In Norway they used the digital switchover as a chance to turn all (3 or 4ish) channels but the state broadcaster into payed channels, and they added a lot of new channels. They turned a somewhat credible free TV system with no setup cost into something useless. Now, either you like TV and have to pay, or most others don't really care and won't even bother to set up the free channel.
Digital is probably good overall, if it can free up some spectrum, but new technology certainly exposes how people can be greedy assholes. At least DVB-T can still be received with a passive receiver, which helps with privacy and stability
This is an interesting point (and new to me, would mod up if I had poitns). It's the same argument that's being cited for scientific experiments when people don't get the "it's cool and important for its own sake, how can you possibly not get that?" argument.
Some corrections are in order, hope I caught all my mistakes now..
Hidden serivces seem to have SSL-like protection built-in, thanks to the encryption of Tor,
Probably not, that was made up. there is encryption, but I don't see how they could have authentication (unless the certificate was in the *.onion name, but they're not that long)
The best way seems to be to use VMs or clean installations like booting from CD. There is then a separate computer for the Tor client, blocking anything but the Tor HTTP proxy with a firewall on the interface connected to the client.
To clarify, client & gateway be connected directly, no others computers including no internet
The client shouldn;'t have any unique software
..including language & keyboard layout
(don't know [about blocking] audio / microphone).
OF course block mic. Not only can the malware *hear you speaking*, the mic probably also has a unique noise spectrum, and there may even be outside noises like trains. Speakers probably OK, but could relay information via high frequency signals to other compromised local computers
You're right about the first point, it was a hidden service which FBI took control over, sorry I completely forgot and should have checked. Hidden serivces seem to have SSL-like protection built-in, thanks to the encryption of Tor, but when the FBI controls the server that's of course moot. That's also a different threat model than I thought of before, so bad example.
I still believe it's possible to be safe, but may have underestimated the risks before. The best way seems to be to use VMs or clean installations like booting from CD. There is then a separate computer for the Tor client, blocking anything but the Tor HTTP proxy with a firewall on the interface connected to the client. The client shouldn;'t have any unique software or hardware (as malware can enumerate USB, PCI devices, display resolution, etc), so the best is to use a VM. Also the MAC addresses of the gateway and the client must be randomised frequently, and the client must of course not have access to other communication devices like WiFi and bluetooth, and webcams. (don't know audio / microphone). The client would ideally have no persistent storage (one more point in favour of VMs, real hardware has a bunch of firmwares). The link seems interesting, actually talks about Tor, will have a look
Owning exit nodes is not sufficient to reveal the identity of tor users. Owning a large percentage of relay nodes AND exit nodes could compromise the anonymity, as one could just follow the progression of any data throughout the network. If the traffic volume is small enough to be able to statistically separate the streams from various users, it may be sufficient to surveil relay and exit nodes, instead of actually owning the hardware.
There are limitations: the exit node can mess with the data at will, in both directions, and this is how the FBI owned the visitors to a pedo site. They injected some HTML (I'm not positive that it was HTML/JS, but one would assume) to make the browsers of the users connect to FBI servers outside of Tor. It was a bug in firefox that allowed this.
There are two strategies to protect against this, 1) Encrypt everything; only access SSL sites over Tor. This works in theory because the exit node can no longer mess with the data stream. The only way to reliably use this strategy is to *block* non-SSL traffic. There are so many websites with mixed content, which may pull images and ads from non-SSL streams. Also, NSA may be able to break SSL either by a proper MITM attack (completely hypothetical, no evidence exists) or by owning private keys for some CAs.
2) Block any non-tor access from the system used to access Tor. This is possible at the network level with extra hardware, VMs and possibly with SELinux. If the browser *cannot* communicate over the standard internet, only Tor, then one is moderately safe. It's still important to configure the browser to not send identifiable information for fingerprinting and tracking cookies.
By doing 1 and 2 one is quite safe. It may be fine to use a less safe setup for non-secret stuff, like checking facebook, and contributing to flood the tor network with un-interesting traffic. If the "really anonymous" mode required restarting Tor, the NSA would be able to see this from ISP logs, of course.
The summary lists the good things about bitcoins, but leaves out some important ones... - Truly international. As opposed to most other systems, which have some friction when moving money between countries - Free! You only pay for the bandwidth, and the CPU for verifying hashes (not talking about mining) - Universally accessible. I suppose the article touches on this, but it's quite important that it's available to anyone who wants it. Not like credit cards which can shut down someone like wikileaks at will. You don't need a credit history etc to pay on line
For someone who is not an expert in the field, what is the efficiency of the conductor? It seems to refer to the fact that no charge is lost (dissipated) between the ends of the conductor, but it's not clear.
I assume since no one used the word "superconductor" that it has a finite resistance; does anyone know what the resistance is? (would large bundles of these conductors be useful for energy transport?)
I eagerly awate assemblerex's demand for Voltage Pictures to be compensated millions of dollars for the bittorrented distribution of The Hurt Locker. I bring this up as someone who was employed on that film, and note that that money pays my salary on the next film...
Good to point out hypocricy, but BAD to bring up "The Hurt Locker". The company made absolute arses of themselves with their rhetoric against file sharers. Most of Hollywood manages to somewhat maintain their dignity while speaking out against piracy.
As for slashdot being hypocrites (ignoring that the people commenting pro-Morel in this story aren't necessarily the same as those who come out against Hollywood), I think it's mainly a subjective moral judgement. There are many substantive differences between the cases, like the pirates doing individual infringement vs. Getty selling the image, and the predatory practices of Hollywood companies, but in the end it may not be possible to construct an all-encompassing slashdot-approved framework for what is bad infringement and what is bad enforcement. I known it when I see it. Sorry, I don't like these fuzzy standards either, but it's not like it mattters, the law is the law.
Lost of good suggestions here. If you have some time you can harass them by being annoying, doing roleplaying, rickrolling them or playing other sounds, or use a Duke Nukem soundboard like in this dubious classic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE3KdcTgrno
Even if the whole files take up more than the cache, the filters and algorithms running on them may need to access only a part of the image/video (e.g. a access a frame of the video multiple times). The benefit of caching is highly dependent on the algorithms used
As this is not (mainly) about the system RAM, it's about the CPU caches, I wonder if any attempt is being made to correct the errors, and if it's worthwhile. One would just need to reset the node on any sign of an error, so the capactiy penalty would be small compared to ECC. On the other hand, the errors could just as well happen in the actual logical units, and at some point it's impossible or very expensive to protect everything. Because the SRAM takes up a large fraction of the CPU area, it may be useful to add something to protect the caches.
For some workloads you can do consistency checks in software, but for many computations that would require you to run the computations twice -- which is very expensive. Maybe statistical methods can be used to include a term for gross numerical errors -- different from the small floating point errors. It would probably be close to impossible to model the effect of such errors on the results though. Another option is to shield the datacentres from cosmic rays, if those are indeed the culprit.
The automation makes it somewhat dubious. There are technical systems where not saying something at the protocol level means saying something at the human level. I find it hard to come up with examples, but in certain reliable multicast-oriented protocols such as PGM, a NAK is sent for a missing packet, so when a NAK is not sent, the client is saying that all packets were received. (Not quite at the "user" level, but I'm sure there are better examples)
I use the Shelve firefox plugin to save every single website I visit on the desktop. up to 65 GB (deduplicated) now. A distributed system like this makes sense, but i think we should also expect the people publishing information to keep their own copies (wouldn't solve the issue in TFA of course).
Sure, but the basic premise is.... still flawed. *But* if it was a "copyright" curriculum and not an "anti-piracy" curriculum, it could actually be strangely appropriate. Copyright has become quite important in the digital world, and most people are both creators and consumers, and should know their rights. I'd rather the schools used their time on more basic stuff, but it wouldn't be horrible.
Great that there's competition. I'm sure this blows the AMD ones away in Linux, but do they still have the tearing problems for video? Video has looked like crap on both my recent nVidia cards because it's splitting in the middle, though only when using two monitors. The exception is a few video players that use vdpau, but I can't expect all my videos to be playable on those. While I've preferred AMD before, I'm trying to not care about the brand as long as they don't do something hostile to users (Sony), so I'd love to get an nVidia if they got their non-accelerated video playback stuff together.
I have a single screen at 2560x1440 and I can almost play Dota 2 (not a demanding game) at full settings with a HD6770. I get about 35 fps, but horrible jerking / stuttering. There is a large difference in how good I can play with better fps, but I also get less headache. Turning down the settings is a solution, but it makes it slightly more difficult to keep up, and I need all the help I can get. I want to play on linux only, but on Linux I get ~13 fps with the same card. So I need a card that's 4 times as fast as the HD6770, and these new ones seem like they would do it. Currently selling my old computer parts to save up for one of these
The researchers probably broke a law about generating child porn. At least in Australia it's illegal to make cartoon child porn. That just shows how screwed up the laws are though, and I hope they don't get caught. The research is interesting, but only as a preliminary study. If they wanted to gauge the size of the global online pedo population, they would have to make some kind of estimate about what fraction of that population contacted their bot. Now we have a lower limit, but it's only 0.001 % of the world internet users. Also, it's no a huge problem: their bot logged onto chat rooms and got requests. For a real 10 year old in the Philipines, how about ignoring them. It's a spam problem. If local crooks round up 10 year olds and force them to chat, we have a problem, but to crack down on those it seems like one should be posing as a pedo and not as a 10 year old.
Not a good word I agree. Unfortunately it's frequently used in this context. It has a neutral ethical connotation, after all predators only hunt for food (and cats for their own amusement). This pedo thing seems to be quite big, so there should be a better word for it.
Call them scum or perverts. This is what they are.
Not in the news, too imprecise and too emotional. It would be like the papers referring to accused murderers as fucking assholes or accused scammers as lying scumbags
Additionally, the analogy doesn't add anything. We all know how a password works and what happens if you don't have it. All we get from comparing it to a physical key is a legal inaccuracy
While funny, the issue is not with a personal password. These are passwords for infrastructure. It's kind of like working for a trucking company and taking the truck keys with you when you quit, except that it sounds like this was a pretty big ass truck (thinking in $$).
Stop it , PLEASE! This is the "copyright infringement is not stealing" debate over again, except slashdot is on the other side now for some reason. Taking a key to some equipment is theft, taking a password is not, even though the consequences are the same. It's not the same thing legally, and we're talking about a matter of law, not about what happens to the company.
What he did when he reconfigured the systems to only accept his password may have been sabotage or vandalism, but please don't call it theft. The analogy *does* break down. For example, the police can search your house and person and confirm that you don't have the key; they can't search your brain.
(I had even moderated, and undoing it now, just couldn't stand all the theft analogies)
It's almost impossible to find any >1080p monitors with better than 60 Hz. Some overclockable Korean monitors have it, but it's arguable whether the panel can keep up. Many gamers forego higher resolution in order to get higher refresh rates.
This guy may actually have a point (haven't RTFA). If a graphics card can display consistent 60 fps on 2560x1600 or 144 fps on 1920x1080, then there's nothing better to do (pending 4K, which will be reasonably priced soon enough)
Many of these "forks" may do nothing wrong legally (some may infringe trademarks). I wonder what criteria Google will use for blocking potentially legal apps
Slashdot Mirror
In Norway they used the digital switchover as a chance to turn all (3 or 4ish) channels but the state broadcaster into payed channels, and they added a lot of new channels. They turned a somewhat credible free TV system with no setup cost into something useless. Now, either you like TV and have to pay, or most others don't really care and won't even bother to set up the free channel.
Digital is probably good overall, if it can free up some spectrum, but new technology certainly exposes how people can be greedy assholes. At least DVB-T can still be received with a passive receiver, which helps with privacy and stability
This is an interesting point (and new to me, would mod up if I had poitns). It's the same argument that's being cited for scientific experiments when people don't get the "it's cool and important for its own sake, how can you possibly not get that?" argument.
Some corrections are in order, hope I caught all my mistakes now..
Hidden serivces seem to have SSL-like protection built-in, thanks to the encryption of Tor,
Probably not, that was made up. there is encryption, but I don't see how they could have authentication (unless the certificate was in the *.onion name, but they're not that long)
The best way seems to be to use VMs or clean installations like booting from CD. There is then a separate computer for the Tor client, blocking anything but the Tor HTTP proxy with a firewall on the interface connected to the client.
To clarify, client & gateway be connected directly, no others computers including no internet
The client shouldn;'t have any unique software
..including language & keyboard layout
(don't know [about blocking] audio / microphone).
OF course block mic. Not only can the malware *hear you speaking*, the mic probably also has a unique noise spectrum, and there may even be outside noises like trains. Speakers probably OK, but could relay information via high frequency signals to other compromised local computers
You're right about the first point, it was a hidden service which FBI took control over, sorry I completely forgot and should have checked. Hidden serivces seem to have SSL-like protection built-in, thanks to the encryption of Tor, but when the FBI controls the server that's of course moot. That's also a different threat model than I thought of before, so bad example.
I still believe it's possible to be safe, but may have underestimated the risks before. The best way seems to be to use VMs or clean installations like booting from CD. There is then a separate computer for the Tor client, blocking anything but the Tor HTTP proxy with a firewall on the interface connected to the client. The client shouldn;'t have any unique software or hardware (as malware can enumerate USB, PCI devices, display resolution, etc), so the best is to use a VM. Also the MAC addresses of the gateway and the client must be randomised frequently, and the client must of course not have access to other communication devices like WiFi and bluetooth, and webcams. (don't know audio / microphone). The client would ideally have no persistent storage (one more point in favour of VMs, real hardware has a bunch of firmwares). The link seems interesting, actually talks about Tor, will have a look
Owning exit nodes is not sufficient to reveal the identity of tor users. Owning a large percentage of relay nodes AND exit nodes could compromise the anonymity, as one could just follow the progression of any data throughout the network. If the traffic volume is small enough to be able to statistically separate the streams from various users, it may be sufficient to surveil relay and exit nodes, instead of actually owning the hardware.
There are limitations: the exit node can mess with the data at will, in both directions, and this is how the FBI owned the visitors to a pedo site. They injected some HTML (I'm not positive that it was HTML/JS, but one would assume) to make the browsers of the users connect to FBI servers outside of Tor. It was a bug in firefox that allowed this.
There are two strategies to protect against this,
1) Encrypt everything; only access SSL sites over Tor. This works in theory because the exit node can no longer mess with the data stream. The only way to reliably use this strategy is to *block* non-SSL traffic. There are so many websites with mixed content, which may pull images and ads from non-SSL streams. Also, NSA may be able to break SSL either by a proper MITM attack (completely hypothetical, no evidence exists) or by owning private keys for some CAs.
2) Block any non-tor access from the system used to access Tor. This is possible at the network level with extra hardware, VMs and possibly with SELinux. If the browser *cannot* communicate over the standard internet, only Tor, then one is moderately safe. It's still important to configure the browser to not send identifiable information for fingerprinting and tracking cookies.
By doing 1 and 2 one is quite safe. It may be fine to use a less safe setup for non-secret stuff, like checking facebook, and contributing to flood the tor network with un-interesting traffic. If the "really anonymous" mode required restarting Tor, the NSA would be able to see this from ISP logs, of course.
The summary lists the good things about bitcoins, but leaves out some important ones...
- Truly international. As opposed to most other systems, which have some friction when moving money between countries
- Free! You only pay for the bandwidth, and the CPU for verifying hashes (not talking about mining)
- Universally accessible. I suppose the article touches on this, but it's quite important that it's available to anyone who wants it. Not like credit cards which can shut down someone like wikileaks at will. You don't need a credit history etc to pay on line
For someone who is not an expert in the field, what is the efficiency of the conductor? It seems to refer to the fact that no charge is lost (dissipated) between the ends of the conductor, but it's not clear.
I assume since no one used the word "superconductor" that it has a finite resistance; does anyone know what the resistance is? (would large bundles of these conductors be useful for energy transport?)
I eagerly awate assemblerex's demand for Voltage Pictures to be compensated millions of dollars for the bittorrented distribution of The Hurt Locker. I bring this up as someone who was employed on that film, and note that that money pays my salary on the next film...
Good to point out hypocricy, but BAD to bring up "The Hurt Locker". The company made absolute arses of themselves with their rhetoric against file sharers. Most of Hollywood manages to somewhat maintain their dignity while speaking out against piracy.
As for slashdot being hypocrites (ignoring that the people commenting pro-Morel in this story aren't necessarily the same as those who come out against Hollywood), I think it's mainly a subjective moral judgement. There are many substantive differences between the cases, like the pirates doing individual infringement vs. Getty selling the image, and the predatory practices of Hollywood companies, but in the end it may not be possible to construct an all-encompassing slashdot-approved framework for what is bad infringement and what is bad enforcement. I known it when I see it. Sorry, I don't like these fuzzy standards either, but it's not like it mattters, the law is the law.
Lost of good suggestions here. If you have some time you can harass them by being annoying, doing roleplaying, rickrolling them or playing other sounds, or use a Duke Nukem soundboard like in this dubious classic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE3KdcTgrno
Even if the whole files take up more than the cache, the filters and algorithms running on them may need to access only a part of the image/video (e.g. a access a frame of the video multiple times). The benefit of caching is highly dependent on the algorithms used
As this is not (mainly) about the system RAM, it's about the CPU caches, I wonder if any attempt is being made to correct the errors, and if it's worthwhile. One would just need to reset the node on any sign of an error, so the capactiy penalty would be small compared to ECC. On the other hand, the errors could just as well happen in the actual logical units, and at some point it's impossible or very expensive to protect everything. Because the SRAM takes up a large fraction of the CPU area, it may be useful to add something to protect the caches.
For some workloads you can do consistency checks in software, but for many computations that would require you to run the computations twice -- which is very expensive. Maybe statistical methods can be used to include a term for gross numerical errors -- different from the small floating point errors. It would probably be close to impossible to model the effect of such errors on the results though. Another option is to shield the datacentres from cosmic rays, if those are indeed the culprit.
The automation makes it somewhat dubious. There are technical systems where not saying something at the protocol level means saying something at the human level. I find it hard to come up with examples, but in certain reliable multicast-oriented protocols such as PGM, a NAK is sent for a missing packet, so when a NAK is not sent, the client is saying that all packets were received. (Not quite at the "user" level, but I'm sure there are better examples)
I use the Shelve firefox plugin to save every single website I visit on the desktop. up to 65 GB (deduplicated) now. A distributed system like this makes sense, but i think we should also expect the people publishing information to keep their own copies (wouldn't solve the issue in TFA of course).
Of course we all know this will be biased.
Sure, but the basic premise is .... still flawed. *But* if it was a "copyright" curriculum and not an "anti-piracy" curriculum, it could actually be strangely appropriate. Copyright has become quite important in the digital world, and most people are both creators and consumers, and should know their rights. I'd rather the schools used their time on more basic stuff, but it wouldn't be horrible.
Just because a policy has negative effects doesn't mean it's not a net positive.
Anyway, fear is part of human nature. Groups like governments or nations seem to exhibit the same good and bad personality traits as individuals do
Great that there's competition. I'm sure this blows the AMD ones away in Linux, but do they still have the tearing problems for video? Video has looked like crap on both my recent nVidia cards because it's splitting in the middle, though only when using two monitors. The exception is a few video players that use vdpau, but I can't expect all my videos to be playable on those. While I've preferred AMD before, I'm trying to not care about the brand as long as they don't do something hostile to users (Sony), so I'd love to get an nVidia if they got their non-accelerated video playback stuff together.
I have a single screen at 2560x1440 and I can almost play Dota 2 (not a demanding game) at full settings with a HD6770. I get about 35 fps, but horrible jerking / stuttering. There is a large difference in how good I can play with better fps, but I also get less headache. Turning down the settings is a solution, but it makes it slightly more difficult to keep up, and I need all the help I can get. I want to play on linux only, but on Linux I get ~13 fps with the same card. So I need a card that's 4 times as fast as the HD6770, and these new ones seem like they would do it. Currently selling my old computer parts to save up for one of these
The researchers probably broke a law about generating child porn. At least in Australia it's illegal to make cartoon child porn. That just shows how screwed up the laws are though, and I hope they don't get caught. The research is interesting, but only as a preliminary study. If they wanted to gauge the size of the global online pedo population, they would have to make some kind of estimate about what fraction of that population contacted their bot. Now we have a lower limit, but it's only 0.001 % of the world internet users. Also, it's no a huge problem: their bot logged onto chat rooms and got requests. For a real 10 year old in the Philipines, how about ignoring them. It's a spam problem. If local crooks round up 10 year olds and force them to chat, we have a problem, but to crack down on those it seems like one should be posing as a pedo and not as a 10 year old.
Predators?
Not a good word I agree. Unfortunately it's frequently used in this context. It has a neutral ethical connotation, after all predators only hunt for food (and cats for their own amusement). This pedo thing seems to be quite big, so there should be a better word for it.
Call them scum or perverts. This is what they are.
Not in the news, too imprecise and too emotional. It would be like the papers referring to accused murderers as fucking assholes or accused scammers as lying scumbags
Sorry to reply to mysefl, but..
Additionally, the analogy doesn't add anything. We all know how a password works and what happens if you don't have it. All we get from comparing it to a physical key is a legal inaccuracy
While funny, the issue is not with a personal password. These are passwords for infrastructure. It's kind of like working for a trucking company and taking the truck keys with you when you quit, except that it sounds like this was a pretty big ass truck (thinking in $$).
Stop it , PLEASE! This is the "copyright infringement is not stealing" debate over again, except slashdot is on the other side now for some reason. Taking a key to some equipment is theft, taking a password is not, even though the consequences are the same. It's not the same thing legally, and we're talking about a matter of law, not about what happens to the company.
What he did when he reconfigured the systems to only accept his password may have been sabotage or vandalism, but please don't call it theft. The analogy *does* break down. For example, the police can search your house and person and confirm that you don't have the key; they can't search your brain.
(I had even moderated, and undoing it now, just couldn't stand all the theft analogies)
It's almost impossible to find any >1080p monitors with better than 60 Hz. Some overclockable Korean monitors have it, but it's arguable whether the panel can keep up. Many gamers forego higher resolution in order to get higher refresh rates.
This guy may actually have a point (haven't RTFA). If a graphics card can display consistent 60 fps on 2560x1600 or 144 fps on 1920x1080, then there's nothing better to do (pending 4K, which will be reasonably priced soon enough)
WTF, *this* is what the flag in the corner is nagging me about? "Turn on SmartScreen (Important)" yeah wouldn't you love that M$
Many of these "forks" may do nothing wrong legally (some may infringe trademarks). I wonder what criteria Google will use for blocking potentially legal apps