I think they are using PRISM and what they have, to monitor those 50... who actually count more like 100.000 or so. They just don't want to disclose who they are monitoring, so they ask to have their filters applied directly to the data at the ISP.
If you ask them they say yes, but they don't do anything because the don't know how to do it. They hardly ever figure out such things on their own. They learn from friends showing or telling how they do it, but none of their friends do it.
Here is a solution. Modify Thunderbird, or create an add-on. Upon installation, generate a key pair without even asking the user. Encrypt the private key with a generated password, which is stored lightly obfuscated in the registry or somewhere. Totally insecure, of course. Append a special Mime attachment to every outgoing mail, with the public key. Check every incoming mail for this kind of attachment, and store the contained key in the address book. When sending to recipients whose public key is known, encrypt automatically.
In a short time it will be known that if you use Thunderbird, all mail exchanges with other Thunderbird users will be encrypted, with no hassle for anyone. People will begin telling each other about it.
Offer a configuration dialogue to set a proper password for the private key, a password which is not stored, but will be prompted for. Nerds and people who needs it will use it. But mails on the wire will look no different, and attract no more attention from the NSA.
Provide a simple synchronization function for those who use IMAP and multiple PCs/laptops/ipads.
This will make people switch to Thunderbird. But only if it's Thunderbird or something with a similar user base, not some new and obscure app.
Then the makers of other clients will add similar and compatible features to their stuff. The ball is rolling. At some point Google and Hotmail will offer snake-oil competition, encryption with the host controlling the keys. A few years later they will offer encryption in the thin client, with the keys stored in the user's system.
Create a keyword substitution code. Make a list of keywords for your subject, and a list of substitution words. Let the the most frequently used substitution word be "Viagra". Your message will land in the NSA's spam bucket and be forgotten.
molten glass for example, is stable at around 5,000 degrees celsius and easily stored in big ceramic tanks - expose water to that and generate power from the steam
5000 degrees Celsius is a bit high, It approaches the temperature of the Sun's surface. How do you contain that molten glass?
Perhaps you meant 5000 degrees Fahrenheit (2760 deg C)? The highest temperature refractory materials can take that. But they may not take the thermal shocks involved in spraying water on the glass. Perhaps you can design a plant where the water is never in touch with the walls, except the ceiling. The vapor rising up to the ceiling could be much colder that the glass. Turbine blades can probably not be made to withstand such temperatures either.
Or perhaps you meant 500 degrees Celsius? That's doable, refer to the Solar Two experimental plant in the Mojave Desert. There molten salt was heated to just below 600 degrees Celsius.
Otherwise you are right. It is easy to store thermal energy quite efficiently. I suspect that solar concentration plants is the future of large-scale energy production, rather than photovoltaic.
How did the new employer get hold of that copy? If you did not give it to them, you are not to blame for their access to it.
The old employer should be alerted about the case, since they might want to know that their new employee has a questionable moral and hence questionable dependability. Maybe the old employer will be willing to attest that they had and used this software product at a time when you, and not yet their new employee, was working for them.
We don't know the mode of operation of the new employee. Perhaps the new employee just ran a script to put his name on all the files out of a naive thought of assuming control, without any conscious intent to embarrass you or deny your contribution. The new employee may have little knowledge about copyright law. Have you had any conversation with him?
If no copyright transfer has taken place, I see two possibilities. If both you and the new employee work for hire, the copyright may belong to the company. If the new emplyee is modifying the files, they may be. eg. (c) 2011, 2013 Employer Company Ltd.
If you own the copyright to your work, you may still not be in position to deny the company the right to create derived works from it and using such derived works in their production. Supposing the new employee has a similar contract, then the derived work will probably be (c) 2011 You; (c) 2013 The New Employee. You may suggest to the new employee that he updates the files again with correct copyright information. You may even suggest he attributes you correctly by writing (c) 2011, 2013 Employer Ltd; Authors; You; He; Others...
There is a countermeasure to coercion. Allow people to vote as many times as they like; only the last vote counts. If you are forced to vote for Eve, you vote again later in the afternoon, for Alice.
Your boss would have to keep you locked in until the poll closes to prevent you from overriding the forced vote with a later vote. It would be hard to do that with enough people to change the election outcome, without it becoming very evident.
Add another provision: When you vote electronically, the computer shows you ten pictures and you have to select one. When you vote next time, you are shown ten pictures including the one one you selected. You have to select the same picture as last time to override the previous vote. The system does not tell you if you picked the right picture. If your boss forces you to vote five minutes before the poll closes, you select a different picture, and that vote is not valid. Your boss may force you to select a particular picture, but his chances of picking the right one will be just 10%. He could force you to vote ten times, but there could be timeout rules to make that hard.
Add a third provision: You may also vote in person at any police station, school, or any one of a number of places, and not just on election day, similar to absentee votes. A vote in person overrides votes over the Internet even if the Internet vote was issued later. If you suspect that you may be forced to vote for Eve just before the poll closes, vote in person early.
"I fail to see how this is more secure than simply exchanging USB keys."
This is more secure than exchanging USB keys because such keys exist all the time between the moment of generation and the moment of decryption. An attacker that gains access to the storage media at some point in between can copy the pad very quickly without anyone noticing.
This method lets Alice and Bob store only the sequence S and the combination W = (A xor B), which may be published, as Eve cannot use them to decode intercepted messages. The actual codes A and B are not stored, they are recreated when needed from S and the corresponding piece of glass.
The two pieces of glass are safer because it is hard to copy them. That is, the idea is that each piece of glass is like a 100-petabyte one-time pad, which would be both time consuming to read and hard to store.
The sequence S is used to extract a manageable portion A (or B) of this 100-petabyte pad.
But here is perhaps the weakness of the system: If the sequence S is known to Eve, and she briefly gets access to one of the pieces of glass, she will only need to repeat the process by which A or B was generated from S and the glass. This is precisely the same process that Alice and Bob must repeat to actually use the system. Such brief access is largely equivalent to a similarly brief access to the USB key or the stored data on a hard disk. Once Eve has one of A or B, she computes the other one using A = B xor W or B = A xor W.
So the security benefit boils down to the glass not being continuously connected to the optical device. This is similar to a USB key not being continuously connected.
But it may still be easier to protect a single piece of glass that is reused with different values of S, than to keep track of multiple USB keys for the different sessions. (And not confuse these keys with other keys used for other purposes.)
You already said it: throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation.
The reason this works so well for "most" people is that they don't care about computers. They approach them much like a five years old: They just consume what appears on the screen, they click some place pursuing curiosity, and if something happens, cool!
But if you actually need to get something done, you will always despair when things change: I don't have the time to explore this! Where is the damn button to get bold text?
In other words, what you call "most people" are those who only seek entertainment. Those who don't, don't throw out the old and accept the new. They pull their hair out.
History does not support that things only deteriorate except through revolutions. The twentieth century saw a tremendous improvement without violent revolutions. I tend to think that there was a couple of historical factors behind, like the combination of a world war to create a greatly enhanced sense of community, and a socialist and unionizing movement creating a previously unheard of balance of power -- until the the unions themselves became too corrupt or too dumb and static.
If the 99% find new ways of organizing we may see another golden age until that new structure again becomes too corrupt. Then newer generations will have to develop still newer ways of organizing, etc. But these changes do not have to be violent revolutions.
On the other hand there is another factor behind the ever increasing level of taxes: As manufacturing becomes cheaper, the kind of things that are best done through a government becomes a larger fraction of the GDP.
But Roman_Mir followed up with a couple of other things that he said were implemented in similar ways: Gun control, taxing income on a graduated scale, telling people what they can and cannot do with their private property, same for people running businesses.
Then he finished off with this diagnosis: all of this grows and emboldens the government and when governments grow and become emboldened people shrink and become scared little nothings
This is not quite enough to guarantee absolute certainty about his opinions, but there's a well known ring to it.
People fuss to much about the security of the passphrase and such things. The effect is that almost nobody uses encryption.
Make a Thunderbird extension that automatically sets up a default configuration that works from the get-go. In this default configuration the private key could be stored in a local file encrypted with a passphrase that is hardwired into the program. Totally insecure if there is a virus that targets this arrangement, but still a million times safer than sending everything over the wire in the clear.
Add simple functions to synchronize the security parameters, including the private key(s), on multiple laptops and computers.
Have the extension generate a mail that can be sent to yourself or stored in the drafts folder of your IMAP account, containing the synchronization data. Upon opening such a mail, or even just upon downloading it, the extension should know what to do and do it.
Add a good user interface to perform key management tasks and to configure all these dangerous things, like turning off some automatic actions, or adding a true user-selected password to the private key file.
Add a feature, active by default, to include in all MIME-encapsulated mails an attachment containing your public key, and another feature to automatically harvest all public keys that your Thunderbird installations come across. If you send a mail to some party with a known public key, encrypt automatically. If you receive an encrypted mail, decrypt automatically. If one copy of Thunderbird does not have the private key it needs to decrypt a mail it has received/downloaded, generate a special request mail that other instances of Thunderbird will know to answer if they have the private key requested. Etc.
If such an extension becomes included in the standard distribution, more and more people will begin using it, and then other people will hear about it and request it from their mail application vendors.
But would it be possible for the insurgents to take control of the physical network in the areas they control, negotiate and set up new connections to networks in the neighboring countries?
I guess the telco(s) i Syria have more or less a star topology infrastructure with the hub in or near Damascus, and I guess the international connections use dedicated fibers from the hub to similar hubs in other countries, as well as satellite links and possibly some forms of terrestial point-to-point radio links.
How hard would it be to reconnect equipment they get hold of, and reorganize the topology? If some of the dedicated fibers carrying international traffic, pass through rebel territory, can they connect to these links, eg. at the repeaters?
Why can't the major software vendors publish sha265sum signatures (hashes) of all their files? Why can't the major software vendors cooperate on a dns-like service where you look up the signature of a file you have on your disk in order to know if it is unaltered? Why can't we crowd-source a new service where people and everybody can submit the signatures of files they have and believe to be OK... - because the bad guy or his first victim would register the signature of the infected file? - Well, let's take some measures... The submitters need to have had a pgp/gpg key registered with a keyserver for at least two years, and the service response includes a field telling how many distinct submitters have submitted this same signature. All right, I come to think about more problems with this idea faster than I can write about them... But many of them have fairly obvious solutions, and some may not completely invalidate the benefits... Who would like to contribute to a discussion about such a concept?
The question is if the needle to hay ratio is better in the added hay. If there was no needles in the original haystack, adding more hay may add a needle.
A mobile computer is still a computer. A mobile phone is a device containing a computer. What the tethering device is doing is not different from what any router does, and what any router does used to be done by general computers since the advent of the tcp/ip protocol suite.
Or can you patent routing with a pink computer, declaring that after today, pink computers are a different kind of device?
Or patent routing with a computer having a wooden case? (But that patent would not be worth much since few people need to put their computers inside wooden cases.)
Or patent routing with a computer having sub x-nanometer techonoly (substitute a suitable number for 'x'), in case you are the first to achieve sub x-nanometer feature chips?
What about patenting multiplication of numbers using a computer having sub x-nanometer technology?
But the reason Einstein could gain such a recognition in the general society is that up to his day the fundamental principles of physics were eminently understandable, but he introduced Weirdness, and his Weirdness was soon confirmed by observations, so the High Priests of physics (gradually) told the public that this Weirdness was right. Thanks to Einstein's own popularization, the public was exposed to an exposition that was largely understandable on a step by step basis, even if when rounding it all up at the end it was incomprehensible to most.
Today the fundamental principles are incomprehensible from the very beginning, and they have been that way for some time. Anyone that makes similar breakthroughs at the fundamental level as Einstein did, will likely be perceived as someone who just replaces a book of incomprehensible mathematical formulas for another equally incomprehensible. There will be streams of articles in Scientific American, New Scientist, etc, but these articles will simply not make much sense. Al this makes i tharder to gain a similar recognition as Einstein had.
Patents are supposed to disclose enough to enable a person skilled in the art to recreate the invention. But the problems that a person skilled in the art must overcome to recreate this invention, are thousands of times more demanding than coming up with the details of this claim. How can it be obvious to the person skilled in the art how to implement this invention if the standard of "obviousness" is such that the invention itself is not obvious to the person skilled in the art?
This patent, like most modern, computer-related patents, do not describe, much less patent, the actual solution to the problem. They patent the problem itself.
Consider, for instance, claim 12 (for increased legibility, I have added some punctuation, numbering, and line breaks):
A computer program product
- stored on a non-transitory tangible computer readable medium
- and comprising instructions that, when executed, cause a computer system to:
1. receive an image of the first user via a camera operably coupled with the computing device;
2. determine an identity of the first user based on the received first image;
3. if the determined identity of the first user matches the first predetermined identity,
- then, based at least on the identity of the first user matching the first predetermined identity,
- log the first user in to the computing device;
4. receive a second image of a second user via the camera operably coupled with the computing device;
5. determine an identity of the second user based on the received second image;
6. and if the determined identity of the second user matches the second predetermined identity,
- then, issue a prompt to confirm that the first user should be logged off of the computing device
- and that the second user should be logged on to the computing device;
7. receive a valid confirmation from the first or second user in response to the prompt;
8. in response to receiving the valid confirmation,
- log the first user off of the computing device
- and log the second user in to the computing device.
All this algorithmic trading was a bit like building a power station to extract energy from surface waves in a choppy sea. The algorithms are adjusted to maximize profits from small minute-to-minute price movements. Now, in a sea, if the volume of one wave diminishes, the water is still somewhere, the sea level does not sink. But in the economy, sometimes the bottom plug is out and the water is draining.
The Black-Scholes formula uses "volatility" as input. It does not try to predict the volatility. Volatility is measured as the standard deviation in the price variability over a limited time period. There is no method there to compute the possibility of a market crash. If you assume the price movements are random walk, the likelyhood of all prices going in the same direction is nil, since there are millions of prices.
I refuse to believe that nobody saw this flaw. I am sure the whole population of quants were thinking "after me, the deludge". Very many CDOs were created by companies that sold them to other institutions, so that they only ran a limited risk associated with the small amount of derivatives they still held when the crash came. Add the bailout likelyhood, and add the fact that the individuals would get away with their bonuses even if their ship were to sink.
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Libreoffice can save files in .doc and .docx format.
Whipping is not torture if the victim does not experience the pain of death. If the victim survives, it is perfectly legal and normal.
Secret patents? How are they enforced?
I think they are using PRISM and what they have, to monitor those 50... who actually count more like 100.000 or so. They just don't want to disclose who they are monitoring, so they ask to have their filters applied directly to the data at the ISP.
Here is a solution. Modify Thunderbird, or create an add-on. Upon installation, generate a key pair without even asking the user. Encrypt the private key with a generated password, which is stored lightly obfuscated in the registry or somewhere. Totally insecure, of course. Append a special Mime attachment to every outgoing mail, with the public key. Check every incoming mail for this kind of attachment, and store the contained key in the address book. When sending to recipients whose public key is known, encrypt automatically.
In a short time it will be known that if you use Thunderbird, all mail exchanges with other Thunderbird users will be encrypted, with no hassle for anyone. People will begin telling each other about it.
Offer a configuration dialogue to set a proper password for the private key, a password which is not stored, but will be prompted for. Nerds and people who needs it will use it. But mails on the wire will look no different, and attract no more attention from the NSA.
Provide a simple synchronization function for those who use IMAP and multiple PCs/laptops/ipads.
This will make people switch to Thunderbird. But only if it's Thunderbird or something with a similar user base, not some new and obscure app.
Then the makers of other clients will add similar and compatible features to their stuff. The ball is rolling. At some point Google and Hotmail will offer snake-oil competition, encryption with the host controlling the keys. A few years later they will offer encryption in the thin client, with the keys stored in the user's system.
To target you and infect your system and capture the data prior to encryption, requires three to five orders of magnitude more resources.
Create a keyword substitution code. Make a list of keywords for your subject, and a list of substitution words. Let the the most frequently used substitution word be "Viagra". Your message will land in the NSA's spam bucket and be forgotten.
Now it is guilt by association
Now it is guilt by up to three degrees of association
That is why some of us are not yet in Guantanamo. That would take six degrees.
molten glass for example, is stable at around 5,000 degrees celsius and easily stored in big ceramic tanks - expose water to that and generate power from the steam
5000 degrees Celsius is a bit high, It approaches the temperature of the Sun's surface. How do you contain that molten glass?
Perhaps you meant 5000 degrees Fahrenheit (2760 deg C)? The highest temperature refractory materials can take that. But they may not take the thermal shocks involved in spraying water on the glass. Perhaps you can design a plant where the water is never in touch with the walls, except the ceiling. The vapor rising up to the ceiling could be much colder that the glass. Turbine blades can probably not be made to withstand such temperatures either.
Or perhaps you meant 500 degrees Celsius? That's doable, refer to the Solar Two experimental plant in the Mojave Desert. There molten salt was heated to just below 600 degrees Celsius.
Otherwise you are right. It is easy to store thermal energy quite efficiently. I suspect that solar concentration plants is the future of large-scale energy production, rather than photovoltaic.
How did the new employer get hold of that copy? If you did not give it to them, you are not to blame for their access to it.
The old employer should be alerted about the case, since they might want to know that their new employee has a questionable moral and hence questionable dependability. Maybe the old employer will be willing to attest that they had and used this software product at a time when you, and not yet their new employee, was working for them.
We don't know the mode of operation of the new employee. Perhaps the new employee just ran a script to put his name on all the files out of a naive thought of assuming control, without any conscious intent to embarrass you or deny your contribution. The new employee may have little knowledge about copyright law. Have you had any conversation with him?
If no copyright transfer has taken place, I see two possibilities. If both you and the new employee work for hire, the copyright may belong to the company. If the new emplyee is modifying the files, they may be. eg. (c) 2011, 2013 Employer Company Ltd.
If you own the copyright to your work, you may still not be in position to deny the company the right to create derived works from it and using such derived works in their production. Supposing the new employee has a similar contract, then the derived work will probably be (c) 2011 You; (c) 2013 The New Employee. You may suggest to the new employee that he updates the files again with correct copyright information. You may even suggest he attributes you correctly by writing (c) 2011, 2013 Employer Ltd; Authors; You; He; Others...
There is a countermeasure to coercion. Allow people to vote as many times as they like; only the last vote counts. If you are forced to vote for Eve, you vote again later in the afternoon, for Alice.
Your boss would have to keep you locked in until the poll closes to prevent you from overriding the forced vote with a later vote. It would be hard to do that with enough people to change the election outcome, without it becoming very evident.
Add another provision: When you vote electronically, the computer shows you ten pictures and you have to select one. When you vote next time, you are shown ten pictures including the one one you selected. You have to select the same picture as last time to override the previous vote. The system does not tell you if you picked the right picture. If your boss forces you to vote five minutes before the poll closes, you select a different picture, and that vote is not valid. Your boss may force you to select a particular picture, but his chances of picking the right one will be just 10%. He could force you to vote ten times, but there could be timeout rules to make that hard.
Add a third provision: You may also vote in person at any police station, school, or any one of a number of places, and not just on election day, similar to absentee votes. A vote in person overrides votes over the Internet even if the Internet vote was issued later. If you suspect that you may be forced to vote for Eve just before the poll closes, vote in person early.
"I fail to see how this is more secure than simply exchanging USB keys."
This is more secure than exchanging USB keys because such keys exist all the time between the moment of generation and the moment of decryption. An attacker that gains access to the storage media at some point in between can copy the pad very quickly without anyone noticing.
This method lets Alice and Bob store only the sequence S and the combination W = (A xor B), which may be published, as Eve cannot use them to decode intercepted messages. The actual codes A and B are not stored, they are recreated when needed from S and the corresponding piece of glass.
The two pieces of glass are safer because it is hard to copy them. That is, the idea is that each piece of glass is like a 100-petabyte one-time pad, which would be both time consuming to read and hard to store.
The sequence S is used to extract a manageable portion A (or B) of this 100-petabyte pad.
But here is perhaps the weakness of the system: If the sequence S is known to Eve, and she briefly gets access to one of the pieces of glass, she will only need to repeat the process by which A or B was generated from S and the glass. This is precisely the same process that Alice and Bob must repeat to actually use the system. Such brief access is largely equivalent to a similarly brief access to the USB key or the stored data on a hard disk. Once Eve has one of A or B, she computes the other one using A = B xor W or B = A xor W.
So the security benefit boils down to the glass not being continuously connected to the optical device. This is similar to a USB key not being continuously connected.
But it may still be easier to protect a single piece of glass that is reused with different values of S, than to keep track of multiple USB keys for the different sessions. (And not confuse these keys with other keys used for other purposes.)
And my hammer is a new device at each point of its trajectory to the nail, as it steadily gains velocity and momentum!
You already said it: throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation.
The reason this works so well for "most" people is that they don't care about computers. They approach them much like a five years old: They just consume what appears on the screen, they click some place pursuing curiosity, and if something happens, cool!
But if you actually need to get something done, you will always despair when things change: I don't have the time to explore this! Where is the damn button to get bold text?
In other words, what you call "most people" are those who only seek entertainment. Those who don't, don't throw out the old and accept the new. They pull their hair out.
History does not support that things only deteriorate except through revolutions. The twentieth century saw a tremendous improvement without violent revolutions. I tend to think that there was a couple of historical factors behind, like the combination of a world war to create a greatly enhanced sense of community, and a socialist and unionizing movement creating a previously unheard of balance of power -- until the the unions themselves became too corrupt or too dumb and static.
If the 99% find new ways of organizing we may see another golden age until that new structure again becomes too corrupt. Then newer generations will have to develop still newer ways of organizing, etc. But these changes do not have to be violent revolutions.
On the other hand there is another factor behind the ever increasing level of taxes: As manufacturing becomes cheaper, the kind of things that are best done through a government becomes a larger fraction of the GDP.
But Roman_Mir followed up with a couple of other things that he said were implemented in similar ways: Gun control, taxing income on a graduated scale, telling people what they can and cannot do with their private property, same for people running businesses.
Then he finished off with this diagnosis: all of this grows and emboldens the government and when governments grow and become emboldened people shrink and become scared little nothings
This is not quite enough to guarantee absolute certainty about his opinions, but there's a well known ring to it.
People fuss to much about the security of the passphrase and such things. The effect is that almost nobody uses encryption.
Make a Thunderbird extension that automatically sets up a default configuration that works from the get-go.
In this default configuration the private key could be stored in a local file encrypted with a passphrase that is hardwired into the program.
Totally insecure if there is a virus that targets this arrangement, but still a million times safer than sending everything over the wire in the clear.
Add simple functions to synchronize the security parameters, including the private key(s), on multiple laptops and computers.
Have the extension generate a mail that can be sent to yourself or stored in the drafts folder of your IMAP account, containing the synchronization data.
Upon opening such a mail, or even just upon downloading it, the extension should know what to do and do it.
Add a good user interface to perform key management tasks and to configure all these dangerous things, like turning off some automatic actions, or adding a true user-selected password to the private key file.
Add a feature, active by default, to include in all MIME-encapsulated mails an attachment containing your public key,
and another feature to automatically harvest all public keys that your Thunderbird installations come across. If you send a mail to some party with a known public key, encrypt automatically. If you receive an encrypted mail, decrypt automatically.
If one copy of Thunderbird does not have the private key it needs to decrypt a mail it has received/downloaded, generate a special request mail that other instances of Thunderbird will know to answer if they have the private key requested. Etc.
If such an extension becomes included in the standard distribution, more and more people will begin using it, and then other people will hear about it and request it from their mail application vendors.
But would it be possible for the insurgents to take control of the physical network in the areas they control, negotiate and set up new connections to networks in the neighboring countries?
I guess the telco(s) i Syria have more or less a star topology infrastructure with the hub in or near Damascus, and I guess the international connections use dedicated fibers from the hub to similar hubs in other countries, as well as satellite links and possibly some forms of terrestial point-to-point radio links.
How hard would it be to reconnect equipment they get hold of, and reorganize the topology?
If some of the dedicated fibers carrying international traffic, pass through rebel territory, can they connect to these links, eg. at the repeaters?
Why can't the major software vendors publish sha265sum signatures (hashes) of all their files?
Why can't the major software vendors cooperate on a dns-like service where you look up the signature of a file you have on your disk in order to know if it is unaltered?
Why can't we crowd-source a new service where people and everybody can submit the signatures of files they have and believe to be OK...
- because the bad guy or his first victim would register the signature of the infected file?
- Well, let's take some measures... The submitters need to have had a pgp/gpg key registered with a keyserver for at least two years,
and the service response includes a field telling how many distinct submitters have submitted this same signature.
All right, I come to think about more problems with this idea faster than I can write about them... But many of them have fairly obvious solutions, and some may not completely invalidate the benefits... Who would like to contribute to a discussion about such a concept?
The question is if the needle to hay ratio is better in the added hay.
If there was no needles in the original haystack, adding more hay may add a needle.
A mobile computer is still a computer. A mobile phone is a device containing a computer. What the tethering device is doing is not different from what any router does, and what any router does used to be done by general computers since the advent of the tcp/ip protocol suite. Or can you patent routing with a pink computer, declaring that after today, pink computers are a different kind of device? Or patent routing with a computer having a wooden case? (But that patent would not be worth much since few people need to put their computers inside wooden cases.) Or patent routing with a computer having sub x-nanometer techonoly (substitute a suitable number for 'x'), in case you are the first to achieve sub x-nanometer feature chips? What about patenting multiplication of numbers using a computer having sub x-nanometer technology?
But the reason Einstein could gain such a recognition in the general society is that up to his day the fundamental principles of physics were eminently understandable, but he introduced Weirdness, and his Weirdness was soon confirmed by observations, so the High Priests of physics (gradually) told the public that this Weirdness was right. Thanks to Einstein's own popularization, the public was exposed to an exposition that was largely understandable on a step by step basis, even if when rounding it all up at the end it was incomprehensible to most. Today the fundamental principles are incomprehensible from the very beginning, and they have been that way for some time. Anyone that makes similar breakthroughs at the fundamental level as Einstein did, will likely be perceived as someone who just replaces a book of incomprehensible mathematical formulas for another equally incomprehensible. There will be streams of articles in Scientific American, New Scientist, etc, but these articles will simply not make much sense. Al this makes i tharder to gain a similar recognition as Einstein had.
This patent, like most modern, computer-related patents, do not describe, much less patent, the actual solution to the problem. They patent the problem itself.
Consider, for instance, claim 12 (for increased legibility, I have added some punctuation, numbering, and line breaks):
A computer program product
- stored on a non-transitory tangible computer readable medium
- and comprising instructions that, when executed, cause a computer system to:
1. receive an image of the first user via a camera operably coupled with the computing device;
2. determine an identity of the first user based on the received first image;
3. if the determined identity of the first user matches the first predetermined identity,
- then, based at least on the identity of the first user matching the first predetermined identity,
- log the first user in to the computing device;
4. receive a second image of a second user via the camera operably coupled with the computing device;
5. determine an identity of the second user based on the received second image;
6. and if the determined identity of the second user matches the second predetermined identity,
- then, issue a prompt to confirm that the first user should be logged off of the computing device
- and that the second user should be logged on to the computing device;
7. receive a valid confirmation from the first or second user in response to the prompt;
8. in response to receiving the valid confirmation,
- log the first user off of the computing device
- and log the second user in to the computing device.
All this algorithmic trading was a bit like building a power station to extract energy from surface waves in a choppy sea. The algorithms are adjusted to maximize profits from small minute-to-minute price movements. Now, in a sea, if the volume of one wave diminishes, the water is still somewhere, the sea level does not sink. But in the economy, sometimes the bottom plug is out and the water is draining.
The Black-Scholes formula uses "volatility" as input. It does not try to predict the volatility. Volatility is measured as the standard deviation in the price variability over a limited time period. There is no method there to compute the possibility of a market crash. If you assume the price movements are random walk, the likelyhood of all prices going in the same direction is nil, since there are millions of prices.
I refuse to believe that nobody saw this flaw. I am sure the whole population of quants were thinking "after me, the deludge". Very many CDOs were created by companies that sold them to other institutions, so that they only ran a limited risk associated with the small amount of derivatives they still held when the crash came. Add the bailout likelyhood, and add the fact that the individuals would get away with their bonuses even if their ship were to sink.
The fact is, they don't have to be there at all. The only reason they are is for profits.
Do you really think it would be better if Google just remained out of China?