Several years ago, Mark Ordesky told us that New Line have rights to make not just The Hobbit but a second "LOTR prequel", covering the events leading up to those depicted in LOTR.
Well, I don't think this legislation is supposed to force people to not to discriminate in their choice in whom they rent to, since that would be pretty hard to enforce. It's more likely that the intent is to bar people from causing offense. However, I personally think that even this is pretty futile, especially on an online forum. If a forum like that were held responsible for all potentially offensive content posted, the viability of all online forums would be called into question. When it's suddenly not enough to have active moderation of the content, what is a provider of an interactive site to do? Hire people to manually filter and approve every post? I'm afraid this would be pretty damn impractical.
Although I'm not from the US myself, I agree with you 100% from what I've heard and seen that American society seems to go way too far in enforcing political correctness everywhere. There will always be bigots and assholes, and I feel that they should have the right to advertise their stuff and services under their own terms. At least that way people can see where they stand and judge their merit accordingly.
I ask you: Which scenario is worse?
1) A white supremacist advertises housing for rent using neutral language, since the law says he has to. He gets contacted by lots of people of color whom he dismisses with verbal insults, since he feels safer expressing his views one-on-one.
2) A white supremacist advertises housing for rent stating his viewpoint and his desire to rent to whites only. He does not get contacted by any people of color or any other people who dislike his views.
Oops - seems I jumped the gun there. It's Israel that's developing this. That said, I think my criticism still stands. Israel is very closely related to the US in many respects, including the tendency to pump money into the development of high-tech weaponry with dubious justifications.
Am I the only one who finds it laughable that nowadays practially every new piece of military tech these days is about fighting 'terrorists'? This technology could, of course, be used on people who are not terrorists, and it probably will be if it goes into production. This includes legitimate uses such as actual combat against soldiers who are not terrorists. Believe me, those do still exist. Even outside the US.
Of course, the flip side of the coin is the ongoing effort to redefine everyone the US is about to strike against as 'terrorists' beforehand.
Sorry if I'm way offtopic, but this just struck a bad chord with me.
We are willing to do the same deal with Red Hat and other Linux distributors, it's not an exclusive thing.
My, how nice of you. So you're willing to include others in your protection racket? You're much too gracious.
Seriously, this is f*cked up, in a disturbingly devious way. Basically, Ballmer's philosophy here seems to be: "Microsoft deserves money for every single computer out there, and we will get it one way or the other."
At the end of the day for basically the whole 18, 19 years that we've been pursuing the server and enterprise opportunity, our number one competitor in the data center for new applications has been Unix. Unix, Unix, Unix, Unix.
So they need lots of developers, developers, developers, developers to keep up...
In short, the weakness lies in the fact that although DES3 is used to encrypt the communication between the passport chip and the reader, the key is based upon data that's available on the passport:
By last month, Booth, Laurie and I each had access to a new biometric chipped passport and were ready to begin testing them. Laurie's first port of call was the ICAO's [International Civil Aviation Organisation] website, where the organisation had published specifications for the new travel documents. This is where he learned that the key to opening up the secure chip was contained in the passports themselves - passport number, date of birth and expiry date.
...
The Home Office has adopted a very high encryption technology called 3DES - that is, to a military-level data-encryption standard times three. So they are using strong cryptography to prevent conversations between the passport and the reader being eavesdropped, but they are then breaking one of the fundamental principles of encryption by using non-secret information actually published in the passport to create a 'secret key'. That is the equivalent of installing a solid steel front door to your house and then putting the key under the mat.
This reaffirms advice that states that when the robot uprising finally comes, you should always aim your rocket launcher at the head (or brain nexus).
'In extreme circumstances, the assailants can be stopped by removing the head or destroying the brain. I will repeat that: By removing the head or destroying the brain.'
No injuries were reported. Working together, the users were able to delete all the harmful parts of the explosion. Of course, there was a lot of debate first on whether or not to delete them, since some argued that both the harmful and non-harmful parts should be represented, but in the end the 'delete' votes outnumbered them.
So you carefully type in your one time pad into the computer. Guess what, since the attacker has all your keystrokes, he can easily put himself in the middle and take the pad you so careflly entered and give them to the bank himself and boom, he has access with minimal effort.
This won't work if you enter only small bits of the pad at a time... one bit for each login.
For example the Enigma is completely secure, unless you encrypt more than about 4kb of german text with a key.
It's funny you should mention Enigma in this context, because I remember doing a project for a cryptography class back in college that involved cracking a simplified version of the Enigma cipher. The solution that I came up with involved brute force, coupled with sorting the results by their frequency distributions. This is based on the simple enough premise that language is pretty far from random, and can be detected by a fairly simple statistical analysis. Long story short, this worked like a charm. So you don't actually need any plaintext to check whether the results of a brute force are correct or not - the only limiting factor is how long it takes to go through all the possible decryptions. But of course, with modern ciphers, this is extremely prohibitive.
Is it just me, or are the DOJ's demands ridiculously numerous and far-reaching? A typical subpoena request 29 separate items, many of which are pretty, well, general. Consider, for example, this item from the Comcast subpoena (PDF Alert):
27. Studies indicating the number ofwebsites with pornographic content available on the
World Wide Web, the proportion of such websites in comparison to the number of all
websites on the World Wide Web, and/or the proportion of websites with pornographic
content produced or created in the United States in comparison to such websites produced
or created elsewhere.
Why on Earth is a humble ISP supposed to provide the DOJ with this information, and how are they supposed to do it? And why doesn't the DOJ just research this themselves if this is such a big deal for them?
The Internet connection is under the sea (no spacewaves here yet). There are two massive optic-fibre cables that provide it; CANTAT-3 and Farice. CANTAT-3 is older and has been relatively stable. Farice has broken a few times since it was laid, but has been stable these past few months.
When both cables are up, transfer rates are actually rather good - I myself have experienced download rates of hundreds of kilobytes per second. In the vast majority of cases, the upload rate of the foreign host is the limiting factor. So, if you fork out for a good ADSL connection, you rarely have cause to complain.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently they are.
Peter Jackson says:
Well, I don't think this legislation is supposed to force people to not to discriminate in their choice in whom they rent to, since that would be pretty hard to enforce. It's more likely that the intent is to bar people from causing offense. However, I personally think that even this is pretty futile, especially on an online forum. If a forum like that were held responsible for all potentially offensive content posted, the viability of all online forums would be called into question. When it's suddenly not enough to have active moderation of the content, what is a provider of an interactive site to do? Hire people to manually filter and approve every post? I'm afraid this would be pretty damn impractical.
Although I'm not from the US myself, I agree with you 100% from what I've heard and seen that American society seems to go way too far in enforcing political correctness everywhere. There will always be bigots and assholes, and I feel that they should have the right to advertise their stuff and services under their own terms. At least that way people can see where they stand and judge their merit accordingly.
I ask you: Which scenario is worse?
1) A white supremacist advertises housing for rent using neutral language, since the law says he has to. He gets contacted by lots of people of color whom he dismisses with verbal insults, since he feels safer expressing his views one-on-one.
2) A white supremacist advertises housing for rent stating his viewpoint and his desire to rent to whites only. He does not get contacted by any people of color or any other people who dislike his views.
Oops - seems I jumped the gun there. It's Israel that's developing this. That said, I think my criticism still stands. Israel is very closely related to the US in many respects, including the tendency to pump money into the development of high-tech weaponry with dubious justifications.
Am I the only one who finds it laughable that nowadays practially every new piece of military tech these days is about fighting 'terrorists'? This technology could, of course, be used on people who are not terrorists, and it probably will be if it goes into production. This includes legitimate uses such as actual combat against soldiers who are not terrorists. Believe me, those do still exist. Even outside the US.
Of course, the flip side of the coin is the ongoing effort to redefine everyone the US is about to strike against as 'terrorists' beforehand.
Sorry if I'm way offtopic, but this just struck a bad chord with me.
Also from Ballmer:
My, how nice of you. So you're willing to include others in your protection racket? You're much too gracious.
Seriously, this is f*cked up, in a disturbingly devious way. Basically, Ballmer's philosophy here seems to be: "Microsoft deserves money for every single computer out there, and we will get it one way or the other."
Quoth Ballmer:
So they need lots of developers, developers, developers, developers to keep up ...
I just finished reading the article.
In short, the weakness lies in the fact that although DES3 is used to encrypt the communication between the passport chip and the reader, the key is based upon data that's available on the passport:
'In extreme circumstances, the assailants can be stopped by removing the head or destroying the brain. I will repeat that: By removing the head or destroying the brain.'
Bill Gates on the Past, Future, and Google
So he's saying Google is the Present?
Damn straight ...
It seems to me that it's about purple haddocks that live in houses made of straw. I could be wrong though ...
The findings link looks like an html document, but it redirects to a PDF file. Neat trick.
No wonder some people are confused over this interweb business ...
Or maybe they could do it Marvin-style:
"Processes? Don't talk to me about processes ..."
A simple Google News search turns up a whole lot of items on this story in English.
No injuries were reported. Working together, the users were able to delete all the harmful parts of the explosion. Of course, there was a lot of debate first on whether or not to delete them, since some argued that both the harmful and non-harmful parts should be represented, but in the end the 'delete' votes outnumbered them.
This won't work if you enter only small bits of the pad at a time ... one bit for each login.
Hey, if Ballmer says so, it must be true, right?
I just found a copy of the EULA they're going to use on this Wallop thing:
Is it just me, or does this sound a little ... ominous?
#ifdef C_PROGRAMMER
printf("BRING BACK CAPS LOCK!\n");
#endif
"Algorithms. Don't talk to me about algorithms."
Also, cue Ballmer's Ipod. I'm sure Microsoft could use some ideas from this as a basis for a marketing campaign.
Yes, and a skunk seems harmless enough until it releases its foul scent.
Well, according to this thing (Swedish Chef setting), it's "Yerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr"
Why on Earth is a humble ISP supposed to provide the DOJ with this information, and how are they supposed to do it? And why doesn't the DOJ just research this themselves if this is such a big deal for them?
When both cables are up, transfer rates are actually rather good - I myself have experienced download rates of hundreds of kilobytes per second. In the vast majority of cases, the upload rate of the foreign host is the limiting factor. So, if you fork out for a good ADSL connection, you rarely have cause to complain.