I don't think Etherium and their Smart Contracts may ever be ready for the prime-time, at least not without a major shift in technology.
The problem is the code that gets written to express a contract. Code *always* has bugs, and it requires a great deal of knowledge and expertise to debug. Often these bugs are just so subtle that they live for years inside code - and often no-one looks.
How is joe-average supposed to invest in and trust a smart contract - there is no way they can verify that the code is correct. I'm a (hopefully better than average) coder and I didn't spot the issue in the Parity wallet that caused a big loss a few days ago (hint - internal methods accidentally made public). I did look. Ditto for the DAO hack.
Bitcoin has a steady code base that is moving forward in increments, being written/managed by a small number of experienced people (theoretically anyone could check it, but realistically only a few do). Its in a much steadier state.
Smart contracts are made by anyone. Very few people understand the tech well enough to verify. Probably even fewer actually look. There will be bugs.
Even worse... Etherium devs just keep forking the blockchain each time one of these hacks occurs. I expect they will do the same again. Ick.
I suggest avoiding like the plague until they figure out how to remove the chance of bugs in smart contracts.
The first burglar or house fire will remove all your 'backups'.
Personally I load all RAW photos onto my main linux PC (which uses RAID 1 HDDs).
The best photos, once edited and polished, are sync'd to the PVR and
Mac (where they then move to the iPads for display). I also run full &
incremental backups of the PC, Mac and core PVR files via wifi down to a
DNS-323 with RAID 1 hidden in the garage.
Lastly I take an encrypted snapshot every month to work.
PC/HDD crashes - RAID will probably save me. No loss of work.
PC explodes - Garage backup will save me. Loss of (at most) 1 days work.
Burglar - Garage backup will save me. Loss of 1 days work.
House and Garage burn to the ground. Loss of at most 1 months work.
Its all automated (except taking the encrypted snapshot offsite).
Have you actually *read* the iPhone contract? I'm surprised they didn't require blood.
When I got my iPhone, I asked to read the contract.
The store workers had never had anyone ask, so they didn't know where it was.
Took them a long time to find a copy.
It was pretty nasty, but from memory (they wouldn't let me keep their
only copy now that they knew where it was) the worst section was something of the form:
"if we suspect you may have altered your phone, you agree to let us cancel
your phone service, and you will keep paying out the rest of your term."
Suspicion (not proof, just if they felt like it) was enough to give them the right
to cancel my phone service (and reclaim the phone phone IIRC) and I had to
keep paying. the monthly fee. And there was no
appeal or ability to protest your innocence.
If this is a business device, the killer app is OneNote. Sure tablets dont suit a lot of people,
but if you want to take notes, do research, read and link information, be mobile etc... Onenote is it.
Evernote is not. (right idea, wrong execution).
There are also niche applications (medical etc), but from a general business focus... do Onenote.
If its a consumer device - create an open iPad.
BUT you will also need to ensure that Music, Reading, Web browsing, Gaming, Sharing work brilliantly.
Only Apple has really succeeded with that, as long as you live in their ecosystem.
If you can made those apps work openly **and** get the media providers on board, then you stand
a chance.
So photo software has been offering facial recognition for a while. When this all gets uploaded to google, you're going to be able to ask (where was X on the given date).
Cool.
Scary.
Re:Great, still doesn't fix the Houston problem.
on
The Year of the E-Bicycle
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I worked in Houston for a few years - over off Nasa Road One.
I used to walk to work - wasn't that far. A mile or so...
Two things stand out:
a) every few days, someone would stop and ask if I was ok and whether I needed a lift.
On one hand, it was great to see so many caring people. But it just shows that they never
saw people walk before.
b) the path actually went up to people's front doors, so I had to either walk on the road, or follow the path into people's
property. Weird. Again - not built for pedestrians.
Can someone propose a cheap system (LESS THAN $300), that uses low power (LESS THAN 40W full power) and actually move GREATER THAN 20MB/sec (which of course requires Gbit LAN).
Ok - so we have had people proposing - buffalo link station - alix boards - sheevaplug - EPIA 5000 - WRT54G - Mac Mini among others. The thing these *all* have in common is completely horrible LAN/IO performance. None (except for a mac mini and perhaps the EPIA 5000) can come close to saturating a 100Mb LAN. Certainly only the MacMini has half a chance at making use of a Gb LAN. Remember this guy wants NFS, so one presumes he actually wants to move reasonable files around at a reasonable rate.
I've got a low cost LAN drive, and get, at best, 2-3MB/s out of it over a 100Mb LAN - about 1/6th what I expected. I turned it into a remote backup drive where the ugly performance is ok.
So lets rephrase the question: can someone suggest a cheap system ( 20MB/sec (which of course requires Gbit LAN).
1) Whatever you do, kids will get around it. You can only do a good job of security a box if you have physical security. And you dont.
2) If you do something and it fails, you are liable. So if some kid gets porn all over his Laptop despite your best efforts, his parents are coming after you.
3) Spend your time protecting your severs and dealing with the fact that you are going to have a lot of worm/virus laden laptops coming into your LAN.
Do NOT encrypt your drive. That is a sure fire way to get them very interested in you.
They can't demand your password, but they can require you to enter it. Having said that, of course, the people manning these stations aren't concerned about your rights and may just demand your password anyway.
The key is to make it look like you are open and friendly and giving them all they want, while keeping your privacy intact.
So... use truecrypt. Make a single large encrypted storage file called (say).zip, or better backups.tar.gz (they might search for.zips along with.jpgs).
Put all your stuff in there. Then you can happily let them search and mess around on your laptop. You can log in for them etc.
If they should happen to find your backup.tar.gz (unlikely) say that it is an backup but it got corrupted. You are hoping to find someone who can fix corrupted backups because you lost some work files in there. It sure will look corrupted.
So they've visited this library 3 times in the past 10 years. There are about 120,000 libraries in the US. Lets just focus on the 10k that are public libraries.
If we guess that this library is average, then each of those 10k libs is visited every ~3 years. Or about 10 Libraries per day, every day of the week/year. Thats a crapload of data collection.
Remember that Libraries can't talk about when they get visited if the (un)Patriot Act is used.
or more possible... running TOR. Clicks from other TOR users could appear to come from you.
Think about the sort of people and activities that will use TOR. I'm sure there is a lot of innocent usage, but there's bound to be some ugly stuff too.
And the feds sure aint going to buy a plea of "I was running TOR".
Furthermore, I call bullshit on this story. I've recently traveled internationally and went through 8 major airports (plus 'random selection' secondary inspection in Philadelphia) throughout the world, with a laptop, Nintendo DS, two Ipod Mini's, and a case of DVD's all stuffed into my laptop bag, while returning from an Islamic nation and nobody asked me to show them anything.
So let me see if I get you. You went through one trip with all that crap, and based on that call his story rubbish.
I've done that road warrior stuff - I was a 100k united flyer for a while, plus a crapload in other airlines. I spent up to 6 months a year on the road all over the world for a few years. Thing is - frequent fliers see all sorts of weird and stupid stuff. I've been singled out once or twice and it can get surreal and disempowering. You really are at their mercy, and "they" ain't the pick of the crop.
Further, I sure do know that feeling of waking up and not really knowing where you are - I think he describes it well (although exaggerated). It's disorienting.
Well, I did RTFA, and you are sort of right, but it doesn't even have to be an issue with DRM - the format is just as important. The key to providing a winning formula for consumers is:
a) don't DRM the data. People remember what MS did to all their loyal customers with the Zune (all their legally purchased "PlaysForSure" music from Napster, Yahoo Music, AOL Music Now, MusicMatch, or even Microsoft's MSN Music or MTV-partnered Urge became obsolete and unusable in the Zune, and therefore completely unusable at some point in the future). b) use an *existing* standard format, OR if you need new features, create an *OPEN* format. People want to own books, not just rent it until Amazon decides it doesn't want to keep building the readers.
What publishers of music *and* books need to remember is that people want to keep their music and books, and be able to enjoy them in the future. I have books and music dating back to the 80's and I still enjoy them today. And I want to keep enjoying them into the future.
With music, Apple won by: a) creating a very permissive DRM that protected rights but let the customers do what they wanted (shift to different devices) b) supporting ownership of music users already owned - that is when music was ripped from a purchased CD, it went into non-DRM formats (c.f. early MS rippers that DRMd your music). c) supporting most playable formats, especially MP3.
Actually they used pretty standard negotiating tactics for the 15k. I'm in a software company and involved in negotiations, and I see that type of positioning all the time. Such as:
"This stuff is worth 100,000, but if you sell it to us for 25,000 then we promise there'll be lots more business coming your way. It'll be *huge* . Honest."
My bet is they would have paid 100k or more for the gold he could provide, but they convinced him that there was a big future and got a great discount.
Its kinda like when someone says they are using 4096 bit encryption for their SSL banking, and not realising their password is being stolen by a keylogger.
The biggest problem we face today is *not* the encryption. We have bags of good encryption technologies out there, from AES (symmetric) to a variety of Public Key techniques. The problem actually comes from the people and processes at either end of the encryption pipe.
Guess what - no-ones SSID has (probably) ever been stolen while in transit via SSL over the internet. The millions of SSIDs stolen to date have been theftoflaptops or admins not securing their websites properly.
Hopefully they will understand this, and spend an equal portion of their time/energy securing their endpoints.
Westmount resident Brian Wrench said he recently had a bad experience ordering programs through tvboxset.com.
At the end of June, Wrench bought what was advertised on the site as all 278 uncut episodes of the Carol Burnett Show, spanning 11 seasons on eight DVDs.
Holy cow - 278 episodes of Carol Burnett!!! This guy deserved to get ripped off. In fact, shoot him. We'd be doing him a favor. The judge would surely accept this as a mercy killing.
By definition, you can't infect system files in non-admin mode
Running as a non-admin certainly does reduce the chance for an infection, but I still can't convince myself that they can't download something that could infect something.
Good comments about Firefox vulnerabilities though. Thanks.
Similar here, but I've run XP, *no* AV, *no* anti-spyware etc for 4 years. I do have a firewall/wireless hub for the house. I browse with Firefox only, and thats kept up to date and has Adblock and NoScript. My mail is scanned (although quite a few nasties sneak through).
My wife is computer illiterate, but she knows she's only supposed to open a small set of attachments and sees me about the rest. She knows not to open anything she doesn't recognize.
4 years, no viruses/spyware etc. I've tried a couple of those online scans and they came up clean.
However, now the kids are starting to use the PC.... I've switched to Ubuntu. I not convinced I can set up an XP machine that can't be infected by them.
That switch was a *major* pain. Switching MSmoney to gnucash, losing Photoshop, copying outlook mail history to evolution, loss of PDA syncing, blah blah blah.
I haven't seen the license agreement for the iPhone (I'm not in the US) but
you will find that most software sold these days is not actually "sold" per se. Instead you get a license to use it, and you dont own it.
Most licenses (which you have probably agreed to by opening the box, even if the license is *inside* the box) specifically disallow reverse engineering or modification.
You may own the hardware, but as soon as you touch any software not via approved channels, you are stuffed.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is the code that gets written to express a contract. Code *always* has bugs, and it requires a great deal of knowledge and expertise to debug. Often these bugs are just so subtle that they live for years inside code - and often no-one looks.
How is joe-average supposed to invest in and trust a smart contract - there is no way they can verify that the code is correct. I'm a (hopefully better than average) coder and I didn't spot the issue in the Parity wallet that caused a big loss a few days ago (hint - internal methods accidentally made public). I did look. Ditto for the DAO hack.
Bitcoin has a steady code base that is moving forward in increments, being written/managed by a small number of experienced people (theoretically anyone could check it, but realistically only a few do). Its in a much steadier state. Smart contracts are made by anyone. Very few people understand the tech well enough to verify. Probably even fewer actually look. There will be bugs.
Even worse... Etherium devs just keep forking the blockchain each time one of these hacks occurs. I expect they will do the same again. Ick. I suggest avoiding like the plague until they figure out how to remove the chance of bugs in smart contracts.
The first burglar or house fire will remove all your 'backups'.
Personally I load all RAW photos onto my main linux PC (which uses RAID 1 HDDs). The best photos, once edited and polished, are sync'd to the PVR and Mac (where they then move to the iPads for display). I also run full & incremental backups of the PC, Mac and core PVR files via wifi down to a DNS-323 with RAID 1 hidden in the garage.
Lastly I take an encrypted snapshot every month to work.
PC/HDD crashes - RAID will probably save me. No loss of work.
PC explodes - Garage backup will save me. Loss of (at most) 1 days work.
Burglar - Garage backup will save me. Loss of 1 days work.
House and Garage burn to the ground. Loss of at most 1 months work.
Its all automated (except taking the encrypted snapshot offsite).
Have you actually *read* the iPhone contract? I'm surprised they didn't require blood.
When I got my iPhone, I asked to read the contract.
The store workers had never had anyone ask, so they didn't know where it was.
Took them a long time to find a copy.
It was pretty nasty, but from memory (they wouldn't let me keep their
only copy now that they knew where it was) the worst section was something of the form:
"if we suspect you may have altered your phone, you agree to let us cancel
your phone service, and you will keep paying out the rest of your term."
Suspicion (not proof, just if they felt like it) was enough to give them the right
to cancel my phone service (and reclaim the phone phone IIRC) and I had to
keep paying. the monthly fee. And there was no
appeal or ability to protest your innocence.
If this is a business device, the killer app is OneNote. Sure tablets dont suit a lot of people, but if you want to take notes, do research, read and link information, be mobile etc... Onenote is it. Evernote is not. (right idea, wrong execution). There are also niche applications (medical etc), but from a general business focus... do Onenote.
If its a consumer device - create an open iPad. BUT you will also need to ensure that Music, Reading, Web browsing, Gaming, Sharing work brilliantly. Only Apple has really succeeded with that, as long as you live in their ecosystem. If you can made those apps work openly **and** get the media providers on board, then you stand a chance.
Definition of a geek: You are reading slashdot while at the pub with your friends. Probably on your iphone.
So photo software has been offering facial recognition for a while. When this all gets uploaded to google, you're going to be able to ask (where was X on the given date). Cool. Scary.
I worked in Houston for a few years - over off Nasa Road One.
I used to walk to work - wasn't that far. A mile or so...
Two things stand out:
a) every few days, someone would stop and ask if I was ok and whether I needed a lift.
On one hand, it was great to see so many caring people. But it just shows that they never
saw people walk before.
b) the path actually went up to people's front doors, so I had to either walk on the road, or follow the path into people's
property. Weird. Again - not built for pedestrians.
DARN: Slashcode stole the end of my post...
Can someone propose a cheap system (LESS THAN $300),
that uses low power (LESS THAN 40W full power) and actually move
GREATER THAN 20MB/sec (which of course requires Gbit LAN).
Ok - so we have had people proposing
- buffalo link station
- alix boards
- sheevaplug
- EPIA 5000
- WRT54G
- Mac Mini
among others. The thing these *all* have in common is
completely horrible LAN/IO performance. None (except for a mac mini
and perhaps the EPIA 5000) can come close to saturating a 100Mb LAN.
Certainly only the MacMini has half a chance at making use of a Gb LAN.
Remember this guy wants NFS, so one presumes he actually wants
to move reasonable files around at a reasonable rate.
I've got a low cost LAN drive, and get, at best, 2-3MB/s out of
it over a 100Mb LAN - about 1/6th what I expected. I turned it into
a remote backup drive where the ugly performance is ok.
So lets rephrase the question: can someone suggest a cheap system
( 20MB/sec (which of course requires Gbit LAN).
1) Whatever you do, kids will get around it. You can only do a good job of security a box if you have physical security. And you dont.
2) If you do something and it fails, you are liable. So if some kid gets porn all over his Laptop despite your best efforts, his parents are coming after you.
3) Spend your time protecting your severs and dealing with the fact that you are going to have a lot of worm/virus laden laptops coming into your LAN.
You know you can do that now right? Both mythbuntu and knoppmyth support backend-only installs.
They can't demand your password, but they can require you to enter it. Having said that, of course, the people manning these stations aren't concerned about your rights and may just demand your password anyway.
The key is to make it look like you are open and friendly and giving them all they want, while keeping your privacy intact.
So... use truecrypt. Make a single large encrypted storage file called (say) .zip, or better backups.tar.gz (they might search for .zips along with .jpgs).
Put all your stuff in there. Then you can happily let them search and mess around on your laptop. You can log in for them etc.
If they should happen to find your backup.tar.gz (unlikely) say that it is an backup but it got corrupted. You are hoping to find someone who can fix corrupted backups because you lost some work files in there. It sure will look corrupted.
Oh, and make sure you clear your cache.
So Pamela finds a wino and its front page news? Thats the price of celebrity I guess...
If we guess that this library is average, then each of those 10k libs is visited every ~3 years. Or about 10 Libraries per day, every day of the week/year. Thats a crapload of data collection.
Remember that Libraries can't talk about when they get visited if the (un)Patriot Act is used.
Scary.
And they dont even need to visit a judge.
or more possible... running TOR.
Clicks from other TOR users could appear to come from you.
Think about the sort of people and activities that will use TOR.
I'm sure there is a lot of innocent usage, but there's bound
to be some ugly stuff too.
And the feds sure aint going to buy a plea of "I was running TOR".
Actually, the slashdot homepage is usually over 800k.
So let me see if I get you. You went through one trip with all that crap, and based on that call his story rubbish.
I've done that road warrior stuff - I was a 100k united flyer for a while, plus a crapload in other airlines. I spent up to 6 months a year on the road all over the world for a few years. Thing is - frequent fliers see all sorts of weird and stupid stuff. I've been singled out once or twice and it can get surreal and disempowering. You really are at their mercy, and "they" ain't the pick of the crop.
Further, I sure do know that feeling of waking up and not really knowing where you are - I think he describes it well (although exaggerated). It's disorienting.
Well, I did RTFA, and you are sort of right, but it doesn't even have to be an issue with DRM - the format is just as important. The key to providing a winning formula for consumers is:
a) don't DRM the data. People remember what MS did to all their loyal customers with the Zune (all their legally purchased "PlaysForSure" music from Napster, Yahoo Music, AOL Music Now, MusicMatch, or even Microsoft's MSN Music or MTV-partnered Urge became obsolete and unusable in the Zune, and therefore completely unusable at some point in the future).
b) use an *existing* standard format, OR if you need new features, create an *OPEN* format. People want to own books, not just rent it until Amazon decides it doesn't want to keep building the readers.
What publishers of music *and* books need to remember is that people want to keep their music and books, and be able to enjoy them in the future. I have books and music dating back to the 80's and I still enjoy them today. And I want to keep enjoying them into the future.
With music, Apple won by:
a) creating a very permissive DRM that protected rights but let the customers do what they wanted (shift to different devices)
b) supporting ownership of music users already owned - that is when music was ripped from a purchased CD, it went into non-DRM formats (c.f. early MS rippers that DRMd your music).
c) supporting most playable formats, especially MP3.
Actually they used pretty standard negotiating tactics for the 15k.
I'm in a software company and involved in negotiations, and I see that type of
positioning all the time. Such as:
"This stuff is worth 100,000, but if you sell it to us for
25,000 then we promise there'll be lots more business coming your way.
It'll be *huge* . Honest."
My bet is they would have paid 100k or more for the gold he could provide,
but they convinced him that there was a big future and got a great discount.
The biggest problem we face today is *not* the encryption. We have bags of good encryption technologies out there, from AES (symmetric) to a variety of Public Key techniques. The problem actually comes from the people and processes at either end of the encryption pipe.
Guess what - no-ones SSID has (probably) ever been stolen while in transit via SSL over the internet. The millions of SSIDs stolen to date have been theft of laptops or admins not securing their websites properly. Hopefully they will understand this, and spend an equal portion of their time/energy securing their endpoints.
Holy cow - 278 episodes of Carol Burnett!!! This guy deserved to get ripped off.
In fact, shoot him. We'd be doing him a favor. The judge would surely accept this as a mercy killing.
Similar here, but I've run XP, *no* AV, *no* anti-spyware etc for 4 years. I do have a firewall/wireless hub for the house. I browse with Firefox only, and thats kept up to date and has Adblock and NoScript. My mail is scanned (although quite a few nasties sneak through).
My wife is computer illiterate, but she knows she's only supposed to open a small set of attachments and sees me about the rest. She knows not to open anything she doesn't recognize.
4 years, no viruses/spyware etc. I've tried a couple of those online scans and they came up clean.
However, now the kids are starting to use the PC.... I've switched to Ubuntu. I not convinced I can set up an XP machine that can't be infected by them.
That switch was a *major* pain. Switching MSmoney to gnucash, losing Photoshop, copying outlook mail history to evolution, loss of PDA syncing, blah blah blah.
Most licenses (which you have probably agreed to by opening the box, even if the license is *inside* the box) specifically disallow reverse engineering or modification.
You may own the hardware, but as soon as you touch any software not via approved channels, you are stuffed.
Now thats pretty useful. Where on earth is that described?