"I really want a cryptosystem where I can enter, say, two different plaintexts (of similar length, I imagine) and then there are two keys: the private key, and the decoy key.If required to give up "your private key" then give up the decoy key. The decoy plaintexts decrypts, and you're done. The real plaintext is still hidden away."
Marutukku (formerly RubberHose) is designed to do that (with more levels - no matter how many keys you reveal it's impossible to prove there aren't more) although their website seems to be down at the moment, and I don't remember it being updated for a while. Apparently BSD has it (might explain it's death;-)
I've just downloaded that, and it says that it requires Internet Explorer 6.01 or later before you can continue installation.
I'm sure there's an joke to be had about needing Internet Explorer to view a Firefox advert...
It's like "RPM dependancy hell" or whatever they call it. If I download internet explorer, it will probably require an operating-system service pack or something (and if you're lucky, that will require Internet Explorer 6...)
"Maybe this will spell the end of power-strips with curiously shaped "bricks" constantly falling out of them..."
As to the "falling out" bit, one good solution is British Standard 1363 - I never did understand why people put-up with power cables that get disconnected every time you move them too far.
"You really shouldn't make statments you know nothing about. As a licensed pilot I can assure you that there are backup systems for everything...exactly how do you think people flew planes before there was a GPS system?"
Not sure where you're flying, but those other instruments are not generally a backup for GPS. The other instruments are what the pilot's supposed to use, and the GPS is a novelty shiny toy for the copilot to play with.
In fact, many GPS units actually say "not to be relied upon", or "not for use as an avionics instrument" on the front screen that you have to confirm before using the device.
"I have just created a zero line P2P program which I have entitled "Walking to the Neighbor's House to Borrow a Movie". I could be evil and patent it, but I have decided to release it under the GPL."
Well if it's GPL, I ought to contribute a patch... "Passing it across the fence"
"did it seem like every other nominee was an EA game? I swear, EA had at least two games in almost every category, and the ones it was in, it tended to win"
"I thought that it was normal corporate behaviour to look at their competitors. Long time ago there was a story here on/. where one of the lead devs of IE admitted that he ran firefox"
Surely not the same IE developer who left to work on Firefox, and whose article is on slashdot's front page at this very moment???
"How can one be sure about closed source kernels like Windows XP"
From what I've read so far, they didn't. They just listed how many lines of code it had.
They're also not making any estimates about the quality of programming. Obviously the errors/line-of-code varies wildly, so assuming that anything fits that average seems quite odd. Linux doesn't, obviously (by several orders of magnitude), and it's similarly unlikely that WindowsXP turns out to have exactly 20 error per 1000 lines.
There's a meeting with the DTI / Patent Office tomorrow morning in London, if anyone has any good questions regarding UK Software Patents, then post them here and I'll ask.
Note: UK-specific questions only, stuff relating to the "Computer Implemented Inventions Directive"
"Would the logical conclusion of this be that the EU has the right to shoot down the US GPS system if the EU felt the GPS system was being used by countries against the best interests of the EU?"
"Is this just a pork-barrel project"... asks someone from the country which invented Star Wars, the War on Terror, the Department of Homeland Security, and just elected Haliburton's CEO as vice-president who promptly invaded two countries.
I'd recommend any "semi-pro" card (staring around $150) over any consumer card, for almost ANY "work"
The work I do requires very similar things to the games market, so the very cheap cards actually tend to work best (outperforming cards that cost 5 times as much, in many cases)
It's all in the hardware acceleration, and the ability to change settings of a sample which is already in a hardware buffer (frequency control, etc.) - when a pilot moves their throttle, the engine sound has to change instantly, no time to recalculate the whole buffer and send it to the soundcard again.
The next project will be to get multiple channels (not 5:1, but actual different channels) in the same soundcard that does our 3D variable-frequency sound. Or at least, in the same machine. (did I mention soundcards don't like to share PCs?)
While the expensive (m-audio etc.) cards give you "accurate" sound quality and low noise, most of them don't even attempt to do things like realtime frequency shifting and 3D sound. (M-Audio don't even have hardware acceleration, as I recall) which means the PC gets dumped with the whole processing load, which means you can't run much else on it. We're experimenting with them more and more, though. The problem is always that it costs so much when you buy a "semi-pro" card and it turns out not to do what you thought it would...
"If you're using it for non-audio purposes, I strongly recommend a real data aquisition card instead"
Oh that's true enough. And a dedicated dual-processor PC... luckily I don't need to get involved in any of that!
"Then as an affected user, your ire (and efforts) should be directed against those that have chosen to abuse your chosen method of distribution, rather than against those who are pursuing recourse against those who have neither respect for them, nor you."
How did you come to that conclusion?
If there's someone who is copying another person's video without their permission, I have no quarrel with either of those people. Suggesting I should fight them because they use a particular tool that I also use is just silly.
I do however, have a problem with someone who looks at that copyright infringer, decides the tool Must Be Banned, and goes vandalising the internet, harassing the creator of the tool, and generally making a big nuisance of themselves.
They have a problem with somone copying their work? Fine. Sort it out. But don't go accusing every BitTorrent user in the world of being a criminal, don't expect any help in your crusade against networking protocols, and don't write newspaper articles starting from the assumption that every bittorrented file is an illegal copy of a movie, like the article just posted to slashdot.
"And you haven't made the case yet that P2P is "large sections of the internet"."
If you wanted to do so, you could cite the percentage of internet traffic which bittorrent uses, some figures were even in the article.
Some people estimate 800,000 copies of bittorrent might be running at any one time. Download.com estimates that 1.5 million copies of the standard BitTorrent client have been downloaded from their site alone (more than firefox). I think the claim of "large sections of the internet being affected by someone trying to fuck-up BitTorrent" is justified.
"Copyright violations aren't a free speech issue"
Indeed. Wasn't suggesting they should be. But trying to shut-down whole systems of communication for fear that copyrighted stuff might be transmitted on them is a free-speech issue.
My analogy was with speaking in public. You can read a copyrighted book in public. You can sing a copyrighted song. But restricting the ability to speak in public is not a valid solution to either of those problems. Similarly, restricting the ability to use BitTorrent is not a valud solution to the problem of people using it to share other peoples' video.
Or to use a more specific example, I don't want MPAA-funded vandals interfering with my Debian and Mepis downloads, then claiming that what they're doing is legitimate.
"There isn't a single mainstream IT rag which is even marginally trustworthy. Note how much stuff they get wrong, how shallow the article is, and how it almost reads like an advertisement."
Couldn't agree more. My favourite one is the PC magazines all listing Creative soundcards in positions 1,2, and 3 of their "best products" review... sounds reasonable enough, until (like me) you have to use them for real, at work, and the project is delayed every time you buy a soundcard which blatantly doesn't work (or which runs too slow, or which crashes on dual-processor machines, or which crashes with java running, or which doesn't process sound correctly, or which had a miserable volume-level, or which takes an hour to install, or...)
It wouldn't so be bad if all the companies producing good, reliable, useful kit hadn't gone out of business as a result of these "reviews". I can name 3 really great soundcards that work perfectly, that you can't buy anymore because PC-something magazine said that Creative were the only soundcards worth buying.
"How do you install adware in debian? I tried apt-get install virus, apt-get install adware, apt-get install malware, nothing works. man, linux is crap"
You could try adding "non-free contrib" to your apt-sources list, and doing apt-get realplayer. I'm not sure that they even bothered with much spyware on the linux version though.
There's also a virus you could try installing - it was from about 1980 or so, but you should be able to find it on usenet. Or write your own, maybe using some of the nessus modules and get nmap to find vulnerable machines.
Failing that, you could just set a blank root password and run sshd, although you'll probably find people hosting sourceforge projects on your machine or something...
Pretty interesting article, and it seems to show quite clearly that some people will stop at nothing to destroy large sections of the internet.
The article is full of quotes about film-industry people bitching about how difficult it will be to destroy bittorrent. "It's very difficult for an interdiction company to get in the middle of that system"... "BitTorrent has proven to be resistant to some of the countermeasures the entertainment industry has taken to sabotage file-sharing"
Uh-huh. Yes, the internet is resistant to people attempting to destroy it, that's part of the design. The worrying thing is how many people are completely open about wanting to do so.
" [John] Malcolm of the MPAA declined to say whether the trade group intends to sue Cohen" - I think that says it all really, that such options are even being considered. You may as well sue the founding fathers for allowing people to speak in public.
Slashdot Mirror
"I really want a cryptosystem where I can enter, say, two different plaintexts (of similar length, I imagine) and then there are two keys: the private key, and the decoy key.If required to give up "your private key" then give up the decoy key. The decoy plaintexts decrypts, and you're done. The real plaintext is still hidden away."
;-)
Marutukku (formerly RubberHose) is designed to do that (with more levels - no matter how many keys you reveal it's impossible to prove there aren't more) although their website seems to be down at the moment, and I don't remember it being updated for a while. Apparently BSD has it (might explain it's death
"Is GPS really a "primary" means of navigation for the average Joe? As opposed to, say, having a map or reading the signs on the freeway?"
Don't know, but I've seen too many drivers not using the view out of the window as their primary means of navigation...
"The official Acrobat Reader"
I've just downloaded that, and it says that it requires Internet Explorer 6.01 or later before you can continue installation.
I'm sure there's an joke to be had about needing Internet Explorer to view a Firefox advert...
It's like "RPM dependancy hell" or whatever they call it. If I download internet explorer, it will probably require an operating-system service pack or something (and if you're lucky, that will require Internet Explorer 6...)
"Maybe this will spell the end of power-strips with curiously shaped "bricks" constantly falling out of them..."
As to the "falling out" bit, one good solution is British Standard 1363 - I never did understand why people put-up with power cables that get disconnected every time you move them too far.
"And how is shutting down GPS going to prevent a suitcase nuke attack?"
;-)
The GPS-guided freight ship crashes into a bridge the suitcase-bomber is standing on, throwing the device into the sea before it can be activated.
Hey, it's about as likely as some of the other threats people are mobilising aginst
"You really shouldn't make statments you know nothing about. As a licensed pilot I can assure you that there are backup systems for everything...exactly how do you think people flew planes before there was a GPS system?"
Not sure where you're flying, but those other instruments are not generally a backup for GPS. The other instruments are what the pilot's supposed to use, and the GPS is a novelty shiny toy for the copilot to play with.
In fact, many GPS units actually say "not to be relied upon", or "not for use as an avionics instrument" on the front screen that you have to confirm before using the device.
"I have just created a zero line P2P program which I have entitled "Walking to the Neighbor's House to Borrow a Movie". I could be evil and patent it, but I have decided to release it under the GPL."
Well if it's GPL, I ought to contribute a patch... "Passing it across the fence"
"did it seem like every other nominee was an EA game? I swear, EA had at least two games in almost every category, and the ones it was in, it tended to win"
They must have been working overtime on it...
"Simply graph f(x)=x^2 and you'll have a graph of hits as a function of time where x=0 is where the link is posted on slashdot."
But why would there be so many more hits before the story is posted?
This article: "What interests high school students?"
Next article: "Book Reviews: Mathematics and Sex"
"I thought that it was normal corporate behaviour to look at their competitors. Long time ago there was a story here on /. where one of the lead devs of IE admitted that he ran firefox"
Surely not the same IE developer who left to work on Firefox, and whose article is on slashdot's front page at this very moment???
"How can one be sure about closed source kernels like Windows XP"
From what I've read so far, they didn't. They just listed how many lines of code it had.
They're also not making any estimates about the quality of programming. Obviously the errors/line-of-code varies wildly, so assuming that anything fits that average seems quite odd. Linux doesn't, obviously (by several orders of magnitude), and it's similarly unlikely that WindowsXP turns out to have exactly 20 error per 1000 lines.
"I need this for my desktop. Firefox is pretty heavyweight. Currently it takes 133MB of ram."
Uh, that's your cache. Try reducing it if you want to reduce it.
There's a meeting with the DTI / Patent Office tomorrow morning in London, if anyone has any good questions regarding UK Software Patents, then post them here and I'll ask.
Note: UK-specific questions only, stuff relating to the "Computer Implemented Inventions Directive"
"Would the logical conclusion of this be that the EU has the right to shoot down the US GPS system if the EU felt the GPS system was being used by countries against the best interests of the EU?"
Short answer: Yes
Longer answer: Yes, obviously.
"Is this just a pork-barrel project" ... asks someone from the country which invented Star Wars, the War on Terror, the Department of Homeland Security, and just elected Haliburton's CEO as vice-president who promptly invaded two countries.
Portable firefox - no it won't cure [Jeff Lash's ?] incredible lack of clue, but it will let you run a decent browser without installing anything.
I'd recommend any "semi-pro" card (staring around $150) over any consumer card, for almost ANY "work"
The work I do requires very similar things to the games market, so the very cheap cards actually tend to work best (outperforming cards that cost 5 times as much, in many cases)
It's all in the hardware acceleration, and the ability to change settings of a sample which is already in a hardware buffer (frequency control, etc.) - when a pilot moves their throttle, the engine sound has to change instantly, no time to recalculate the whole buffer and send it to the soundcard again.
The next project will be to get multiple channels (not 5:1, but actual different channels) in the same soundcard that does our 3D variable-frequency sound. Or at least, in the same machine. (did I mention soundcards don't like to share PCs?)
While the expensive (m-audio etc.) cards give you "accurate" sound quality and low noise, most of them don't even attempt to do things like realtime frequency shifting and 3D sound. (M-Audio don't even have hardware acceleration, as I recall) which means the PC gets dumped with the whole processing load, which means you can't run much else on it. We're experimenting with them more and more, though. The problem is always that it costs so much when you buy a "semi-pro" card and it turns out not to do what you thought it would...
"If you're using it for non-audio purposes, I strongly recommend a real data aquisition card instead"
Oh that's true enough. And a dedicated dual-processor PC... luckily I don't need to get involved in any of that!
"Then as an affected user, your ire (and efforts) should be directed against those that have chosen to abuse your chosen method of distribution, rather than against those who are pursuing recourse against those who have neither respect for them, nor you."
How did you come to that conclusion?
If there's someone who is copying another person's video without their permission, I have no quarrel with either of those people. Suggesting I should fight them because they use a particular tool that I also use is just silly.
I do however, have a problem with someone who looks at that copyright infringer, decides the tool Must Be Banned, and goes vandalising the internet, harassing the creator of the tool, and generally making a big nuisance of themselves.
They have a problem with somone copying their work? Fine. Sort it out. But don't go accusing every BitTorrent user in the world of being a criminal, don't expect any help in your crusade against networking protocols, and don't write newspaper articles starting from the assumption that every bittorrented file is an illegal copy of a movie, like the article just posted to slashdot.
"And you haven't made the case yet that P2P is "large sections of the internet"."
If you wanted to do so, you could cite the percentage of internet traffic which bittorrent uses, some figures were even in the article.
Some people estimate 800,000 copies of bittorrent might be running at any one time. Download.com estimates that 1.5 million copies of the standard BitTorrent client have been downloaded from their site alone (more than firefox). I think the claim of "large sections of the internet being affected by someone trying to fuck-up BitTorrent" is justified.
"Copyright violations aren't a free speech issue"
Indeed. Wasn't suggesting they should be. But trying to shut-down whole systems of communication for fear that copyrighted stuff might be transmitted on them is a free-speech issue.
My analogy was with speaking in public. You can read a copyrighted book in public. You can sing a copyrighted song. But restricting the ability to speak in public is not a valid solution to either of those problems. Similarly, restricting the ability to use BitTorrent is not a valud solution to the problem of people using it to share other peoples' video.
Or to use a more specific example, I don't want MPAA-funded vandals interfering with my Debian and Mepis downloads, then claiming that what they're doing is legitimate.
"When does spin doctoring cross the line and become false advertising?"
When you have to redefine the units of some physical quantity to make your product look better...
"... disk really has about 38 megabytes of real capacity, once you convert from marketing-megabytes to real ones "
"... PMPO 120 Watts (10W RMS, 1ms @ KHz)"
"...Athlon 1700+ (clock speed 1533MHz)"
"There isn't a single mainstream IT rag which is even marginally trustworthy. Note how much stuff they get wrong, how shallow the article is, and how it almost reads like an advertisement."
Couldn't agree more. My favourite one is the PC magazines all listing Creative soundcards in positions 1,2, and 3 of their "best products" review... sounds reasonable enough, until (like me) you have to use them for real, at work, and the project is delayed every time you buy a soundcard which blatantly doesn't work (or which runs too slow, or which crashes on dual-processor machines, or which crashes with java running, or which doesn't process sound correctly, or which had a miserable volume-level, or which takes an hour to install, or...)
It wouldn't so be bad if all the companies producing good, reliable, useful kit hadn't gone out of business as a result of these "reviews". I can name 3 really great soundcards that work perfectly, that you can't buy anymore because PC-something magazine said that Creative were the only soundcards worth buying.
"They probably didn't want the support burden of bundling the PC with a Linux distribution."
Presumably the cost of supporting Windows would also be considerable - do any of these comments compare like-with-like?
"How do you install adware in debian? I tried apt-get install virus, apt-get install adware, apt-get install malware, nothing works. man, linux is crap"
You could try adding "non-free contrib" to your apt-sources list, and doing apt-get realplayer. I'm not sure that they even bothered with much spyware on the linux version though.
There's also a virus you could try installing - it was from about 1980 or so, but you should be able to find it on usenet. Or write your own, maybe using some of the nessus modules and get nmap to find vulnerable machines.
Failing that, you could just set a blank root password and run sshd, although you'll probably find people hosting sourceforge projects on your machine or something...
Pretty interesting article, and it seems to show quite clearly that some people will stop at nothing to destroy large sections of the internet.
... "BitTorrent has proven to be resistant to some of the countermeasures the entertainment industry has taken to sabotage file-sharing"
The article is full of quotes about film-industry people bitching about how difficult it will be to destroy bittorrent. "It's very difficult for an interdiction company to get in the middle of that system"
Uh-huh. Yes, the internet is resistant to people attempting to destroy it, that's part of the design. The worrying thing is how many people are completely open about wanting to do so.
" [John] Malcolm of the MPAA declined to say whether the trade group intends to sue Cohen" - I think that says it all really, that such options are even being considered. You may as well sue the founding fathers for allowing people to speak in public.