> Having pointed this out, I do have to add: this is a retarded idea.
Not only is it stupid, I imagine that it would be very hard to implement.
Who wants to volounteer to code a "use-once rootkit" that provides a "special encrypting network stack" that guarentees secure communication on a machine that you believe is compromised with x brand of malware and y number of existing rootkits? How are you going to make it so secure than malware writers can't subvert it for their own purposes?
The idea presented is bafflingly stupid, but the idea behind it is not: different security models for users based on behaviour patterns.
If someone uses a six character dictionary-word password (you could check once before hashing and store the result), or fails to uncheck the "receive offers from our partners" checkbox when entering their e-mail address, then perhaps they're not terribly savvy computer users and it would be an idea to throw a few more CAPTCHAS at them each time they log in, or more closely monitor their account for suspicious activity.
>Recently there has been a sharp increase in the amount of abusive language on the New Scientist website.
Oh, how very fucking _interesting_! Sounds just like the kind of impartial, thoughtful introduction that heralds a fucking well-balanced scientific curio doesn't it? It's on an intellectual par with Schrödinger postulating about quantum mechanics because his damned cat wouldn't stop shitting on the carpet. Bra-fucking-vo.
>My pet theory about why people behave so rudely is that online commenting is treated, by most people, like a pub conversation
Oh yeah? Well _my_ pet theory is that you're fucking retarded. What's your local pub? The "make up spurious claims & expect people to be interested in them"? >After being described a few weeks ago as "a self-lobotomised liberal who can't face the facts", I decided to look into the psychology of online behaviour a bit further.
You don't need a shitting psychology decree to know that's called fucking rampart narcissism, you self-interested jackass.
>Psychologically, we are "distant" from the person we're talking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we're more prone to aggressive behaviour, he says.
Well that's fucking retarded, all I can think about when reading your mastabatory drivel is how awesome I am in comparison.
>Another factor influencing online communication, according to Epley, is simply the risk of miscommunication involved with text-based messages, which are inherently more ambiguous.
Nothing ambiguous about how much of a shit-eating moron you are, you must be a master of textual precision.
>Another obvious factor is that, if you insult someone online, it's unlikely you'll face any physical retaliation for it.
Look at brave Mr. New-Scientist-Blogger! People won't insult him in _real_ _life_ because if they do, he fucks their shit up for them! If he invents a way to stab people in the face over the internet, I'm in real fucking trouble.
>I'm not sure what we can do to minimise miscommunication and abuse online. But being aware that we're not as good at communication online as we'd like to think seems like a good start. I know I often have to restrain myself from joining in.
Didn't fucking restrain yourself hard enough did you? Didn't fucking restrain yourself hard enough, or I wouldn't be reading this peice of vomit you call an article.
>I've cut back to only 4 letters a day now. I'm almost cured!
Then I appreciate your effort in writing this post, seeing as it must have taken you twelve days.
>How does DjVu compare to CDisplay's ZIP/RAR archives?
I've never used DjVu, nor seen archived comics using that format.
However, based on the wiki, it does seem to be superior, if indeed it can compress a color comic page to "40-70kB". As the wiki states, around 500kB is standard for comic rips (unless you're one of the super-anal collecters that do lossless PNG rips of their stuff, as well as buying an extra copy to keep in mylar on acid-free paper), so the format looks interesting.
However, one of the primary advantages of CBR and CBZ is their simplicity, ubiquity and versatility - there are thousands of softwares that can handle RAR and ZIP archives and millions that can manipulate JPEGs.
PDF is a horrible format for comics, unless you intend to print them, and you should only think about doing that if you access to a very high quality printer designed specifically for this kind of work.
Scene rips of comics use the excellent Comic Book Archive file format, which is an archive (usually ZIP or RAR) with an image file (usually JPEG) for each page of the comic. The archive is typically renamed with a different extension to identify that it is meant to be viewed sequentially (.cbr for RAR archives and.cbz for ZIP archives.) Suitable viewing software (e.g. CDisplay) sequentially decompresses each page and displays it. It's a much simpler, more elegant way of viewing comics than PDFs and with much less overhead.
Viewing comics on a laptop can be great, especially if the laptop is widescreen - you simply rotate the desktop 90 degrees and you've got the perfect aspect ratio for comic pages. I regularly read comics on my laptop fullscreen at 800 (width) x 1280 (height).
I imagine it would be great on a machine like the XO because the screen folds right over, giving you a very convenient read.
> A week ago, seven telescopes around the world were linked together to watch a distant galaxy called 3C273 in real time and create a
> single world telescope.
Not to be overly pedantic, but the data were streamed from all over the world to a location in Europe, then processed, and then streamed to China for viewing.
Even though they weren't going over the public net, that's still almost certainly >1000ms latency. Harldy "real time".
Although, I suppose that's acceptable on top of the two and a half years it took for the photons to get to us.
> DSL is also individually wired to each customer, unlike cable, as cable's bandwidth is shared throughout entire neighborhoods. So, > the only one you hurt by maxing out the bandwidth of DSL is yourself, and with a packet shaper, this becomes less of a problem.
You completely misunderstand how DSL works. DSL is a contended internet service, you only have your own wire to the local telephone exchange (the "last mile"). From there, it's all travelling over the same pipe, either over copper or fiber. Few of the pipes have enough bandwidth to allow hundreds of people to saturate DSL connections simultaneously.
Well, because it's the cleanest way of distributing a file to a number of people at once. It's efficient, and assuming no-one twigs, there aren't any copies left anywhere.
If you post even an encrypted RAR to a rapishare or a YouSendIt or whatever, then most likely there's a bit-for-bit copy of your stash on their servers for authorities to examine if they twig to what you're up to.
Fair enough, you could host the tracker yourself, but its not in the realms of the inconceivable for someone to do what I outlined.
> TPB stated that they do not hold such links, and if any are reported they are immediately investigated and removed.
Those statements are not logically cohesive. If you run a tracker indexing hundreds of thousands of torrents, you have no idea whether or not you index any child porn torrents. You might know that you delete any that are reported as child porn, but if Bob puts up a torrent of an encrypted RAR called "my holiday snaps", or even a something in the clear that is named innocuously enough, it's probably not going to be downloaded by anyone except the people Bob invites to, so the chances of it being reported if it is nefarious are fairly slim. After all, TPB can't download things to check can they? That would copyright infringment ^_^
I have nothing against what TPB does, but I do think such blanket denials are silly.
> Last month alone, the Red Cross refunded 700 fraudulent credit-card transactions, Martin said.
Surely, a fraudulent credit-card transaction is caused (in theory) by the credit-card company fucking up? I would have thought that the credit company would absorb the loss instead of being able to make the receiving party refund the money.
If I buy a $6000 HDTV using a stolen credit card, and I fake the signature on the receipt very convincingly (so the TV shop follows due diligence), when it emerges that the card was stolen is the TV shop out 6k? How can the CC company force the shop to refund the money? Isn't it the CC company's fault for having poor security measures?
I believe the OP was suggesting that there should be some pubs where it's allowed.
If local councils were allowed to license, say, 5% of pubs in their area to allow smoking, on condition of having good air conditioning, not allowing children in even with families, and an extra license fee, for example, it's highly unlikely that anyone would go to that pub, or indeed work in that pub, who didn't want to be in a smoky environment.
I think it would be a pretty fair solution. Most pubs remain smoke-free, but smokers willing to sit in a filthy haze of carcinogens are able to, surrounded by other smokers willing to sit in a filthy haze of carcinogens.
It would also allow places like cigar clubs to still exist.
> work to extend the copyright term to 70 years and crack down on piracy
Right... because the first thing to do in the fight against piracy is to broaden the definition of piracy to include twenty years worth of extra music. In other news, Cameron announced that as the first step in a crackdown on murder, the definition of "murder" will been expanded to include drunk-driving. He said that government claims that this would increase reported cases of murder by 12000% as "exagerated".
> He argued that extending the term would give an "incentive to the music industry to digitise both older and niche repertoire which
> more people can enjoy at no extra cost".
Right... so, extending the copyright term to include works which are currently in the public domain, and thus free and legal to use for any purpose will help people enjoy these works at "no extra cost"? In other news, as part of a campaign to try and get kids to exercise more, Cameron announced plans to put all public playparks into the hands of private companies that will charge for their use.
> Mr Cameron said: "Most people think these are all multimillionaires living in some penthouse flat. The reality is that many of > these are low-earning session musicians who will be losing a vital pension."...
>...Sir Cliff Richard, The Who and Sir Paul McCartney backed the campaign to extend the 50-year term
David Cameron almost had me starting to consider the posibility that he had actually made some headway into changing the political direction of the Tories, but no: nothing has changed. Let's pay off big businesses in exchange for more social/cultural control and censorship.
(7)
In this section "image" means--
(a)
a moving or still image (produced by any means); or
25
(b)
data (stored by any means) which is capable of conversion into an
image within paragraph (a).
Maybe this is just one of those WTFs brough about because IANAL, but seriously - any data which is capable of conversion into an extreme image?
Who wants to be the first to convert the text of the bill into an ASCII goatse?
> There's always the off-chance of some random stranger getting in by sheer luck.
Especially if the stranger is using proxied bots to guess ten times a second.
Assuming a generously extravagant implementation, you might have to correctly choose from 100 handwriting samples to log in. An attacker appears to be you on average 1 time in 100.
Assuming a very weak password system, six characters, all lower case, no numbers or special characters, then your password is 1 among 26^6 possible passwords. An attacker appears to be you on average 1 time in 308915776.
I think I'll stick to passwords.
Why can't the game devs shift focus away from DRM & etc. and try building a solid product that doesn't NEED a third party anti-cheat software running? It's called internal testing, FFS. You made the software yet you can't find the holes, meanwhile some smartass 15 year old Russian just reads your code and goes "Oh! Look at what we have here!"
Because there are some types of cheating that it is just not possible to identify or prevent through a well-designed client. If the game is one that computers can play better than humans (or can play some aspect of better than humans), then software can be written that simulates human user input but is actually computationally controlled. There isn't really a way to prevent this completely, because at some point your sufficiently advanced aimbot is indistinguishable from an excellent human player.
Think of it this way: you can't alter the rules of chess played through the mail in such a way as to stop me using a computer to "cheat". The problem isn't the rules of correspondence chess, the problem is that computers are better than many humans at chess.
It "just works" with *our* hardware and *our* software.
Come on, who'd buy a first-gen iPod without checking to see if it would work with their XP box? Or a Newton without checking to see if it could data transfer with Windows 3.1?
> Hard Disks are old news...no one is going to be using them in 5 years, let alone 10...flash is so the way forward
Probably not in the notebook/desktop consumer market, but I can imagine enterprise/research uses for magnetic HDDs where read/write times are less important and $/GB much more so.
That said, if I'm right, laser-based magnetic storage being faster than current tech won't really matter for that kind of scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
> Members of the Teamfurry community found TOR exit-nodes which only forward unencrypted versions of certain protocols.
Are they worried that the Chinese will intercept pictures of them dressed like this?
> Having pointed this out, I do have to add: this is a retarded idea.
Not only is it stupid, I imagine that it would be very hard to implement.
Who wants to volounteer to code a "use-once rootkit" that provides a "special encrypting network stack" that guarentees secure communication on a machine that you believe is compromised with x brand of malware and y number of existing rootkits? How are you going to make it so secure than malware writers can't subvert it for their own purposes?
The idea presented is bafflingly stupid, but the idea behind it is not: different security models for users based on behaviour patterns.
If someone uses a six character dictionary-word password (you could check once before hashing and store the result), or fails to uncheck the "receive offers from our partners" checkbox when entering their e-mail address, then perhaps they're not terribly savvy computer users and it would be an idea to throw a few more CAPTCHAS at them each time they log in, or more closely monitor their account for suspicious activity.
>Recently there has been a sharp increase in the amount of abusive language on the New Scientist website.
Oh, how very fucking _interesting_! Sounds just like the kind of impartial, thoughtful introduction that heralds a fucking well-balanced scientific curio doesn't it? It's on an intellectual par with Schrödinger postulating about quantum mechanics because his damned cat wouldn't stop shitting on the carpet. Bra-fucking-vo.
>My pet theory about why people behave so rudely is that online commenting is treated, by most people, like a pub conversation
Oh yeah? Well _my_ pet theory is that you're fucking retarded. What's your local pub? The "make up spurious claims & expect people to be interested in them"?
>After being described a few weeks ago as "a self-lobotomised liberal who can't face the facts", I decided to look into the psychology of online behaviour a bit further.
You don't need a shitting psychology decree to know that's called fucking rampart narcissism, you self-interested jackass.
>Psychologically, we are "distant" from the person we're talking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we're more prone to aggressive behaviour, he says.
Well that's fucking retarded, all I can think about when reading your mastabatory drivel is how awesome I am in comparison.
>Another factor influencing online communication, according to Epley, is simply the risk of miscommunication involved with text-based messages, which are inherently more ambiguous.
Nothing ambiguous about how much of a shit-eating moron you are, you must be a master of textual precision.
>Another obvious factor is that, if you insult someone online, it's unlikely you'll face any physical retaliation for it.
Look at brave Mr. New-Scientist-Blogger! People won't insult him in _real_ _life_ because if they do, he fucks their shit up for them! If he invents a way to stab people in the face over the internet, I'm in real fucking trouble.
>I'm not sure what we can do to minimise miscommunication and abuse online. But being aware that we're not as good at communication online as we'd like to think seems like a good start. I know I often have to restrain myself from joining in.
Didn't fucking restrain yourself hard enough did you? Didn't fucking restrain yourself hard enough, or I wouldn't be reading this peice of vomit you call an article.
>I've cut back to only 4 letters a day now. I'm almost cured! Then I appreciate your effort in writing this post, seeing as it must have taken you twelve days.
>How does DjVu compare to CDisplay's ZIP/RAR archives?
I've never used DjVu, nor seen archived comics using that format.
However, based on the wiki, it does seem to be superior, if indeed it can compress a color comic page to "40-70kB". As the wiki states, around 500kB is standard for comic rips (unless you're one of the super-anal collecters that do lossless PNG rips of their stuff, as well as buying an extra copy to keep in mylar on acid-free paper), so the format looks interesting.
However, one of the primary advantages of CBR and CBZ is their simplicity, ubiquity and versatility - there are thousands of softwares that can handle RAR and ZIP archives and millions that can manipulate JPEGs.
>Plus, once you have 500 comics in PDF format
.cbz for ZIP archives.) Suitable viewing software (e.g. CDisplay) sequentially decompresses each page and displays it. It's a much simpler, more elegant way of viewing comics than PDFs and with much less overhead.
Ahhhhh!
PDF is a horrible format for comics, unless you intend to print them, and you should only think about doing that if you access to a very high quality printer designed specifically for this kind of work.
Scene rips of comics use the excellent Comic Book Archive file format, which is an archive (usually ZIP or RAR) with an image file (usually JPEG) for each page of the comic. The archive is typically renamed with a different extension to identify that it is meant to be viewed sequentially (.cbr for RAR archives and
Viewing comics on a laptop can be great, especially if the laptop is widescreen - you simply rotate the desktop 90 degrees and you've got the perfect aspect ratio for comic pages. I regularly read comics on my laptop fullscreen at 800 (width) x 1280 (height).
I imagine it would be great on a machine like the XO because the screen folds right over, giving you a very convenient read.
> If it's built-in, it may be using a chunk of normal RAM as video RAM, in which case it would be faster to use a normal RAM virtual disc.
Perhaps, but regardless, using RAM as swap seems a little redundant.
> and they have no aspirations to be master chefs. That's just as well, Halo 3 won't run on linu... oh.
ooh, there's the problem - it's 2.44 Gly, not 2.44 ly
damn my unscientific mind
Hrm.
I just wiki'd 3C 273 and took the distance from that, but I see now that's a quasar, not a galaxy.
Perhaps TFA made a mistake? It seems unlikely that there would be both a galaxy and a quasar with that name.
> A week ago, seven telescopes around the world were linked together to watch a distant galaxy called 3C273 in real time and create a
> single world telescope.
Not to be overly pedantic, but the data were streamed from all over the world to a location in Europe, then processed, and then streamed to China for viewing.
Even though they weren't going over the public net, that's still almost certainly >1000ms latency. Harldy "real time".
Although, I suppose that's acceptable on top of the two and a half years it took for the photons to get to us.
> DSL is also individually wired to each customer, unlike cable, as cable's bandwidth is shared throughout entire neighborhoods. So,
> the only one you hurt by maxing out the bandwidth of DSL is yourself, and with a packet shaper, this becomes less of a problem.
You completely misunderstand how DSL works. DSL is a contended internet service, you only have your own wire to the local telephone exchange (the "last mile"). From there, it's all travelling over the same pipe, either over copper or fiber. Few of the pipes have enough bandwidth to allow hundreds of people to saturate DSL connections simultaneously.
I discovered a weird IE bug... there are six words that, when included on a webpage, stop IE ever being used on that computer again:
get
firefox
from
mozilla
dot
com
Well, because it's the cleanest way of distributing a file to a number of people at once. It's efficient, and assuming no-one twigs, there aren't any copies left anywhere.
If you post even an encrypted RAR to a rapishare or a YouSendIt or whatever, then most likely there's a bit-for-bit copy of your stash on their servers for authorities to examine if they twig to what you're up to.
Fair enough, you could host the tracker yourself, but its not in the realms of the inconceivable for someone to do what I outlined.
> TPB stated that they do not hold such links, and if any are reported they are immediately investigated and removed.
Those statements are not logically cohesive. If you run a tracker indexing hundreds of thousands of torrents, you have no idea whether or not you index any child porn torrents. You might know that you delete any that are reported as child porn, but if Bob puts up a torrent of an encrypted RAR called "my holiday snaps", or even a something in the clear that is named innocuously enough, it's probably not going to be downloaded by anyone except the people Bob invites to, so the chances of it being reported if it is nefarious are fairly slim. After all, TPB can't download things to check can they? That would copyright infringment ^_^
I have nothing against what TPB does, but I do think such blanket denials are silly.
So, you want to ask someone for a little plastic card with a name on it to make sure that another little plastic card with a name on it is theirs?
> Last month alone, the Red Cross refunded 700 fraudulent credit-card transactions, Martin said.
Surely, a fraudulent credit-card transaction is caused (in theory) by the credit-card company fucking up? I would have thought that the credit company would absorb the loss instead of being able to make the receiving party refund the money.
If I buy a $6000 HDTV using a stolen credit card, and I fake the signature on the receipt very convincingly (so the TV shop follows due diligence), when it emerges that the card was stolen is the TV shop out 6k? How can the CC company force the shop to refund the money? Isn't it the CC company's fault for having poor security measures?
I believe the OP was suggesting that there should be some pubs where it's allowed.
If local councils were allowed to license, say, 5% of pubs in their area to allow smoking, on condition of having good air conditioning, not allowing children in even with families, and an extra license fee, for example, it's highly unlikely that anyone would go to that pub, or indeed work in that pub, who didn't want to be in a smoky environment.
I think it would be a pretty fair solution. Most pubs remain smoke-free, but smokers willing to sit in a filthy haze of carcinogens are able to, surrounded by other smokers willing to sit in a filthy haze of carcinogens.
It would also allow places like cigar clubs to still exist.
> work to extend the copyright term to 70 years and crack down on piracy
...Sir Cliff Richard, The Who and Sir Paul McCartney backed the campaign to extend the 50-year term
...enough said
Right... because the first thing to do in the fight against piracy is to broaden the definition of piracy to include twenty years worth of extra music. In other news, Cameron announced that as the first step in a crackdown on murder, the definition of "murder" will been expanded to include drunk-driving. He said that government claims that this would increase reported cases of murder by 12000% as "exagerated".
> He argued that extending the term would give an "incentive to the music industry to digitise both older and niche repertoire which
> more people can enjoy at no extra cost".
Right... so, extending the copyright term to include works which are currently in the public domain, and thus free and legal to use for any purpose will help people enjoy these works at "no extra cost"? In other news, as part of a campaign to try and get kids to exercise more, Cameron announced plans to put all public playparks into the hands of private companies that will charge for their use.
> Mr Cameron said: "Most people think these are all multimillionaires living in some penthouse flat. The reality is that many of
> these are low-earning session musicians who will be losing a vital pension."...
>
David Cameron almost had me starting to consider the posibility that he had actually made some headway into changing the political direction of the Tories, but no: nothing has changed. Let's pay off big businesses in exchange for more social/cultural control and censorship.
Maybe this is just one of those WTFs brough about because IANAL, but seriously - any data which is capable of conversion into an extreme image?
Who wants to be the first to convert the text of the bill into an ASCII goatse?
> There's always the off-chance of some random stranger getting in by sheer luck.
Especially if the stranger is using proxied bots to guess ten times a second. Assuming a generously extravagant implementation, you might have to correctly choose from 100 handwriting samples to log in. An attacker appears to be you on average 1 time in 100. Assuming a very weak password system, six characters, all lower case, no numbers or special characters, then your password is 1 among 26^6 possible passwords. An attacker appears to be you on average 1 time in 308915776. I think I'll stick to passwords.
Because there are some types of cheating that it is just not possible to identify or prevent through a well-designed client. If the game is one that computers can play better than humans (or can play some aspect of better than humans), then software can be written that simulates human user input but is actually computationally controlled. There isn't really a way to prevent this completely, because at some point your sufficiently advanced aimbot is indistinguishable from an excellent human player.
Think of it this way: you can't alter the rules of chess played through the mail in such a way as to stop me using a computer to "cheat". The problem isn't the rules of correspondence chess, the problem is that computers are better than many humans at chess.
It "just works" with *our* hardware and *our* software.
Come on, who'd buy a first-gen iPod without checking to see if it would work with their XP box? Or a Newton without checking to see if it could data transfer with Windows 3.1?
> Hard Disks are old news...no one is going to be using them in 5 years, let alone 10...flash is so the way forward
Probably not in the notebook/desktop consumer market, but I can imagine enterprise/research uses for magnetic HDDs where read/write times are less important and $/GB much more so.
That said, if I'm right, laser-based magnetic storage being faster than current tech won't really matter for that kind of scenario.