The GSM Association, the industry group based in London that devised the algorithm and represents wireless operators, called Mr. Nohl's efforts illegal and said they overstated the security threat to wireless calls. 'This is theoretically possible but practically unlikely,' says Claire Cranton, a GSM spokeswoman, noting that no one else had broken the code since its adoption. 'What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States. To do this while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me.'
Oh, so now it's illegal to divulge impractical attacks that do not threaten privacy?
So it has come to this... At last I'm a positive badass for my GSM attack where you build a Turing-complete duck-based processor (using tasty duck treats to encourage the ducks to behave like little waddling transistors) and then use that to attack the crypto through brute-quacking-force! Ahhh HA HA HA!
If they asked me if I could stand on one foot for 5 seconds at security for no reason whatsoever, it would piss me off.
So when they ask me to not get up during the last hour of a 10 hour flight, and ask me to check my one international bag instead of carrying it on, all for no reason whatsoever, yes, it pisses me off.
Why are we paying these guys to come up with this crap?
Don't get me wrong, I hate the Security Theater as much as anyone
I dunno--it kinda sounds like you don't really care that much what horseshit they pile on there, as long as it's only like an hour or something...
Wikipedia has a pile of links at the bottom of the page you can follow.
I can't find a record of a denial by the White House, and the guys who leaked the memo went to jail for it. Maybe the White House did issue an actual denial (I didn't search that much), and maybe there was something in the memo that wasn't Al Jazeera-related, that was why they went to jail.
But apparently it's well-acknowledged by everyone that there was a memo, but whether or not that memo contained any information about bombing Al Jazeera has not been confirmed nor denied.
That being said, I would be very shocked if this event didn't unfold in a similar form to the accusation. It would be a natural question as to whether or not to attack Al Jazeera—it's an uncontrolled media establishment operating in the war zone. If the question didn't arise, it would be remiss of those in charge. To actually bomb Al Jazeera in Qatar would be a capital B-A-D bad idea, so, if it was considered, it was rightly dropped.
I really hope it didn't actually come down to Bush and Blair having a discussion about it. The idea should have been considered and discarded before it got that high.
And if this is the trend, a trend that boycotting cannot stop because of the sheer amount of morons, in a few years we will have huge productions, costing in the excesses of 60 dollars, for which you have to purchase another 25$ extension for actually enjoy the game you bought in the first place.
It's not a rant about how they can be bug-free. As yourself actually said, bug-free is only pricier. But the balance will be so off in some years that we will have bugged games AND we have to purchase DLC to make them work.
If the market will bear it, that's exactly what we'll have.
I wouldn't mind them so much if there were at least some standards, like limited to a few per website, nothing annoying, simple text and images, perhaps allowing for moving ads where appropriate and non distracting, also no sound, EVER!
Dream on. Self-regulation isn't going to work, and neither is government regulation. The only sane solution is: if you don't want to view the ads, don't request them from a web server and display them to yourself.
Without entirely disagreeing with you, Flash is great for games, and makes cross-platform development dreamy compared to AJAX. I would argue that it's not intrinsically evil.
Reducing defects in code isn't free. It's the opposite of free. I wouldn't expect, as a video game consumer, the producers of these games are going to just eat that huge development cost; they're going to pass it right on.
“I think the idea that commercial software be judged by the same standards as other commercial products is not so crazy,” [Tanenbaum] says. “Cars, TVs, and telephones are all expected to work, and they are full of software. Why not standalone software?"
With all due respect to Tanenbaum, a modern video game is way more complex than a TV or telephone, and it has to run on a much wider variety of hardware. I'm so surprised by his response that I wonder if he is being quoted out of context.
Wardell believes enforced refunds would be a disaster. “When Demigod came out, there were people who couldn’t launch the game, but it turned out to be due to Google Desktop. It had a system hook that was preventing Demigod from launching on some people’s machines. We had to work around it. But whose bug is that? It wasn’t really a bug at all: it was just incompatibility. Retailers are not in any position to make that call.”
So imagine you spend the unheard-of amount of $100 million on testing to get a "defect-free" game that runs on every platform you can get your hands on, it goes gold, goes to press, and the day it gets on shelves, Google puts out a product that causes your game to not work. Nice.
My vote is the system is fine the way it is. If you can fix it for $zero, go for it. Otherwise forget it.
But don't come to me to tell that bug free complex games are *impossible*. That's bullshit.
They're not impossible. They're just very very VERY expensive and you'd never buy them. The free market has figured out the proper amount of bug-fixing time to maximize profit.
On consoles, it's easier to release games with fewer defects because of the homogeneous hardware. On PCs you can forget about that.
If you came to me with a 2 MLOC video game and told me it was bug-free, I wouldn't believe you. And even if it was defect-free, you'd have to sell about 8 bazillion copies to recoup your development and testing costs.
Slowly but surely. Kids still do stupid stuff, but now pretty much ALL of it gets on the Internet. Instead of you being in the minority, you'll just be another person with wacky kid crap online. You're just about 10 years too early.
Anyone care to comment on the possibility of this:
1. BadPerson puts up a web page, and put an iframe on there. A very tiny invisible one. That iframe links to some random 3rd-party childpornsite.com. 2. GoodPerson goes to BadPerson's web page, and unknowingly downloads stuff from childpornsite.com in the invisible iframe, which is dutifully cached.
As a variant, BadPerson could only include the iframe when requests are from the guy he is trying to frame. To everyone else, the web page would appear normal.
I'm not sure if BadPerson's URL will show up as a referring URL to the childpornsite.com, though.
Reason #1 to never talk to the police: there's no way it can help. As he says, that really ought to be good enough, but he gives seven more reasons, just in case.
I also argue that if someone else patents an invention before others can the others wasted money doing the research.
Whereas without the patent, they can just take the invention and sell it themselves. If I understand correctly, you're just saying they should compete in the marketplace. I think that's fine, but one of the companies is going to have a million dollar head start.
Now if in order to stay in business a company needs to lower manufacturing costs and or has to make a better product then that helps progress.
But if you're inventing, say, computer chips, it's unlikely you're going to be able to manufacture them for less than an established full-scale fab.
Can they just fabricate your chip for everyone wholesale and cut you out? Does copyright extend to hardware?
Why should I spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars to invent something when I can lose the ability to use it because someone else beat me to patenting it?
Well, that's a risk, but I think if the world in general agreed with you, we wouldn't see millions of people and corporations hard at work.
Did you read any of the economic studies I linked to?
Let me put it another way. You asked, "Why should I spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars to invent something when I can lose the ability to use it because someone else beat me to patenting it?"
I say, "Ask IBM, HP, Genentec, or any one of millions of people or companies why they spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars to invent something when they can lose the ability to use it because someone else beat them to patenting it." They will tell you the answer to your question.
Microsoft doesn't sit back and say, "Don't bother investing any money in research--someone else is just going to patent it anyway!" Why not?
Some economists disagree with you.
I'm saying that there is research investment even though someone else can patent the process before the researcher does. I didn't read the papers, but I doubt any economist is going to disagree that there is research investment occurring.
Why should I spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars to invent something when I can lose the ability to use it because someone else beat me to patenting it?
Well, that's a risk, but I think if the world in general agreed with you, we wouldn't see millions of people and corporations hard at work.
However, I do fully retract "software patents are a great idea." I said that off-handedly and it doesn't reflect my true feelings. I'll change it to "in theory, software patents make some kind of demented sense".
So I ask you: have you ever seen a Linux desktop in the wild? LUG meetings do not count. Here's my definition of what counts: coffee shops, restaurants, airports, trains, lobbies, office cubicles, etc.
Two definite sightings: 1) a laptop on a subway, 2) my friend (a character artist for a game studio) uses Ubuntu at home on a desktop. Both instances were user installs. A place I worked a couple jobs ago doing Java dev had a pile of Linux machines--most of the software engineers used them.
In my experience, the stigma of using Linux is way down in the workplace from what it was 10 years ago.
All this being said, I can't think of any reason to doubt that the Net Application numbers are correctly representing what they purport to.
I'm not denying there are many idiotic patents out there, but there are also many valuable, useful and innovative patents that deserve protection.
Software patents are a great idea, but the execution is so completely flawed that I'm convinced we'd be better off without them. The cure is worse than the ill.
Let's take a very normal hypothetical. You produce a piece of software with a genuinely innovative non-obvious algorithm in it, absolutely patentable by the rules, and you get a patent on it. IBM shamelessly steals the idea and puts it in their software. Can you sue? The thing is, you've undoubtedly violated at least one (and probably more) IBM patents in your software. Unless you have a licensing agreement with IBM, you're going to have trouble.
Part of the problem is that virtually every idea a software engineer can come up with is either patented or patentable. When the bar is that low, the system is worse than worthless.
Like with virtually all sources, the answer is "maybe". When I research something, Wikipedia is usually the first place I go.
You say there's no cure for information overload, but I'm inclined to disagree. The amount of information we consumed in our youth compared to those 1000 years ago would undoubtedly be considered "overload". As long as its somehow structured, people will find a way to navigate it. Research will not cease.
But, yes, dealing with and judging the quality of the information is something that should be taught.
Consume more trains, Elvis! He, and snorkels, drink elephant's sock puppet master. Steamed cabbage can reverse big piles of ducks. Additionally, cheese log cabin nightmare.
And they didn't have a discussion page like wikipedia;)
One more thing: I'm really envious of kids who get to grow up with Wikipedia and the Web at their immediate disposal from Day One.
So much information and knowledge at their fingertips. So much potential. I don't even care if they watch piles of bad youtube vids--as long as they make use of the good stuff, too.
I did play an awful lot of computer games when I was a kid, but my folks again tried to direct this, and it was Flight Simulator II and Seven Cities of Gold, to begin with. (But this morning, I played Sauerbraten for 20 minutes, so I'd have to vote for "all things in moderation".)
I like the book "A Theory of Fun for Game Design" by Raph Koster and Will Wright. One thing the book says is that people have fun while they're learning something, but the minute they've mastered it, the fun wears down. (Think tic-tac-toe.) One thing I've always thought along these lines is that you could "trick" someone into learning something just because they're having fun doing it.
The question is, how do you frame, say, chemistry so that more people are having fun?
When I was about 4 years old, dad put a cup of ice water on the counter and told me to come back in about 10 minutes. After the time had elapsed, I did, and there was condensation on the outside of the glass. Dad asked me how the water got there. I speculated that it had somehow leaked through the glass.
I can't remember if he told me how the water actually got there, but that was the first time I can remember deliberately forming a hypothesis about something I'd observed
Also, for as long as I can remember, my folks had science books just floating around--lots of them with pictures like the Time-Life science books, which I had thumbed through many times before I even knew how to read. Plus they had a set of World Book Encyclopedias. I was always re-readings those.
I do wonder if I'd be as science-minded as I am today without such encouragement, or if I was just born that way to begin with. I'm sure the encouragement didn't hurt.
Slashdot Mirror
40 miles per year is like 12 cm per minute--you could actually watch it go!
The GSM Association, the industry group based in London that devised the algorithm and represents wireless operators, called Mr. Nohl's efforts illegal and said they overstated the security threat to wireless calls. 'This is theoretically possible but practically unlikely,' says Claire Cranton, a GSM spokeswoman, noting that no one else had broken the code since its adoption. 'What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States. To do this while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me.'
Oh, so now it's illegal to divulge impractical attacks that do not threaten privacy?
So it has come to this... At last I'm a positive badass for my GSM attack where you build a Turing-complete duck-based processor (using tasty duck treats to encourage the ducks to behave like little waddling transistors) and then use that to attack the crypto through brute-quacking-force! Ahhh HA HA HA!
You'll never catch me, coppers!
If they asked me if I could stand on one foot for 5 seconds at security for no reason whatsoever, it would piss me off.
So when they ask me to not get up during the last hour of a 10 hour flight, and ask me to check my one international bag instead of carrying it on, all for no reason whatsoever, yes, it pisses me off.
Why are we paying these guys to come up with this crap?
Don't get me wrong, I hate the Security Theater as much as anyone
I dunno--it kinda sounds like you don't really care that much what horseshit they pile on there, as long as it's only like an hour or something...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_bombing_memo
Wikipedia has a pile of links at the bottom of the page you can follow.
I can't find a record of a denial by the White House, and the guys who leaked the memo went to jail for it. Maybe the White House did issue an actual denial (I didn't search that much), and maybe there was something in the memo that wasn't Al Jazeera-related, that was why they went to jail.
But apparently it's well-acknowledged by everyone that there was a memo, but whether or not that memo contained any information about bombing Al Jazeera has not been confirmed nor denied.
That being said, I would be very shocked if this event didn't unfold in a similar form to the accusation. It would be a natural question as to whether or not to attack Al Jazeera—it's an uncontrolled media establishment operating in the war zone. If the question didn't arise, it would be remiss of those in charge. To actually bomb Al Jazeera in Qatar would be a capital B-A-D bad idea, so, if it was considered, it was rightly dropped.
I really hope it didn't actually come down to Bush and Blair having a discussion about it. The idea should have been considered and discarded before it got that high.
And if this is the trend, a trend that boycotting cannot stop because of the sheer amount of morons, in a few years we will have huge productions, costing in the excesses of 60 dollars, for which you have to purchase another 25$ extension for actually enjoy the game you bought in the first place.
It's not a rant about how they can be bug-free. As yourself actually said, bug-free is only pricier. But the balance will be so off in some years that we will have bugged games AND we have to purchase DLC to make them work.
If the market will bear it, that's exactly what we'll have.
The botnets are already more intelligent than your average spammer; making them autonomous is a small matter of programming.
I wouldn't mind them so much if there were at least some standards, like limited to a few per website, nothing annoying, simple text and images, perhaps allowing for moving ads where appropriate and non distracting, also no sound, EVER!
Dream on. Self-regulation isn't going to work, and neither is government regulation. The only sane solution is: if you don't want to view the ads, don't request them from a web server and display them to yourself.
Without entirely disagreeing with you, Flash is great for games, and makes cross-platform development dreamy compared to AJAX. I would argue that it's not intrinsically evil.
Reducing defects in code isn't free. It's the opposite of free. I wouldn't expect, as a video game consumer, the producers of these games are going to just eat that huge development cost; they're going to pass it right on.
“I think the idea that commercial software be judged by the same standards as other commercial products is not so crazy,” [Tanenbaum] says. “Cars, TVs, and telephones are all expected to work, and they are full of software. Why not standalone software?"
With all due respect to Tanenbaum, a modern video game is way more complex than a TV or telephone, and it has to run on a much wider variety of hardware. I'm so surprised by his response that I wonder if he is being quoted out of context.
Wardell believes enforced refunds would be a disaster. “When Demigod came out, there were people who couldn’t launch the game, but it turned out to be due to Google Desktop. It had a system hook that was preventing Demigod from launching on some people’s machines. We had to work around it. But whose bug is that? It wasn’t really a bug at all: it was just incompatibility. Retailers are not in any position to make that call.”
So imagine you spend the unheard-of amount of $100 million on testing to get a "defect-free" game that runs on every platform you can get your hands on, it goes gold, goes to press, and the day it gets on shelves, Google puts out a product that causes your game to not work. Nice.
My vote is the system is fine the way it is. If you can fix it for $zero, go for it. Otherwise forget it.
If it's hurting the bottom line, they'll fix it on their own. Hurting the bottom line is the one sure way to make a company change its habits.
But don't come to me to tell that bug free complex games are *impossible*. That's bullshit.
They're not impossible. They're just very very VERY expensive and you'd never buy them. The free market has figured out the proper amount of bug-fixing time to maximize profit.
On consoles, it's easier to release games with fewer defects because of the homogeneous hardware. On PCs you can forget about that.
If you came to me with a 2 MLOC video game and told me it was bug-free, I wouldn't believe you. And even if it was defect-free, you'd have to sell about 8 bazillion copies to recoup your development and testing costs.
Slowly but surely. Kids still do stupid stuff, but now pretty much ALL of it gets on the Internet. Instead of you being in the minority, you'll just be another person with wacky kid crap online. You're just about 10 years too early.
For text messages, they charge $1.5 million per gigabyte.
It's different than other data, though, because each gigabyte of texts comes encased in 87 pounds of solid gold.
Anyone care to comment on the possibility of this:
1. BadPerson puts up a web page, and put an iframe on there. A very tiny invisible one. That iframe links to some random 3rd-party childpornsite.com.
2. GoodPerson goes to BadPerson's web page, and unknowingly downloads stuff from childpornsite.com in the invisible iframe, which is dutifully cached.
As a variant, BadPerson could only include the iframe when requests are from the guy he is trying to frame. To everyone else, the web page would appear normal.
I'm not sure if BadPerson's URL will show up as a referring URL to the childpornsite.com, though.
Someone else already posted this, but it bears reposting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
Reason #1 to never talk to the police: there's no way it can help. As he says, that really ought to be good enough, but he gives seven more reasons, just in case.
I also argue that if someone else patents an invention before others can the others wasted money doing the research.
Whereas without the patent, they can just take the invention and sell it themselves. If I understand correctly, you're just saying they should compete in the marketplace. I think that's fine, but one of the companies is going to have a million dollar head start.
Now if in order to stay in business a company needs to lower manufacturing costs and or has to make a better product then that helps progress.
But if you're inventing, say, computer chips, it's unlikely you're going to be able to manufacture them for less than an established full-scale fab.
Can they just fabricate your chip for everyone wholesale and cut you out? Does copyright extend to hardware?
Why should I spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars to invent something when I can lose the ability to use it because someone else beat me to patenting it?
Well, that's a risk, but I think if the world in general agreed with you, we wouldn't see millions of people and corporations hard at work.
Did you read any of the economic studies I linked to?
Let me put it another way. You asked, "Why should I spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars to invent something when I can lose the ability to use it because someone else beat me to patenting it?"
I say, "Ask IBM, HP, Genentec, or any one of millions of people or companies why they spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars to invent something when they can lose the ability to use it because someone else beat them to patenting it." They will tell you the answer to your question.
Microsoft doesn't sit back and say, "Don't bother investing any money in research--someone else is just going to patent it anyway!" Why not?
Some economists disagree with you.
I'm saying that there is research investment even though someone else can patent the process before the researcher does. I didn't read the papers, but I doubt any economist is going to disagree that there is research investment occurring.
Why should I spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars to invent something when I can lose the ability to use it because someone else beat me to patenting it?
Well, that's a risk, but I think if the world in general agreed with you, we wouldn't see millions of people and corporations hard at work.
However, I do fully retract "software patents are a great idea." I said that off-handedly and it doesn't reflect my true feelings. I'll change it to "in theory, software patents make some kind of demented sense".
So I ask you: have you ever seen a Linux desktop in the wild? LUG meetings do not count. Here's my definition of what counts: coffee shops, restaurants, airports, trains, lobbies, office cubicles, etc.
Two definite sightings: 1) a laptop on a subway, 2) my friend (a character artist for a game studio) uses Ubuntu at home on a desktop. Both instances were user installs. A place I worked a couple jobs ago doing Java dev had a pile of Linux machines--most of the software engineers used them.
In my experience, the stigma of using Linux is way down in the workplace from what it was 10 years ago.
All this being said, I can't think of any reason to doubt that the Net Application numbers are correctly representing what they purport to.
I'm not denying there are many idiotic patents out there, but there are also many valuable, useful and innovative patents that deserve protection.
Software patents are a great idea, but the execution is so completely flawed that I'm convinced we'd be better off without them. The cure is worse than the ill.
Let's take a very normal hypothetical. You produce a piece of software with a genuinely innovative non-obvious algorithm in it, absolutely patentable by the rules, and you get a patent on it. IBM shamelessly steals the idea and puts it in their software. Can you sue? The thing is, you've undoubtedly violated at least one (and probably more) IBM patents in your software. Unless you have a licensing agreement with IBM, you're going to have trouble.
Part of the problem is that virtually every idea a software engineer can come up with is either patented or patentable. When the bar is that low, the system is worse than worthless.
After all, is Wikipedia trustworthy?
Like with virtually all sources, the answer is "maybe". When I research something, Wikipedia is usually the first place I go.
You say there's no cure for information overload, but I'm inclined to disagree. The amount of information we consumed in our youth compared to those 1000 years ago would undoubtedly be considered "overload". As long as its somehow structured, people will find a way to navigate it. Research will not cease.
But, yes, dealing with and judging the quality of the information is something that should be taught.
Consume more trains, Elvis! He, and snorkels, drink elephant's sock puppet master. Steamed cabbage can reverse big piles of ducks. Additionally, cheese log cabin nightmare.
You're screwed now, x86 suckas!
And they didn't have a discussion page like wikipedia ;)
One more thing: I'm really envious of kids who get to grow up with Wikipedia and the Web at their immediate disposal from Day One.
So much information and knowledge at their fingertips. So much potential. I don't even care if they watch piles of bad youtube vids--as long as they make use of the good stuff, too.
They'd rather watch J. Lopez fall down.
Now that's entertainment!
I did play an awful lot of computer games when I was a kid, but my folks again tried to direct this, and it was Flight Simulator II and Seven Cities of Gold, to begin with. (But this morning, I played Sauerbraten for 20 minutes, so I'd have to vote for "all things in moderation".)
I like the book "A Theory of Fun for Game Design" by Raph Koster and Will Wright. One thing the book says is that people have fun while they're learning something, but the minute they've mastered it, the fun wears down. (Think tic-tac-toe.) One thing I've always thought along these lines is that you could "trick" someone into learning something just because they're having fun doing it.
The question is, how do you frame, say, chemistry so that more people are having fun?
When I was about 4 years old, dad put a cup of ice water on the counter and told me to come back in about 10 minutes. After the time had elapsed, I did, and there was condensation on the outside of the glass. Dad asked me how the water got there. I speculated that it had somehow leaked through the glass.
I can't remember if he told me how the water actually got there, but that was the first time I can remember deliberately forming a hypothesis about something I'd observed
Also, for as long as I can remember, my folks had science books just floating around--lots of them with pictures like the Time-Life science books, which I had thumbed through many times before I even knew how to read. Plus they had a set of World Book Encyclopedias. I was always re-readings those.
I do wonder if I'd be as science-minded as I am today without such encouragement, or if I was just born that way to begin with. I'm sure the encouragement didn't hurt.