It's perfectly possible to make a type of RFID tag that doesn't affect privacy in any meaningful way. If the tag wasn't a unique identifier, but more like a product code (like the UPC code), then the only information it leaks it that it's a particlar inventiroy item, say, a red sweater.
No one can trace it to you, since--like a UPC symbol--it's not unique to item, but to the kind of item. And they could msake a way to disable them after purchase (like they do the little magnetized thingies in bookstores).
The privacy loss in unique-id RFID tags has a technological solution. I wish some slashdotter with access to capital would make a better, privacy-preserving widget instead of just hearing all of the bitching that you don't want the gov't to know you shop at LL Bean.
Is there a link explaining why they chose that theme?
No link necessary. Matt's Script archive is well-known among Perl programmers as one of the densest collections of hole-ridden crappy code on the net.
There's even a project to write secure, well-written clones of his scripts so the poor bastards stuck with his can drop-in something that won't allow remote exploits on their machine.:-)
They patented the ability to use and set information in cookies for load balancing decisions.
And it's still shameless. I've worked with cookie persistence on F5's BigIP load balancers. It uses a cookie to identify which server out of a server pool a particular client should go to.
This is for load-balanced webservers that keep server-side session data, which is only on one server for any particular client. So the clients are distributed across the pool, but any particular client always goes to the same server in the pool. Simple.
This is what cookies were made for. Cookies were designed to solve problems where you need a particular HTTP client to keep a piece of data the server needs. This is a piece of data the F5 server needs, and so it uses a cookie to store it on the client. It's not any new innovation.
Any good developer would've come up with the same solution. This is just patenting "Using Cookies for Application X." Next we'll see "Using Cookies for Application Y." Humbug.
In the first Matrix movie, Neo is supposed to be the hero. He is supposed to deliver humanity from a scourge of machines that, with AI, decided we were expendable.
But the first Animatrix makes we humans, pretty much en masse, into horrible villains. It's the same tired old Humanity Is Cruel And Stupid line. Yawn. What's worse is that it tries to make you root for the machines!
So which is it, Wachowskis? Machines are evil, or all of humanity?
I don't care for yet more everything-is-grey-there-is-no-morality bullshit, either. Oh well, I guess I'll wait and see.
Freedom requires vigilance
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
The states of Iraq, along with Iran, Syria and Saudia Arabia condone and finance militant anti-Western terrorists. They routinely call for the destruction of "infidels" (read: Western non-Islamic nations).
I support the values of the Founders of America, and fear that, undefended, America could become overrun with the sorts of terrorist acts that Israel suffers every day. Anyone who thinks there is no precendent hasn't been watching the last twenty years of overseas bombings, attacks on Americans, threats, and indoctrination of children.
Whatever flaws the US has, or mistakes it has made, it is still the closest thing to a free constitutional republic, and I support defending that freedom, both from outside aggressors and it's own politicians, if need be.
I know this isn't popular on slashdot, but karma's just karma and it had to be said.
Speaking from personal experience, every project I have been involved with for my employer over the past year has been either partially or (in most cases) completely built on Open Source applications.
Hear, hear! Where I work (investment industry), they were hostile to open source two years ago, even begrudging the use of Perl. We'd been sneaking it in.
Last week I had a meeting where I made explicit that the dev crew defaults to open source solutions, and will only get a vendor product when the OSS doesn't meet requirements. Not a word of disagreement anywhere. Even on support agreements, which are required, they hire a company that supports OSS.
On the low end Sun servers cost $250,000 (unless you cut a deal)
You might want to qualify that, since Sun sells lots of low-end servers for under $5k. If you count "going to their website" as "cutting a deal," then, maybe.:-)
I've worked with a bunch of el-cheap SunFires (prices) that were pretty good servers.
IMHO it makes more sense to specify the most specific section of the domain first, as the general bit can be assumed.
For example, I have a default domain of twoshortplanks.com. This means I can type "http://zen" into my browser and it looks up "zen.twoshortplanks.com".
Well, that doesn't matter to the OP's suggestion.
If you type http://zen/bob.html, it expands that to http://zen.somedomain.com/bob.html. there's nothing stopping the inverted names from doing the same thing, and in fact they make *more* sense.
Instead of adding default domains in the middle of the URL between the host and path, they can just be prepended: http://zen/bob.html becomes http://com.domain.zen/bob.html
I always hated that most hierarchies are displayed most general -> least general, except for DNS!
For multiplayer games like this, I like to play along with my gaming friends. They all bought NWN when it came out, played the hell out of it, and now they don't play it so often. So if I buy it now, I'm playing alone.
Even though the game looks promising, I'll give it a miss.
it seems to me (and it's early, so bear with me) that it's easier for me to remember one piece of meta-data (i.e. the path to the file) than several
I agree. I'm skeptical of all these UI ideas which start with: "Poor User, he's too stupid to remember filenames, or create a hierarchy that classifies files properly."
I don't know how many times I've tried to re-find something on the web with Google, but just can't come up with the right search terms to bring it up. That's what happens to me when I think that I won't need the URL, I'll just remember some keywords...
Plus, the filesystems I have trouble with won't be helped by this. At work, how will a BA tell me where he's stored the requirements on the shared filesystem? I suppose he crafts a query which returns just one single document. But then how's that easier than a filename?
I just don't get it. In any case, even if it does catch on with joe sixpack, it won't with me.
... for email. They blithely put whatever comes to mind in their email as though it's private.
I like to ask them how they'll enjoy explaining such emails after their company's email is subpoenaed in a lawsuit. It's usually just an "it'll never happen" shrug.
So the threat of being spied upon doesn't seem to make a difference to most non-geek people I know, even if they do things that would be embarassing to them if they were publicized. Odd.
The network at my company is quickly becoming so complex that neither I nor the admins can troubleshoot it.
We have redundant everything -- firewalls, routers, load balancers, app servers, etc. The idea is to have half of everything offsite, so either the main site or the co-lo can go down, and we still rock.
But with all the zones and NATs and rules and routing oddities, the network is less reliable than before. It takes days for them to fix routing problems or firewall problems. Every little problem means we need three people troubleshooting it instead of one admin.
Developers suspect that there's a simpler way to do it all, but since we're not networking experts, it's just a suspicion.
Now, this is where the plausible deniability comes in: the data coming from Alice's node looks just like the data coming from all the other nodes she talked to during the request/insert process.
And if you're living in a dictatorship which has banned the use of freenet outright, and which punishes people without trial, they're going to care about plausible deniability? I don't think so.
That's the real downside here. It would be great if there was a tool for those in oppressed nations to get the word out about freedom, but this tool, like a meeting in somebody'd basement, will be outlawed and users punished without trial.
Add to that the mission statement that the creators think copyright should be abolished, and I think this is a tool which is built more to subvert copyright laws in relatively free countries, rather than help those in dictatorships.
Intellectual property is owned by the public and in essence leased to authors and inventors
So 'the public' owned the telephone, and just leased it to Alexander Bell? The 'public' had no telephone until Bell invented it. It cannot lease him those thoughts, or that creativity. He earned it on his own.
While I have problems with the current system, collectivist nonsense like this is not the answer. When 'the public' thinks it has a right to the product of my effort, then they can try and pry it out of my mind. I'd rather keep it secret than give it to someone who demands it's his.
It's just as bad when RMS complains he has a right to my source, whether or not I want to give it away. This talk does not enhance freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
It's perfectly possible to make a type of RFID tag that doesn't affect privacy in any meaningful way. If the tag wasn't a unique identifier, but more like a product code (like the UPC code), then the only information it leaks it that it's a particlar inventiroy item, say, a red sweater.
No one can trace it to you, since--like a UPC symbol--it's not unique to item, but to the kind of item. And they could msake a way to disable them after purchase (like they do the little magnetized thingies in bookstores).
The privacy loss in unique-id RFID tags has a technological solution. I wish some slashdotter with access to capital would make a better, privacy-preserving widget instead of just hearing all of the bitching that you don't want the gov't to know you shop at LL Bean.
No link necessary. Matt's Script archive is well-known among Perl programmers as one of the densest collections of hole-ridden crappy code on the net.
There's even a project to write secure, well-written clones of his scripts so the poor bastards stuck with his can drop-in something that won't allow remote exploits on their machine. :-)
I love April fool's day.
Perl programmers may want to check out their beloved cpan.org site today, too. :-)
Or: "It'll make you a sexual tyrannosaurus, just like me."
Pitch Black: great sci-fi fun.
Predator: "Dey are using da trees." Hooya!
And it's still shameless. I've worked with cookie persistence on F5's BigIP load balancers. It uses a cookie to identify which server out of a server pool a particular client should go to.
This is for load-balanced webservers that keep server-side session data, which is only on one server for any particular client. So the clients are distributed across the pool, but any particular client always goes to the same server in the pool. Simple.
This is what cookies were made for. Cookies were designed to solve problems where you need a particular HTTP client to keep a piece of data the server needs. This is a piece of data the F5 server needs, and so it uses a cookie to store it on the client. It's not any new innovation.
Any good developer would've come up with the same solution. This is just patenting "Using Cookies for Application X." Next we'll see "Using Cookies for Application Y." Humbug.
In the first Matrix movie, Neo is supposed to be the hero. He is supposed to deliver humanity from a scourge of machines that, with AI, decided we were expendable.
But the first Animatrix makes we humans, pretty much en masse, into horrible villains. It's the same tired old Humanity Is Cruel And Stupid line. Yawn. What's worse is that it tries to make you root for the machines!
So which is it, Wachowskis? Machines are evil, or all of humanity?
I don't care for yet more everything-is-grey-there-is-no-morality bullshit, either. Oh well, I guess I'll wait and see.
The states of Iraq, along with Iran, Syria and Saudia Arabia condone and finance militant anti-Western terrorists. They routinely call for the destruction of "infidels" (read: Western non-Islamic nations).
I support the values of the Founders of America, and fear that, undefended, America could become overrun with the sorts of terrorist acts that Israel suffers every day. Anyone who thinks there is no precendent hasn't been watching the last twenty years of overseas bombings, attacks on Americans, threats, and indoctrination of children.
Whatever flaws the US has, or mistakes it has made, it is still the closest thing to a free constitutional republic, and I support defending that freedom, both from outside aggressors and it's own politicians, if need be.
I know this isn't popular on slashdot, but karma's just karma and it had to be said.
Hear, hear! Where I work (investment industry), they were hostile to open source two years ago, even begrudging the use of Perl. We'd been sneaking it in.
Last week I had a meeting where I made explicit that the dev crew defaults to open source solutions, and will only get a vendor product when the OSS doesn't meet requirements. Not a word of disagreement anywhere. Even on support agreements, which are required, they hire a company that supports OSS.
OSS has truly arrived at my firm!
...tell us if this will make factoring large numbers easier? What are the implications for public key encryption?
So we either (possibly) lose some priceless artifacts, or we lose priceless lives when the next terrorist strike comes.
I know which one is more important. Do you?
You might want to qualify that, since Sun sells lots of low-end servers for under $5k. If you count "going to their website" as "cutting a deal," then, maybe. :-)
I've worked with a bunch of el-cheap SunFires (prices) that were pretty good servers.
Well, that doesn't matter to the OP's suggestion.
If you type http://zen/bob.html, it expands that to http://zen.somedomain.com/bob.html. there's nothing stopping the inverted names from doing the same thing, and in fact they make *more* sense.
Instead of adding default domains in the middle of the URL between the host and path, they can just be prepended: http://zen/bob.html becomes http://com.domain.zen/bob.html
I always hated that most hierarchies are displayed most general -> least general, except for DNS!
was Cathy rogers. Rrowr!
So why only a 7.5? What's missing?
For multiplayer games like this, I like to play along with my gaming friends. They all bought NWN when it came out, played the hell out of it, and now they don't play it so often. So if I buy it now, I'm playing alone.
Even though the game looks promising, I'll give it a miss.
I agree. I'm skeptical of all these UI ideas which start with: "Poor User, he's too stupid to remember filenames, or create a hierarchy that classifies files properly."
I don't know how many times I've tried to re-find something on the web with Google, but just can't come up with the right search terms to bring it up. That's what happens to me when I think that I won't need the URL, I'll just remember some keywords...
Plus, the filesystems I have trouble with won't be helped by this. At work, how will a BA tell me where he's stored the requirements on the shared filesystem? I suppose he crafts a query which returns just one single document. But then how's that easier than a filename?
I just don't get it. In any case, even if it does catch on with joe sixpack, it won't with me.
... for email. They blithely put whatever comes to mind in their email as though it's private.
I like to ask them how they'll enjoy explaining such emails after their company's email is subpoenaed in a lawsuit. It's usually just an "it'll never happen" shrug.
So the threat of being spied upon doesn't seem to make a difference to most non-geek people I know, even if they do things that would be embarassing to them if they were publicized. Odd.
The network at my company is quickly becoming so complex that neither I nor the admins can troubleshoot it.
We have redundant everything -- firewalls, routers, load balancers, app servers, etc. The idea is to have half of everything offsite, so either the main site or the co-lo can go down, and we still rock.
But with all the zones and NATs and rules and routing oddities, the network is less reliable than before. It takes days for them to fix routing problems or firewall problems. Every little problem means we need three people troubleshooting it instead of one admin.
Developers suspect that there's a simpler way to do it all, but since we're not networking experts, it's just a suspicion.
``Don't trust Microsoft'' is just a good security principle in general. Finally they realize it. :-)
This appears to use the same idea as referer-links on weblogs. Here's the progression from idea to uselessness:
- Obtain data from visitors as they browse.
- Post data obtained form visitors on the same site.
- Watch as three new internet startups market a tool to spam pr0n links on all the pages that use (1) and (2), above.
Only let your users post shit on your site if you want it to all be pr0n spam or goatse links.And if you're living in a dictatorship which has banned the use of freenet outright, and which punishes people without trial, they're going to care about plausible deniability? I don't think so.
That's the real downside here. It would be great if there was a tool for those in oppressed nations to get the word out about freedom, but this tool, like a meeting in somebody'd basement, will be outlawed and users punished without trial.
Add to that the mission statement that the creators think copyright should be abolished, and I think this is a tool which is built more to subvert copyright laws in relatively free countries, rather than help those in dictatorships.
...I'd expect to see a post to comp.os.minix that had a single line:
In your face, Tanenbaum!
So 'the public' owned the telephone, and just leased it to Alexander Bell? The 'public' had no telephone until Bell invented it. It cannot lease him those thoughts, or that creativity. He earned it on his own.
While I have problems with the current system, collectivist nonsense like this is not the answer. When 'the public' thinks it has a right to the product of my effort, then they can try and pry it out of my mind. I'd rather keep it secret than give it to someone who demands it's his.
It's just as bad when RMS complains he has a right to my source, whether or not I want to give it away. This talk does not enhance freedom.