Just drop *.doubleclick.net into junkbuster's blockfile, and doubleclick cannot track you any longer.
Now, what I'm really waiting for is for someone to write a proxy that can dynamically rewrite pages as they come through an http tunnel. Then, we can block ads, the associated javacrap, and other stuff - like pages containing the string "MAKE MONEY FAST!" I prefer not to get involved with the ethical side of business - business long ago proved to me they have no real ethics, hence I focus on creating technical solutions which either force them to be ethical, or force them away from me.
I think the technical community should make a stand and say we will not tolerate this, and then proceed to distribute easy-to-use software which blocks companies money-grabbing attempts. Remember: no company can survive without people. If a company is being unethical, solve the problem via technical means. If you work for the company, stall, drag your feet, and if you have to engineer the privacy-invading feature, remember these words "Yes, it's possible, but it would cost too much to do it".. and if they try anyway, make sure you're very well paid and that the product develops all kinds of bugs.. like suspicious dialog boxes in spyware that give your company's URL along with a "please report this error: Error collecting data on ${USER}, please contact sales@mycompany.com".
The only way that would pay off would be if you were in a position to get funds earmarked for NASA that congress would now be reluctant to hand over to them. Some people (in gov't) don't really like NASA and are quick to point out it's errors whenever they come up.
*sarcasm* I think they'd sooner setup shop in the high school down the block than go to antarctica. They got this little problem of englishmetric conversions that need to be worked out first before they can get to Mars. */sarcasm*
Sigh. Yeah, and I suppose they're in direct contact with the liquid. You take a piece of glass at room temperature and submerse it suddenly in liquid nitrogen. If it doesn't explode, I'll send you a 12 pack of guinness (provided you're of legal age).
Alot of people have used liquid nitrogen to cool their systems, this is not unusual for hardcore overclockers. What is unusual, however, is using the florinert(sp??) - not only does it have an incredibly low viscosity (something that was air tight could still leak a *ton* of this stuff), but it's also extremelly dangerous if burned. Well, like most coolants, actually.. but still, this one is worse than usual.
Well, don't use a thermos. They usually have glass linings inside (the high quality ones, anyway), and those WILL shatter when subjected to those kinds of temperatures, and also considering that others use plastic which is brittle to begin with.. and you have yourself a recipe for disaster.:(
Use a storage container with a pressure valve and a pipe to feed the liquid into the apparatus.. it's safer, it's more efficient, and most important - your nitro isn't exposed to the atmosphere. Very important detail, that.
That was the easy part. Do you remember why Earth was built? To come up with the question that fits that answer. Of course, we're scheduled for demolition next week. Oh well...
Once you can demonstrate to a judge that these two pieces of information, when run through a computer, create the censored document, most judges will either:
Order the destruction of the machine and/or wipe all the data off it.
Delete both pieces of data, regardless of "interdependencies" - think of the phrase "reasonable doubt". They don't understand math, they just see what is shown to them.
Outlaw the system that did this, as it is subversive (which it is!).
That's pretty standard for most any country, with the exception being that maybe they won't label it "subversive" in the US - they'll call it a national security risk instead.:\
The system needs to ensure that brute-forcing the database cannot occur, otherwise interested parties would take that information to the judge and get it removed, and possibly have the service shut down. If, OTOH, brute-forcing wasn't possible, then they could only remove data on an as-discovered basis - making the database a hundredfold more resistant to attack.
I did some number crunching on a system like this, and the results aren't encouraging. Here's my (probably broken) math, enclosed in an e-mail to someone who actually knows how to do these kind of calculations...
First some background..
If you take a stream of random data, and XOR it with your plaintext, and then delete the plaintext, it's still possible to recover the plaintext by doing this:
A ^ B = C - encrypt
B = A ^ C - decrypt
Given that, let's assume you create a server filled with XOR'd 'packets' - files of a preset size, we'll say 1MB. These packets are each assigned a key. Every packet has a unique key.
The system works by allowing you to check in an arbitrary number of packets. Once those packets are in the system, they begin to be propagated through the network. Important point - the network is protocol agnostic - it'll happily run over http, ftp, or even finger if you're masochistic.
Since each packet is identified only by a GUID it's impossible to know who created it, or which other piece of data it needs to be XOR'd with to recover the plaintext.
And this is the math problem. In computing, it isn't hard to simply brute-force something, and this system is no different, except in how the brute force occurs. In this case, we would download a complete copy of the database and then grab one piece of the data and then sequentially XOR it with every other piece of data on the system until you find something that looks like plaintext.
Since each piece of data should, in theory, have a counter- component, how many packets need to be in a system before decryption via brute-force becomes not feasible? Not feasible would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 2^64 operations, or about 1.8*10^20.
Unfortunately, I've realized that if someone knows that one piece is half of the plaintext, you only need to download and XOR every other file in the database once to recover the plaintext. So if I had 20GB of data, this would amount to a mere 20,480 operations.:( Not very strong! In order to make it so that 2^64 operations would only exhaust.5% of the keyspace, it is necessary to have 3.6*10^20 packets in the system!
Doesn't this require about 3,518,437,208,883,200 terabytes of storage? I hate math. It shot down a perfectly good idea.:) Can you double-check my numbers and make sure this is the right conclusion?
-- Signal 11 The makers may make and the users may use, but the fixers must fix with but minimal clues
Optics. X-rays. Gamma rays. All of these are outside the jurisdiction of the FCC. A bunch of lasers and a few comsats would make a good low-cost network.. it'd probably cost more to get the bandwidth allocation than to launch a satellite and use optics to relay it.
Infact, someone I know very well is planning on doing this soon - next summer.
Oh no, we've created a monster - a self-referential loop.
Malda: Hemos, bring me the brains! Hemos: Yeees maaaster. Malda: *squish* Gosh, there wasn't that much there, you sure you got the right brain? Hemos: Yeah, bird brains.. right? Malda: Fool! We'll use it anyway, though. * Malda casts feign life. Katz: *groan* Malda: It's alive! IT'S ALLLIIIVVVEEE! Katz:.. socio-economic effects by the post-columbine third-wave era in ecopolitical dogmatic... Malda: Uh oh. Ego^H^H^HHemos, quick, activate the lameness filter! Hemos: Yeeesss maaaster.... *gurgle* Katz: SEXBOTS new paradigm shift think outside the box... Malda: HURRY! * CLiCK! * Slashdot Audience: Hey, when are you gonna fix Katz? Malda: Ask me about it again and I'll delay fixing him by 24 hours!
And there you have it.. now we have a frankenkatz on slashdot writing about frankenstein. Wonderful.. slashdot creates infinite katzian loop, film at 11.
Yes, that Mars probe that slinked off into the great inky depths certainly offered great ROI.
If you believe that NASA's contribution to the bottom line of the government ledger is success or failure of it's constituent projects, we have a serious problem. NASA caused, both directly and indirectly, millions, possibly billions, of dollars worth of return from aerospace technologies. Technologies that can be found in most automobiles, in modern airplanes and jet fighters. Not only that, but it's scientific advance. Science has improved our quality of life, told us how the universe works and how to harness its energies. Geez.. to simply limit yourself to adding figures on the bottom of a ledger as the sum contribution of NASA is at best, a misinformed and limited view.
Congress is about politics, not economics or technology. Comeon - you wouldn't let an auto mechanic work on your computer any more than he would let you, as a computer geek, work on his car. Give these people some credit - they're the best qualified people to give you an answer about how this is helping people.. without all the econo-political crap that comes out of congress on a daily basis.
How arrogant to assume that the US is the only company that can make advances in this field! How absolutely horridly arrogant. I, for one, applaud their efforts - for every dollar that was invested in NASA, economists have determined that we average about 6 dollars back in benefits from technology advances caused by NASA. What's to assume India won't experience the same boost from investing in aerospace? If they're smarter than us, they'll pour lots of cash into it and turbocharge their technology sector.
Second, once they get clear of the full gravitational effects of earth, the weight would become less for those on top and thus the entire weight of 149,600 people would not be on chip boy, only a portion would.
Well, yes, but this is a slashdot post, and it's late at night. I'm sure I could have taken into account the reduce gravitational effects the higher you go, but this was just a rough off-the-cuff calculation and not meant to be a real scientific analysis. Besides, there's a ton (excuse the pun) of other reasons why it wouldn't fly (excuse that pun too) - namely the wind would create enough force to topple them. Then there's the problem with decompression. People need to remain in a pressurized environment.. which space, unfortunately, does not provide. As those people got above a hundred or so miles above the earth, pressure would drop off, and as boyle's law states, as pressure drops, assuming the volume remains constant, what happens to the temp? It goes up. These poor bastards would literally be having their blood boil at those altitudes without protection. Actually, NASA has some information on this very question, if you're interested.
I don't think that's very feasible. Assuming the average person weighs 150 pounds (ludicriously light, but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept). we'll also assume each person is 6 feet tall.
Now, with the basic math out of the way, we'll say that we want to get to about 170 miles outside of the earth's orbit. At that point, we'll be at the point where we can simply hand someone an aerosol can and tell them to point it at the earth and the familiar newtonian physics will take over, propelling him, slowly, to the moon.
But how many people would it take to create a human tower 170 miles up? Well, that's exactly 897600 feet up, and assume we use only one person stacked on top of another, that means that it'll take a mere 149,600 people to get to the moon - not bad, considering how many peope live in India! But, unfortunately, those people would collectively weigh about 10179 tons, excluding the bendy-straws. Now, the official world record for two-handed weightlifting by a man is 600 pounds, but there is someone claiming they can lift up to 7063.75 pounds. Alas, this is still less than one hundredth of one percent of the required lifting power.
In short, our psychic weight lifter would be flattened to approximately the thickness of a dorito chip in about half a second. Sorry if this upset anyone trying to get to space...
I have no idea, honestly. It's just one of those subculture things that has sprung up on slashdot - it's a running joke that has started to get old. I just use it now like I do metavariables like "foo" and "tmp".. I could have just as easily made the headline: Rob Malda Found Strangled To Death by Cat5, Local Natalie Portman Club Questioned.
ROB,will you PLEASE fix my account so I can start posting at 1 again instead of 2?! I want my goddamn PREVIEW feature back...
This marks a new low in slashdot posting history. Now it's not "News for Nerds".. it's "News for the Average Computer User".. the one type of person who's literary tastes I do not share.
Slashdot headlines for next week...
Beowulf Cluster Used to Create More Effective Toilet Plunger.
Malda Spends Evening At Hospital - Hot Grits Found In Pants
${COMPANY} patents ${OBVIOUS}, sues ${COMPANY2}
Signal 11 Found Dead In Woods - Local LUG Members Questioned
European Union To Mimick Congress, Proposes IQ Limits For Senators.
Well, I suppose Oracle is the only one who could have done it - just try storing all the dirt on Microsoft and its allies in an Access database and we'll see how far YOU get!
Actually, it really is me. There's a bug in the system - I can't login correctly, which is why I have to "shotgun" the system by posting without logging in - which is why all my posts for the past week have been +2'd by default. Sorry.. normally I wouldn't inflict this on people.. however, on with the show...
I'm going to skip over you calling me a troll. I may be misinformed. I may be wrong. but I'm not a troll.
Now, first, you got it backwards - TCP is not rate limited perse, however, if you consider that your max RWIN is typically 64k, and that it'll take 5ms to ack it, this means that 64 * (1000/5) = 12800, or alittle over 12MB/s. That's a good lan connection! However, if you increase it to about 100ms, which is my typical ping for my cable modem, my maximum bandwidth is a mere 640KB/s. Ow. Biiig difference. So, there's where my numbers come from. Now, about the persistence..
Persistence does you no good as you still need to request the data. Now, let's assume you have a 50kb webpage to download. We'll say the html is 5k, and there are 3 graphics on the page, 15k each.
TCP handshake will take about 150ms. This means 50ms to get there, 50ms to get back, and another 50 to get the final SYN/ACK. Now for the first request, another 50ms to send it. We're at 200ms. Server gets HTML page, we'll say it takes 5ms to do that and pipe it back out. We'll also say it does this all at once. 255ms later, we have the page. Now, we'll open 3 new connections for the images - 150ms for each. Now we're at 405ms. Images each take another 5ms to grab it, 50 ms to come back. 460ms. Rendering begins on your system by your browser. Now, we want to close the connection - the server already closed its remote connection probably with an RST pkt on the last piece of data. So another 50ms to send your RST pkt, 50ms to ack that, and now we're done.. grand total: 560ms.
Now, let's assume we could have done this via UDP all at once... again.. 50ms to send the query. 5ms to retrieve all 4 parts. another 50 to send it back. 105ms, your system begins rendering. As this is a stateless connection, no need to close it - if it failed, we'll retry. Congrats, you're done at a smoking 105ms vs. 560ms.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, what I'm really waiting for is for someone to write a proxy that can dynamically rewrite pages as they come through an http tunnel. Then, we can block ads, the associated javacrap, and other stuff - like pages containing the string "MAKE MONEY FAST!" I prefer not to get involved with the ethical side of business - business long ago proved to me they have no real ethics, hence I focus on creating technical solutions which either force them to be ethical, or force them away from me.
I think the technical community should make a stand and say we will not tolerate this, and then proceed to distribute easy-to-use software which blocks companies money-grabbing attempts. Remember: no company can survive without people. If a company is being unethical, solve the problem via technical means. If you work for the company, stall, drag your feet, and if you have to engineer the privacy-invading feature, remember these words "Yes, it's possible, but it would cost too much to do it".. and if they try anyway, make sure you're very well paid and that the product develops all kinds of bugs.. like suspicious dialog boxes in spyware that give your company's URL along with a "please report this error: Error collecting data on ${USER}, please contact sales@mycompany.com".
Civil disobedience.
Can it be radiation hardened easily, perchance?
Bingo.
Mmmmm. In either event, the vapor won't kill you instantly.. but you won't live very long either.
I hire a private security agency to secure my building. They gut the building and steal all the valuables. Who's at fault, me or them?
*sarcasm* I think they'd sooner setup shop in the high school down the block than go to antarctica. They got this little problem of englishmetric conversions that need to be worked out first before they can get to Mars. */sarcasm*
Sigh. Yeah, and I suppose they're in direct contact with the liquid. You take a piece of glass at room temperature and submerse it suddenly in liquid nitrogen. If it doesn't explode, I'll send you a 12 pack of guinness (provided you're of legal age).
Alot of people have used liquid nitrogen to cool their systems, this is not unusual for hardcore overclockers. What is unusual, however, is using the florinert(sp??) - not only does it have an incredibly low viscosity (something that was air tight could still leak a *ton* of this stuff), but it's also extremelly dangerous if burned. Well, like most coolants, actually.. but still, this one is worse than usual.
Use a storage container with a pressure valve and a pipe to feed the liquid into the apparatus.. it's safer, it's more efficient, and most important - your nitro isn't exposed to the atmosphere. Very important detail, that.
That was the easy part. Do you remember why Earth was built? To come up with the question that fits that answer. Of course, we're scheduled for demolition next week. Oh well...
That's pretty standard for most any country, with the exception being that maybe they won't label it "subversive" in the US - they'll call it a national security risk instead. :\
The system needs to ensure that brute-forcing the database cannot occur, otherwise interested parties would take that information to the judge and get it removed, and possibly have the service shut down. If, OTOH, brute-forcing wasn't possible, then they could only remove data on an as-discovered basis - making the database a hundredfold more resistant to attack.
I did some number crunching on a system like this, and the results aren't encouraging. Here's my (probably broken) math, enclosed in an e-mail to someone who actually knows how to do these kind of calculations...
:( Not .5% of the keyspace,
:) Can you double-check my numbers and make
First some background..
If you take a stream of random data, and XOR it with your
plaintext, and then delete the plaintext, it's still possible
to recover the plaintext by doing this:
A ^ B = C - encrypt
B = A ^ C - decrypt
Given that, let's assume you create a server filled with
XOR'd 'packets' - files of a preset size, we'll say 1MB.
These packets are each assigned a key. Every packet has
a unique key.
The system works by allowing you to check in an arbitrary
number of packets. Once those packets are in the system,
they begin to be propagated through the network. Important
point - the network is protocol agnostic - it'll happily
run over http, ftp, or even finger if you're masochistic.
Since each packet is identified only by a GUID it's
impossible to know who created it, or which other piece
of data it needs to be XOR'd with to recover the plaintext.
And this is the math problem. In computing, it isn't
hard to simply brute-force something, and this system is
no different, except in how the brute force occurs. In
this case, we would download a complete copy of the database
and then grab one piece of the data and then sequentially
XOR it with every other piece of data on the system until
you find something that looks like plaintext.
Since each piece of data should, in theory, have a counter-
component, how many packets need to be in a system before
decryption via brute-force becomes not feasible? Not
feasible would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 2^64
operations, or about 1.8*10^20.
Unfortunately, I've realized that if someone knows that
one piece is half of the plaintext, you only need to
download and XOR every other file in the database once
to recover the plaintext. So if I had 20GB of data,
this would amount to a mere 20,480 operations.
very strong! In order to make it so that 2^64
operations would only exhaust
it is necessary to have 3.6*10^20 packets in the
system!
Doesn't this require about 3,518,437,208,883,200 terabytes
of storage? I hate math. It shot down a perfectly
good idea.
sure this is the right conclusion?
--
Signal 11
The makers may make and the users may use, but
the fixers must fix with but minimal clues
*sarcasm* Oh, just ban the whole internet. Afterall it's only used by pedophiles and 14 year old kids who play video games. */sarcasm*
Infact, someone I know very well is planning on doing this soon - next summer.
Malda: Hemos, bring me the brains! .. socio-economic effects by the post-columbine third-wave era in ecopolitical dogmatic...
Hemos: Yeees maaaster.
Malda: *squish* Gosh, there wasn't that much there, you sure you got the right brain?
Hemos: Yeah, bird brains.. right?
Malda: Fool! We'll use it anyway, though.
* Malda casts feign life.
Katz: *groan*
Malda: It's alive! IT'S ALLLIIIVVVEEE!
Katz:
Malda: Uh oh. Ego^H^H^HHemos, quick, activate the lameness filter!
Hemos: Yeeesss maaaster.... *gurgle*
Katz: SEXBOTS new paradigm shift think outside the box...
Malda: HURRY!
* CLiCK! *
Slashdot Audience: Hey, when are you gonna fix Katz?
Malda: Ask me about it again and I'll delay fixing him by 24 hours!
And there you have it.. now we have a frankenkatz on slashdot writing about frankenstein. Wonderful.. slashdot creates infinite katzian loop, film at 11.
If you believe that NASA's contribution to the bottom line of the government ledger is success or failure of it's constituent projects, we have a serious problem. NASA caused, both directly and indirectly, millions, possibly billions, of dollars worth of return from aerospace technologies. Technologies that can be found in most automobiles, in modern airplanes and jet fighters. Not only that, but it's scientific advance. Science has improved our quality of life, told us how the universe works and how to harness its energies. Geez.. to simply limit yourself to adding figures on the bottom of a ledger as the sum contribution of NASA is at best, a misinformed and limited view.
Congress is about politics, not economics or technology. Comeon - you wouldn't let an auto mechanic work on your computer any more than he would let you, as a computer geek, work on his car. Give these people some credit - they're the best qualified people to give you an answer about how this is helping people.. without all the econo-political crap that comes out of congress on a daily basis.
How arrogant to assume that the US is the only company that can make advances in this field! How absolutely horridly arrogant. I, for one, applaud their efforts - for every dollar that was invested in NASA, economists have determined that we average about 6 dollars back in benefits from technology advances caused by NASA. What's to assume India won't experience the same boost from investing in aerospace? If they're smarter than us, they'll pour lots of cash into it and turbocharge their technology sector.
Well, yes, but this is a slashdot post, and it's late at night. I'm sure I could have taken into account the reduce gravitational effects the higher you go, but this was just a rough off-the-cuff calculation and not meant to be a real scientific analysis. Besides, there's a ton (excuse the pun) of other reasons why it wouldn't fly (excuse that pun too) - namely the wind would create enough force to topple them. Then there's the problem with decompression. People need to remain in a pressurized environment.. which space, unfortunately, does not provide. As those people got above a hundred or so miles above the earth, pressure would drop off, and as boyle's law states, as pressure drops, assuming the volume remains constant, what happens to the temp? It goes up. These poor bastards would literally be having their blood boil at those altitudes without protection. Actually, NASA has some information on this very question, if you're interested.
Now, with the basic math out of the way, we'll say that we want to get to about 170 miles outside of the earth's orbit. At that point, we'll be at the point where we can simply hand someone an aerosol can and tell them to point it at the earth and the familiar newtonian physics will take over, propelling him, slowly, to the moon.
But how many people would it take to create a human tower 170 miles up? Well, that's exactly 897600 feet up, and assume we use only one person stacked on top of another, that means that it'll take a mere 149,600 people to get to the moon - not bad, considering how many peope live in India! But, unfortunately, those people would collectively weigh about 10179 tons, excluding the bendy-straws. Now, the official world record for two-handed weightlifting by a man is 600 pounds, but there is someone claiming they can lift up to 7063.75 pounds. Alas, this is still less than one hundredth of one percent of the required lifting power.
In short, our psychic weight lifter would be flattened to approximately the thickness of a dorito chip in about half a second. Sorry if this upset anyone trying to get to space...
ROB ,will you PLEASE fix my account so I can start posting at 1 again instead of 2?! I want my goddamn PREVIEW feature back...
Slashdot headlines for next week...
Well, I suppose Oracle is the only one who could have done it - just try storing all the dirt on Microsoft and its allies in an Access database and we'll see how far YOU get!
Either you didn't read my post and figure out that this IS what I was talking about, or your IQ is smaller than your waistline.
I'm going to skip over you calling me a troll. I may be misinformed. I may be wrong. but I'm not a troll.
Now, first, you got it backwards - TCP is not rate limited perse, however, if you consider that your max RWIN is typically 64k, and that it'll take 5ms to ack it, this means that 64 * (1000/5) = 12800, or alittle over 12MB/s. That's a good lan connection! However, if you increase it to about 100ms, which is my typical ping for my cable modem, my maximum bandwidth is a mere 640KB/s. Ow. Biiig difference. So, there's where my numbers come from. Now, about the persistence..
Persistence does you no good as you still need to request the data. Now, let's assume you have a 50kb webpage to download. We'll say the html is 5k, and there are 3 graphics on the page, 15k each.
TCP handshake will take about 150ms. This means 50ms to get there, 50ms to get back, and another 50 to get the final SYN/ACK. Now for the first request, another 50ms to send it. We're at 200ms. Server gets HTML page, we'll say it takes 5ms to do that and pipe it back out. We'll also say it does this all at once. 255ms later, we have the page. Now, we'll open 3 new connections for the images - 150ms for each. Now we're at 405ms. Images each take another 5ms to grab it, 50 ms to come back. 460ms. Rendering begins on your system by your browser. Now, we want to close the connection - the server already closed its remote connection probably with an RST pkt on the last piece of data. So another 50ms to send your RST pkt, 50ms to ack that, and now we're done.. grand total: 560ms.
Now, let's assume we could have done this via UDP all at once... again.. 50ms to send the query. 5ms to retrieve all 4 parts. another 50 to send it back. 105ms, your system begins rendering. As this is a stateless connection, no need to close it - if it failed, we'll retry. Congrats, you're done at a smoking 105ms vs. 560ms.
Now then, about me not being informative...
It's apparently going to run about $550 US if my conversion from uk pounds are correct. Ouch. And that's just for the board + CPU...