Many people have been talking about MD5 checksums and integrity ratings. Unfortunately the client provides these, so they could easily just supply mp3s with checksums that match popular versions of files.
Not without borrowing ACSI Blue for a few years, they couldn't! MD5 is a one-way function, it was designed to make life very hard for people trying to do just what you are suggesting. Matching arbitrary data to a known MD5 hash would require a brute-force attack. They would have to generate the data, create an MD5, check if it matches the MD5 of britney_spears_latest_crap.mp3, if not, try again. Repeat 2^64 times.
Barring any huge leaps in crypanalysis, by the time they've done a significant number of songs we will either have bankrupted the RIAA or banned all computers for decades!
The problem is that PGP's model is a PITA to use in an electronic setting. In a real-life social setting, I can pick up cues from peers' body language and speech whether or not they trust a certain person, and adjust my perception of his/her trustworthiness accordingly. On the internet, I have to go to each of those peers and explicitly ask them to sign that person's PGP (or GPG:-) key. The PGP model might work in a few years when we have more natural means of communicating over the internet, but it's a royal pain to use over email and instant messenger.
The appeal of a hierarchial trust system is that I only have to grant trust to a few entities (the root CAs), and I still get a reasonable level of certainty that the people running www.foo.com are actually Foomatic Industries, Ltd. and not a bunch of Indonesian script kiddies.
'm really not all that keen on him (I voted for Brown), but the fact remains that George W. Bush is our president. The leftists who try to pretend that he's not (incl. Michael Moore, whom I saw on British television making near-treasonous comments regarding Bush) need to get lives. But then, that applies to all leftists.
Treasonous, my ass. How long did you right-wingers wait after Clinton left office to chisel those "Charlton Heston is MY President" stickers off your trucks?
Remeber kids, when you buy cheap DRM-less Chinese processors, you're funding TERRORISM!
Re:Linux IS hard to use.
on
Ark Linux
·
· Score: 1
When will developers finally realize sharing libraries is really retarded? EVERYTHING should be self standing.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooo!!!!! Lots of linux apps were stand-alone, before gtk and qt became popular. Back then, you might have a black-and-white file manager that looked like part of Mac System 6 and required double-clicking to activate an icon, a text editor with lavender italic text on dark grey 3D GUI elements and icons that respond to single clicks, an image viewer where every control is a hideous shade of blue with bold text, and a web browser that looked like a cross between OpenStep and Windows 3.1 apps. None of them would let you drag and drop icons, or let you paste anything more than a simple text string. This is where the "Linux sucks on the desktop" meme came from. It really did, then. It was anarchy, there was no consistency between apps. There was no way to cut and paste, beyond the X11 selection buffer, and even that didn't work with a lot of apps. Shared GUI libraries make it possible to have a singe point of configuration for look and feel, instead of hundreds of.rc files (with different syntax for every app).
As for Mac software, it all uses a common part of the system (called quartz, I think) for all the GUI functions, so it does use shared libraries, they are just considered part of the OS on a Mac.
Re:counterproductive
on
Ark Linux
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Let me know when setting up a stable, usable* Linux box is as easy as pulling the tab off a can of soda, or twisting off the lid, or squeezing the bottle, etc.
Will do! Now, let me know when you find a can/bottle that can play counter-Strike, fetch my email, format papers for printing, browse slashdot, etc.
Jeebus Cripes I get sick of seeing this in every story that links to a Flash animation.
If you can be bothered to post a rant about evil insecure plugins on slashdot, you've already expended more effort than it takes to install flash player.
(mumbling about old-fart unix geeks, and their inability to grasp the idea of progress as anything other than bloating and feature-creep) Maybe all you flash-haters can go sit in the back of the cave with the lynx users and bitch about what bad web design taste the rest of us have while you all read Slashdot in fluorescent-purple-on-black, 80 column textmode!
If you're really worried about the Flash plugin's security, install it as a user other than your normal account, and when you need it, just pop open an xterm, su to that user, and run mozilla. (Assuming you run *nix. If you run Windows, installing a mozilla plugin should be the least of your security worries.)
1 Unwrap the DRM wrapper. 2 Copy the DRM-free digital media. 3... 4 PROFIT!!! 5. Get arrested for violating DMCA 6. Flip the RIAA, MPAA, and a federal judge "The Bird" 7. Spend 25 to life in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison
Ever cross your mind that (gasp!) it's possible to fix problems and make a better fingerprint scanner?
Even if you can build a perfect scanner, that doesn't fix the fundamental flaw of fingerprint ID. You can't revoke a compromised fingerprint. It seems to me like we need some major innovation in fingers before this will work, not just the scanners!;-)
(Don't even start about PIN numbers. I bet you would have new ATM cards made if yours were stolen, not just hope the theives couldn't guess your PIN. A 4-digit combination may be strong enough for locking my luggage, but it alone isn't strong enough for protecting my life's savings.)
You cannot even use standard PC video cards on a Mac, since the Mac architecture expects extension cards to have OpenFirmware compliant firmware. Hence, nice Mac-specific NVidia AGP cards that wont fit anywhere else. Again, there are ways around that, but reliabiality suffers.
There is a way to flash the Mac-specific firmware into some PC Geforce2/3 cards. Take a look Still, I agree that Mac-compatible hardware is expensive and you don't have a lot of choices.
Assuming that Nvidia writes poor drivers that cause system crashes, what's wrong with making a first pass guess that the source of your problem is the thing that goes wrong most often, i.e. Nvidia drivers? This is "prejudice", you're right. But people use prejudice every day to try to limit the scope of problems.
It's the assuming that bothers me! Why are we assuming that nVidia writes buggy drivers? Because they're closed source?
Trivial indeed! From my quick scan of the article, it looks like they just added a new macro, so all you should have to do is add the line "#define EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL EXPORT_SYMBOL" to some file that gets included into everything (think kernel.h)
If anybody reports and error on a system that has been using nVidia drivers, the kernel developers will tell the person to reproduce it without the nVidia driver or go bother nVidia.
This is just another facet of the kernel developers' jihad against binary modules. Presumption of guilt does not imply bad code, it implies prejudice(*).
(*) Please don't flame me for calling Linus a racist. I use the word prejudice because it literally means "to judge before" which is exactly what they are doing to nVidia and users of nVidia's hardware.
Resolving opennc.unrated.net... failed: Host not found.
I guess you can't get to OpenNIC unless you're using OpenNIC. That's agreat way to make sure your userbase doesn't expand. God knows we don't need people actually *using* alternative DNS systems!
The Secret Service is also responsible for the enforcement of laws relating to counterfeiting of obligations and securities of the United States, investigation of financial crimes including, but not limited to access device fraud, financial institution fraud, identity theft, computer fraud, telecommunications fraud, and computer based attacks on our nation's financial, banking, and telecommunications infrastructure.
Making lots of pirated CDs with CDR drives (and, we presume, computers) sounds suspiciously like a subset of computer fraud to me!
CATO [cato.org] has some of the best independent studies and reviews of all sides of the issue.
oh, PUH-leeze! The Cato institute is about as far right as you can get and still claim to any sort of credibility.
Nobody has "unbiased" facts and figures on crime and gun control. Everyone has an axe to grind, on every major issue. What you have to learn to do is look at everyone's biased figures and interpolate to something near the truth.
``Can it automaitcaly re-modulate the phase buffer to route power to the primary shields'' Nope. The manufacturer refused to release specs for the hardware, so no driver has been written yet. Reverse engineering is in progress, though.
Not so fast! The data stream between phase buffers and any output device (including the primary deflector antenna) must be encrypted as required by the QMCA (Quantum Millennium Copyright Act). Since the act also makes it illegal to decrypt that content, or exposing the encryption algorithms publicly is banned by the same act, any hope of having open-source drivers is pretty well stuffed! Besides, the phase bufferes would never allow output to an untrusted device, like the deflector dish; no part of the shield system has the proper Palladium4 technology to ensure content security.
This is what you get, for allowing unlimited "soft money" donations to Federation Council members! And yes, "Steamboat Willie" is still under copyright, until at least the year 4300.
The LaCie page has a suggested US $ price of $899...
MacMall has it on their website as available *soon* for $999 for the 500 gig one.
Proving once again that you CAN screw Mac users out of an extra $100 just by selling stuff in a Mac-specific store. No wonder similar hardware always costs more for Macs than for wintel. Oh well, I guess you can't expect too much consumer sense from people who still pay 3 grand for a new computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Many people have been talking about MD5 checksums and integrity ratings. Unfortunately the client provides these, so they could easily just supply mp3s with checksums that match popular versions of files.
Not without borrowing ACSI Blue for a few years, they couldn't! MD5 is a one-way function, it was designed to make life very hard for people trying to do just what you are suggesting. Matching arbitrary data to a known MD5 hash would require a brute-force attack. They would have to generate the data, create an MD5, check if it matches the MD5 of britney_spears_latest_crap.mp3, if not, try again. Repeat 2^64 times.
Barring any huge leaps in crypanalysis, by the time they've done a significant number of songs we will either have bankrupted the RIAA or banned all computers for decades!
If all goes as planned all the great OSS software will be written to output this format in no time.
And the bad part?
Seriously, I don't see how this "dark side ploy" can do anything bad to OSS except bloat The Gimp with another 2kB image loader.
The problem is that PGP's model is a PITA to use in an electronic setting. In a real-life social setting, I can pick up cues from peers' body language and speech whether or not they trust a certain person, and adjust my perception of his/her trustworthiness accordingly. On the internet, I have to go to each of those peers and explicitly ask them to sign that person's PGP (or GPG :-) key. The PGP model might work in a few years when we have more natural means of communicating over the internet, but it's a royal pain to use over email and instant messenger.
The appeal of a hierarchial trust system is that I only have to grant trust to a few entities (the root CAs), and I still get a reasonable level of certainty that the people running www.foo.com are actually Foomatic Industries, Ltd. and not a bunch of Indonesian script kiddies.
'm really not all that keen on him (I voted for Brown), but the fact remains that George W. Bush is our president. The leftists who try to pretend that he's not (incl. Michael Moore, whom I saw on British television making near-treasonous comments regarding Bush) need to get lives. But then, that applies to all leftists.
Treasonous, my ass. How long did you right-wingers wait after Clinton left office to chisel those "Charlton Heston is MY President" stickers off your trucks?
Remeber kids, when you buy cheap DRM-less Chinese processors, you're funding TERRORISM!
When will developers finally realize sharing libraries is really retarded? EVERYTHING should be self standing.
.rc files (with different syntax for every app).
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooo!!!!!
Lots of linux apps were stand-alone, before gtk and qt became popular. Back then, you might have a black-and-white file manager that looked like part of Mac System 6 and required double-clicking to activate an icon, a text editor with lavender italic text on dark grey 3D GUI elements and icons that respond to single clicks, an image viewer where every control is a hideous shade of blue with bold text, and a web browser that looked like a cross between OpenStep and Windows 3.1 apps. None of them would let you drag and drop icons, or let you paste anything more than a simple text string. This is where the "Linux sucks on the desktop" meme came from. It really did, then. It was anarchy, there was no consistency between apps. There was no way to cut and paste, beyond the X11 selection buffer, and even that didn't work with a lot of apps. Shared GUI libraries make it possible to have a singe point of configuration for look and feel, instead of hundreds of
As for Mac software, it all uses a common part of the system (called quartz, I think) for all the GUI functions, so it does use shared libraries, they are just considered part of the OS on a Mac.
Let me know when setting up a stable, usable* Linux box is as easy as pulling the tab off a can of soda, or twisting off the lid, or squeezing the bottle, etc.
Will do!
Now, let me know when you find a can/bottle that can play counter-Strike, fetch my email, format papers for printing, browse slashdot, etc.
Jeebus Cripes I get sick of seeing this in every story that links to a Flash animation.
If you can be bothered to post a rant about evil insecure plugins on slashdot, you've already expended more effort than it takes to install flash player.
(mumbling about old-fart unix geeks, and their inability to grasp the idea of progress as anything other than bloating and feature-creep) Maybe all you flash-haters can go sit in the back of the cave with the lynx users and bitch about what bad web design taste the rest of us have while you all read Slashdot in fluorescent-purple-on-black, 80 column textmode!
If you're really worried about the Flash plugin's security, install it as a user other than your normal account, and when you need it, just pop open an xterm, su to that user, and run mozilla. (Assuming you run *nix. If you run Windows, installing a mozilla plugin should be the least of your security worries.)
It's a movie quote. It doesn't have to be factually correct, it just has to be what was in the script.
Watch "Office Space". Become enlightened.
1 Unwrap the DRM wrapper. ...
2 Copy the DRM-free digital media.
3
4 PROFIT!!!
5. Get arrested for violating DMCA
6. Flip the RIAA, MPAA, and a federal judge "The Bird"
7. Spend 25 to life in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison
So you stay here any keep reading slashdot... why?
(same rant, circa 1940)
Ever cross your mind that (gasp!) it's possible to fix problems and make a better fingerprint scanner?
;-)
Even if you can build a perfect scanner, that doesn't fix the fundamental flaw of fingerprint ID. You can't revoke a compromised fingerprint. It seems to me like we need some major innovation in fingers before this will work, not just the scanners!
(Don't even start about PIN numbers. I bet you would have new ATM cards made if yours were stolen, not just hope the theives couldn't guess your PIN. A 4-digit combination may be strong enough for locking my luggage, but it alone isn't strong enough for protecting my life's savings.)
You cannot even use standard PC video cards on a Mac, since the Mac architecture expects extension cards to have OpenFirmware compliant firmware. Hence, nice Mac-specific NVidia AGP cards that wont fit anywhere else. Again, there are ways around that, but reliabiality suffers.
There is a way to flash the Mac-specific firmware into some PC Geforce2/3 cards. Take a look Still, I agree that Mac-compatible hardware is expensive and you don't have a lot of choices.
In other news, a 45 year old italian plumber named mario, sues nintendo, for defamation of character, and slander.
Isn't he still in rehab for that shroom habit of his?
Assuming that Nvidia writes poor drivers that cause system crashes, what's wrong with making a first pass guess that the source of your problem is the thing that goes wrong most often, i.e. Nvidia drivers? This is "prejudice", you're right. But people use prejudice every day to try to limit the scope of problems.
It's the assuming that bothers me! Why are we assuming that nVidia writes buggy drivers? Because they're closed source?
Trivial indeed! From my quick scan of the article, it looks like they just added a new macro, so all you should have to do is add the line "#define EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL EXPORT_SYMBOL" to some file that gets included into everything (think kernel.h)
If anybody reports and error on a system that has been using nVidia drivers, the kernel developers will tell the person to reproduce it without the nVidia driver or go bother nVidia.
This is just another facet of the kernel developers' jihad against binary modules. Presumption of guilt does not imply bad code, it implies prejudice(*).
(*) Please don't flame me for calling Linus a racist. I use the word prejudice because it literally means "to judge before" which is exactly what they are doing to nVidia and users of nVidia's hardware.
I have three 'votes' on what the authorities ultimately can and can't do: HK93, Mauser P.08, and Enfield #1 mk3.
That's nice.
The CIA has unmanned Predator aircraft that carry hellfire missiles. I think you've just been outvoted!
Resolving opennc.unrated.net... failed: Host not found.
I guess you can't get to OpenNIC unless you're using OpenNIC. That's agreat way to make sure your userbase doesn't expand. God knows we don't need people actually *using* alternative DNS systems!
Doh!
There was a </i> tag right after "computer fraud" the first time I previewed that post!
Making lots of pirated CDs with CDR drives (and, we presume, computers) sounds suspiciously like a subset of computer fraud to me!
CATO [cato.org] has some of the best independent studies and reviews of all sides of the issue.
oh, PUH-leeze!
The Cato institute is about as far right as you can get and still claim to any sort of credibility.
Nobody has "unbiased" facts and figures on crime and gun control. Everyone has an axe to grind, on every major issue. What you have to learn to do is look at everyone's biased figures and interpolate to something near the truth.
``Can it automaitcaly re-modulate the phase buffer to route power to the primary shields''
Nope. The manufacturer refused to release specs for the hardware, so no driver has been written yet. Reverse engineering is in progress, though.
Not so fast!
The data stream between phase buffers and any output device (including the primary deflector antenna) must be encrypted as required by the QMCA (Quantum Millennium Copyright Act). Since the act also makes it illegal to decrypt that content, or exposing the encryption algorithms publicly is banned by the same act, any hope of having open-source drivers is pretty well stuffed! Besides, the phase bufferes would never allow output to an untrusted device, like the deflector dish; no part of the shield system has the proper Palladium4 technology to ensure content security.
This is what you get, for allowing unlimited "soft money" donations to Federation Council members! And yes, "Steamboat Willie" is still under copyright, until at least the year 4300.
The LaCie page has a suggested US $ price of $899...
MacMall has it on their website as available
*soon* for $999 for the 500 gig one.
Proving once again that you CAN screw Mac users out of an extra $100 just by selling stuff in a Mac-specific store. No wonder similar hardware always costs more for Macs than for wintel. Oh well, I guess you can't expect too much consumer sense from people who still pay 3 grand for a new computer.