm not thinking about the specifics of Farid.
FORGET Farid, FORGET about the particulars of JPEG versus other formats, etc.
I'm talking about the more general, abstract, case.
First, let's dispose of the "perfect knowledge" case, because that's easier.
Assume that "the world" has an "undefeatable" way to detect image alteration.
Yes, I acknowledge that the very word seems an oxymoron -- how can you prove a negative, how can you prove that someone hasn't found away to defeat detection?
But it's irrelevant: I think we can agree that, if "undefeatable" detection WERE available, then no possessor of kid-porn could succeed in falsely claiming that his photos are merely digital fakes.
Now let's take the other case, of detection technology which exists but is imperfect, i.e. defeatable. (btw, for the purposes of this illustration, known-defeatable detection is really no different than the case of the "unproveably perfect" detection technology.)
Let's revisit the criminal-trial scenario . .
-- Mr.X is arrested for having child porn images.
-- As I mentioned before, a U.S. court recently ruled that child-porn doesn't violate the Child Online Protection Act, if the porn was actually produced without the involvement of real children.
-- Mr. X's defense: "The images are digitally altered, no actual children were involved."
-- Prosecutor: "We had the images analyzed by the world's foremost scientific expert, who attests that these images show no sign of digital alteration. Therefore, your claim of digital alteration is not credible, and I believe the images to genuinely portray children, and so should the jury."
-- Mr X: "Yes, I know your expert's detection techniques; and so, after creating the altered images, I finished the job by using special techniques designed specifically to defeat those detection techniques."
-- Prosecutor: "WHY DID YOU GO TO THAT EXTRA TROUBLE?"
Now, put yourself in the defendant's shoes.
How can you answer this last question from the prosecutor, in a way which sounds plausible?
If you can't produce such an answer, the jury is now more likely to believe that the prosecutor is right, that the images portray real children.
And even if you can produce a plausible-sounding answer, you might then be compelled to *demonstrate* that you're actually capable of doing what you claim to have done (including your claimed counter-detection capability.)
THIS is the novel legal consequence of work LIKE Farid's (in my opinion).
The legal landscape has been changed for these kinds of cases, EVEN if the detection technology is imperfect.
Defense arguments like Mr. X's haven't been made impossible, but they're a lot more difficult.
"I'm catholic and from Scotland originally, so I'm not really from a computing background"
How does either of those traits make one less likely to be "from a computing background"?
For that matter, how does being "working class" make one more likely? (unless one is so teddibly well-bred and silver-spooned, that one regards any activity of remotely non-posh utility as being "working class")
"The only problem that I might see is a license violation for every user that installs these songs onto their iPod. After all, the iPod has a software license, I'm sure, that limits use"
so, does this mean that Real is guilty of INDUCEing users to commit a violation?
Delicious!
what happened to your home page / domain?
"Couldn't you just as well set a low bond, accept a few spams, and fund your ABM Yahoo! mail account that way?"
;-)
Well, as President Nixon said to the hidden microphone:
'Yes, we could do that . . . ', then [inaudible to microphone] ' . . . but it would be wrong.'
But seriously, at this point I sense that you get my point, to wit, that ABM drive us in the direction of the thing I described fearing, i.e. that using email would require monetary *transactions*, which in turn might someday require sacrificing anonymity.
(and btw it's not hard to imagine an ABM world in which your suggestion is defined as prosecutable fraud by the justice system.
And it would be the kind of fraud which prosecutors especially love, i.e. anything that allows them to tack on special Extra Bonus Charges like Fraud Committed With The Aid Of A Federally Regulated Communication Medium, Fraud Involving Making False Statements To A Financial Institution, etc.
Those slime-balls live for this kind of stuff.)
"open an e-mail attachment by mistake, and end up poking yourself in the eye for hours"
;-)
who's the clueless doofus who modded the above comment as "insightful" instead of "funny"?
OTOH, if YOU had a direct interface, perhaps you'd correctly spell "argumentAtive"
"very unlikely you can actually get anything useful from EEG signals"
not even alpha waves?
no bio-feedback?
. . . John Ashcroft and DHS, whom I'm sure are already doing all the research we need into "direct neural interfacing".
"What research have you seen being done?"
Well, I haven't so much *seen* it as I sometimes *feel* and *hear* it when I remove my tin-foil hat.
1. re: complexity.
.
Imagine this experiment.
-- Find a the "best", most representative FAQ page for SPF. Show it to 1,000 *busy* people. Take a stopwatch, and time how long it takes each person to reach the point of saying, "OK, I've got it -- I skipped the details of writing MX records, etc., but I'm confident that I can draw a picture and explain the *idea* to someone else." Plot the distribution-curve of the 1,000 stopwatch values.
-- Now do the same for ABM, with a different set of 1,000 busy people.
-- Superimpose the two curves. No matter how "fast" the ABM responses, I contend that the ABM curve will be shifted significantly to the right.
Another version of the experiment . .
-- First step is same as above. Then show the same people the ABM FAQ, let them read as much or little as they want, and ask them which proposal (if either) they find to be *significantly* simpler. Count how many say "SPF".
-- Do the same with another 1,000 people, except reverse the order.
-- I'll bet that SPF gets more "simpler" votes.
2. re: anonymity.
You say, "That's the whole point of SPF. There's no anonymity preserved there."
We're talking about two different kinds of anonymity.
YOU'RE talking about the anonymity of the identity of the sending ACCOUNT.
*I'M* talking about the anonymity of the HUMAN BEING using the account.
If I'm using a free account, such as Yahoo, using SPF puts no one any closer to knowing who I AM, which some day could be a very different matter if I have to use ABM. And, even if the use of ABM isn't itself a *legal* mandate, that point would make no difference if ABM becomes an ubiquitous de-facto standard.
When I last researched this several years ago, I asked about Fresnel and never got a straight answer (even from the manufacturer).
Your link, however, EXPLICITLY says, "yes, that's how it's done."
Thanks!
oops, finger-check
;-)
was supposed to say,
If you (i.e. the downloader) are right in the middle of the action, then it CAN'T possibly be convincing.
Several years ago I researched this on the web, but never really reached a satisfactory resolution.
There's a type of traffic signal whose illumination is clearly visible only within a narrow angle. As you approach the intersection, you can see all three *lamps/lenses*, but you don't see which lamp (r/y/g) is currently *lit* until you enter within a certain angle of the lamp.
Can anyone *authoritatively* explain how this is done in *this* application?
(mostly) -- for my usage, that is.
-- I use webmail, but not for high-volume long-term storage.
I download-and-delete my webmail to perm storage, so I don't need massive space,
and I'm happy to let my local filter do my spam filtering.
-- I use webmail just for two purposes:
(1) to keep a long-term copy a few things I might want when away (e.g., editor, telnet client, etc.);
(2) to check my mail when I temporarily can't access my perm mail storage --
and at those times, I'm willing to tolerate the spam if the server doesn't catch it.
My impression is that it's also usable as a passenger vehicle, in a RORO manner. If that's correct, then I doubt that they'd switch drivers when transitioning between road & rail -- in which case, which "profession" supplies the drivers for passenger transport?
I'm saying, for either of the two answers to that question, I wouldn't be comfortable as a *passenger*. I wouldn't want to be on the road, driven either by someone lacking tractor-trailer experience, or driven by today's typical tractor-trailer highway driver. And I wouldn't want to be on the rail, if driven by someone without rail experience.
point taken.
that's what i get for speed-reading.
but reason #2 is still a show-stopper.
"This sounds very like the phased array speaker technology that 1 Limited [1limited.com] have been using from some years"
Phased array speakers were introduced approx 30 years ago by Dahlquist.
"I can't wait to download convincing lesbian orgy movies and feel like i'm right in the middle of the action."
;-)
If YOU are right in the middle of the action, then it can possibly be convincing.
even if one assumes that all the prior "there's a hole" posts are wrong . . .
Reason #3: SPF. I didn't even need to read beyond the ABM FAQ's TOC. Just look at the length of the TOC itself. Although there's a TOC item "Will the ABM be complicated to use?", the answer is obvious without reading it. Now contrast this with SPF: how long does it take you to understand SPF, or to explain its BASIC CONCEPTS to someone else?
Reason #2: ABM doesn't itself kill anonymity, but it makes it easier for government to do so. As one poster has already said:
"There isn't a central database from which funds are collected that has everyone's name and bank information. The only requirement is that you have funds available to back up your email, and like it says, this can be accomplished by paying in person with cash for an anonymous e-mail account."
It's a bitter lesson of the past three years -- or it should be, if you haven't already realized it -- that there are few limits to the extent to which government will regulate (read "criminalize") financial transactions in order to control individuals, in the guise of "fighting terrorism".
If you don't believe this, then go to the service desk in any large grocery chain where they sell money orders, and look on the wall for the sign which describes the maximum anonymous cash transaction which can be performed without triggering a report to the government. (I'll provide additional detail and examples if anyone chooses to dispute this.)
Implement ABM, and just how long do you think it will take for some publicity-hungry politicians to propose that all ABM payments require identification?
Reason #1: The ITU supports it. I have no problem with organizations like IETF. But in view of recent trends of trans-national political authorities (like the EU) taking action contrary to human rights, I'm immediately suspicious of a proposal supported by an organ of the UN ("tin-foil-hat" insults notwithstanding).
Who'll drive it? Two separate workforces of rail drivers and road driers? Not likely.
Well, I wouldn't ride it if the driver is NOT an experienced truck driver.
And I wouldn't ride it if the driver IS a typical cowboy-aggressive U.S. trucker.
the death of BSD, by AC
;-)
not that I necessarily agree, but may be this will deter AC from posting it.
"You couldn't tell a packet to slowdown . . . in theory you could "synchronize" all the transmitters . . . a switch is more like a cloverleaf"
Right, you can't slow down a packet which is literally on the wire between nodes. But I was thinking of something like what's already done today at various levels of network architecture, like TCP windows / pacing / slowdown.
In the case of low-level physical networking, I'd be interested in seeing if the vehicle researchers' algorithms would be an improvement on current network algorithms. And the same idea could be extended to any conceptual network of queues -- such as mail relays, work dispatchers in grid computing, etc. -- with each node, as it approaches congestion, informing its feeders to adjust the feed-rate, which is equivalent to scheduling a series of arrivals.
wider applicability of this? (not meaning to sound like one of those a**holes in today's article about Are-You-Annoying).
Forget about vehicles, dogs, pedestrians, etc., and think about a completely different "problem space":
how much is this like, and how might it be applied to, architectures for managing traffic flows in nets, LANs, p2p networks, grid computing, email systems, etc.?
The people who carry this question that far (as in the article) are the really annoying ones. They're the corporate-culture-nazis, PHBs, HR-types with w-a-a-a-a-y too much time on their hands.
It's one thing too say that being uber-geek with non-geeks is annoying, or arrogance is annoying, or bad hygiene is annoying.
But some of the quotes are way over the top, talking about how we all must constantly monitor EVERY word and mannerism, in ANY company, or else risk contaminating the entire work environment.
These are the same ass-kissing back-stabbing political types who constantly use language like "proactive", "incentivize", "realign", "laser focus", "customer-centric", "team players", "challenge", etc.
Oh, and my favorite -- there are no "problems", only "issues" and "concerns".