Stampers are a nice idea, but use of one may in and of itself be grounds for dismissal under confidentiality agreements that employers commonly require the little guys to sign (transmission of confidential information, including internal communications, to a third party.)
Stampers are only as 'authentic' as a judge believes a third-party to be. There's an ironclad way to maintain confidentiality and to record the time and date of the communication. Send the e-mail, ask for a reply. When you get the reply (or after a few days, if they do not respond), print out the e-mail. Take the printout to a notary public and ask the notary to officially witness that you've been in possession of this document at this time and day.
Were I to develop games and try to copy protect them, if there was even a 1% chance a legit customer couldn't use the software they paid for, I'd skip the option.
This seems to be a pretty misunderstood situation around here; let me try to help. You are not a business mogul. Let that sink in. If you were to develop games and copy protect them... How are you getting the games to be sold in the local stores? Unless you have a string of blockbuster hits, they are likely not going to take a chance on you. Are you going to front the money to print up a game box, manual, and burn a few thousand copies of the game discs yourself? Likely not. So what would you realistically do if you wanted to develop a game and get it sold to other people? You'd find an established publisher or development shop and work out a deal. You would have to sell X% of your equity to a capital firm and use the money to actually produce the game. What's my point? The people who run the capital firm are going to have some ideas about 'protecting their investment,' and you, their investment, are going to have to follow some of these ideas or not get funded. I am betting that at the top of the list of these ideas is "make sure that people can't just steal this product and use it." Is it technically correct? No. Will it work? No. However the capital guys are mostly not computer guys, and the DRM guys are savvy business people who've sold their ideas and made them stick.
But wait! What if you're going to leverage the power of the internet and stick it to the business guys? You won't need any capital people and can write your own rules! This is precisely what Positech is trying to do, why they care about what pirates actually want, and why you won't see their games in TV commercials or on Best Buy shelves.
Here's a repost from the last time Microsoft did something OSS friendly, I'd love to get feedback from the idea:
Microsoft is often accused of pissing off their user base and risking
corporate and government conversions to competitors due to them
continually trying to create vendor lock-in. Here's an idea that
sounds like the absolute worst thing (from MS's point of view), but
I'm starting to think it is the most profitable thing that MS could
do, and would guarantee MS's future prosperity in a way that nothing
else could:
Make MS products open source. MS faces the most competition in the
markets dominated by elite users such as computer science majors and
the like, so why not join the competition? If that were to happen, MS
would instantly gain thousands of pro-bono security reviewers, feature
implementers, etc.; they'd have all the benefits that open source
projects have. I would bet anything that a team (it would be wise for
MS to start it) would form to port MS operating systems onto the Linux
kernel. ODF would be written into all Office apps, and the best part
is that MS would stand to lose nothing. The open source environment
has a way of coalescing around the most mature applications. How many
OpenOffice developers would love nothing more than to work all the
features they love about OO into Office? If MS truly GPL'd their
software, they would gain unstoppable momentum. Developers,
developers, developers!
I know, I know, here's the obvious reason this would never work: MS
doesn't want to give away their software. The kicker is, people would
buy the packaged and supported official OS, even if they could roll
their own for free. Look at the Red Hat business model; corporations
and other large entities want support, and they want a large company
holding their hand and telling them that it will be OK. My parents
aren't going to download tarballs and compile Vista because the
majority of people will happily pay for convenience. OK, so other
people can roll their own MS based packages and try to sell them, you
say? MS has the most brand-awareness that has ever existed. Ubuntu's
Ubunista (now with Office 2007 and Exchange!) will not out sell
Microsoft's CollabOS, because people will buy what they know best. The
media hype around the decision will leave the average user with the
thought that MS has done something to make their product even greater,
not with the thought that they can now go to someone they've never
heard about and buy MS Office.
It seems to me that MS would retain the majority of their customers,
be given the labor that would transform their products into the best
software that exists for free, gain market share in the tech crowd as
their products mature, and steal developers from their OSS
competitors. All at the same time. What am I missing here?
Swift one there, Ayn! I guess that those firemen walk into your burning house to pull you away from a horrible death for the pay. Likewise the physicians, therapists and the other adherents to the social compact.
Public interest lawsuits, seat belts, vaccines - yep, you have hit the nail on the head: everybody is exactly like you.
There is a difference between caring about 'people' and caring about 'an unknown person'. Firemen, physicians, etc, clearly care about people a great deal. Those who donate to the Red Cross are trying to help people. However, if you take a fireman aside and tell him "Jim Bob in Kentucky has died", the odds of him shedding a tear are very low. Similarly, if you told me that a woman in Florida read my post and thinks I'm mentally ill, would I care? Hardly.
People often care about people. People often care about humanity. But do people often care about every actual instance of 'some person they don't know' ? Not hardly.
Yep, the technology isn't there for that to happen yet. However, here's food for thought: the NIA allows you to bind key strokes to a particular neural pattern, which would allow you to think "shoot!" and have it shoot. Why not add an eye recognition device that would move the FPS view according to where you were looking?
"If they truly cared about justice they'd say "hey we need to take another look at this". I don't know how they can live with that on their conscience anymore than I understand how defense lawyers can live with setting rapists and killers free on technicalities."
There's a difference. A prosecutor in the situation you give is placing his own career interests above the interests of justice and the law.
No, no, no. Three words explain why the prosecutor doesn't want to re-try the case and why this is the right thing to do in the circumstances: adversarial justice system.
It may not be the best system, but it's what we have; it is the duty of the prosecution to assume that they are right, just as it is the duty of the defence to assume that the prosecution is wrong. To allow the prosecutor to pick and choose the circumstances in which to present a strong case vs the circumstances in which to side with the defence introduces more bias into the system. Each side must present their case as if it was absolutely the way that they say it is, and then the jury must weigh the circumstances and decide.
And I thought Braille on a drive up ATM was pointless.
Because you're not blind, and you've never had to trust a stranger to do an ATM transaction for you,
and you've never done an ATM transaction from the back seat of a taxi.
Bah, you're both wrong. Why is there Braille on the keypad of the ATM? Because the ATM manufacturer bought the keypad from a keypad vendor. Said vendor most likely sells keypads to a number of clients, some of which end up in devices heavily used by the visually impaired.
On an unrelated note, there is something very strange I find about the US election process. Your founding fathers went to so much trouble to create "cheques and balances", yet it never seemed to occur to them to make a completely seperate body for running elections.
An honest question: when a traditionally authoritarian country claims to change its ways and have a fair election, isn't it the case that they can have international (UN?) parties there to monitor the election? If so, how do we get some of those?
Why do you need identification to transmit a PUBLIC key (aka SSL cert)?
Note: The moderators in this discussion who nuked my other post, like the parent, seem to not understand the difference between public and private keys. Crypto is complicated, but those who don't understand it should not be moderating a crypt discussion!
Nor should they be posting in it. You do not understand the difference between a key and a certificate, nor do you understand the purpose of a certificate authority.
In public/private key cryptography, the public key ensures that one can have a secure conversation with the holder of the corresponding private key. It does not address the problem of verifying who the holder of that key is. So, if Alice and Bob desire a private conversation using asymmetric (public/private) key cryptography, the first step is for them to exchange public keys. However, during the exchange, Mallory intercepts Alice's public key and supplies Bob with Mallory's public key. Mallory can now read the messages between the two and no one is the wiser. Enter the Certificate Authority. The CA's job is to act as a foundation for trust. The CA's key is provided to Alice and Bob securely (i.e. when installing an OS or browser). Alice and Bob can then go to the CA, prove that they are Alice and Bob, and they receive a certificate. The certificate for Alice consists of Alice's public key cryptographically signed by the CA's private key. Bob can then take the CA's public key, which he received previously, and verify the signature on Alice's public key. Bob has then proven that the CA is stating that that public key does in fact belong to Alice.
So, if the CA isn't actually verifying that Alice is Alice or that Bob is Bob, then Mallory can get a certificate that states Mallory is Alice, and we're back to square one.
That's the idea with the deniability, They can never know if there actually is a hidden volume in there.
This is exactly the reason that deniable file systems are good for 'spies' but that is not where they really shine. DFS is the solution for the scenario when the local police are knocking down your door, you unplug the computer, and they serve you with a search warrant that specifies the encrypted contents of your hard disk. You are in contempt of court if you do not reveal the encrypted portion (in some jurisdictions, at least) of the disk, but you're safe if there is an encrypted volume hidden there. In order to compel you to reveal a hidden volume there would need to be evidence that it exists and evidence that there's relevant information on it (hence this flaw).
On the other hand, if you are involved in spycraft-level activities and are being tortured for your passphrase to anything, you're a dead man. The NSA and all other cryptology experts know that there is absolutely no way to ensure that they have access to all the encrypted data on a disk. Perhaps you have taken your 'secret' disk, compared that disk with a legitimate disk, and generated a one time hash that, when XOR'd with your legitimate disk, will reveal the 'secret' disk. Perhaps there's another hidden volume in this layer. (Also, you cannot have an 'infinite' amount of layers, as each layer is stored in the 'free space' of the layer above it.) The point is, if you're being tortured for 'all the information', and the torturer(s) cannot ever be sure you've given it all up, then they are going to kill you. It's the only way to be sure they've gotten all the information you were willing to give.
I'll do you one better. Read about the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) that comes standard in motherboards. This chip is what would allow a 'trusted' operating system to retain control over a machine that you 'own'. Check out the specs here, here's a brief list of some of the commands that this chip supports.
TPM_TakeOwnership - Sets the actual owner of the TPM, used by an OS upon installation.
TPM_OwnerClear, TPM_ForceClear - Here's a relief! The physical owner of the computer can override the chip if needed...
TPM_DisableOwnerClear, TPM_DisableForceClear - Disables the override commands, locking the TPM to the current owner. Incidentally, only the current owner can issue the disable commands.
Check out http://www.20q.net/ . It's a neural network that's been put online for quite some time and does exactly what you describe. It's very interesting to note the final question that determines your answer; Here's me playing vs 20q: I was thinking of a lampshade. Q20. I am guessing that it is a lamp shade?
Right, Wrong, Close
19. Does it weigh more than a duck? No.
18. Is it found on a desk? Sometimes.
17. Is it larger than a microwave oven (or bread box)? Sometimes.
16. Do you use it at night? Sometimes.
15. Is some part of it made of glass? No.
14. Is it worn? No.
13. Is it decorative? Yes.
12. Is it pleasurable? No.
11. Does it move air? No.
10. Is it black? Sometimes.
9. Is it square shaped? No.
8. Can it be easily moved? Yes.
7. Does it beep? No.
6. Can you talk on it? No.
5. Does it usually have four corners? No.
4. Is it larger than a pound of butter? Yes.
3. Does it get wet? No.
2. Do you hold it when you use it? No.
1. It is classified as Other.
Regarding Deep Blue's approach to chess: we reduced it to brute force. I believe it was nothing more than a insanely large minimax tree at heart. However, we have moved beyond brute force techniques in some areas. If one defines an 'AI Problem' as one that has been solved by means of an adaptive algorithm when the problem could not have otherwise been solved by a human-created algorithm then there are a lot of AI problems out there. In the board game field, look at TD-Gammon; it is very similar to Deep Blue in that a computer played the world champion and defeated the human, but the TD-Gammon program used AI techniques and actually learned to play by inference. Cool stuff.
Consider that the computer industry is faced with three major crises: software unreliability, low productivity and the parallel programming problem. Guess what? Not one of Turing's supposedly brilliant ideas is of any help. Not a single one! Erm... are talking about the same Turing? The Turing that proposed the Turing machine as a theoretical machine in order to explore the line between problems that are solvable using a binary system with infinite computational and storage capacities and those that are not? Turing machines never were intended to represent physical devices; it's a thought exercise. If a problem is not computable on a Turing machine, then the problem is not computable with any binary system of representation, regardless of how powerful it is. The whole point was to be able to illustrate that some problems are simply outside of the scope of computational theory.
Your claim that Turing's theories do not help to solve the problem of "software unreliability" is akin to me complaining that your comments have yet to help me change the alternator in my car; what's one got to do with the other? How do you propose that Turing's theoretical model of computational capacity at all affects "software unreliability, low productivity and the parallel programming problem" ?...
I'm eager to hear what an "anti-Turing" revolution would entail...
I highly recommend reading Jeff Hawkins's On intelligence which proposes a structural model of the brain based on the concept that, at every level of the cortex, there is only the one operation of pattern recognition and repetition being performed. It doesn't attempt to model 'old brain' (emotions, life support, etc.,) just the cortex and intelligence itself.
The model puts forth hypothesis about a number of interesting things that one can notice about their own operation. Hawkins proposes that at every level of processing a cluster of neurons attempts to recognize the pattern and predict what will occur next. This is theoretically why one might never pay any attention at all to something like the way their front door looks but will immediately notice if there's a spot of paint on it that wasn't there before; a "pattern mismatch" signal gets passed up the chain of command from subconscious to conscious. This is why people can't help but look repeatedly at facial deformations; the face is so very familiar that any small irregularity sets off alarms. After we're used to the new pattern, it fades back into the background. After living in a dirty room for a month, it seems less cluttered and more 'the way things are'; after smelling a particular smell for a while it no longer smells like anything in particular.
An absolutely fascinating read. That book is the reason I'm going into a CE doctoral program to study that sort of thing.
Hrmm, it's probably a minor issue, but am I the only one who ended up thinking that the hard drives falling into the lake/river at the end are going to end up being some very damaging pieces of litter?
The only other alternative would be a locked down OS (far moreso than Vista) with some sort of anti-modding hardware and a hypervisor. Even that would only mostly work, but it would work well enough to eliminate any other inconviences. The device you're thinking of is the Trusted Platform Module (already present in modern motherboards) and the technology the OS will use is Trusted Computing. The specs are already published, it's insidiously effective.
Haha, actually I've been cheering them because despite being stacked with conservatives, they have still handed Bush his most significant legal setbacks of his entire eight years. While I'm sure there are some examples of that, this is not one of them. From the article:
The Bush administration supported Intel's customers. It cited inconvenience, annoyance and inefficiency of multiple royalty payments being passed down the chain of distribution with no obvious stopping point.
I enjoy the comments way more than the articles (which usually suck, tbh). For any article, there are almost always some extremely insightful comments, and for me, the interpretation of those is the whole point of the site. Agreed. I agree that the fact interpretation aspect of intelligence will quickly become the bottleneck for the 'new' breed of internet-fed smart people.
That's why I try to climb to the top of the interpretation food chain, enumerated as follows from low to high:
The article. Second hand recounting of the writers interpretation of fact, or an interpretation of the interviewee's knowledge. Skip it.
The summary. A poster's alcohol-aided version of what they would have preferred to read as they looked over the article (or someone's summary of said article). Only useful as an indicator of the magnitude of the flame wa.. discussion to follow.
The comments. Some user's interpretation of the situation, albeit of an unknown quality. Worth glancing at.
The +5 comments. These have been interpreted by moderators and deemed worthy of consumption. Because I now know that moderators have said the comment is valuable, I am able to interpret it differently than the moderators themselves, adding value.
The top of the chain: my thoughts. Because my thoughts are based on a weighted average of all the other sources (favoring the ones higher up the chain), they are guaranteed to be the result of the most interpretive thought available on the subject.
I am always careful to only lurk and never contribute, as that would allow someone to interpret my thoughts and thus lowering my position on the chain.... oh.
Making DOC and XLS so uncommon that people go through the hassle of converting them is step three. Here's a Bud-Light sponsored thought: how hard would it be to make an e-mail gateway for a business that automatically scanned outgoing e-mail attachments and converted OO documents to MSOffice format as well as converting incoming documents to OO format? Yes, it would hurt OO adoption in theory due to the recipient receiving Office documents, but it seems to me that it would be a huge benefit to offices trying to adopt OO...
A simple solution would be to tell them that you do not have the ability to do that. You could say that your database stores data for all of your customers and that it's not possible to give them direct access without compromising the security of the other customers' data.
Nope. The US system has selective availability turned off, and all new US GPS satellites don't even have SA functionality, so they can't turn it back on later. Right, but if the Chinese have their own satellites that only provide encrypted data then they can damn sure turn ours off. Whether or not the debris caused by the destruction of the US and EU GPS systems take out the Chinese system is debatable, but I'm betting the Chinese have a "if we can't have it no one can" attitude towards that sort of thing.
Sure the AI was simple, That fact just contributed to the most awesome side-game ever: "How many monsters can I stand behind so that they get shot by friendly fire and attack each other?" I had loads of fun just making zombie soldiers fight each other...
IANAL, but I play one on the internet.
Devil's advocate here. Your analogy is flawed. Presumably TorrentSpy was found liable for the same (dubious) reasons as Napster; it's not that they indexed locations that had copyrighted material, it's that they did so in such a way that would imply one could go there to violate copyright and illegally download content. The logic is that the site itself implied that it was a viable way to obtain illegal content, which is why Google is not threatened by this.
If I ask where to buy a gun and you tell me, that's fine because you had no reason to believe I have ill intentions and you're not implying that Walmart is particularly suited to someone wanting a gun for murder. A proper analogy would be if I come to you and tell you that I've absolutely had it with my wife, I'm going to get a gun and shoot her in the face, and then I ask you where to buy a gun. If you were to tell me "I hear they don't check IDs at Walmart," then yes, you would then be liable for the murder (though not as much as me, and likely only civilly liable) because you gave me information that was intended to facilitate murder.
Slashdot Mirror
Stampers are a nice idea, but use of one may in and of itself be grounds for dismissal under confidentiality agreements that employers commonly require the little guys to sign (transmission of confidential information, including internal communications, to a third party.)
Stampers are only as 'authentic' as a judge believes a third-party to be. There's an ironclad way to maintain confidentiality and to record the time and date of the communication. Send the e-mail, ask for a reply. When you get the reply (or after a few days, if they do not respond), print out the e-mail. Take the printout to a notary public and ask the notary to officially witness that you've been in possession of this document at this time and day.
Were I to develop games and try to copy protect them, if there was even a 1% chance a legit customer couldn't use the software they paid for, I'd skip the option.
This seems to be a pretty misunderstood situation around here; let me try to help. You are not a business mogul. Let that sink in. If you were to develop games and copy protect them... How are you getting the games to be sold in the local stores? Unless you have a string of blockbuster hits, they are likely not going to take a chance on you. Are you going to front the money to print up a game box, manual, and burn a few thousand copies of the game discs yourself? Likely not. So what would you realistically do if you wanted to develop a game and get it sold to other people? You'd find an established publisher or development shop and work out a deal. You would have to sell X% of your equity to a capital firm and use the money to actually produce the game. What's my point? The people who run the capital firm are going to have some ideas about 'protecting their investment,' and you, their investment, are going to have to follow some of these ideas or not get funded. I am betting that at the top of the list of these ideas is "make sure that people can't just steal this product and use it." Is it technically correct? No. Will it work? No. However the capital guys are mostly not computer guys, and the DRM guys are savvy business people who've sold their ideas and made them stick.
But wait! What if you're going to leverage the power of the internet and stick it to the business guys? You won't need any capital people and can write your own rules! This is precisely what Positech is trying to do, why they care about what pirates actually want, and why you won't see their games in TV commercials or on Best Buy shelves.
Here's a repost from the last time Microsoft did something OSS friendly, I'd love to get feedback from the idea:
Microsoft is often accused of pissing off their user base and risking corporate and government conversions to competitors due to them continually trying to create vendor lock-in. Here's an idea that sounds like the absolute worst thing (from MS's point of view), but I'm starting to think it is the most profitable thing that MS could do, and would guarantee MS's future prosperity in a way that nothing else could:
Make MS products open source. MS faces the most competition in the markets dominated by elite users such as computer science majors and the like, so why not join the competition? If that were to happen, MS would instantly gain thousands of pro-bono security reviewers, feature implementers, etc.; they'd have all the benefits that open source projects have. I would bet anything that a team (it would be wise for MS to start it) would form to port MS operating systems onto the Linux kernel. ODF would be written into all Office apps, and the best part is that MS would stand to lose nothing. The open source environment has a way of coalescing around the most mature applications. How many OpenOffice developers would love nothing more than to work all the features they love about OO into Office? If MS truly GPL'd their software, they would gain unstoppable momentum. Developers, developers, developers!
I know, I know, here's the obvious reason this would never work: MS doesn't want to give away their software. The kicker is, people would buy the packaged and supported official OS, even if they could roll their own for free. Look at the Red Hat business model; corporations and other large entities want support, and they want a large company holding their hand and telling them that it will be OK. My parents aren't going to download tarballs and compile Vista because the majority of people will happily pay for convenience. OK, so other people can roll their own MS based packages and try to sell them, you say? MS has the most brand-awareness that has ever existed. Ubuntu's Ubunista (now with Office 2007 and Exchange!) will not out sell Microsoft's CollabOS, because people will buy what they know best. The media hype around the decision will leave the average user with the thought that MS has done something to make their product even greater, not with the thought that they can now go to someone they've never heard about and buy MS Office.
It seems to me that MS would retain the majority of their customers, be given the labor that would transform their products into the best software that exists for free, gain market share in the tech crowd as their products mature, and steal developers from their OSS competitors. All at the same time. What am I missing here?
Swift one there, Ayn! I guess that those firemen walk into your burning house to pull you away from a horrible death for the pay. Likewise the physicians, therapists and the other adherents to the social compact. Public interest lawsuits, seat belts, vaccines - yep, you have hit the nail on the head: everybody is exactly like you.
There is a difference between caring about 'people' and caring about 'an unknown person'. Firemen, physicians, etc, clearly care about people a great deal. Those who donate to the Red Cross are trying to help people. However, if you take a fireman aside and tell him "Jim Bob in Kentucky has died", the odds of him shedding a tear are very low. Similarly, if you told me that a woman in Florida read my post and thinks I'm mentally ill, would I care? Hardly.
People often care about people. People often care about humanity. But do people often care about every actual instance of 'some person they don't know' ? Not hardly.
you can't just magically think "shoot that guy"
Yep, the technology isn't there for that to happen yet. However, here's food for thought: the NIA allows you to bind key strokes to a particular neural pattern, which would allow you to think "shoot!" and have it shoot. Why not add an eye recognition device that would move the FPS view according to where you were looking?
"If they truly cared about justice they'd say "hey we need to take another look at this". I don't know how they can live with that on their conscience anymore than I understand how defense lawyers can live with setting rapists and killers free on technicalities."
There's a difference. A prosecutor in the situation you give is placing his own career interests above the interests of justice and the law.
No, no, no. Three words explain why the prosecutor doesn't want to re-try the case and why this is the right thing to do in the circumstances: adversarial justice system.
It may not be the best system, but it's what we have; it is the duty of the prosecution to assume that they are right, just as it is the duty of the defence to assume that the prosecution is wrong. To allow the prosecutor to pick and choose the circumstances in which to present a strong case vs the circumstances in which to side with the defence introduces more bias into the system. Each side must present their case as if it was absolutely the way that they say it is, and then the jury must weigh the circumstances and decide.
And I thought Braille on a drive up ATM was pointless.
Because you're not blind, and you've never had to trust a stranger to do an ATM transaction for you, and you've never done an ATM transaction from the back seat of a taxi.
Bah, you're both wrong. Why is there Braille on the keypad of the ATM? Because the ATM manufacturer bought the keypad from a keypad vendor. Said vendor most likely sells keypads to a number of clients, some of which end up in devices heavily used by the visually impaired.
On an unrelated note, there is something very strange I find about the US election process. Your founding fathers went to so much trouble to create "cheques and balances", yet it never seemed to occur to them to make a completely seperate body for running elections.
An honest question: when a traditionally authoritarian country claims to change its ways and have a fair election, isn't it the case that they can have international (UN?) parties there to monitor the election? If so, how do we get some of those?
Why do you need identification to transmit a PUBLIC key (aka SSL cert)? Note: The moderators in this discussion who nuked my other post, like the parent, seem to not understand the difference between public and private keys. Crypto is complicated, but those who don't understand it should not be moderating a crypt discussion!
Nor should they be posting in it. You do not understand the difference between a key and a certificate, nor do you understand the purpose of a certificate authority.
In public/private key cryptography, the public key ensures that one can have a secure conversation with the holder of the corresponding private key. It does not address the problem of verifying who the holder of that key is. So, if Alice and Bob desire a private conversation using asymmetric (public/private) key cryptography, the first step is for them to exchange public keys. However, during the exchange, Mallory intercepts Alice's public key and supplies Bob with Mallory's public key. Mallory can now read the messages between the two and no one is the wiser. Enter the Certificate Authority. The CA's job is to act as a foundation for trust. The CA's key is provided to Alice and Bob securely (i.e. when installing an OS or browser). Alice and Bob can then go to the CA, prove that they are Alice and Bob, and they receive a certificate. The certificate for Alice consists of Alice's public key cryptographically signed by the CA's private key. Bob can then take the CA's public key, which he received previously, and verify the signature on Alice's public key. Bob has then proven that the CA is stating that that public key does in fact belong to Alice.
So, if the CA isn't actually verifying that Alice is Alice or that Bob is Bob, then Mallory can get a certificate that states Mallory is Alice, and we're back to square one.
That's the idea with the deniability, They can never know if there actually is a hidden volume in there.
This is exactly the reason that deniable file systems are good for 'spies' but that is not where they really shine. DFS is the solution for the scenario when the local police are knocking down your door, you unplug the computer, and they serve you with a search warrant that specifies the encrypted contents of your hard disk. You are in contempt of court if you do not reveal the encrypted portion (in some jurisdictions, at least) of the disk, but you're safe if there is an encrypted volume hidden there. In order to compel you to reveal a hidden volume there would need to be evidence that it exists and evidence that there's relevant information on it (hence this flaw).
On the other hand, if you are involved in spycraft-level activities and are being tortured for your passphrase to anything, you're a dead man. The NSA and all other cryptology experts know that there is absolutely no way to ensure that they have access to all the encrypted data on a disk. Perhaps you have taken your 'secret' disk, compared that disk with a legitimate disk, and generated a one time hash that, when XOR'd with your legitimate disk, will reveal the 'secret' disk. Perhaps there's another hidden volume in this layer. (Also, you cannot have an 'infinite' amount of layers, as each layer is stored in the 'free space' of the layer above it.) The point is, if you're being tortured for 'all the information', and the torturer(s) cannot ever be sure you've given it all up, then they are going to kill you. It's the only way to be sure they've gotten all the information you were willing to give.
Check out http://www.20q.net/ . It's a neural network that's been put online for quite some time and does exactly what you describe. It's very interesting to note the final question that determines your answer; Here's me playing vs 20q: I was thinking of a lampshade.
Q20. I am guessing that it is a lamp shade? Right, Wrong, Close
19. Does it weigh more than a duck? No.
18. Is it found on a desk? Sometimes.
17. Is it larger than a microwave oven (or bread box)? Sometimes.
16. Do you use it at night? Sometimes.
15. Is some part of it made of glass? No.
14. Is it worn? No.
13. Is it decorative? Yes.
12. Is it pleasurable? No.
11. Does it move air? No.
10. Is it black? Sometimes.
9. Is it square shaped? No.
8. Can it be easily moved? Yes.
7. Does it beep? No.
6. Can you talk on it? No.
5. Does it usually have four corners? No.
4. Is it larger than a pound of butter? Yes.
3. Does it get wet? No.
2. Do you hold it when you use it? No.
1. It is classified as Other.
Regarding Deep Blue's approach to chess: we reduced it to brute force. I believe it was nothing more than a insanely large minimax tree at heart. However, we have moved beyond brute force techniques in some areas. If one defines an 'AI Problem' as one that has been solved by means of an adaptive algorithm when the problem could not have otherwise been solved by a human-created algorithm then there are a lot of AI problems out there. In the board game field, look at TD-Gammon; it is very similar to Deep Blue in that a computer played the world champion and defeated the human, but the TD-Gammon program used AI techniques and actually learned to play by inference. Cool stuff.
Your claim that Turing's theories do not help to solve the problem of "software unreliability" is akin to me complaining that your comments have yet to help me change the alternator in my car; what's one got to do with the other? How do you propose that Turing's theoretical model of computational capacity at all affects "software unreliability, low productivity and the parallel programming problem" ?
I highly recommend reading Jeff Hawkins's On intelligence which proposes a structural model of the brain based on the concept that, at every level of the cortex, there is only the one operation of pattern recognition and repetition being performed. It doesn't attempt to model 'old brain' (emotions, life support, etc.,) just the cortex and intelligence itself.
The model puts forth hypothesis about a number of interesting things that one can notice about their own operation. Hawkins proposes that at every level of processing a cluster of neurons attempts to recognize the pattern and predict what will occur next. This is theoretically why one might never pay any attention at all to something like the way their front door looks but will immediately notice if there's a spot of paint on it that wasn't there before; a "pattern mismatch" signal gets passed up the chain of command from subconscious to conscious. This is why people can't help but look repeatedly at facial deformations; the face is so very familiar that any small irregularity sets off alarms. After we're used to the new pattern, it fades back into the background. After living in a dirty room for a month, it seems less cluttered and more 'the way things are'; after smelling a particular smell for a while it no longer smells like anything in particular.
An absolutely fascinating read. That book is the reason I'm going into a CE doctoral program to study that sort of thing.
Hrmm, it's probably a minor issue, but am I the only one who ended up thinking that the hard drives falling into the lake/river at the end are going to end up being some very damaging pieces of litter?
That's why I try to climb to the top of the interpretation food chain, enumerated as follows from low to high:
- The article. Second hand recounting of the writers interpretation of fact, or an interpretation of the interviewee's knowledge. Skip it.
- The summary. A poster's alcohol-aided version of what they would have preferred to read as they looked over the article (or someone's summary of said article). Only useful as an indicator of the magnitude of the flame wa.. discussion to follow.
- The comments. Some user's interpretation of the situation, albeit of an unknown quality. Worth glancing at.
- The +5 comments. These have been interpreted by moderators and deemed worthy of consumption. Because I now know that moderators have said the comment is valuable, I am able to interpret it differently than the moderators themselves, adding value.
- The top of the chain: my thoughts. Because my thoughts are based on a weighted average of all the other sources (favoring the ones higher up the chain), they are guaranteed to be the result of the most interpretive thought available on the subject.
I am always careful to only lurk and never contribute, as that would allow someone to interpret my thoughts and thus lowering my position on the chain.A simple solution would be to tell them that you do not have the ability to do that. You could say that your database stores data for all of your customers and that it's not possible to give them direct access without compromising the security of the other customers' data.
IANAL, but I play one on the internet. Devil's advocate here. Your analogy is flawed. Presumably TorrentSpy was found liable for the same (dubious) reasons as Napster; it's not that they indexed locations that had copyrighted material, it's that they did so in such a way that would imply one could go there to violate copyright and illegally download content. The logic is that the site itself implied that it was a viable way to obtain illegal content, which is why Google is not threatened by this.
If I ask where to buy a gun and you tell me, that's fine because you had no reason to believe I have ill intentions and you're not implying that Walmart is particularly suited to someone wanting a gun for murder. A proper analogy would be if I come to you and tell you that I've absolutely had it with my wife, I'm going to get a gun and shoot her in the face, and then I ask you where to buy a gun. If you were to tell me "I hear they don't check IDs at Walmart," then yes, you would then be liable for the murder (though not as much as me, and likely only civilly liable) because you gave me information that was intended to facilitate murder.