If you embed a signiature of the file into the file, this by definition changes the file's signiature. At best you can append the signiature.
Set the swappable instructions in the program to their bitwise equivalent of 0.
Calculate a signature based on that number.
Swap the instructions to encode that number.
To decode.
Find swappable instructions.
Determine what bit setting they're at.
Set their bit setting to 0.
Recalc signature based on the new bit setting.
Compare to the bit setting you just retrieved.
I would still recommend publishing a separate public key, however, and include an encrypted signature in the program. As you say, it can always be changed and re-encoded.
On the other hand, this might be useful on a server, by encoding a public key and checker on a CD-R and checking all your programs periodically against the CD-R key. You could encode signatures in each program and be able to upgrade programs from a central encoding server without having to write a new cd each time.
If steganography is now in the hands of joe user, how useful is it really? It's not exactly a secret anymore, is it?;P
If I transmit files out to my friends that include encrypted data using steganography, then the extra data should be indistinguishable, effectively hiding within the noise of random crap on the web/usenet/email. Thus, without the key, an intercepted message is difficult to detect, and even if detected, I have sufficient plausible deniability to say "nothing there".
In order to detect an message encrypted and included inside another file, you either need to know its there and be looking for it, compare it to an existing file which should be identical, or statistically detect some aspect of the file. If you know it should be there, you just need to grab any file that looks like the file you're seeking, grab the relevant bits, and attempt decryption. If you have a file that should be identical, (say, an image that looks the same that was posted to usenet a couple days earlier), you can take the bits that are different and try and make some sense of them. If you are just doing statistical analysis, you might be able to find files which have a set of bits whose randomness is just shy of where it should be, and maybe those bits mean something.
In short, unencrypted steganography isn't particularly useful, but encrypted, you can really hide things.
What is so great about getting something done right away?
That you don't have that constant "hey, psst, remember, you need to do x!" reminder in your head, that you can't turn off.
Personally, I usually get that after the time I needed to do x has passed. It isn't consistent, it leads to just as much stress, but I find I've forgotten or not gotten around to doing things for far too long. Well, until recently, when I started meds for that. That's where this would help most, people like me with ADD/ADHD.
When I take Ritalin, I feel, for lack of a better word, zombified.
So try another one, like the only FDA approved treatment for ADHD/ADD in adults: Strattera. I started on a course of treatment for it a few months ago and my concentration is way up without being a zombie. In fact, I'm more alert than ever and can process inputs, like speech, better than I used to be able to. One of my big problems was always that I had to have something written down because then I could look at it again and again, but speech only comes as input once, so I'd have to ask to have things repeated. I knew I'd heard them right the first time, I just couldn't remember what was said, since my mind would randomly wander in the middle of a sentence.
Are you insinuating that the democrats actaully built worthwhile public education??
What worthwhile public education we have exists in spite of both parties. A government that needs to control its people does not desire an educated people. This goes for either party in the US. Republicans do not have a monopoly on bad education decisions.
One new power that the War on Terror is properly justifying is that encuraging somebody else to comitt a crime on your behalf needs to be a crime.
As far as I know, conspiracy to commit murder is not a new crime. The individuals who planned the attacks and are still alive are party to the conspiracy. No new laws needed. Of course, we could just label them "enemy combatants" and lock them away without actually putting them on trial, now. That's what's changed. The government apparently no longer needs to actually prove they committed the crime.
This is the SAME Greg Newby who is the CEO of the original Project Gutenberg. Make of that what you will.
What I make of this is that he's a fool. He's not going to prosecute himself for trademark infringement. The side effect he doesn't realise, though, is that he just caused himself trademark infringement. If someone comes along and creates a website ProjectGutenburgEbook, he won't be able to prosecute them for trademark infringement because there are already companies doing the same thing with the PG name and the same target audience.
Way to go. Why didn't he just add an option to purchase a converted ebook or pdf file from the original PG website as a special subscription to support the project?
This would be capitally stupid. Just like CAN-SPAM, it would legitimize spam! Once the spamming scumbags PAY for it, your ISP would not be allowed to block it!
Yes, it would be legitimized. But if every e-mail to you cost a penny, do you really think a spammer who gets a few thousand dollar return on a 1 million recipient spam message will find it economical to continue? After all, a 1 million recpient message would cost $10,000 to send. That would eat most, if not all, of the profit.
But now we're seeing spammers sending message through backdoored windows boxes. Does that mean that the end users who own windows boxes with backdoors will end up paying for all that spam? Sure, you could argue that only people with poorly configured computers will have the problem. Unfortunately, new viruses come out too quickly for all of them to be caught, and even a well configured and maintained computer stands a decent chance of being backdoored for at least a few hours, during which time a bill in the thousands of dollars could be accumulated.
On the plus side, chances are any implementation of this will involve a tracking number on the payment, so it can be verified. (How do you know it was paid for, just because it said it was?) Pros to this, spammers can't send scams without being caught or shut down. Cons to this, I can't send a truly anonymous message to anyone. Again, circumvented by routing through a backdoored PC.
perhaps this means we'll soon see more glass stuff, I like the feel of glass over plastic and such.
Glass refers to a noncrystalline, random arrangement at the molecular level. Silicon dioxide glass is generally transparent, but most glasses aren't. I've even seen aluminum glass, but it was in a sealed package. We weren't allowed to open it, apparently access to ambient oxygen would have caused it's surface to start reverting to a crystal state. It wasn't transparent, though. Looked like aluminum.
There are two aspects to this case. First, he contacted two companies running Usenet servers via e-mail. AOL didn't respond, and says they didn't get it, thus they didn't remove the files from their servers. That's what the lawsuit is really about. Personally, I think if the case comes to this point, the testimony will bear out exactly what happened. He may have sent to the wrong e-mail, or it got lost among the spam. If you want something done, legally, send a piece of paper, not an e-mail.
The larger issue is that each Usenet group is carried, in its majority (not necessarily whole) by hundreds, possibly thousands of companies across the globe. Tens of thousands of messages pass through thousands of groups daily. Any server carrying a large percentage of groups with a standard policy for deletion should be treated as a common carrier. The case here should revolve around whether notice was served and responded too.
Otherwise, all Usenet would be vulnerable to this kind of attack, and companies might begin to shut down a valuable means for information exchange on the presumption of the guilt of its users. It isn't like this is a single company who can fight using the "substantial noninfringing uses" argument.
Of course, this doesn't exclude the fact that he contacted 2 of the hundreds or thousands of companies with news feeds. What about the rest? Did he not know how the system worked? He should be taking out potential losses on the hide of the person who posted the material.
It was also funny reading some of the things students posted on whototake.com about other teachers: DR SMITH SUCKS BIGTIME!! SHE THE FUCKIN WORST ENGLISH TEECHUR IN THE WORLD! WHAT A BITCH!!!! I TOOK ENGLISH 1 FROM HER. AND I HAD TO DROP! CUZ, SHE THINK WE GOT NOTHING TO DO BUT READ BORRING BOOKS. N RIGHT PAPERS N SHIT.
Faced with an opportunity to delete libelous comments, I think this one would definitely have to be left up. I think whoever posted that comment should definitely look into finishing an English class.
He said touch-screen machines could be disabled simply by repeatedly jamming a voter card into a terminal or lifting it up and pulling out wires. (from
Yahoo story)
Pulling out wires? Just what wires come out of the bottom of these computers and how hard would it be to insert a dongle between the computer and server? It sounds fairly trivial to hack the hardware stream, then, and cause every, say, second vote to be automatically cast in a particular way.
Which is, of course, why a user verifiable paper trail is required.
"A single one-inch thick windowpane of silica aerogel is equivalent to the insulation provided by 20 windowpanes of glass (R-20 insulation factor)."
This can't be right...
R-values are done by the thickness of the material, sure, but if you're going to compare apples to apples, do so...
The R-value of a single pane of 1/8" glass is.89 (R-value was originally defined as the insulating value of a single pane of glass, but glass is less insulating now than it was then.) The R-value of 1 inch of glass would be 7.12. Alternatively, the R-value of a 1/8" pane of aerogel, by their description, would only be 2.5.
I'm not sure where they got this number, but given other reports I'd have to say this is either an error or a misquote.
Or perhaps to insulate between windowpanes? Since it's more or less transparent, it'll let the light in, but not heat out...
That application is being researched, but the particulate matter that makes up aerogel is still not up to the task. The rate of occurence of larger bubbles in the aerogel still gives even the best stuff a blue cast. Research into making the bubbles consistently small, and thus making it transparent, is ongoing. One hopeful manufacturing method does the work in space, where tests have yielded a consistent, small bubble.
I mean it's all very well being able to cram yourself into a tight parking space, but getting out might just be a bit trickier.
13 inches? You call that a tight parking space? In my volvo I've been boxed in so close I had to take the trailer hitch off. (Lucky I had it on too, or it would've been 5 inches closer that guy would've gotten.) I had to get out of a 12 inch space, and didn't touch either bumper.
Alas, poor volvo... Gone now to a major accident... damn drunks.
Oops, the first sentence was copied from a previous poster, but I did the blockquote tag wrong and didn't notice it on preview. Sorry.
Also, when purchasing a compact flourescent bulb, be sure it is electronically ballasted. It'll last longer, turn on quicker, provide no noticable flicker, and work in colder temperatures.
But an electronic ballasted compact flourescent that screws into a standard lamp base flickers at 25-40kHz. The compact flourescent technology causes no visible flicker, is smaller than the old magnetic ballast (which operated at the frequency of house wiring, 60Hz), and improved efficiency overall, losing less energy to heat in the ballast.
This could be FUD on the part of GM. I remember a few years ago, Mazda Canada tried to claim that your warrently would be void if your car was serviced by anyone other than a Mazda dealer. Needless to say, they lost the court challenge.
This isn't service, this is a modification to the vehicle. Given the tie-ins the vehicles computer systems have to each other, I'd expect the manufacturer could successfully argue to a judge that hacking into one of the systems is sufficently capable of causing harm to the rest of the vehicles systems that they're justified in voiding the warrantee.
Even being a computer guy, and confident that if I wanted to I could probably execute the instructions without harm to the vehicle, I'd tend to agree. The vehicle might suffer no harm, but now the authorized service centers don't know what's going on inside, so they can't guarantee everything will work as designed.
The problem isn't really distillable into layman's terms. If you aren't a mathematician you probably won't understand it. I've taken enough calculus to know I have no idea what the problem wants.:)
You can find a technical description Here, however.
But is there one good thing you can say about the Bush administration
The reduction of income taxes?
At the obvious beginning of a recession and in such a way as to not bring any impact to the economy. I'll quite confidently say that as soon as I saw bush was running I expected him to win and his win to be followed by a nasty downturn in the economy. To my great dismay, I was right. Now that the economy's doing so bad all estimates show huge deficits in the federal budget that wouldn't have been there if he hadn't messed with taxes to begin with. I would rather he'd have looked to the real problems in the economy than offering his dad's No New Taxes panacea.
The reduction of the number of living terrorist?
Take the number before 9/11/2001, subtract the number that he's caused to be killed, and add the number that he's caused to be inspired to revenge, and I don't believe there's any evidence to show the new number is less than the old one. In fact, I expect it is probably quite a bit higher.
The reduction of tyrants in power?
I haven't heard about Afghanistan lately, so while we removed one set I have no reason to believe that another set hasn't replaced the first. As for Iraq, I reserve judgement until I see what the old tyrants are replaced with.
That this administration had the balls to do what they saw as right regardless of world opinion?
And thus damage relations with europe, russia, and create a new crop of terrorists in the mideast?
Not unless you do what liberals do and stretch the definition of "terrorism" so much that painting the United States as being as bad as Al Quaeda is a matter of fancy footwork.
It doesn't take a liberal to redefine "terrorism" in their own interests. From an article at ABC News:
"Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases," said Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. "They say they want the Patriot Act to fight terrorism, then, within six months, they are teaching their people how to use it on ordinary citizens."
And
A North Carolina county prosecutor charged a man accused of running a methamphetamine lab with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture of chemical weapons. If convicted, Martin Dwayne Miller could get 12 years to life in prison for a crime that usually brings about six months.
As you can see from these tidbits and the overall article, any crime which can find the slightest foothold for prosecution within the new anti-terrorism laws is being treated as a terrorism case.
Slashdot Mirror
To decode.
I would still recommend publishing a separate public key, however, and include an encrypted signature in the program. As you say, it can always be changed and re-encoded.
On the other hand, this might be useful on a server, by encoding a public key and checker on a CD-R and checking all your programs periodically against the CD-R key. You could encode signatures in each program and be able to upgrade programs from a central encoding server without having to write a new cd each time.
If I transmit files out to my friends that include encrypted data using steganography, then the extra data should be indistinguishable, effectively hiding within the noise of random crap on the web/usenet/email. Thus, without the key, an intercepted message is difficult to detect, and even if detected, I have sufficient plausible deniability to say "nothing there".
In order to detect an message encrypted and included inside another file, you either need to know its there and be looking for it, compare it to an existing file which should be identical, or statistically detect some aspect of the file. If you know it should be there, you just need to grab any file that looks like the file you're seeking, grab the relevant bits, and attempt decryption. If you have a file that should be identical, (say, an image that looks the same that was posted to usenet a couple days earlier), you can take the bits that are different and try and make some sense of them. If you are just doing statistical analysis, you might be able to find files which have a set of bits whose randomness is just shy of where it should be, and maybe those bits mean something.
In short, unencrypted steganography isn't particularly useful, but encrypted, you can really hide things.
Personally, I usually get that after the time I needed to do x has passed. It isn't consistent, it leads to just as much stress, but I find I've forgotten or not gotten around to doing things for far too long. Well, until recently, when I started meds for that. That's where this would help most, people like me with ADD/ADHD.
What worthwhile public education we have exists in spite of both parties. A government that needs to control its people does not desire an educated people. This goes for either party in the US. Republicans do not have a monopoly on bad education decisions.
As far as I know, conspiracy to commit murder is not a new crime. The individuals who planned the attacks and are still alive are party to the conspiracy. No new laws needed. Of course, we could just label them "enemy combatants" and lock them away without actually putting them on trial, now. That's what's changed. The government apparently no longer needs to actually prove they committed the crime.
Oops, didn't see that typo... "he just caused himself trademark infringement" should read "he just caused himself trademark dilution".
What I make of this is that he's a fool. He's not going to prosecute himself for trademark infringement. The side effect he doesn't realise, though, is that he just caused himself trademark infringement. If someone comes along and creates a website ProjectGutenburgEbook, he won't be able to prosecute them for trademark infringement because there are already companies doing the same thing with the PG name and the same target audience.
Way to go. Why didn't he just add an option to purchase a converted ebook or pdf file from the original PG website as a special subscription to support the project?
I want the Castle Expansion Pack with that! I've always wanted towers, a dungeon, and a moat.
By the time this works, maybe I can have a Dragon that looks like a real one, too.
Yes, it would be legitimized. But if every e-mail to you cost a penny, do you really think a spammer who gets a few thousand dollar return on a 1 million recipient spam message will find it economical to continue? After all, a 1 million recpient message would cost $10,000 to send. That would eat most, if not all, of the profit.
But now we're seeing spammers sending message through backdoored windows boxes. Does that mean that the end users who own windows boxes with backdoors will end up paying for all that spam? Sure, you could argue that only people with poorly configured computers will have the problem. Unfortunately, new viruses come out too quickly for all of them to be caught, and even a well configured and maintained computer stands a decent chance of being backdoored for at least a few hours, during which time a bill in the thousands of dollars could be accumulated.
On the plus side, chances are any implementation of this will involve a tracking number on the payment, so it can be verified. (How do you know it was paid for, just because it said it was?) Pros to this, spammers can't send scams without being caught or shut down. Cons to this, I can't send a truly anonymous message to anyone. Again, circumvented by routing through a backdoored PC.
Glass refers to a noncrystalline, random arrangement at the molecular level. Silicon dioxide glass is generally transparent, but most glasses aren't. I've even seen aluminum glass, but it was in a sealed package. We weren't allowed to open it, apparently access to ambient oxygen would have caused it's surface to start reverting to a crystal state. It wasn't transparent, though. Looked like aluminum.
The larger issue is that each Usenet group is carried, in its majority (not necessarily whole) by hundreds, possibly thousands of companies across the globe. Tens of thousands of messages pass through thousands of groups daily. Any server carrying a large percentage of groups with a standard policy for deletion should be treated as a common carrier. The case here should revolve around whether notice was served and responded too.
Otherwise, all Usenet would be vulnerable to this kind of attack, and companies might begin to shut down a valuable means for information exchange on the presumption of the guilt of its users. It isn't like this is a single company who can fight using the "substantial noninfringing uses" argument.
Of course, this doesn't exclude the fact that he contacted 2 of the hundreds or thousands of companies with news feeds. What about the rest? Did he not know how the system worked? He should be taking out potential losses on the hide of the person who posted the material.
Faced with an opportunity to delete libelous comments, I think this one would definitely have to be left up. I think whoever posted that comment should definitely look into finishing an English class.
Pulling out wires? Just what wires come out of the bottom of these computers and how hard would it be to insert a dongle between the computer and server? It sounds fairly trivial to hack the hardware stream, then, and cause every, say, second vote to be automatically cast in a particular way.
Which is, of course, why a user verifiable paper trail is required.
That just means he needs to move to Britain, so he can buy an upgrade. (The Pro version?)
This can't be right...
R-values are done by the thickness of the material, sure, but if you're going to compare apples to apples, do so...
The R-value of a single pane of 1/8" glass is .89 (R-value was originally defined as the insulating value of a single pane of glass, but glass is less insulating now than it was then.) The R-value of 1 inch of glass would be 7.12. Alternatively, the R-value of a 1/8" pane of aerogel, by their description, would only be 2.5.
I'm not sure where they got this number, but given other reports I'd have to say this is either an error or a misquote.
That application is being researched, but the particulate matter that makes up aerogel is still not up to the task. The rate of occurence of larger bubbles in the aerogel still gives even the best stuff a blue cast. Research into making the bubbles consistently small, and thus making it transparent, is ongoing. One hopeful manufacturing method does the work in space, where tests have yielded a consistent, small bubble.
13 inches? You call that a tight parking space? In my volvo I've been boxed in so close I had to take the trailer hitch off. (Lucky I had it on too, or it would've been 5 inches closer that guy would've gotten.) I had to get out of a 12 inch space, and didn't touch either bumper.
Alas, poor volvo... Gone now to a major accident... damn drunks.
Oops, the first sentence was copied from a previous poster, but I did the blockquote tag wrong and didn't notice it on preview. Sorry.
Also, when purchasing a compact flourescent bulb, be sure it is electronically ballasted. It'll last longer, turn on quicker, provide no noticable flicker, and work in colder temperatures.
But an electronic ballasted compact flourescent that screws into a standard lamp base flickers at 25-40kHz. The compact flourescent technology causes no visible flicker, is smaller than the old magnetic ballast (which operated at the frequency of house wiring, 60Hz), and improved efficiency overall, losing less energy to heat in the ballast.
One reference
Another reference.
This isn't service, this is a modification to the vehicle. Given the tie-ins the vehicles computer systems have to each other, I'd expect the manufacturer could successfully argue to a judge that hacking into one of the systems is sufficently capable of causing harm to the rest of the vehicles systems that they're justified in voiding the warrantee.
Even being a computer guy, and confident that if I wanted to I could probably execute the instructions without harm to the vehicle, I'd tend to agree. The vehicle might suffer no harm, but now the authorized service centers don't know what's going on inside, so they can't guarantee everything will work as designed.
You can find a technical description Here, however.
At the obvious beginning of a recession and in such a way as to not bring any impact to the economy. I'll quite confidently say that as soon as I saw bush was running I expected him to win and his win to be followed by a nasty downturn in the economy. To my great dismay, I was right. Now that the economy's doing so bad all estimates show huge deficits in the federal budget that wouldn't have been there if he hadn't messed with taxes to begin with. I would rather he'd have looked to the real problems in the economy than offering his dad's No New Taxes panacea.
Take the number before 9/11/2001, subtract the number that he's caused to be killed, and add the number that he's caused to be inspired to revenge, and I don't believe there's any evidence to show the new number is less than the old one. In fact, I expect it is probably quite a bit higher. I haven't heard about Afghanistan lately, so while we removed one set I have no reason to believe that another set hasn't replaced the first. As for Iraq, I reserve judgement until I see what the old tyrants are replaced with. And thus damage relations with europe, russia, and create a new crop of terrorists in the mideast? Still waiting.It doesn't take a liberal to redefine "terrorism" in their own interests. From an article at ABC News:
And
As you can see from these tidbits and the overall article, any crime which can find the slightest foothold for prosecution within the new anti-terrorism laws is being treated as a terrorism case.