Suppose that instead of "National Geographic", someone at the NSA wanted to search every email that was sent to Snowden's Gmail account from within the NSA.
Do you think they would be able to do that? Not being able to do that sounds like a security problem.
I thought their excuse was that they could do a search for a single email address, just not a complete domain. So snowden@nsacontractor.com would work, but *@natgeo.org wouldn't.
Others seem to be arguing that they're saying that they can only search against one employee as well.
Can I borrow the time machine you used to get DVDs in 1994? They were invented in 1995. They became commercially available in Japan in 1996, and in the US in 1997.
Indeed... I figure the cracks were due to the stress of said time travel. When I started collecting DVDs in 2000, video rental stores hadn't even heard of them, and I had to order them online.
NeoOffice could use Apache OpenOffice generous license for pretty much the same reason LibreOffice has been taking it: GPL software is not welcome in the Apple Store.
What we are seeing now is that Apache OpenOffice will be rhe base for all other suites... One suite to rule them all, or the lowest common denominator, if you prefer to see it that way.
NeoOffice is GPL and is not in the Apple store; just thought I'd add that, as your post seems to imply differently.
You're right about the fact that NeoOffice COULD use Apache licensed code though. But they seem to have gone off in their own direction and are using a base that's not under current development.
about 1/2 of my C64 and C128 5 1/4 floppies are still working in the C128 (the 2 64s i have no longer boot, i think a cap popped) the other half are unreadable, at least by the handful of 5 1/4 drives I own. Some of these disks are almost 30 years old. Kept in temp controlled room for the past 13 years (when i aquired them from a school). I cant say ive tested all disks (i have over 500 pounds in weight, just in floppy disks and sleves) but I have to admit that some disks that I know worked in the past are not workng as of 6 months ago when I had the urge to set everything back up. But the point im getting at is that there is no way DVDs, DVD-rs or even DVD-rws have a 7 year life.
I was just watching a DVD last night that I bought in 2000; it still works fine, with no scratches or degradation.
Commercially pressed DVDs are a different beast than the ones you write yourself. The foil is etched and pressed into the plastic instead of inks being hit by lasers after assembly. The ones you write yourself seem to have about a 7-10 year life if you treat them well.
Even though I use LO almost exclusively now, I would feel horrible if OO disappeared, because I have a sense that LO would stagnate in a sea of trivial bugfixes without making any real progress.
For a counter argument, see NeoOffice -- I think it forked from OO back around 2.1, then again with 3.x, and it's still under active development with new features today, even though OOo 3.x stopped getting much in the way of commits years ago now.
Now LibreOffice and NeoOffice are fairly license compatible, but of course the NO commits are platform specific, so I don't envision the LO guys are going to be too interested in merging THEM back in. Plus, NO only compiles on OS X 10.6; LO can compile on pretty much anything.
You never know... when you will discover errors in your digital copy. DVDs are not born analog. In fact the only have a shelf life of around 7 years. You need to get everything off DVDs and make several digital copies of it. You should keep the DVDs as long as possible but eventually you will not be able to read them anymore. Make sure your digital copies of the DVDs are error-free because there will come a time when you cannot go back to the DVDs.
Hmm... DVDs only live for 7 years, eh? In an archive?
I was just watching a DVD last night that I bought in 2000; it still works fine, with no scratches or degradation. I was also pulling data off a DVD-R the other day that I recorded in 2003. This DID have a slight bit of degradation, so maybe there's an issue here. Never had a problem with properly stored pressed DVDs though.
For that matter, I've still got 5 1/4" floppy disks that have readable data on them from 198, and Audio CDs from 1990. Got rid of all my cassette tapes though; both the digital and analog ones degraded really quickly with use.
Just remember that imaging the bits is only half the equation -- you're also going to want to document the file format unless you really want someone to have to reverse engineer those.abx documents from 1985 from scratch every time they want to make sense of the contents.
A while back, someone made a system that could go on a credit card that would play what sounded like a brief burst of static. This was used similar to a one-way car remote as a way to have a second authentication factor.
Of course, this might work and needs no additional hardware other than an ADC and DAC that are fairly accurate.
The downside is additional noise pollution. Maybe frequencies that are out of the normal human range can be used, but that narrows the amount of bandwidth the device can use to transmit/receive data with.
Ideally, we should just move to NFC. Using sound is a lowest common denominator type of way to do authentication and key exchanges. It does work, but so does Kermit over a 300 baud modem... we have better protocols and technology at our disposal.
Here's my idea: set the tone at a pitch that causes dogs to howl... then encode the information in the dog's howl (after calibration of course), not the original sound. Using a canine as a second factor sounds interesting to me....
it should be fairly easy to do a public key exchange to encode the handshake. This is nothing new, like, nothing, except perhaps a higher bitrate. However, that too is sketchy. I'd guess 5-7 seconds would be the minimum in a noise environment, assuming any sort of "security", much less robust security.
Don't worry... even though the first version will only be 300 baud, they'll get a new version up to 1200 baud in a few months, followed a year later by 2400 baud. Each of these bitrates will need to add on to the initial handshake of the previous one so that the receiver and sender will know which frequency they're transmitting at of course.
And yes, I always used to set my modem to have the speaker on during handshake:)
I just got an idea for a new set of ringtones.... thanks slashdot!
But short-range peer-to-peer radio between two devices would be at least as secure as an audio squawk between those same two units - either technique can be bugged or spooked.
Ah; but used as a broadcast method, it's actually pretty interesting, as it will be picked up by video cameras etc. and can be replayed in a different location at another time. Useful steganographic method, as long as the transmission uses a secure key.
This made me think of another data transfer method though -- since pretty much all smartphones have a vibrate mode and an accelerometer now, why not transfer data via vibration? Stick one phone on top of the other to communicate. Very difficult to intercept; you could even hide one of the phones under a table and leave it broadcasting, and likely nobody would notice.
IMHO there is way too much lighting - residential areas just plain don't need outdoor lighting at all; what's wrong with just carrying a torch?
Really? So I don't need to light up the places where criminals may hide where no-one will see them? There are no street lights at all in our neighborhood making it extremely dark on our street. There have already been several burglaries around here, it's so dark nobody saw anything.
Properly aimed and adjusted light/motion sensors won't be triggered by every little thing.
While it's true that properly aimed and adjusted light/motion sensors are better than improperly aimed and adjusted ones, they still don't do much for security. Better to have a distributed lighting system with light that's further into the red spectrum. Cheaper, leaves fewer shadows, and still does the job.
But as far as security goes, just install a sprinkler system. Put THAT on a motion sensor if you want. Added to that, you can put a pot light on a motion sensor over common entries to the house; something that's going to illuminate the immediate area if someone steps into it, but isn't going to flood the entire neighborhood just because the wind blew through the bushes a bit vigorously.
I may look a tool wearing one, but since discovering it, i'll never turn back to handheld torches for poking around the garden.
The energizer headlamp is also great in that it has spot, flood, spot & flood, and red light settings. So it's got you covered no matter what you're doing.
I use mine all over the place; plus it'll entertain the kids for hours....
My floodlights are on motion sensor, however. It helps cut down on the obnoxiousness.
Floodlights that go on for 10 minutes in the evening and then go off are minorly irritating.
Floodlights on a motion sensor that go on every time a cat walks by, the wind blows a tree branch a bit too much, a car drives by or a person walks by are VERY annoying. Not so bad if they're YOUR floodlights, but I ended up installing blackout curtains because my neighbours' motion sensitive floodlights kept lighting up the bedrooms in my house randomly for 1-minute periods. Nothing's worse than repeated unexpected lighting changes.
At least make sure your light is calibrated so it's not going off when it shouldn't, and that your light is positioned so it only floods the area the motion sensor senses.
There's an easy example of this happening in recent history, where Unisys' assertion of the LZW patent as it applied to GIF spurred the development of the far superior PNG format.
The flaw here is that PNG didnt use any new algorithms. PNG was superior in that is allowed more than just 8-bit images, and supported alpha channels, but PNG simply used the same DEFLATE (LZ77 + Huffman) compression algorithm as already well known and implemented in PKZIP v2.0 archives.
Not only this, there's a counter-example: JPEG vs JPEG2000 -- nost people have never heard of JPEG2000 because the way the patent was enforced meant that it wasn't worth licensing it over JPEG, despite the superior algorithms. And when the Unisys patent expired, suddenly all sorts of software started using LZW, where it couldn't before without licensing, which it wouldn't because the technological increase wasn't THAT much better to be worth yet another license.
I have to admit, I was hoping for coloured 3-D clouds -- where it actually mapped the signal strength curve of each channel including reflections from each AP.
I was also hoping that someone had developed a CCD that responded in the WiFi wavelengths instead of visible spectrum. Oh well.... maybe someone will visualize it as flying pigs next.
If there are ads, I refuse to buy the content -- it's already paid for.
Unfortunately, there's this thing called subsidy. This is, however, why I was suggesting they re-tool and not just make digital "dead tree -- but now online!" People expect different content and interaction from online than they do from a hard-copy magazine.
That said, I love my back-issues of National Geographic -- they might be scanned pages of the originals (including ads), but looking at the old ads is half the fun! If you go back far enough, there are no ads; the original journal was just that -- a journal of NG events, with articles submitted by members. The money to publish came out of the membership fees.
Once they started doing color photographs, ads started showing up -- until today, despite the fact that you are a member of the NGS and have a paid subscription to the magazine as well, the magazine is half the size content-wize, and is half ads. At least the ads are usually artistically interesting still.
Gotta love how you can trace through things like Nikon cameras and the latest luxury American automobiles through the ads.
Um. From the end of TFA: "Indeed, I relied on Snyder’s beat sheet to write this piece, using every beat, in the order he lists. (Try reading this piece from the beginning and see if you can spot all the beats. Or click here to see a version of the essay in which they are all labeled.)"
From Xaedalus' comment above:
1) a good idea is a good idea and even a plot-writing formula won't ruin it; and 2) good writing is good writing.
If you are teenager what do you do on friday evening ?... That there is actually people who thinks that they are manipulating us is actually very funny!:D Can you imagine that there is someone who doesn't know that young people likes explosions and good looking women ?
I think this says it all....
Personally, I thought people had given up doing the "movie thing" as a social escape for the most part... but I guess the current set of teens is getting reeled back into it again, at least in some places. Maybe there's hope for the video arcade after all, if these are the criteria for entertainment.
The real eye opener comes when you start testing supermarket food against what's on the label/what the FDA states the contents should be.
There's huge variance from item to item, and usually on the "worse" side. FDA spot-checks ensure it's not TOO far out of variance "on average" on the specific items that they test on those specific products.
Basically, we've come to trust that we're getting a product that meets some minimum standard when buying from a corporation -- but when it comes to food, the truth is usually that what you grow by hand will usually not only exceed the standards, but exceed in areas the standards don't test. What you get from a supermarket is purely there to make a profit for the supply chain, and seasonal growers are usually forced out of the equation (the distributors demand a steady supply (volume and physical shape) that is about as obtainable in the real world as it is for all women to look like Barbie. So the people who get the supplier contracts have to cut corners and do things to their product that meet these requirements while also meeting the FDA minimums. This is just as true for organic food sold in supermarkets as it is for the rest, by the way. They might be Organic certified, but if you read what the requirements are for that certification for the products you buy, you'll see that there's a lot left out.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose that instead of "National Geographic", someone at the NSA wanted to search every email that was sent to Snowden's Gmail account from within the NSA.
Do you think they would be able to do that? Not being able to do that sounds like a security problem.
I thought their excuse was that they could do a search for a single email address, just not a complete domain. So snowden@nsacontractor.com would work, but *@natgeo.org wouldn't.
Others seem to be arguing that they're saying that they can only search against one employee as well.
...who listens to Aimee Mann?
Probably more than twice as many people as did before this hit the news....
Can I borrow the time machine you used to get DVDs in 1994? They were invented in 1995. They became commercially available in Japan in 1996, and in the US in 1997.
Indeed... I figure the cracks were due to the stress of said time travel. When I started collecting DVDs in 2000, video rental stores hadn't even heard of them, and I had to order them online.
NeoOffice could use Apache OpenOffice generous license for pretty much the same reason LibreOffice has been taking it: GPL software is not welcome in the Apple Store.
What we are seeing now is that Apache OpenOffice will be rhe base for all other suites ... One suite to rule them all, or the lowest common denominator, if you prefer to see it that way.
NeoOffice is GPL and is not in the Apple store; just thought I'd add that, as your post seems to imply differently.
You're right about the fact that NeoOffice COULD use Apache licensed code though. But they seem to have gone off in their own direction and are using a base that's not under current development.
about 1/2 of my C64 and C128 5 1/4 floppies are still working in the C128 (the 2 64s i have no longer boot, i think a cap popped) the other half are unreadable, at least by the handful of 5 1/4 drives I own. Some of these disks are almost 30 years old. Kept in temp controlled room for the past 13 years (when i aquired them from a school). I cant say ive tested all disks (i have over 500 pounds in weight, just in floppy disks and sleves) but I have to admit that some disks that I know worked in the past are not workng as of 6 months ago when I had the urge to set everything back up. But the point im getting at is that there is no way DVDs, DVD-rs or even DVD-rws have a 7 year life.
Commercially pressed DVDs are a different beast than the ones you write yourself. The foil is etched and pressed into the plastic instead of inks being hit by lasers after assembly. The ones you write yourself seem to have about a 7-10 year life if you treat them well.
Even though I use LO almost exclusively now, I would feel horrible if OO disappeared, because I have a sense that LO would stagnate in a sea of trivial bugfixes without making any real progress.
For a counter argument, see NeoOffice -- I think it forked from OO back around 2.1, then again with 3.x, and it's still under active development with new features today, even though OOo 3.x stopped getting much in the way of commits years ago now.
Now LibreOffice and NeoOffice are fairly license compatible, but of course the NO commits are platform specific, so I don't envision the LO guys are going to be too interested in merging THEM back in. Plus, NO only compiles on OS X 10.6; LO can compile on pretty much anything.
*Two* open source offerings competing against each other instead of against Microsoft.
You're right... vi could never compete with emacs.... ;)
Strange how no-one "rejected change" in any other office version.
What change? Seriously, what was the big UI change between Office 95, 98, 2000, and 2003 that people would have objected to?
Word 5.1 for the Macintosh was obviously the best version ever.
http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4008/4477954904_003108c675_z.jpg
Interestingly, it has a floating sidebar.
That, is true.
Is, that you, William, Shatner?
You have never experienced OpenOffice until you have used it in the original Klingon!
I always assumed that BASH was the shell of choice for the discerning Klingon....
You never know ... when you will discover errors in your digital copy. DVDs are not born analog. In fact the only have a shelf life of around 7 years. You need to get everything off DVDs and make several digital copies of it. You should keep the DVDs as long as possible but eventually you will not be able to read them anymore. Make sure your digital copies of the DVDs are error-free because there will come a time when you cannot go back to the DVDs.
Hmm... DVDs only live for 7 years, eh? In an archive?
I was just watching a DVD last night that I bought in 2000; it still works fine, with no scratches or degradation. I was also pulling data off a DVD-R the other day that I recorded in 2003. This DID have a slight bit of degradation, so maybe there's an issue here. Never had a problem with properly stored pressed DVDs though.
For that matter, I've still got 5 1/4" floppy disks that have readable data on them from 198, and Audio CDs from 1990. Got rid of all my cassette tapes though; both the digital and analog ones degraded really quickly with use.
Just remember that imaging the bits is only half the equation -- you're also going to want to document the file format unless you really want someone to have to reverse engineer those .abx documents from 1985 from scratch every time they want to make sense of the contents.
A while back, someone made a system that could go on a credit card that would play what sounded like a brief burst of static. This was used similar to a one-way car remote as a way to have a second authentication factor.
Of course, this might work and needs no additional hardware other than an ADC and DAC that are fairly accurate.
The downside is additional noise pollution. Maybe frequencies that are out of the normal human range can be used, but that narrows the amount of bandwidth the device can use to transmit/receive data with.
Ideally, we should just move to NFC. Using sound is a lowest common denominator type of way to do authentication and key exchanges. It does work, but so does Kermit over a 300 baud modem... we have better protocols and technology at our disposal.
Here's my idea: set the tone at a pitch that causes dogs to howl... then encode the information in the dog's howl (after calibration of course), not the original sound. Using a canine as a second factor sounds interesting to me....
it should be fairly easy to do a public key exchange to encode the handshake. This is nothing new, like, nothing, except perhaps a higher bitrate. However, that too is sketchy. I'd guess 5-7 seconds would be the minimum in a noise environment, assuming any sort of "security", much less robust security.
Don't worry... even though the first version will only be 300 baud, they'll get a new version up to 1200 baud in a few months, followed a year later by 2400 baud. Each of these bitrates will need to add on to the initial handshake of the previous one so that the receiver and sender will know which frequency they're transmitting at of course.
And yes, I always used to set my modem to have the speaker on during handshake :)
I just got an idea for a new set of ringtones.... thanks slashdot!
But short-range peer-to-peer radio between two devices would be at least as secure as an audio squawk between those same two units - either technique can be bugged or spooked.
Ah; but used as a broadcast method, it's actually pretty interesting, as it will be picked up by video cameras etc. and can be replayed in a different location at another time. Useful steganographic method, as long as the transmission uses a secure key.
This made me think of another data transfer method though -- since pretty much all smartphones have a vibrate mode and an accelerometer now, why not transfer data via vibration? Stick one phone on top of the other to communicate. Very difficult to intercept; you could even hide one of the phones under a table and leave it broadcasting, and likely nobody would notice.
What do you need a floodlight for?
IMHO there is way too much lighting - residential areas just plain don't need outdoor lighting at all; what's wrong with just carrying a torch?
Really? So I don't need to light up the places where criminals may hide where no-one will see them? There are no street lights at all in our neighborhood making it extremely dark on our street. There have already been several burglaries around here, it's so dark nobody saw anything.
Properly aimed and adjusted light/motion sensors won't be triggered by every little thing.
While it's true that properly aimed and adjusted light/motion sensors are better than improperly aimed and adjusted ones, they still don't do much for security. Better to have a distributed lighting system with light that's further into the red spectrum. Cheaper, leaves fewer shadows, and still does the job.
But as far as security goes, just install a sprinkler system. Put THAT on a motion sensor if you want. Added to that, you can put a pot light on a motion sensor over common entries to the house; something that's going to illuminate the immediate area if someone steps into it, but isn't going to flood the entire neighborhood just because the wind blew through the bushes a bit vigorously.
Try one of these, they are great for this kind of stuff.
http://www.amazon.com/Energizer-Industrial-Headlight-Batteries-Included/dp/B00352O79U
I may look a tool wearing one, but since discovering it, i'll never turn back to handheld torches for poking around the garden.
The energizer headlamp is also great in that it has spot, flood, spot & flood, and red light settings. So it's got you covered no matter what you're doing.
I use mine all over the place; plus it'll entertain the kids for hours....
My floodlights are on motion sensor, however. It helps cut down on the obnoxiousness.
Floodlights that go on for 10 minutes in the evening and then go off are minorly irritating.
Floodlights on a motion sensor that go on every time a cat walks by, the wind blows a tree branch a bit too much, a car drives by or a person walks by are VERY annoying. Not so bad if they're YOUR floodlights, but I ended up installing blackout curtains because my neighbours' motion sensitive floodlights kept lighting up the bedrooms in my house randomly for 1-minute periods. Nothing's worse than repeated unexpected lighting changes.
At least make sure your light is calibrated so it's not going off when it shouldn't, and that your light is positioned so it only floods the area the motion sensor senses.
There's an easy example of this happening in recent history, where Unisys' assertion of the LZW patent as it applied to GIF spurred the development of the far superior PNG format.
The flaw here is that PNG didnt use any new algorithms. PNG was superior in that is allowed more than just 8-bit images, and supported alpha channels, but PNG simply used the same DEFLATE (LZ77 + Huffman) compression algorithm as already well known and implemented in PKZIP v2.0 archives.
Not only this, there's a counter-example: JPEG vs JPEG2000 -- nost people have never heard of JPEG2000 because the way the patent was enforced meant that it wasn't worth licensing it over JPEG, despite the superior algorithms. And when the Unisys patent expired, suddenly all sorts of software started using LZW, where it couldn't before without licensing, which it wouldn't because the technological increase wasn't THAT much better to be worth yet another license.
More interesting info on Unisys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys#Controversies
I have no idea what you had for breakfast.
The Superman comment might help us narrow that down :D
I have to admit, I was hoping for coloured 3-D clouds -- where it actually mapped the signal strength curve of each channel including reflections from each AP.
I was also hoping that someone had developed a CCD that responded in the WiFi wavelengths instead of visible spectrum. Oh well.... maybe someone will visualize it as flying pigs next.
If there are ads, I refuse to buy the content -- it's already paid for.
Unfortunately, there's this thing called subsidy. This is, however, why I was suggesting they re-tool and not just make digital "dead tree -- but now online!" People expect different content and interaction from online than they do from a hard-copy magazine.
That said, I love my back-issues of National Geographic -- they might be scanned pages of the originals (including ads), but looking at the old ads is half the fun! If you go back far enough, there are no ads; the original journal was just that -- a journal of NG events, with articles submitted by members. The money to publish came out of the membership fees.
Once they started doing color photographs, ads started showing up -- until today, despite the fact that you are a member of the NGS and have a paid subscription to the magazine as well, the magazine is half the size content-wize, and is half ads. At least the ads are usually artistically interesting still.
Gotta love how you can trace through things like Nikon cameras and the latest luxury American automobiles through the ads.
Um. From the end of TFA: "Indeed, I relied on Snyder’s beat sheet to write this piece, using every beat, in the order he lists. (Try reading this piece from the beginning and see if you can spot all the beats. Or click here to see a version of the essay in which they are all labeled.)"
From Xaedalus' comment above:
1) a good idea is a good idea and even a plot-writing formula won't ruin it; and 2) good writing is good writing.
I think the inverse also holds true.
If you are teenager what do you do on friday evening ? ... That there is actually people who thinks that they are manipulating us is actually very funny! :D Can you imagine that there is someone who doesn't know that young people likes explosions and good looking women ?
I think this says it all....
Personally, I thought people had given up doing the "movie thing" as a social escape for the most part... but I guess the current set of teens is getting reeled back into it again, at least in some places. Maybe there's hope for the video arcade after all, if these are the criteria for entertainment.
The real eye opener comes when you start testing supermarket food against what's on the label/what the FDA states the contents should be.
There's huge variance from item to item, and usually on the "worse" side. FDA spot-checks ensure it's not TOO far out of variance "on average" on the specific items that they test on those specific products.
Basically, we've come to trust that we're getting a product that meets some minimum standard when buying from a corporation -- but when it comes to food, the truth is usually that what you grow by hand will usually not only exceed the standards, but exceed in areas the standards don't test. What you get from a supermarket is purely there to make a profit for the supply chain, and seasonal growers are usually forced out of the equation (the distributors demand a steady supply (volume and physical shape) that is about as obtainable in the real world as it is for all women to look like Barbie. So the people who get the supplier contracts have to cut corners and do things to their product that meet these requirements while also meeting the FDA minimums. This is just as true for organic food sold in supermarkets as it is for the rest, by the way. They might be Organic certified, but if you read what the requirements are for that certification for the products you buy, you'll see that there's a lot left out.