Like I said... it's a battle between two good things. Shutting up morons is a good thing; there are ideas and philosophies that have been so soundly and thoroughly discredited for so long that it's merely a waste of breath (and an offensive one in some cases) to air them again.
But then again, free speech is a good thing; when large organizations have the right to stifle those who would oppose them, everyone suffers. The organization corrupts, and the minority's rights are impeded.
Where the line should be drawn between these two good things is an exercise left to the reader. But note, just because Nat Van has been removed from Google News does not mean it is inaccessible via their more-popular search site. One can still find them with a simple "I feel lucky."
Google also, and much more quietly, is removing the National Vanguard, known as a racist neo-Fascist organization, from its list of news sources. This raises the question, how the heck did a site like National Vanguard (no, I won't link to it) wind up on Google's list of news sources in the first place?
And the battle between the good of free speech and the good of shutting up morons continues...
Re:Info on what exactly SHA-1 is ...
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 1
But if you created two documents with the same hash, and then I signed one, wouldn't you have to re-hash it after my signature? Consequently the presence of additional data (my signature) would result in a different output of the hash function than that generated by the unsigned original. The hashes are now different, and there's no way you can claim I signed the other document.
Assuming my digital signature contains some amount of random or non-predictable data, you couldn't even figure out beforehand what a signed document would hash to, and you'd have to start searching for a hash match after I'd signed the original.
Why not have a bar-code on every dollar bill that can validate each bill. If a serial comes up in the same place more than once, then it is fake and disabled. This would be a global database, but not unrealistic.
How is a global database of currency bar codes (which could keep track of which bills are spent when - and track bill X from your ATM to the bookstore you spend it in to the restaurant the cashier spends it in...) less intrusive than firmware blocks in your scanners and printers?
I do agree that it's a lot more cost-effective for a mint to produce coins rather than bills - they certainly have a much longer usable lifespan, and probably are less attractive to counterfeiters - but coins have their own problems. It's a lot easier for a $50 coin to accidentally roll out of your pocket than for a $50 bill to fall out of your wallet. Unless the coin is huge and cumbersome, that is - and who wants to carry a fistful of them around if they are?
No, it isn't. Is it? What institute, body, or power exists to uphold this right? Who bestowed this right? In my country (U.S.), we have "certain inalienable rights" "endowed by [our] Creator", and "among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but I don't recall a U.S. Constitutionally-guaranteed right to privacy.
Not trolling, just wondering where a right to privacy would come from, if such does exist.
This is fascinating news, and seems to confirm many astronomer's / xenogeologist's wildest hopes for the Red Planet. But, and forgive my ignorance, where has the water all gone? The atmosphere is mostly CO2, I believe... so, somewhere, there's a bunch of H2 missing. And whether or not Mars ever supported life, I doubt it ever hosted an ecosystem on a scale large enough to convert that much water. Where'd it go? How'd it get there? Anyone?
Perhaps the article could have avoided the confusion we seem to be seeing on the/. boards - and retained its original meaning - if it had been titled "...Total Cost of Pwnership". (Though it would lose the subtlety points it now enjoys.) Those of you flaming this article as astroturf should RTFA and NTFD (Notice the F***ing Details) so that you can GTFJ (Get the F***ing Joke).
The idea of John Q. building his own is silly as well. John Q. does not build small nuclear power plants, nor does he use home-built STMs. Even after several generations of assemblers, the hardware required for programming and design will be out of the Everyman's reach.
1959 says, "The idea of John Q. building his own computer is silly... even after several generations of computers, the hardware required for programming and design will be out of the Everyman's reach."
So you can't count on security through obscurity...
[A]ssemblers won't be universal machines that can tear apart anything and put anything back together. They'll be like custom proteins. One assembler will strip the H from H2O. And that's it. One might add an O to CO. And that's it. They are not magic, they are robotic assembling on a small scale.
That's true. But there's another concern besides mere accidental creation of universally destructive assemblers: intentional creation of universally destructive assemblers.
Consider the following scenario: a scientifically advanced government with interests to preserve engineers a nanobot that parasitically subsists on the opium poppy (or genetically engineers a virus to the same purpose, which seems even more plausible). Using the poppy as its energy source, and destroying the host in the process, this little bugger goes through opium populations like a plague, then after destroying its food source, starves itself out so the government doesn't have to worry about it any more.
Flash forward thirty years or so, to a time when such technology is becoming available on the "black market" to countries or organizations with less-than-altruistic motives - groups of people with a grudge against humanity and a willingness to die to prove their point (see Clancy's Rainbow Six baddies, or substitute the Islamic group of your choice). They use this same technology, originally developed for a war on drugs, and tweak it into a war on humanity. As you say, this doesn't have to be some all-consuming Frankenvirus they're making here - it just has to destroy some fundamental, say, amino acid (well within the capability of a microbug, I'd say, though IANAN), and we're right back to gray goo for all practical purposes. At least where humanity is concerned.
Parent is right; Richard P. Feynman is the true father of nanotechnology. His December 1959 lecture There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom is the foundational work of nanotech; it's short, to the point, and to this day still makes a fascinating and exciting read. Any discussion of nanotech should begin with Feynman's lecture, and I'm surprised it hasn't already been linked in this discussion.
Uh - so primitive (asexual) humans designed and constructed the X and Y chromosomes, adding them to the human genome? Dang, those guys^H^H^H^H folks were more advanced than we give them credit for!
Or, wait - maybe you're saying that a person can't be a "human construct" without having a "gender." But that flies in the face of what the liberal wing of the feminist movement has maintained for thirty some-odd years - that the human is entirely genderless?
I don't understand what you're trying to say... but I'm determined to make a joke out of it nonetheless. >;]
"Back in the day," an OOD class I took at Georgia Tech was taught in Squeak - which was widely held to be waning in favor even then. I don't see how it's groundbreaking now.
Not to say it's good for nothing - Squeak is particularly good at web crawling apps, IIRC.
As an added bit of trivia, I believe Squeak was so named because one of its biggest proponents is the Mouse himself.
... since TFA goes on to say the vulnerability explicitly affects "long-lived" TCP connections, not the POP3 / HTTP / SMTP that Joe User relies on. However, for businesses and security wonks this is a potentially big deal.
This announcement comes with convenient timing for MSFT, I must say... considering this morning's earlier announcement that they're in Deep Stuff(TM) from the EU...
I wonder, does MSFT have some kind of cache of these slightly-beneficial placating press releases somewhere, just waiting to be unleashed to cover up the latest bad news?
Or to put it another way, if the EC had ruled against MSFT three weeks ago, would we have seen this announcement coming from Redmond that afternoon instead?
So, let me get this straight - my spam filter will know better than I do which emails I want to read, and which ones I don't?
"No, trust me man, you really want a bigger johnson. Read it!"
Instead of having this thing crap out fancy-schmancy concrete ugliness with many different curves, it could be greatly beneficial in the way we currently use construction robots on assembly lines: mass production. Specifically, for those unable to afford houses constructed traditionally.
Think of it: Rather than sending a boatload of materials and hundreds of workers to some poor, third-world country (or impoverished urban area), just ship one or ten of these suckers out there, along with one or two operators per, and mix the raw materials on-site. In a week you'll be housing five hundred families.
Of course this assumes several years of R&D before then, such that the process will be cheap, the raw materials commonplace and easily available, and little problems like pipes and windows are solved.
You may laugh at a bunch of cookie-cutter houses all slapped down in a row, but I bet the homeless wouldn't.
You could call it Habitat for Robotity...
UK is correct - bear in mind that software is a tool and not an end product. If you build a crappy treehouse, and it collapses and your kid gets killed, the company that made your hammer isn't liable.
While I'm at it - from the Visual Studio EULA:
Note on Java support. The software product may contain support for programs written in Java. Java technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as on-line control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines, or weapons systems,in which the failure of Java technology could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage.
Slashdot Mirror
And did anyone else detect a hint of irony, or perhaps a wry tongue-in-cheek when the article closed with,
/. after all...
Pay Lyon $50,000 a year and he's protected. He doesn't have to worry about paying extortionist's protection fees.
Wait - who am I kidding. Probably nobody even got that far. This is
Over the next decade, JAXA's plan calls for scientists to use buzzwords like "nanotechnology" and "hydrogen-powered."
Yeah, that sounds more like it.
wake me when they post the transparent backgrounds OS X hack.
Like I said... it's a battle between two good things. Shutting up morons is a good thing; there are ideas and philosophies that have been so soundly and thoroughly discredited for so long that it's merely a waste of breath (and an offensive one in some cases) to air them again.
But then again, free speech is a good thing; when large organizations have the right to stifle those who would oppose them, everyone suffers. The organization corrupts, and the minority's rights are impeded.
Where the line should be drawn between these two good things is an exercise left to the reader. But note, just because Nat Van has been removed from Google News does not mean it is inaccessible via their more-popular search site. One can still find them with a simple "I feel lucky."
Google also, and much more quietly, is removing the National Vanguard, known as a racist neo-Fascist organization, from its list of news sources. This raises the question, how the heck did a site like National Vanguard (no, I won't link to it) wind up on Google's list of news sources in the first place?
And the battle between the good of free speech and the good of shutting up morons continues...
But if you created two documents with the same hash, and then I signed one, wouldn't you have to re-hash it after my signature? Consequently the presence of additional data (my signature) would result in a different output of the hash function than that generated by the unsigned original. The hashes are now different, and there's no way you can claim I signed the other document.
Assuming my digital signature contains some amount of random or non-predictable data, you couldn't even figure out beforehand what a signed document would hash to, and you'd have to start searching for a hash match after I'd signed the original.
Why not have a bar-code on every dollar bill that can validate each bill. If a serial comes up in the same place more than once, then it is fake and disabled. This would be a global database, but not unrealistic.
How is a global database of currency bar codes (which could keep track of which bills are spent when - and track bill X from your ATM to the bookstore you spend it in to the restaurant the cashier spends it in...) less intrusive than firmware blocks in your scanners and printers?
I do agree that it's a lot more cost-effective for a mint to produce coins rather than bills - they certainly have a much longer usable lifespan, and probably are less attractive to counterfeiters - but coins have their own problems. It's a lot easier for a $50 coin to accidentally roll out of your pocket than for a $50 bill to fall out of your wallet. Unless the coin is huge and cumbersome, that is - and who wants to carry a fistful of them around if they are?
Isn't privacy a fundamental right?
No, it isn't. Is it? What institute, body, or power exists to uphold this right? Who bestowed this right? In my country (U.S.), we have "certain inalienable rights" "endowed by [our] Creator", and "among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but I don't recall a U.S. Constitutionally-guaranteed right to privacy.
Not trolling, just wondering where a right to privacy would come from, if such does exist.
This is fascinating news, and seems to confirm many astronomer's / xenogeologist's wildest hopes for the Red Planet. But, and forgive my ignorance, where has the water all gone? The atmosphere is mostly CO2, I believe... so, somewhere, there's a bunch of H2 missing. And whether or not Mars ever supported life, I doubt it ever hosted an ecosystem on a scale large enough to convert that much water. Where'd it go? How'd it get there? Anyone?
Perhaps the article could have avoided the confusion we seem to be seeing on the /. boards - and retained its original meaning - if it had been titled "...Total Cost of Pwnership". (Though it would lose the subtlety points it now enjoys.)
Those of you flaming this article as astroturf should RTFA and NTFD (Notice the F***ing Details) so that you can GTFJ (Get the F***ing Joke).
Anyone ever smell the Mozilla logo's breath?
So you can't count on security through obscurity...
That's true. But there's another concern besides mere accidental creation of universally destructive assemblers: intentional creation of universally destructive assemblers.
Consider the following scenario: a scientifically advanced government with interests to preserve engineers a nanobot that parasitically subsists on the opium poppy (or genetically engineers a virus to the same purpose, which seems even more plausible). Using the poppy as its energy source, and destroying the host in the process, this little bugger goes through opium populations like a plague, then after destroying its food source, starves itself out so the government doesn't have to worry about it any more.
Flash forward thirty years or so, to a time when such technology is becoming available on the "black market" to countries or organizations with less-than-altruistic motives - groups of people with a grudge against humanity and a willingness to die to prove their point (see Clancy's Rainbow Six baddies, or substitute the Islamic group of your choice). They use this same technology, originally developed for a war on drugs, and tweak it into a war on humanity. As you say, this doesn't have to be some all-consuming Frankenvirus they're making here - it just has to destroy some fundamental, say, amino acid (well within the capability of a microbug, I'd say, though IANAN), and we're right back to gray goo for all practical purposes. At least where humanity is concerned.
Parent is right; Richard P. Feynman is the true father of nanotechnology. His December 1959 lecture There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom is the foundational work of nanotech; it's short, to the point, and to this day still makes a fascinating and exciting read. Any discussion of nanotech should begin with Feynman's lecture, and I'm surprised it hasn't already been linked in this discussion.
Don't you mean, "You have no chance to survive make your time"?
gender is such a human construct...
Uh - so primitive (asexual) humans designed and constructed the X and Y chromosomes, adding them to the human genome? Dang, those guys^H^H^H^H folks were more advanced than we give them credit for!
Or, wait - maybe you're saying that a person can't be a "human construct" without having a "gender." But that flies in the face of what the liberal wing of the feminist movement has maintained for thirty some-odd years - that the human is entirely genderless?
I don't understand what you're trying to say... but I'm determined to make a joke out of it nonetheless. >;]
"Back in the day," an OOD class I took at Georgia Tech was taught in Squeak - which was widely held to be waning in favor even then. I don't see how it's groundbreaking now.
Not to say it's good for nothing - Squeak is particularly good at web crawling apps, IIRC.
As an added bit of trivia, I believe Squeak was so named because one of its biggest proponents is the Mouse himself.
... since TFA goes on to say the vulnerability explicitly affects "long-lived" TCP connections, not the POP3 / HTTP / SMTP that Joe User relies on. However, for businesses and security wonks this is a potentially big deal.
This announcement comes with convenient timing for MSFT, I must say... considering this morning's earlier announcement that they're in Deep Stuff(TM) from the EU...
/FOIL HAT
I wonder, does MSFT have some kind of cache of these slightly-beneficial placating press releases somewhere, just waiting to be unleashed to cover up the latest bad news?
Or to put it another way, if the EC had ruled against MSFT three weeks ago, would we have seen this announcement coming from Redmond that afternoon instead?
accuracy levels as high as 10x that of a human...
So, let me get this straight - my spam filter will know better than I do which emails I want to read, and which ones I don't?
"No, trust me man, you really want a bigger johnson. Read it!"
Instead of having this thing crap out fancy-schmancy concrete ugliness with many different curves, it could be greatly beneficial in the way we currently use construction robots on assembly lines: mass production. Specifically, for those unable to afford houses constructed traditionally. Think of it: Rather than sending a boatload of materials and hundreds of workers to some poor, third-world country (or impoverished urban area), just ship one or ten of these suckers out there, along with one or two operators per, and mix the raw materials on-site. In a week you'll be housing five hundred families. Of course this assumes several years of R&D before then, such that the process will be cheap, the raw materials commonplace and easily available, and little problems like pipes and windows are solved. You may laugh at a bunch of cookie-cutter houses all slapped down in a row, but I bet the homeless wouldn't. You could call it Habitat for Robotity...
UK is correct - bear in mind that software is a tool and not an end product. If you build a crappy treehouse, and it collapses and your kid gets killed, the company that made your hammer isn't liable.
While I'm at it - from the Visual Studio EULA:
Note on Java support. The software product may contain support for programs written in Java. Java technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as on-line control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines, or weapons systems,in which the failure of Java technology could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage.