If a car dealership sells you an automobile, and charges you for an option that you didn't ask for that is illegal. Why is the same not true in this case?
It is illegal. That has already been proven in the courts. I realize I'm preaching to the choir, but I can't help myself. Righteous indignation is like that.
To extend your analogy, imagine if Toyota had been found guilty of anticompetitive marketing practices, and they delayed, and appealed, and eventually their fine was reduced to providing Toyota brochures for driver's education classes. Toyota would naturally decide that their most profitable strategy would be to operate illegally, unfairly leverage their market share to their benefit, and pay the silly little fines. It's essentially a small fee to operate a big monopoly.
I bought a new HP notebook 18 months ago. Of course, due to Microsoft's anticompetitive OEM marketing agreement which has been adjudicated as illegal, I was forced to buy a copy of WinXP that I didn't need because I run Linux. Of course, I can't sell my WinXP to someone who wants to upgrade from Win98 because it's some bastardized OEM version that only works on a model of notebook PC that already shipped with XP. I'm sure they didn't do that on purpose (bastards).
I suspect there are about as many Windows pirates in the US as there are Linux notebook PC users who have a virgin Windows license. I think I'll register www.Pirate-MS-Licences.com as a place where Linux users can donate their unused licenses to pirates. When Microsoft sues me, my defense will be, "I was forced to buy this thing, and now I can't even GIVE it away? How is that not a Microsoft Tax on notebook PCs?"
I have a Rio Karma 20 digital music player. A friend told me that his coworker has one and the hard drive died. He turned it on, and the large LCD would only display BAD KARMA.
I really don't believe that I thought of a technical solution that *real* quantum physicists didn't. I know the people working on this are WAY smarter than me, and based on their confidence, I know they must be very proud of what is being called quantum computing. As others have pointed out, it's actually quantum key hiding. That isn't a criticism. As you stated, if you're willing to use a key as long as the message, there is a very nice mathematical neatness to the theoretical security. Of course, in practice, people do not want keys as long as the message, and using a key even half the length of the message results in a brute force decryption for real world messages containing native language text. In other words, try to imagine a paragraph that can be decrypted into English, with all the words spelled correctly, proper sentence structure, and a meaningful message. What are the odds that any other key in the set of all possible keys will do that? The neat theoretical security very quickly dissolves for key lengths less than or equal to half the message length.
As for your attempt to educate me on the technical side of WHY the theorists are so certain of the security on the mechanical side of quantum key protection, I'm sorry to say I completely failed to follow it. It sounded like a lot of technical hand waving, followed by "therefore it's 100% secure. QED." As I said, I'm obviously not a quantum physicist. As such, I'm willing to take it on faith that there is a good mathematical proof. My only option is to spend a day researching it, which I'm not willing to do. And I seem to remember reading about quantum encryption 2-3 years ago in an article (Scientific American?) that presented it in a manner that I could grasp without a strong quantum mechanics background. I vaguely recall being convinced of the soundness of the theory by the previous article.
However, as much as I like math, I'm an engineer and not a mathematician. If a mathematician is told that he can move halfway toward a pile of money across the room every second, he'll never play the game because he knows he can never reach the money. The less-theoretical engineer will quickly realize that within five seconds, he'll be close enough that he can reach the cash.
Nope, it's NEVER going to be unhackable. Hacking implies also using social engineering, physical intrusion, etc. The method here doesn't prevent this, so 'hacking' is still possible. Also, never say never =) You cannot say it's never going to be hackable...
If you're willing to admit to these two aspects of hackability, I'm willing to retire my argument, more on philosophical grounds than mathematical merits.
People have been trying to hide messages almost as long as we've grunted gutteral vowels at each other. We're still trying. The best attempts have resulted in methods that delay decryption long enough to be useful in the real world. That's ultimately all that's needed. And for that, 512-bit RSA over SSL TCP/IP will suffice for a long time to come, and without the expense and complexity of quantum receivers and transmitters. Sure, you can't send the key immediately prior to the message, but it does use a public key, which is pretty damn clever and useful.
Please don't think I'm against quantum cryptography research. I'm not. It appeals to the math/science guy within, to the extent I've stopped to understand it. Heck, any field of study that starts with "quantum" gets bonus points for style. But quantum mechanics is still new enough and sufficiently nonintuitive that I believe we can't be too sure of our proofs. Sort of like a proof based on Newtonian physics before any understanding of relativity. As an engineer, I say that's all the more reason to build devices and test them. The real world is an important laboratory, and building quantum encryption devices will teach us new things. Advancing the state of the art is almost always a good thing. Even in the unlikely event that it's a total waste of time, it'd be a lot better than the many examples of spending a lot of money and inadvertently making the world a less happy place. Unless there's a chance of a quantum photon detector or transmitter collapsing nearby stars, I say go for it.
But by using the quantum cryptography method it is possible to send a key to the recipient and know that no one else has intercepted it.
This is only true if the key is secure. Unless you can prove otherwise, I'll stick with my hypothetical device that emits a quantum entangled photon at exactly the same time as their key photon is received. Once the key is obtained, it's a simple matter of XORing. Even if the first several characters of the key were lost calibrating the timing, it would be a trivial matter to guess them. Not much brute force would be needed to guess five characters.
First, quantum encryption doesn't rely on entanglement.
I know that. But my proposed method of defeating it does. Their detector wouldn't know the photon my system emitted was entangled with one that I controlled.
Second, you CANNOT reproduce quantum information, so you cannot intercept it and re-emit it without changing the value.
I'm not re-emitting anything. I'm determining the quantum state of their photon. Their detector does that, so mine can too. I'm changing the quantum state of my own photon. They're transmitter does that, so mine can too. The only difference is, I'm changing the state of a photon that causes a quantum state change in an entangled photon, but I don't see a problem with that. In fact, while I'm not a quantum physicist, what I propose seems only slightly more difficult than what they're already doing. Breaking encryption is almost always more difficult than encrypting and decrypting. That's the only purpose of encryption - to make it more difficult, not completely impossible as the researchers seem to be claiming.
Third, it doesn't work 'based on a short window of time'.
Yes, it does. The linked article specifically mentioned this. Actually, I think it might have been a link from the linked article. The critical time window was the method they use to determine which arriving photon was the key photon, as opposed to a photon emitted by the sun.
Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is proven unconditionally secure.
That's been claimed for many of the various encryption schemes. Remember the foolish bravado of the company that claimed their video encoding technology was unbreakable? I know more people who enjoy pirated satellite TV than I do those who purchase the service. I'm not saying most of their viewers are pirating the service. That statistic probably says more about me, based on my shady geek associates. But a significant number of people are surely enjoying this "proven unconditionally secure" system. At the risk of repeating myself, it's a fundamental law. Everything can be hacked. Claiming it can't just causes it to happen sooner rather than later.
If you generate a key that is as long as the message, and use it only once, it cannot be decrypted.
The brute force method can make some assumptions. If you were transmitting a message with no information content (noise, random characters), I'd agree. But to be useful, the system must be able to transmit information. If a short key is used for a long message, the key can be guessed by brute force. Eventually, real words will result instead of gibberish, and it's easy for a decrypting routine to detect that as a successful brute force decryption. If the key is as long as the message then I agree that the message would be as secure as the key, but I still argue that my previous statements indicate that the key is not as secure as we are being told. Even the DOD won't give someone a grant for a more complicated and expensive method that doesn't improve on the success of previous efforts. Geeks gotta eat. And they're naturally enthusiastic about their work. So their grant proposals and public statements reflect undue optimism.
Or are you suggesting that this is going to be the first unhackable system ever built? That notion seems laughable to me. If I had a religion, the idea of something being unhackable would be heresy.
The Quantum Man In The Middle
To prevent the man-in-the-middle attack where a photon is intercepted and an identical photon is transmitted in its place, the sender and receiver rely on a very tight window in time. Any photons received outside that window are rejected. If you want to grab the quantum secured key, why not put a receiver in the middle that emits a quantum entangled photon? You intercept the sender's photon, and once you know its state you can change the state of the captured photon so its entangled twin has the same quantum state as the intercepted photon, and arrives at the correct time. You essentially use quantum entanglement to change the state of the imposter photon while it's in transit.
Quantum Brute Force
Quantum computing is emerging almost as fast as "quantum cryptography" (actually "quantum tamper resistant key transmission"). In the near future a good quantum computer will be fast enough to quickly break today's strong encryption. This is the same old game of making sure encryption is just strong enough that commercial users can't crack it but governments can. It's a moving target. Make your own VERY secure encryption algorithm that jumps fifty years down the path of Moore's Law. Add 32 bits to your key and you're secure. That'll piss off your government. So will tying up several hours on their massive supercomputers to learn that you used your favorite commercial encryption algorithm to send your grandmother's cream candy recipe to an internet cafe in South Africa. I'd never do that, but I'd be very tempted to send The Constitution and The Bill of Rights.
User interface preferences are very subjective. I tried PS and PSP, and found them too complex to learn considering my expected usage. I'm sure they're powerful and efficient in the hands of experts (based on the endless pissing and moaning in previous posts), but all the complex features got in my way. Maybe I should have bought the Video Professor DVD ("try my product"). I tried the GIMP 1.x instead. I was stymied for a few minutes, then grokked the right clicky menu and was quickly manipulating my images. The menus seem very logical to me. Adobe products are known for making up their own user interface, so it seems odd for Adobe fans to criticize other software for doing the same thing.
Granted, while I painlessly learn new GIMP tricks every time I use it, I'm still nowhere close to utilizing its potential. But it does everything I want and more, the package install was very quick and easy, it works with my scanner, and it seems fast considering some of the operations I've done on large images. No EULA or copy protection hassles either.
Disclaimers: I am not a graphics pro. I use the GIMP for pretty simple stuff. And I'm comparing recent versions of the GIMP with older versions of PS and PSP.
However, the recent versions of the GIMP are 1.x and 2.x and I'm comparing them against much higher version numbers of PS and PSP, so maybe it isn't such an unfair comparison after all. At the rate the GIMP is advancing, when it reaches version 7.0, it'll not only do all your graphic stuff automatically and before you even know you wanted it, but it'll also serve you free pizza and Jolt cola. OSS may start by satisfying a programmer's itch, but it eventually ends up listening to users and making them very happy.
Despite the/. detractors who don't like it because they learned PS or PSP first, the GIMP is a very useful tool now, and is destined for greatness a version or two down the road.
Besides, any software with such a cute little weasel rat bastard mascot must be good.
I've had the 41CV, 41CX, 15C, and 32SII. Those were all good HP RPN calculators. The 41 series was good if you wanted a handheld computer, good for EE school. Once I was a real engineer, I liked the smaller 15C and even better, the 32SII.
I bought the 15C used for $20 and sold it for $179. I bought two new 32SII calculators for $40 each when they were discontinued and sold them a couple of years later for $185 and $215. Good small HP RPN calculators did even better than most tech stocks in the 90's tech bubble. They're great investments.
Two years in a row, I emailed HP, asking them for a replacement for the 32SII. I made sure they were aware the used price had shot up to $200+. That should motivate them. I told them I wanted RPN, small, rugged, easy to use, and some built-in conversions.
I have a pair of $50 eBay 48G calculators. They're better than the HP algebraic clunkers. I can no longer use anything but RPN. But the 48 series is a bunch of overly complicated crap. Good hardware, bad user interface. I've been waiting for the 32SII replacement. Smaller, better, faster.
From the specs, the 33S looks a lot better than the 48, but not as good as the 32SII. It appears to be flimsier, too. And the design looks like a damn Romulan tricorder from STNG. But I'll still buy one and give it a try, once they're widely available. The 48Gs have got to go.
If the 33S is not good, I'll sell it and the 48G's, bite the bullet and buy two $200 32SII calculators on eBay. Ouch.
The 33S specs are all screwed up. They claim the calculator is.06 inches deep, and the mindless retailers copy the same specs to their websites. Almost certainly.6 inches. And most sites claim they use coin cells, but there are references to AAA batteries. Pin head marketing dweebs.
I question Microsoft's motive, as a simple conditioned response.
But what about Intel's motive? From the article:
...and, in turn, boost demand for faster processors and graphics chips.
Getting a chipmaker involved in a 3D file format committee sounds like a good way to ensure a very computationally inefficient format that needs custom hardware to encode and decode. Heck, why not get some RAM manufacturers, hard drive manufacturers and bandwidth suppliers on the committee to make sure the file sizes are huge, too?
Outlook and Outlook Express will no longer let you open potentially dangerous attachments by default.
That's a pretty decent start.
Funny story: A friend and I both have similarly PC intensive engineering businesses. He uses Win2000, and teases me about Linux. Of course, I give it right back to him. I learned a couple of months ago that the Outlook worm problem became so bad that for some reason having to do with the way he runs his Exchange server, he can no longer double click a DOC file attachment in Outlook and view it in Word. There is no way for him to override this added security feature. Of course, I double click DOC attachments in Mozilla and view them in OpenOffice, and with no worries about executing malware. In this case, it looks like the situation is reversed. He still has the security issues of Outlook and Windows, but without the ease of use. He does what I previously had to do. Save the DOC file, run the application, then open the DOC file.
I got to do my Linux superior dance.
Of course, I didn't tell him when my USB scanner mysteriously quit working. I still haven't figured out the stupid Linux trick I need to do to resurrect it.
I haven't seen XP blue screen in over a year and nothing that would justify a reinstall.
Fair enough. I bailed on Windows just before XP. My criticism was based on Win95 and Win98. I've heard from several people I trust that XP is much more stable than all the previous versions I've used.
Still no explanation why it took Microsoft a decade to produce a reasonably stable version of Windows. Hopefully they won't need another decade to eliminate all those Outlook worms.
Geez, I try to write a conciliatory response, and still can't help making snide Windows remarks. I need to lighten up a bit.
I'm not surprised Microsoft wanted to hire the guy away from SuSE. I'm surprised the SuSE salesman wanted to work for Microsoft.
Of course, as a geek, what motivates people (partiticularly marketing people) is a foreign concept to me. Money, I suppose. Duh.
I read somewhere that Karl Aigner is going to be one of the first contestants on the new Fox TV show, Who Wants To Kill Their Parents For A Million Dollars?
And the show will feature Bill Gates doing a new MasterCard commercial. "There are some things that money can't buy... but I can't even imagine what they might be."
I've given up on any legal solution. I suggest that any of us who don't like Microsoft products or marketing tactics spend a little more time converting users. Slashdot readers are routinely consulted by friends and relatives when buying or maintaining a PC. You know, 'cause we're geeks. My stock answer is now, "If you're surfing the net, sending email and word processing, let me introduce you to Linux."
The Mac is a good option too. I pointed my brother in that direction several years ago and he hasn't needed any support from me since then.
For anyone willing to change, and it's not that hard, they get the free hardware and software support they are accustomed to getting from me. But I'm not wasting any more time removing worms, reinstalling Windows every year when registry rot requires it, or cleaning up spyware. After a short period, I'm saving time, and so is the user.
For now, I'm not trying to convert people who still need a lot of Windows-specific apps. They're phase II. But for most people, I'm now happy recommending Linux, and it's sufficiently mature that most people are happy using it. We've reached that important knee of the curve.
Most naive users are surprised that they no longer have daily crashes, Outlook worms, etc. And they like the price, too. I think most non-geeks would be demanding a nice GUI Linux, but they simply didn't know that option existed.
Microsoft is huge, mostly because in the DOS days PHBs made the purchasing decisions, and we know how technically astute they can be. The Microsoft monopoly is a market based problem, and there is a market based solution. If you don't like it, don't support it. Change the PC marketplace, one PC at a time.
They pay (approx) $45 for a full version of Microsoft Office 2003 Pro. And $52 for a full copy of Windows XP...
Linux is free, OpenOffice.org is free, Mozilla is free....
Microsoft's school marketing program is about as altruistic as Phillip Morris putting low cost cigarette vending machines in high schools.
It's demoralizing to see Microsoft drag out every anti-trust case, and when they're finally found guilty, and all appeals are eventually exhausted, weasel and squirm their way into a "settlement" that amounts to little more than marketing.
Like I said, I wish I had bought an extended warranty.
The scroll wheel breaking when dropped two feet onto carpet is disappointing. I handed mine to a friend and we somehow botched the handoff. We did an odd juggling dance. It would have been funny, if a fragile $400 device hadn't hit a tile floor from about three feet. Landed on it's back and didn't even skip.
My Karma's LCD screen is starting to get a lot of fine scratches. I think they occur when it's in the felt bag in my pocket. Some guy is selling protective covers on eBay. They look a bit cheesy to me. I think they're thin neoprene with a clear soft vinyl window. There are hardcoating processes for Lexan that make "bulletproof glass" vandal resistant as well. Fused quartz is even harder if someone wanted to make a clear insert out of that. I guess the scratch-o-matic plastic was more cost effective.
I'll just treat my Karma as gently as I can and hope for the best. I wish there was a way to backup the entire contents to my PC hard drive, in case I need to swap out my Karma. I use RMML under Linux to transfer songs, and I have a lot of time invested. I'd hate to have to do all that all over again. It'd take 2-3 days to get back where I am because I usually have to supply the track numbers manually.
A coworker of a friend had a hard drive go bad. He said that his Karma wouldn't power on properly, and just displayed the message "Bad Karma". Pretty funny error message, unless it happens to you.
I really don't think the financial analysis is the correct one. I'm fairly sure the US will derive enough benefit to justify the cost, although the benefit is admitedly difficult to quantify and is amortized over the rest of our specie's existence. Does it matter if the rest of the world gets a free ride? They do pure science too, and we benefit. Science is a collaborative effort. This isn't some billion dollar defense department project seeking a military advantage over a perceived adversary. This is about scientific discovery and learning things that have never been known. In my cynicism concerning politics, I sometimes forget to be optimistic about the science.
Moore's Law. In a decade, parking meters will be self aware, and will petition for human rights. You'll run a few minutes late, and as you try to jam in a quarter, the meter will hassle you. You'll end up arguing over some esoteric philosophical point. It's classic Descarte. Cogito ergo sum. The parking meter thinks, therefore the parking meter exists.
Your 3rd Karma since Christmas!?! I've heard of hard drive problems, but one a month? Your comments about scratching the screen and breaking off the scroll wheel lead me to believe you're kinda hard on the hardware. I know it's supposed to be portable, so you can expect the occasional bump. But this thing is small and it has a tiny hard drive. It's not intended to chock the wheels of your car, pound nails, or fill in when you forgot to bring your puck to hockey practice.
Still on my 1st Karma, since about Thanksgiving. I do wish I'd gotten the extended warranty, though.
You are completely missing my point. I never said Windows is too expensive. My only complaint about the price was about being forced to pay for an operating system I didn't want and wouldn't use.
My complaints with Windows are:
A monopoly invariably results in inferior products. That seems obvious, as there is no competition, and therefore no need to worry about the consumer. Companies should compete on merit, not marketing dirty tricks.
A monopoly exists to maintain the monopoly, not to compete to satisfy market demands which would benefit consumers.
While a monopoly would seem to bring standards and order to a messy market, it quickly degenerates into "standards" that only perpetuate the monopoly. Every time the proprietary DOC file format changes to force people to buy yet another new version of a word processor, the monopoly wins and consumers lose. Every time someone puts up a website that uses Internet Explorer's proprietary extensions instead of the perfectly good HTML standards, we move a little closer to the bad old days when there was little chance of viewing a document created on a different computer or using a different application.
Open source software provides real choices. Consumers pick what they like, on a fair and level playing field. Sure, it'd be nice if there was only one Linux GUI, instead of Gnome, KDE, etc. But that sort of thing is minor compared to the bad situation that arises from a monopoly.
I'm not one of the Linux fans that insists on everything being free. I like free enterprise. If you have a better product, you should make money. I purchase nicely integrated Linux distros, and I don't save much money over buying Windows. In a competitive environment, It's mostly about choice.
It seems we agree that the problem is a large and intrusive federal government, we simply disagree about the possible solution.
I am familiar with "tyrrany of the majority". We have that now, when politicians care more about polls than they care about doing what's right. They almost always do what's politically expedient. Of course, they only care about polls when it isn't too much in conflict with the wishes of those who paid to have them elected. But it seems to me that the people who wrote the United States Constitution were a lot more concerned about the tyrrany of the minority, having seen it first hand in Europe, where the powerful few subjugated the majority. And that is exactly the sort of tyrrany we have today. It isn't tyrrany from the kings and The Church conspiring to maintain absolute power. Instead, we've substituted large corporations and powerful individuals, but it's still a matter of those in power weilding their power to stay in power.
I'd rather have the tyrrany of the majority than the tyrrany of the minority. And I say that as someone who frequently finds himself in the minority when speaking out for personal freedoms, liberty, rights and opportunity.
How do you propose to keep the voting citizenship informed of every bill and how it might impact their lives if it beocmes law?
As I mentioned before, not everyone would vote on every issue. We'd vote on what matters to us. The people voting would be the ones who are informed. How many people today vote for elected officials randomly? They know something about the candidates for the major seats available, but 80% of the votes are based on how someone's name sounds.
Representatives are elected as watchdogs for those of us who don't have enough time to participate ourselves. They are our eyes and ears.
Now who's being an idealist? Politicians are commodities, purchased by corporations. By corporate accounting measures, they're cheap enough that most corporations buy BOTH candidates. Vote for whomever you want. It doesn't matter. The corporation still wins and the voters lose.
How do you propose from keeping big-money lobbiests form paying off the voting population?
Good question. It's a lot more difficult and expensive for a corporation to buy thousands of individual votes. It forces them out in the open, instead of making backroom deals behind closed doors. Democracy is inherently an open process, and it fails when corrupted by sleazy secret deals.
Let's not forget that not everyone has access to or wants to use the Internet.
I don't think it'll happen today. My hope is that we can start talking about it today, as a way of moving away from the corrupt two party system. In a hundred years, the issue of access to technology will not be an issue at all. The pure democracy will be viable. But not if we insist that the status quo is the only way it can work. I firmly believe that the people who established the system we have today used elected representatives because that was the best they could do with technology in the late 1700s. I think they'd want a more pure democracy, now that technology is making that a possibility.
No, it won't be a perfect sysytem, but almost anything is better than the corruption we have today, where the system guarantees that all major political candidates are corrupt. Heck, I'm so desperate to eliminate corruption I'd be in favor of selecting representatives at random. I've been to the Department of Motor Vehicles, so I know just how bad a random selection could be. But at least we'd have a democratic process using a representative sampling of the population, instead of a system where only corrupt weasels get to vote on the issues.
I'm sick of having to choose between two guys I know are both blow dried professional politicians, with a corporate agenda. Sadly, I've given up hope of having a candidate who wants to do what is right. I'm thinking about voting for Senator Palpatine. Comparatively speaking, he doesn't look too bad.
The generic notebook PCs available during the time in question cost $100 less, were a year behind the state of the art, used inferior parts and had much lower reliability and poor support. They weren't a viable option.
The point is, Microsoft DID use their OS monopoly to severely limit choices for consumers, squelch healthy competition, and maintain their monopoly. Consumers were harmed by Microsoft's unfair and illegal anticompetitive practices, as the courts have repeatedly demonstrated. Technology suffered too, as technically superior OS options were suppressed.
The penalties for Microsoft's repeated and willful antitrust violations need to be in line with the severity of the crime. We need to stop allowing Microsoft to continue to act like a monopoly, then pay a small "cost of doing business" fine. It's more like a monopoly tax. Given that the fines are often paid in the form of Windows PCs for school children, they probably come out of the Microsoft advertising budget. It's outrageous.
I don't see how you can defend Microsoft's marketing tactics. Do you believe the bully should always win, just because he's the biggest? If monopolies are so great, why not have the government control all software development, under the guise of standards for interoperability?
Microsoft has consistently abused their own customers because they're a captive audience. Consumers need to wake up and fight against this monopoly which benefits only itself. There are much better choices, and consumers need to know this.
The big news will be the pure democracy that technology now allows. We should all be able to vote securely online, on each individual issue. No more weasel politicians.
Don't care about an issue? Don't vote. Care passionately? Vote! We'll have an electorate that is much more knowledgeable. We'll eliminate the graft and corruption that is inevitable when big money pays for a campaign to elect someone who is supposed to represent the electorate. Cut out the middle man and vote on the issues directly. And no more pork filled bills with hundreds of items snuck in there, allowing politicians to claim they voted for something very noble and patriotic, when they actually voted themselves a raise and everyone traded votes for their favorite pork barrel projects.
I'd be willing to sell you some SCO insurance for a lot less. And I accept PayPal.
IBM's legal team will prevail and destroy SCO in the process. There won't be anything left for Red Hat, AutoZone, or Daimler-Chrysler. There is no chance at all that anyone farther down the chain will ever face SCO in court. SCO insurance is a sucker bet.
The business world is finally learning what/. readers have known all along. SCO is a scam. SCOX stock has generally trended downward, with a few surprising upward blips based on the FUD of the day. But SCO is now in its death spiral. The stock is tumbling, and this time it isn't coming back. Time for this company to take a little dirt nap.
It's also time for Microsoft to launch the next assault against Linux. I say, "Bring it, bitch."
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It is illegal. That has already been proven in the courts. I realize I'm preaching to the choir, but I can't help myself. Righteous indignation is like that.
To extend your analogy, imagine if Toyota had been found guilty of anticompetitive marketing practices, and they delayed, and appealed, and eventually their fine was reduced to providing Toyota brochures for driver's education classes. Toyota would naturally decide that their most profitable strategy would be to operate illegally, unfairly leverage their market share to their benefit, and pay the silly little fines. It's essentially a small fee to operate a big monopoly.
I bought a new HP notebook 18 months ago. Of course, due to Microsoft's anticompetitive OEM marketing agreement which has been adjudicated as illegal, I was forced to buy a copy of WinXP that I didn't need because I run Linux. Of course, I can't sell my WinXP to someone who wants to upgrade from Win98 because it's some bastardized OEM version that only works on a model of notebook PC that already shipped with XP. I'm sure they didn't do that on purpose (bastards).
I suspect there are about as many Windows pirates in the US as there are Linux notebook PC users who have a virgin Windows license. I think I'll register www.Pirate-MS-Licences.com as a place where Linux users can donate their unused licenses to pirates. When Microsoft sues me, my defense will be, "I was forced to buy this thing, and now I can't even GIVE it away? How is that not a Microsoft Tax on notebook PCs?"
I have a Rio Karma 20 digital music player. A friend told me that his coworker has one and the hard drive died. He turned it on, and the large LCD would only display BAD KARMA.
I really don't believe that I thought of a technical solution that *real* quantum physicists didn't. I know the people working on this are WAY smarter than me, and based on their confidence, I know they must be very proud of what is being called quantum computing. As others have pointed out, it's actually quantum key hiding. That isn't a criticism. As you stated, if you're willing to use a key as long as the message, there is a very nice mathematical neatness to the theoretical security. Of course, in practice, people do not want keys as long as the message, and using a key even half the length of the message results in a brute force decryption for real world messages containing native language text. In other words, try to imagine a paragraph that can be decrypted into English, with all the words spelled correctly, proper sentence structure, and a meaningful message. What are the odds that any other key in the set of all possible keys will do that? The neat theoretical security very quickly dissolves for key lengths less than or equal to half the message length.
As for your attempt to educate me on the technical side of WHY the theorists are so certain of the security on the mechanical side of quantum key protection, I'm sorry to say I completely failed to follow it. It sounded like a lot of technical hand waving, followed by "therefore it's 100% secure. QED." As I said, I'm obviously not a quantum physicist. As such, I'm willing to take it on faith that there is a good mathematical proof. My only option is to spend a day researching it, which I'm not willing to do. And I seem to remember reading about quantum encryption 2-3 years ago in an article (Scientific American?) that presented it in a manner that I could grasp without a strong quantum mechanics background. I vaguely recall being convinced of the soundness of the theory by the previous article.
However, as much as I like math, I'm an engineer and not a mathematician. If a mathematician is told that he can move halfway toward a pile of money across the room every second, he'll never play the game because he knows he can never reach the money. The less-theoretical engineer will quickly realize that within five seconds, he'll be close enough that he can reach the cash.
If you're willing to admit to these two aspects of hackability, I'm willing to retire my argument, more on philosophical grounds than mathematical merits.People have been trying to hide messages almost as long as we've grunted gutteral vowels at each other. We're still trying. The best attempts have resulted in methods that delay decryption long enough to be useful in the real world. That's ultimately all that's needed. And for that, 512-bit RSA over SSL TCP/IP will suffice for a long time to come, and without the expense and complexity of quantum receivers and transmitters. Sure, you can't send the key immediately prior to the message, but it does use a public key, which is pretty damn clever and useful.
Please don't think I'm against quantum cryptography research. I'm not. It appeals to the math/science guy within, to the extent I've stopped to understand it. Heck, any field of study that starts with "quantum" gets bonus points for style. But quantum mechanics is still new enough and sufficiently nonintuitive that I believe we can't be too sure of our proofs. Sort of like a proof based on Newtonian physics before any understanding of relativity. As an engineer, I say that's all the more reason to build devices and test them. The real world is an important laboratory, and building quantum encryption devices will teach us new things. Advancing the state of the art is almost always a good thing. Even in the unlikely event that it's a total waste of time, it'd be a lot better than the many examples of spending a lot of money and inadvertently making the world a less happy place. Unless there's a chance of a quantum photon detector or transmitter collapsing nearby stars, I say go for it.
This is only true if the key is secure. Unless you can prove otherwise, I'll stick with my hypothetical device that emits a quantum entangled photon at exactly the same time as their key photon is received. Once the key is obtained, it's a simple matter of XORing. Even if the first several characters of the key were lost calibrating the timing, it would be a trivial matter to guess them. Not much brute force would be needed to guess five characters.
I know that. But my proposed method of defeating it does. Their detector wouldn't know the photon my system emitted was entangled with one that I controlled.
I'm not re-emitting anything. I'm determining the quantum state of their photon. Their detector does that, so mine can too. I'm changing the quantum state of my own photon. They're transmitter does that, so mine can too. The only difference is, I'm changing the state of a photon that causes a quantum state change in an entangled photon, but I don't see a problem with that. In fact, while I'm not a quantum physicist, what I propose seems only slightly more difficult than what they're already doing. Breaking encryption is almost always more difficult than encrypting and decrypting. That's the only purpose of encryption - to make it more difficult, not completely impossible as the researchers seem to be claiming.
Yes, it does. The linked article specifically mentioned this. Actually, I think it might have been a link from the linked article. The critical time window was the method they use to determine which arriving photon was the key photon, as opposed to a photon emitted by the sun.
That's been claimed for many of the various encryption schemes. Remember the foolish bravado of the company that claimed their video encoding technology was unbreakable? I know more people who enjoy pirated satellite TV than I do those who purchase the service. I'm not saying most of their viewers are pirating the service. That statistic probably says more about me, based on my shady geek associates. But a significant number of people are surely enjoying this "proven unconditionally secure" system. At the risk of repeating myself, it's a fundamental law. Everything can be hacked. Claiming it can't just causes it to happen sooner rather than later.
The brute force method can make some assumptions. If you were transmitting a message with no information content (noise, random characters), I'd agree. But to be useful, the system must be able to transmit information. If a short key is used for a long message, the key can be guessed by brute force. Eventually, real words will result instead of gibberish, and it's easy for a decrypting routine to detect that as a successful brute force decryption. If the key is as long as the message then I agree that the message would be as secure as the key, but I still argue that my previous statements indicate that the key is not as secure as we are being told. Even the DOD won't give someone a grant for a more complicated and expensive method that doesn't improve on the success of previous efforts. Geeks gotta eat. And they're naturally enthusiastic about their work. So their grant proposals and public statements reflect undue optimism.
Or are you suggesting that this is going to be the first unhackable system ever built? That notion seems laughable to me. If I had a religion, the idea of something being unhackable would be heresy.
Hacker Rule #1: Everything can be hacked.
The Quantum Man In The Middle
To prevent the man-in-the-middle attack where a photon is intercepted and an identical photon is transmitted in its place, the sender and receiver rely on a very tight window in time. Any photons received outside that window are rejected. If you want to grab the quantum secured key, why not put a receiver in the middle that emits a quantum entangled photon? You intercept the sender's photon, and once you know its state you can change the state of the captured photon so its entangled twin has the same quantum state as the intercepted photon, and arrives at the correct time. You essentially use quantum entanglement to change the state of the imposter photon while it's in transit.
Quantum Brute Force
Quantum computing is emerging almost as fast as "quantum cryptography" (actually "quantum tamper resistant key transmission"). In the near future a good quantum computer will be fast enough to quickly break today's strong encryption. This is the same old game of making sure encryption is just strong enough that commercial users can't crack it but governments can. It's a moving target. Make your own VERY secure encryption algorithm that jumps fifty years down the path of Moore's Law. Add 32 bits to your key and you're secure. That'll piss off your government. So will tying up several hours on their massive supercomputers to learn that you used your favorite commercial encryption algorithm to send your grandmother's cream candy recipe to an internet cafe in South Africa. I'd never do that, but I'd be very tempted to send The Constitution and The Bill of Rights.
Granted, while I painlessly learn new GIMP tricks every time I use it, I'm still nowhere close to utilizing its potential. But it does everything I want and more, the package install was very quick and easy, it works with my scanner, and it seems fast considering some of the operations I've done on large images. No EULA or copy protection hassles either.
Disclaimers: I am not a graphics pro. I use the GIMP for pretty simple stuff. And I'm comparing recent versions of the GIMP with older versions of PS and PSP.
However, the recent versions of the GIMP are 1.x and 2.x and I'm comparing them against much higher version numbers of PS and PSP, so maybe it isn't such an unfair comparison after all. At the rate the GIMP is advancing, when it reaches version 7.0, it'll not only do all your graphic stuff automatically and before you even know you wanted it, but it'll also serve you free pizza and Jolt cola. OSS may start by satisfying a programmer's itch, but it eventually ends up listening to users and making them very happy.
Despite the /. detractors who don't like it because they learned PS or PSP first, the GIMP is a very useful tool now, and is destined for greatness a version or two down the road.
Besides, any software with such a cute little weasel rat bastard mascot must be good.
I bought the 15C used for $20 and sold it for $179. I bought two new 32SII calculators for $40 each when they were discontinued and sold them a couple of years later for $185 and $215. Good small HP RPN calculators did even better than most tech stocks in the 90's tech bubble. They're great investments.
Two years in a row, I emailed HP, asking them for a replacement for the 32SII. I made sure they were aware the used price had shot up to $200+. That should motivate them. I told them I wanted RPN, small, rugged, easy to use, and some built-in conversions.
I have a pair of $50 eBay 48G calculators. They're better than the HP algebraic clunkers. I can no longer use anything but RPN. But the 48 series is a bunch of overly complicated crap. Good hardware, bad user interface. I've been waiting for the 32SII replacement. Smaller, better, faster.
From the specs, the 33S looks a lot better than the 48, but not as good as the 32SII. It appears to be flimsier, too. And the design looks like a damn Romulan tricorder from STNG. But I'll still buy one and give it a try, once they're widely available. The 48Gs have got to go.
If the 33S is not good, I'll sell it and the 48G's, bite the bullet and buy two $200 32SII calculators on eBay. Ouch. The 33S specs are all screwed up. They claim the calculator is .06 inches deep, and the mindless retailers copy the same specs to their websites. Almost certainly .6 inches. And most sites claim they use coin cells, but there are references to AAA batteries. Pin head marketing dweebs.
But what about Intel's motive? From the article:
Getting a chipmaker involved in a 3D file format committee sounds like a good way to ensure a very computationally inefficient format that needs custom hardware to encode and decode. Heck, why not get some RAM manufacturers, hard drive manufacturers and bandwidth suppliers on the committee to make sure the file sizes are huge, too?
That's a pretty decent start.
Funny story: A friend and I both have similarly PC intensive engineering businesses. He uses Win2000, and teases me about Linux. Of course, I give it right back to him. I learned a couple of months ago that the Outlook worm problem became so bad that for some reason having to do with the way he runs his Exchange server, he can no longer double click a DOC file attachment in Outlook and view it in Word. There is no way for him to override this added security feature. Of course, I double click DOC attachments in Mozilla and view them in OpenOffice, and with no worries about executing malware. In this case, it looks like the situation is reversed. He still has the security issues of Outlook and Windows, but without the ease of use. He does what I previously had to do. Save the DOC file, run the application, then open the DOC file.
I got to do my Linux superior dance.
Of course, I didn't tell him when my USB scanner mysteriously quit working. I still haven't figured out the stupid Linux trick I need to do to resurrect it.
Fair enough. I bailed on Windows just before XP. My criticism was based on Win95 and Win98. I've heard from several people I trust that XP is much more stable than all the previous versions I've used.
Still no explanation why it took Microsoft a decade to produce a reasonably stable version of Windows. Hopefully they won't need another decade to eliminate all those Outlook worms.
Geez, I try to write a conciliatory response, and still can't help making snide Windows remarks. I need to lighten up a bit.
Of course, as a geek, what motivates people (partiticularly marketing people) is a foreign concept to me. Money, I suppose. Duh.
I read somewhere that Karl Aigner is going to be one of the first contestants on the new Fox TV show, Who Wants To Kill Their Parents For A Million Dollars?
And the show will feature Bill Gates doing a new MasterCard commercial. "There are some things that money can't buy... but I can't even imagine what they might be."
The Mac is a good option too. I pointed my brother in that direction several years ago and he hasn't needed any support from me since then.
For anyone willing to change, and it's not that hard, they get the free hardware and software support they are accustomed to getting from me. But I'm not wasting any more time removing worms, reinstalling Windows every year when registry rot requires it, or cleaning up spyware. After a short period, I'm saving time, and so is the user.
For now, I'm not trying to convert people who still need a lot of Windows-specific apps. They're phase II. But for most people, I'm now happy recommending Linux, and it's sufficiently mature that most people are happy using it. We've reached that important knee of the curve.
Most naive users are surprised that they no longer have daily crashes, Outlook worms, etc. And they like the price, too. I think most non-geeks would be demanding a nice GUI Linux, but they simply didn't know that option existed.
Microsoft is huge, mostly because in the DOS days PHBs made the purchasing decisions, and we know how technically astute they can be. The Microsoft monopoly is a market based problem, and there is a market based solution. If you don't like it, don't support it. Change the PC marketplace, one PC at a time.
Microsoft's school marketing program is about as altruistic as Phillip Morris putting low cost cigarette vending machines in high schools.
It's demoralizing to see Microsoft drag out every anti-trust case, and when they're finally found guilty, and all appeals are eventually exhausted, weasel and squirm their way into a "settlement" that amounts to little more than marketing.
The scroll wheel breaking when dropped two feet onto carpet is disappointing. I handed mine to a friend and we somehow botched the handoff. We did an odd juggling dance. It would have been funny, if a fragile $400 device hadn't hit a tile floor from about three feet. Landed on it's back and didn't even skip.
My Karma's LCD screen is starting to get a lot of fine scratches. I think they occur when it's in the felt bag in my pocket. Some guy is selling protective covers on eBay. They look a bit cheesy to me. I think they're thin neoprene with a clear soft vinyl window. There are hardcoating processes for Lexan that make "bulletproof glass" vandal resistant as well. Fused quartz is even harder if someone wanted to make a clear insert out of that. I guess the scratch-o-matic plastic was more cost effective.
I'll just treat my Karma as gently as I can and hope for the best. I wish there was a way to backup the entire contents to my PC hard drive, in case I need to swap out my Karma. I use RMML under Linux to transfer songs, and I have a lot of time invested. I'd hate to have to do all that all over again. It'd take 2-3 days to get back where I am because I usually have to supply the track numbers manually.
A coworker of a friend had a hard drive go bad. He said that his Karma wouldn't power on properly, and just displayed the message "Bad Karma". Pretty funny error message, unless it happens to you.
I really don't think the financial analysis is the correct one. I'm fairly sure the US will derive enough benefit to justify the cost, although the benefit is admitedly difficult to quantify and is amortized over the rest of our specie's existence. Does it matter if the rest of the world gets a free ride? They do pure science too, and we benefit. Science is a collaborative effort. This isn't some billion dollar defense department project seeking a military advantage over a perceived adversary. This is about scientific discovery and learning things that have never been known. In my cynicism concerning politics, I sometimes forget to be optimistic about the science.
Moore's Law. In a decade, parking meters will be self aware, and will petition for human rights. You'll run a few minutes late, and as you try to jam in a quarter, the meter will hassle you. You'll end up arguing over some esoteric philosophical point. It's classic Descarte. Cogito ergo sum. The parking meter thinks, therefore the parking meter exists.
Still on my 1st Karma, since about Thanksgiving. I do wish I'd gotten the extended warranty, though.
My complaints with Windows are:
A monopoly invariably results in inferior products. That seems obvious, as there is no competition, and therefore no need to worry about the consumer. Companies should compete on merit, not marketing dirty tricks.
A monopoly exists to maintain the monopoly, not to compete to satisfy market demands which would benefit consumers.
While a monopoly would seem to bring standards and order to a messy market, it quickly degenerates into "standards" that only perpetuate the monopoly. Every time the proprietary DOC file format changes to force people to buy yet another new version of a word processor, the monopoly wins and consumers lose. Every time someone puts up a website that uses Internet Explorer's proprietary extensions instead of the perfectly good HTML standards, we move a little closer to the bad old days when there was little chance of viewing a document created on a different computer or using a different application.
Open source software provides real choices. Consumers pick what they like, on a fair and level playing field. Sure, it'd be nice if there was only one Linux GUI, instead of Gnome, KDE, etc. But that sort of thing is minor compared to the bad situation that arises from a monopoly.
I'm not one of the Linux fans that insists on everything being free. I like free enterprise. If you have a better product, you should make money. I purchase nicely integrated Linux distros, and I don't save much money over buying Windows. In a competitive environment, It's mostly about choice.
Repeat after me. Monopoly... bad.
I am familiar with "tyrrany of the majority". We have that now, when politicians care more about polls than they care about doing what's right. They almost always do what's politically expedient. Of course, they only care about polls when it isn't too much in conflict with the wishes of those who paid to have them elected. But it seems to me that the people who wrote the United States Constitution were a lot more concerned about the tyrrany of the minority, having seen it first hand in Europe, where the powerful few subjugated the majority. And that is exactly the sort of tyrrany we have today. It isn't tyrrany from the kings and The Church conspiring to maintain absolute power. Instead, we've substituted large corporations and powerful individuals, but it's still a matter of those in power weilding their power to stay in power.
I'd rather have the tyrrany of the majority than the tyrrany of the minority. And I say that as someone who frequently finds himself in the minority when speaking out for personal freedoms, liberty, rights and opportunity.
As I mentioned before, not everyone would vote on every issue. We'd vote on what matters to us. The people voting would be the ones who are informed. How many people today vote for elected officials randomly? They know something about the candidates for the major seats available, but 80% of the votes are based on how someone's name sounds.
Representatives are elected as watchdogs for those of us who don't have enough time to participate ourselves. They are our eyes and ears.
Now who's being an idealist? Politicians are commodities, purchased by corporations. By corporate accounting measures, they're cheap enough that most corporations buy BOTH candidates. Vote for whomever you want. It doesn't matter. The corporation still wins and the voters lose.
How do you propose from keeping big-money lobbiests form paying off the voting population?
Good question. It's a lot more difficult and expensive for a corporation to buy thousands of individual votes. It forces them out in the open, instead of making backroom deals behind closed doors. Democracy is inherently an open process, and it fails when corrupted by sleazy secret deals.
Let's not forget that not everyone has access to or wants to use the Internet.
I don't think it'll happen today. My hope is that we can start talking about it today, as a way of moving away from the corrupt two party system. In a hundred years, the issue of access to technology will not be an issue at all. The pure democracy will be viable. But not if we insist that the status quo is the only way it can work. I firmly believe that the people who established the system we have today used elected representatives because that was the best they could do with technology in the late 1700s. I think they'd want a more pure democracy, now that technology is making that a possibility.
No, it won't be a perfect sysytem, but almost anything is better than the corruption we have today, where the system guarantees that all major political candidates are corrupt. Heck, I'm so desperate to eliminate corruption I'd be in favor of selecting representatives at random. I've been to the Department of Motor Vehicles, so I know just how bad a random selection could be. But at least we'd have a democratic process using a representative sampling of the population, instead of a system where only corrupt weasels get to vote on the issues.
I'm sick of having to choose between two guys I know are both blow dried professional politicians, with a corporate agenda. Sadly, I've given up hope of having a candidate who wants to do what is right. I'm thinking about voting for Senator Palpatine. Comparatively speaking, he doesn't look too bad.
The point is, Microsoft DID use their OS monopoly to severely limit choices for consumers, squelch healthy competition, and maintain their monopoly. Consumers were harmed by Microsoft's unfair and illegal anticompetitive practices, as the courts have repeatedly demonstrated. Technology suffered too, as technically superior OS options were suppressed.
The penalties for Microsoft's repeated and willful antitrust violations need to be in line with the severity of the crime. We need to stop allowing Microsoft to continue to act like a monopoly, then pay a small "cost of doing business" fine. It's more like a monopoly tax. Given that the fines are often paid in the form of Windows PCs for school children, they probably come out of the Microsoft advertising budget. It's outrageous.
I don't see how you can defend Microsoft's marketing tactics. Do you believe the bully should always win, just because he's the biggest? If monopolies are so great, why not have the government control all software development, under the guise of standards for interoperability?
Microsoft has consistently abused their own customers because they're a captive audience. Consumers need to wake up and fight against this monopoly which benefits only itself. There are much better choices, and consumers need to know this.
Don't care about an issue? Don't vote. Care passionately? Vote! We'll have an electorate that is much more knowledgeable. We'll eliminate the graft and corruption that is inevitable when big money pays for a campaign to elect someone who is supposed to represent the electorate. Cut out the middle man and vote on the issues directly. And no more pork filled bills with hundreds of items snuck in there, allowing politicians to claim they voted for something very noble and patriotic, when they actually voted themselves a raise and everyone traded votes for their favorite pork barrel projects.
IBM's legal team will prevail and destroy SCO in the process. There won't be anything left for Red Hat, AutoZone, or Daimler-Chrysler. There is no chance at all that anyone farther down the chain will ever face SCO in court. SCO insurance is a sucker bet.
The business world is finally learning what /. readers have known all along. SCO is a scam. SCOX stock has generally trended downward, with a few surprising upward blips based on the FUD of the day. But SCO is now in its death spiral. The stock is tumbling, and this time it isn't coming back. Time for this company to take a little dirt nap.
It's also time for Microsoft to launch the next assault against Linux. I say, "Bring it, bitch."