I agree, I don't see any difference between this and spyware. There is nothing "experimental" about this test except to find bugs in their advertising software. They should run the same kind of targeted advertising test using almost identical wording but this time default to opting out.
If it was a real experiment they would run it again using the same people, without modifying adverts, they would count the number of clicks on non-targeted adverts and targeted adverts and compare them.
My expectations are that 0% would choose the targeted advertising options.
Also, without targeted advertising I reckon 0.01% of users would click on an advert, with targeted advertising 0.02% would click on an advert. The remaining ~99.9% of users would be classified as "irritated by the advertising".
We would find out just how worth it those adverts are. I don't think they will ever be able to run such tests because they would never be able to get a statistically significant number of people to agree to be spied on.
I don't know about you folks but I have a lot of copyrighted material on my hard disk (all legitimate of course). I imagine most people do, for example, paid for mp3s from iTunes, Windows, MS Office, Mac OS X, etc.
Isn't it kind of illegal to make copies of such data unless you have bought a licence ?
How can the copyright holders be sure that some border guard isn't going to say "Gosh, this guy has a really sweet configuration, I'm going to keep this HDD image" ?
If you let US Customs make a copy of your disk, isn't that "making available" ?
Stuff the copyright stuff, what about my personal files, downloaded bank statements, medical records etc ? Do they have time to check if my disk is encrypted ?
Mercerism was nothing to do with worshipping animals, it was about feeling empathy to someone, even if you knew that person was doomed.
Animals were not worshipped at all. They were a status symbol because almost all of them had been wiped out from radioactive fallout.
It would not have been difficult to add Mercerism to Blade Runner in presentation but it would have been difficult to avoid confusing the story line.
Basically, Blade Runner was 1000 miles from DADOES. No one has ever made a decent screenplay from a PKD book, maybe that's why Blade Runner succeeded. I doubt this movie will break that tradition unless they similarly make massive changes.
Last year Japan immigration introduced fingerprint scans and face photographs for all foreign entrants to the country for "terrorism prevention". The only terrorist acts ever committed in Japan were by Japanese people (who aren't scanned when returning to Japan).
The real reason is to satisfy their paranoia that a high percentage of crime is committed by foreigners, which statistically is untrue; and to capture the odd illegal immigrant.
Believe me, Japan is not the golden land for immigrants or hot target for terrorists.
Furthermore, one of my friends flew from the UK to Japan via Germany. At Frankfurt the security directed him through another security gate which checked for forbidden goods. The 500 ml jar of expensive honey he'd bought as a gift at Heathrow duty free had to be binned because of the liquids restriction. Totally insane.
CCTV was always sold to the Great British public as a deterrent against crime. But real scumbags don't care if they are caught on camera. And the cameras are mostly installed badly despite using high quality kit.
The FA says that only 3% of crimes have been solved with them, so that's their usefulness as an evidence gathering tool negated.
They have been used slightly successfully for following fraudulent benefit claimants and generally harassing the public about minor infractions.
If you have to throw some money at a crime problem, CCTV is the way to go. Sounds good, easy to find someone to install it and you can waste hundreds of thousands.
German scientist discovers asteroid on "collision course", NASA not very helpful.... start building your rocket ship kid, it might be ready in time for us to fight back!
Wouldn't it be possible to figure out a decent way to drop fake packets ? Make your torrent look like some other type of traffic ? This is just a temporary set back for ComCast/torrent users, I'm sure the next P2P protocol will tackle this.
Still, I'd be rather concerned if my ISP was snooping on my data under the guise of "traffic management". Don't you guys have privacy laws against this ?
Your right I don't know much about image processing other then a limited experience with Photoshop filters. However, this being Slashdot, I don't need to know what I am talking about right? Insult received.
I think it helps to keep things on topic if you don't make a long post speculating about things you clearly don't know. If you know you don't know, then how is it an insult ?
I am approaching it from a logical, mathematical approach
I don't see any logical or mathematical argument in your post. Now you're making an analogy to MP3 compression and adding lots of speculation, that doesn't form a logical argument either. As other posters have pointed out; given suitable knowledge or a model of the physical parameters in the scene it is possible to recover more, real image data. I would argue it is not a prediction if your model is accurate. e.g. after the incident was recorded on CCTV you went back and took some calibration images to measure lens distortion in the video etc.
I think you simply didn't like the fact that I pointed out 2 fundamental errors in your thinking. 1. Seeing the images would be enough to "know" if the algorithm was good - not scientific. 2. The idea was thinking outside of the box - check image processing literature before you make such a bold statement. Plenty of posts above have cited other works that apply.
You clearly don't know anything about image processing, but hey, this is Slashdot.
I could be wrong, but until I see actual pictures
Seeing pictures would not prove anything. A ground truth comparison is what is required.
Great idea, and certainly thinking outside of the box, so they deserve respect for their work.
No, respect for trying but it doesn't look like more than a small improvement, if that. We have to get hold of this paper and see if the results are presented in an appropriate scientific context, something not implied by the summary.
Without seeing the details (read TFA but it's a summary and quite a bad one at that), I can't see why this would be better than a Bayesian optimisation with a photometric constraint. "The objective of the algorithm is to maximize the total number of pixels in the edges" sounds very, very simplified.
There are efficient ways of solving these things. Interesting that they invent an image processing algorithm but publish it in a non image processing journal - I wonder why that is ?
It's natural for Microsoft to report that Vista is the "best ever, yet"; certainly at this time, but it's just spin. I'm not going to analyse the original report but it seems to me that these are the known vulnerabilities. I think statistically, this is meaningless, we have to compare for a period of time, say the first 5 years. What if in 2 years after release everyone realises that the TCP stack is fundamentally flawed and requires total replacement ? That would be a mighty big flaw that we don't know yet and could totally skew this analysis. Also, this implies I don't have to RTFA for another 4 years so that's good for me:)
If you were a hacker, would you develop a crack for XP or Vista ?
XP, is supposedly somewhat secure and stable with an established userbase. How often do security updates get released these days ? Or Vista, which has so many obvious bugs, is bound to get a lot of fixes, patches and service packs - the landscape is constantly changing. I know which one I would develop my crack for.
The OP should try contacting the original author and ask what rights anyone else has to use it... is it OK to use it commercially and to modify it (if the need should arise).
How does the OP know that the code on the forum was posted by the original author ?
For all you know, the code in the forum was copied and pasted from some other source.
If I was a Comcast customer, I would tell them, as I am now telling all the services I am a customer of:
BLOCK MARK CUBAN, PLEASE
As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are people like Mark Cuban who have no clue. Thats right, Mark Cuban is a clueless person who thinks he is able to tell us how we should use our paid for bandwidth.
Does anyone really think that ANYONE is online for free ? That all the bandwidth is consumed by a few people distributing illegal warez and content by P2P ? P2P is used by many individuals and organizations, not just pirates and waremongerers. Consumers have the right to use their Internet connection the way they see fit. P2P users are NOT subsidized by commercial entities (who pay no extra for hogging backbones and high capacity links and usually have gratuitous Flash animations on their websites).
Thats not to say there isnt a place for whiney dolts. There is. Comcast, Time Warner, etc should charge a premium to those users who want to act as gods and prattle on about taking away other peoples rights. After all, that is why P2P is used, right ? It reduces the load on content providers who already avoid significant bandwidth and hosting charges. The proven fact is those people who download MP3s buy more CDs than non-downloaders. Removing P2P will have a negative effect on the music industry.
Yes, getting rid of dolts is a good thing. That will speed up my internet connection.
So unless your service improves Comcast, I hope you file for bankruptcy.
I think the author got it all back to front: if anyone is willing to have their machine root kitted then
surely they are the users that need to be securely handled. The kind of "we'll not trust this user
but this other guy looks fine" security is a back door by another name.
The idea of a test to determine if the user is savvy or not should be applied by the ISP before letting
them plug anything into the net. Zombies are a serious problem, the idea that ISPs think it's OK for a user to be pumping
out tens of thousand emails a day and ignoring it is criminal. Blocking port 25 is going to stop your average
14 year for about 60 seconds.
I for one would be quite happy for Black ICE to be used to destroy zombie machines
As long as I don't mask crimes by it Isn't this one of those well spread FUD things, "people who piggyback WiFi must be downloading child porn" ?
Just like,
"if you buy a pirate DVD you are financing drug dealers"
"if you download music you must be sharing it with millions of people and therefore owe the artist^H^H record company a zillion dollars"
"if it's open source it's less secure"
Has there ever been a case of someone piggybacking WiFi to mask a crime ?
Wow, this is like the least insightful post I have ever seen.
It is well known and de facto usage that a "trojan" refers to software. Obligatory link to wikipedia that states it is software.
Yes, and in the UK there is The Sales of Goods Act (1979).
The original poster should say to the store manager that the laptop obviously couldn't survive only 5 months of sensible usage; it's not a warranty issue. It's only reasonable that a laptop would not break, especially at the hinge - which should be a strong part given that it's designed to be opened and closed.
During the complaint, the poster should mention that the laptop is not fit for purpose (required legal terminology).
Honestly, I took a pair of walking shoes back after 3 months and the shoe shop owner told me that the stitching had come undone because I had "laced them up wrong". Mentioning Sales of Goods Act quickly changed his tune.
As your ace in your pocket, pop into your local court house on the way and pick up an application form for the small claims court and show it to the manager if you have to. That shows you're serious.
Just do your research on the law and go back; don't argue with the manager because it's plain black and white.
Let me see, I run VNC on an only moderately busy LAN and I get slow down, poor refresh rates and that is this year. This guy is claiming to have done all this hacking only about 4 years ago. He could easily have had much better hardware but then he can't claim to have "almost" got the information then can he ?
Have you used a VNC connection in 4 bit colour ? It's bad, very bad and certainly a waste of time for someone who wants to see some alien technology. Far easier to cut up the image into small pieces and transfer it out to his botnet and reassemble it and then he has some evidence.
I know all about how these exploits can happen Here's a clue for you: don't assume that you know everything, adding in these little barbs doesn't make your argument any stronger. The guy is stretching it with his Mitnick-wannabe behaviour; his descriptions are really poor and any one with an ounce of scepticism can see that immediately.
If russia wanted to assassinate this guy, they would have simply had him poisoned, or killed in a road accident, or just shot by a sniper... no? A simple assassination would have made much less noise and news than using expensive radio-active material.
The experts state that there are only about 3 places in Europe where you can get hold of such material; so you believe that another country with that kind of nuclear capability decided that it's OK to go to all this effort just to put Russia in a bad light ? And I suppose the fact that the prime suspect is some high up Russian military intelligence officer who met the victim at exactly the right time and places where contamination was found is just a coincidence ?
Given your penchant for "more likely and logical" reasons, don't you think that's a little odd ? Or perhaps you think Russia did it because no one would believe that they didn't do it so automatically everyone would discard Russia from the list of suspects... That's the type of reasoning you're using.
IP scanning via botnet shouldn't be difficult; nmap is GPL'd, any botnet maker might steal the code and include it in their bot.
Why is he scanning 65k machines when it's oh-so-easy to find the machines in the first place, they are locked down with default passwords and he has the prescience to immediately go to the folder he needs and pick the first image that happens to have all the juicy details...
I imagine the box running VNC wasn't password-protected
Then why not just scan for machines that aren't password protected ?
You can have that list, too. Just google for "IANA IP allocation list", or some such.
Yes, but I'm sure that list doesn't go 148.12.28.126 = top secret military base, 148.12.28.127 = army paperclip supplies. A list of IP addresses in itself doesn't really have that much information in it. If you were him would you really be interested in checking to see if other connections were authorised or not ? And he says "they were not military"; I don't think NASA equates to military (yet) so what is the big deal with military - I think he's just trying to add credibility to his feeble story.
I can see your point of view but you have to make far too many assumptions for it to work.
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I agree, I don't see any difference between this and spyware. There is nothing "experimental" about this test except to find bugs in their advertising software. They should run the same kind of targeted advertising test using almost identical wording but this time default to opting out.
If it was a real experiment they would run it again using the same people, without modifying adverts, they would count the number of clicks on non-targeted adverts and targeted adverts and compare them.
My expectations are that 0% would choose the targeted advertising options.
Also, without targeted advertising I reckon 0.01% of users would click on an advert, with targeted advertising 0.02% would click on an advert. The remaining ~99.9% of users would be classified as "irritated by the advertising".
We would find out just how worth it those adverts are. I don't think they will ever be able to run such tests because they would never be able to get a statistically significant number of people to agree to be spied on.
I don't know about you folks but I have a lot of copyrighted material on my hard disk (all legitimate of course). I imagine most people do, for example, paid for mp3s from iTunes, Windows, MS Office, Mac OS X, etc.
Isn't it kind of illegal to make copies of such data unless you have bought a licence ?
How can the copyright holders be sure that some border guard isn't going to say "Gosh, this guy has a really sweet configuration, I'm going to keep this HDD image" ?
If you let US Customs make a copy of your disk, isn't that "making available" ?
Stuff the copyright stuff, what about my personal files, downloaded bank statements, medical records etc ? Do they have time to check if my disk is encrypted ?
Mercerism was nothing to do with worshipping animals, it was about feeling empathy to someone, even if you knew that person was doomed.
Animals were not worshipped at all. They were a status symbol because almost all of them had been wiped out from radioactive fallout.
It would not have been difficult to add Mercerism to Blade Runner in presentation but it would have been difficult to avoid confusing the story line.
Basically, Blade Runner was 1000 miles from DADOES. No one has ever made a decent screenplay from a PKD book, maybe that's why Blade Runner succeeded. I doubt this movie will break that tradition unless they similarly make massive changes.
Last year Japan immigration introduced fingerprint scans and face photographs for all foreign entrants to the country for "terrorism prevention". The only terrorist acts ever committed in Japan were by Japanese people (who aren't scanned when returning to Japan).
The real reason is to satisfy their paranoia that a high percentage of crime is committed by foreigners, which statistically is untrue; and to capture the odd illegal immigrant.
Believe me, Japan is not the golden land for immigrants or hot target for terrorists.
Furthermore, one of my friends flew from the UK to Japan via Germany. At Frankfurt the security directed him through another security gate which checked for forbidden goods. The 500 ml jar of expensive honey he'd bought as a gift at Heathrow duty free had to be binned because of the liquids restriction. Totally insane.
Am I the only one who thinks it's ironic we are the ones putting 3 legged machines on Mars... ?
CCTV was always sold to the Great British public as a deterrent against crime. But real scumbags don't care if they are caught on camera. And the cameras are mostly installed badly despite using high quality kit.
The FA says that only 3% of crimes have been solved with them, so that's their usefulness as an evidence gathering tool negated.
They have been used slightly successfully for following fraudulent benefit claimants and generally harassing the public about minor infractions.
If you have to throw some money at a crime problem, CCTV is the way to go. Sounds good, easy to find someone to install it and you can waste hundreds of thousands.
Yeah, we can trust them to do the right thing, can't we ?
German scientist discovers asteroid on "collision course", NASA not very helpful.... start building your rocket ship kid, it might be ready in time for us to fight back!
Simple, just sell some advertising and insert it into any HTTP traffic... um, hang on...
Wouldn't it be possible to figure out a decent way to drop fake packets ? Make your torrent look like some other type of traffic ? This is just a temporary set back for ComCast/torrent users, I'm sure the next P2P protocol will tackle this.
Still, I'd be rather concerned if my ISP was snooping on my data under the guise of "traffic management". Don't you guys have privacy laws against this ?
I think it helps to keep things on topic if you don't make a long post speculating about things you clearly don't know. If you know you don't know, then how is it an insult ?
I don't see any logical or mathematical argument in your post. Now you're making an analogy to MP3 compression and adding lots of speculation, that doesn't form a logical argument either. As other posters have pointed out; given suitable knowledge or a model of the physical parameters in the scene it is possible to recover more, real image data. I would argue it is not a prediction if your model is accurate. e.g. after the incident was recorded on CCTV you went back and took some calibration images to measure lens distortion in the video etc.
I think you simply didn't like the fact that I pointed out 2 fundamental errors in your thinking. 1. Seeing the images would be enough to "know" if the algorithm was good - not scientific. 2. The idea was thinking outside of the box - check image processing literature before you make such a bold statement. Plenty of posts above have cited other works that apply.
You clearly don't know anything about image processing, but hey, this is Slashdot.
Seeing pictures would not prove anything. A ground truth comparison is what is required.
No, respect for trying but it doesn't look like more than a small improvement, if that. We have to get hold of this paper and see if the results are presented in an appropriate scientific context, something not implied by the summary.
They've reinvented genetic algorithms ?
Without seeing the details (read TFA but it's a summary and quite a bad one at that), I can't see why this would be better than a Bayesian optimisation with a photometric constraint. "The objective of the algorithm is to maximize the total number of pixels in the edges" sounds very, very simplified.
There are efficient ways of solving these things. Interesting that they invent an image processing algorithm but publish it in a non image processing journal - I wonder why that is ?
It's natural for Microsoft to report that Vista is the "best ever, yet"; certainly at this time, but it's just spin. I'm not going to analyse the original report but it seems to me that these are the known vulnerabilities. I think statistically, this is meaningless, we have to compare for a period of time, say the first 5 years. What if in 2 years after release everyone realises that the TCP stack is fundamentally flawed and requires total replacement ? That would be a mighty big flaw that we don't know yet and could totally skew this analysis. Also, this implies I don't have to RTFA for another 4 years so that's good for me :)
If you were a hacker, would you develop a crack for XP or Vista ?
XP, is supposedly somewhat secure and stable with an established userbase. How often do security updates get released these days ? Or Vista, which has so many obvious bugs, is bound to get a lot of fixes, patches and service packs - the landscape is constantly changing. I know which one I would develop my crack for.
I didn't realise that Adobe make a "Bat Reader". Do they have software for other nocturnal, vision-impaired animals ?
On a serious note, freedom is the right to say no. Your sentence is oxymoron-ic or whatever the proper word is.
How does the OP know that the code on the forum was posted by the original author ?
For all you know, the code in the forum was copied and pasted from some other source.
If I was a Comcast customer, I would tell them, as I am now telling all the services I am a customer of:
BLOCK MARK CUBAN, PLEASE
As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down are people like Mark Cuban who have no clue. Thats right, Mark Cuban is a clueless person who thinks he is able to tell us how we should use our paid for bandwidth.
Does anyone really think that ANYONE is online for free ? That all the bandwidth is consumed by a few people distributing illegal warez and content by P2P ? P2P is used by many individuals and organizations, not just pirates and waremongerers. Consumers have the right to use their Internet connection the way they see fit. P2P users are NOT subsidized by commercial entities (who pay no extra for hogging backbones and high capacity links and usually have gratuitous Flash animations on their websites).
Thats not to say there isnt a place for whiney dolts. There is. Comcast, Time Warner, etc should charge a premium to those users who want to act as gods and prattle on about taking away other peoples rights. After all, that is why P2P is used, right ? It reduces the load on content providers who already avoid significant bandwidth and hosting charges. The proven fact is those people who download MP3s buy more CDs than non-downloaders. Removing P2P will have a negative effect on the music industry.
Yes, getting rid of dolts is a good thing. That will speed up my internet connection.
So unless your service improves Comcast, I hope you file for bankruptcy.
I think the author got it all back to front: if anyone is willing to have their machine root kitted then surely they are the users that need to be securely handled. The kind of "we'll not trust this user but this other guy looks fine" security is a back door by another name.
The idea of a test to determine if the user is savvy or not should be applied by the ISP before letting them plug anything into the net. Zombies are a serious problem, the idea that ISPs think it's OK for a user to be pumping out tens of thousand emails a day and ignoring it is criminal. Blocking port 25 is going to stop your average 14 year for about 60 seconds.
I for one would be quite happy for Black ICE to be used to destroy zombie machines
- "if you buy a pirate DVD you are financing drug dealers"
- "if you download music you must be sharing it with millions of people and therefore owe the artist^H^H record company a zillion dollars"
- "if it's open source it's less secure"
Has there ever been a case of someone piggybacking WiFi to mask a crime ?Wow, this is like the least insightful post I have ever seen. It is well known and de facto usage that a "trojan" refers to software. Obligatory link to wikipedia that states it is software.
"Microsoft should abandon Vista ?"
That's the dumbest fucking thing I've heard since I started Microsoft...
Yes, and in the UK there is The Sales of Goods Act (1979).
The original poster should say to the store manager that the laptop obviously couldn't survive only 5 months of sensible usage; it's not a warranty issue. It's only reasonable that a laptop would not break, especially at the hinge - which should be a strong part given that it's designed to be opened and closed.
During the complaint, the poster should mention that the laptop is not fit for purpose (required legal terminology).
Honestly, I took a pair of walking shoes back after 3 months and the shoe shop owner told me that the stitching had come undone because I had "laced them up wrong". Mentioning Sales of Goods Act quickly changed his tune.
As your ace in your pocket, pop into your local court house on the way and pick up an application form for the small claims court and show it to the manager if you have to. That shows you're serious.
Just do your research on the law and go back; don't argue with the manager because it's plain black and white.
Let me see, I run VNC on an only moderately busy LAN and I get slow down, poor refresh rates and that is this year. This guy is claiming to have done all this hacking only about 4 years ago. He could easily have had much better hardware but then he can't claim to have "almost" got the information then can he ?
Have you used a VNC connection in 4 bit colour ? It's bad, very bad and certainly a waste of time for someone who wants to see some alien technology. Far easier to cut up the image into small pieces and transfer it out to his botnet and reassemble it and then he has some evidence.
I know all about how these exploits can happen Here's a clue for you: don't assume that you know everything, adding in these little barbs doesn't make your argument any stronger. The guy is stretching it with his Mitnick-wannabe behaviour; his descriptions are really poor and any one with an ounce of scepticism can see that immediately.
If russia wanted to assassinate this guy, they would have simply had him poisoned, or killed in a road accident, or just shot by a sniper... no? A simple assassination would have made much less noise and news than using expensive radio-active material.The experts state that there are only about 3 places in Europe where you can get hold of such material; so you believe that another country with that kind of nuclear capability decided that it's OK to go to all this effort just to put Russia in a bad light ? And I suppose the fact that the prime suspect is some high up Russian military intelligence officer who met the victim at exactly the right time and places where contamination was found is just a coincidence ?
Given your penchant for "more likely and logical" reasons, don't you think that's a little odd ? Or perhaps you think Russia did it because no one would believe that they didn't do it so automatically everyone would discard Russia from the list of suspects... That's the type of reasoning you're using.
Why is he scanning 65k machines when it's oh-so-easy to find the machines in the first place, they are locked down with default passwords and he has the prescience to immediately go to the folder he needs and pick the first image that happens to have all the juicy details...
I imagine the box running VNC wasn't password-protectedThen why not just scan for machines that aren't password protected ?
You can have that list, too. Just google for "IANA IP allocation list", or some such.Yes, but I'm sure that list doesn't go 148.12.28.126 = top secret military base, 148.12.28.127 = army paperclip supplies. A list of IP addresses in itself doesn't really have that much information in it. If you were him would you really be interested in checking to see if other connections were authorised or not ? And he says "they were not military"; I don't think NASA equates to military (yet) so what is the big deal with military - I think he's just trying to add credibility to his feeble story.
I can see your point of view but you have to make far too many assumptions for it to work.