of why radio stations buy broadcast licenses of music rather than going down to Sam Goody and buying the $15 comsumer version.
They have no reason to fear prosecution from the DMCA unless their current broadcast licenses specifically state the broadcast medium that the license is good for.
Buying a CD and broadcasting it without a license is illegal. It's equivalent of renting a video tape and play it in a movie theatre. For the copyright laws, "broadcasting" is (I think) roughly equivalent to "copying". At least, the effect is the same: allowing more people to listen to the music.
OK, but if I can't compare the clock speed of an Athlon vs. a P4, I also can't compare two different Athlons. How do I know whether I should be model 1600 or model 1800? It would sound like saying Windows 2000 is better than Windows 98 because the number is higher. Not telling how to compare two of your products, will likely decrease your sale.
Also, now Intel can say: "Our latest P4 beats the crap out of an Athlon XYZ" and people won't know that they compared it the the slowest model.
In almost all cases I prefer PostScript to PDF. Not that much for the format itself, but because ghostscript/ghostview/gv is 100x faster than Acrobat Reader. The other advantage is that you can produce Postscript from any application (in the worst case, you just need a Windows postscript printer driver) without paying Adobe a dime.
Would that be an effect of Code Red. It made a lot realize that they WERE running a web server after all! That's a plan from MS: make sure that every IIS server can be counted.
an algorithm that on the surface is O(N^3) can actually be O(N^5)
I doubt that, while I agree that it can slow down computation by a huge factor, I doubt taking machine hardware into account can change an O(N^3) algorithm into an O(N^5). My reason is simple: the slowdown factor will be a constant, which might look like (time for random memory access)/(time for cache memory access). This factor will not keep increasing as N tends towards infinity (as the O(N^3)->O(N^5) implies).
You might have a slowdown of factor 1000, but that factor won't become 100000 if you multiply the size of the problem by 10.
Re:Serious blow to open source & free software
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 2
Sorry, I didn't understand which program you were talking about... I agree with you now;-)
Re:Serious blow to open source & free software
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 2
Even Linux updates don't get distributed this efficiently.
I don't know how efficient distribution of Linux updates is, but this is certainly not efficient. The different versions of Code Red have been there for more than a month and it doesn't seem to be about to stop. With the amount of publicity there is, you'd expect more people would patch their system. Again, I'm not saying Linux is better on update efficiency, although there seems to be fare less security holes.
1) Get a team of 10 audio researchers
2) Get one persone working on a watermarking technique
3) Get the other 9 try to break the technology
4) If (technology broken) then goto 2) with another researcher
...and loop forever until you realize that you can't make a watermark that cannot be broken.
Re:Adobe legal defense
on
PDF Virus Spotted
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
They're gonna yell out "You see what happens when people reverse-engineer our software ?".
Quite the opposite. When writing a PDF virus you're not reverse engineering or circunventing anything. However, if there's a virus in an e-book, you can't study it because then you'd be violating the DMCA and the virus writer can sue you and have you put in jail. Cool isn't it?
What if somebody releases a virus and protects it under the DMCA? Does that mean it won't be legal to write an anti-virus for it? (that too could be a good way to fight DMCA)
The message our lawmakers are sending to hackers is clear; leave the copy protection alone and instead just beat the f*cking shit out of the copyright holder.
But manufacturers can't make money off anything they can't patent.
AFAIK, the patents in MP3 are not owned by the companies who manufacture the players anyway. So supporting Ogg Vorbis would not make them lose money. Actually, it could give them some independence over companies that develop proprietary codecs (Real, MS, Fraunhofer).
no one would knowingly agree to have their computer ransacked by untrustworthy code.
Sure, but how many people actually read the agreement? I'm sure you could write in bold letters "THIS WILL DESTROY YOUR COMPUTER" and people will still click "I agree".
As some suggested, "What if you write that displays a EULA before causing damage?". Since the UCITA gives a lot of power to EULAs, it might be legal. Now if there appears tons of such virii (and you can't presecute the writer, some people are going to like that), the only way to fight that could be to dump UCITA... Of course, it's a bit far fetched, but how knows?
It's funny that everytime a Windows worm/virus propagates and (of course) Linux and other UNIX are not affected, it's just because they don't have much market share and nobody bothers writing a virus for an OS like Linux. Now, it's IIS that's being hit. If it were only about market share, Apache would get twice as much virii/worms as IIS, right? Maybe the most important factor after all is the number of security breach in a product and not market share.
Manhattan distance, aka L1 norm of the difference.
And the reason I said it should work is that I have already tried that a while ago for a slightly different task. The only thing I'm not too sure it CPU time.
As for histogram randomness, evan if the N-dimension (N ~ 1000) vectors (histograms) don't have a uniform distribution in the 1000-D space. You'd have to be very unlucky to get the same (or approx.) value for all of the 1000 bins.
They could look at the histogram of a bunch of regular emails and just send the spam messages whose histograms are close to a lot of the histograms of the regular emails. This assumes that spammers would have access to the hash function though.
Once again, your assuming there is such a thing as a "normal histogram". Remember, that we're not checking whether the "histogram" is normal or not. We're checking to see if this particular histogram (from a spam e-mail) as been seen more than x times before. Even if the manage to get a piece of spam match to the exact same histogram as a valid e-mail, the piece of spam will still be rejected with the unfortunate side effect that the valid message might be rejected (but since they cannot read your mail, they cannot get one of your e-mails rejected).
As for the CPU time, sure you don't want to make N too large...
certain histogram patterns would be common in non-spam email messages
There is no such thing as a "common histogram". They will all be different. However, two identical messages will have identical histogram. Two almost identical messages will have almost identical histogram (while two almost identical messages usually have very different checksums).
The reverse is usually true (of course, there's not absolute garanty): two almost identical histograms are very likely to come from two almost identical messages. The more you increase N (the bound for the hash result and size of the histogram), the more accurate the result. Also, using trigrams would likely be more accurate.
While it is possible for spammers to vary their messages, they cannot send thousands of messages that are really different one from the other and this is why this technique should work almost all the time. Of course, you'd need to get rid of headers and any html tags and garbage before computing the histograms.
One way that would be much more effective is to take pair of words (eg. in this sentence: "One way", "way that", "that would",...) and apply a hash function that returns a number between 0 and N (N usually between 1000 and 100000). You then compare the histogram (how many of each hash value) of a mail to the database. If histograms are too close to a spam message, you delete it.
Last time I asked, (I think) Vorbis did not support mid-side stereo encoding. That means that it couldn't take advantage of the correlation between the two channels. It would do better than MP3 on mono signals and worse on stereo. Does anyone know whether it's still the case. That could explain the results.
...and this would have created a blackhole destroying all the universe...
Be realistic. I don't approve Iraq invading Koweit, but what you say is insane.
First, not long before the invasion of Koweit, the americans told Iraq "we don't care about happens between you and Koweit", which led Iraq to invade Koweit. There are two interpretations on this: the official is "somebody screwed up, let's blame that person and that's all". The second interpretation is that it was calculated to allow the US to produce the war.
This war benefited the US. It allowed them to establish bases in Saudi Arabia by convincing them that "we must protect you from the evil Iraq". It also allowed them to test all the new toys (weapons) because there hadn't been any war for a while.
Also the war was VERY good the the big war industry. I wouldn't be suprised to learn that their lobbying had a lot to do with the Gulf war. After all, there are billions of $ at stake... and YOU have been paying for that.
Last thing, how do you justify all the US "preventive strikes" on Iraq after the war. Every time, the UN had been against but the US wouldn't listen. People in Iraq got killed in this, and not just military. Of course, one americal life is worth a thousand Iraqi lives, right?
As for Iraq invading all the middle east and everybody starving, this is just plain ridiculous.
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of why radio stations buy broadcast licenses of music rather than going down to Sam Goody and buying the $15 comsumer version.
They have no reason to fear prosecution from the DMCA unless their current broadcast licenses specifically state the broadcast medium that the license is good for.
Buying a CD and broadcasting it without a license is illegal. It's equivalent of renting a video tape and play it in a movie theatre. For the copyright laws, "broadcasting" is (I think) roughly equivalent to "copying". At least, the effect is the same: allowing more people to listen to the music.
Hey, I could turn CodeRed into a SETI@Home client!
OK, but if I can't compare the clock speed of an Athlon vs. a P4, I also can't compare two different Athlons. How do I know whether I should be model 1600 or model 1800? It would sound like saying Windows 2000 is better than Windows 98 because the number is higher. Not telling how to compare two of your products, will likely decrease your sale.
Also, now Intel can say: "Our latest P4 beats the crap out of an Athlon XYZ" and people won't know that they compared it the the slowest model.
Linux running in a totally secure environment
You mean that Linux runs on a powered-off PC cast in concrete? (That's the only totally secore environment I know)
In almost all cases I prefer PostScript to PDF. Not that much for the format itself, but because ghostscript/ghostview/gv is 100x faster than Acrobat Reader. The other advantage is that you can produce Postscript from any application (in the worst case, you just need a Windows postscript printer driver) without paying Adobe a dime.
Would that be an effect of Code Red. It made a lot realize that they WERE running a web server after all! That's a plan from MS: make sure that every IIS server can be counted.
Sure, it can be 1000000X slower, or even 10^100 time slower, but still as N goes to infinity, the slowdown fact does not.
an algorithm that on the surface is O(N^3) can actually be O(N^5)
I doubt that, while I agree that it can slow down computation by a huge factor, I doubt taking machine hardware into account can change an O(N^3) algorithm into an O(N^5). My reason is simple: the slowdown factor will be a constant, which might look like (time for random memory access)/(time for cache memory access). This factor will not keep increasing as N tends towards infinity (as the O(N^3)->O(N^5) implies).
You might have a slowdown of factor 1000, but that factor won't become 100000 if you multiply the size of the problem by 10.
Sorry, I didn't understand which program you were talking about... I agree with you now ;-)
Even Linux updates don't get distributed this efficiently.
I don't know how efficient distribution of Linux updates is, but this is certainly not efficient. The different versions of Code Red have been there for more than a month and it doesn't seem to be about to stop. With the amount of publicity there is, you'd expect more people would patch their system. Again, I'm not saying Linux is better on update efficiency, although there seems to be fare less security holes.
1) Get a team of 10 audio researchers
2) Get one persone working on a watermarking technique
3) Get the other 9 try to break the technology
4) If (technology broken) then goto 2) with another researcher
...and loop forever until you realize that you can't make a watermark that cannot be broken.
They're gonna yell out "You see what happens when people reverse-engineer our software ?".
Quite the opposite. When writing a PDF virus you're not reverse engineering or circunventing anything. However, if there's a virus in an e-book, you can't study it because then you'd be violating the DMCA and the virus writer can sue you and have you put in jail. Cool isn't it?
What if somebody releases a virus and protects it under the DMCA? Does that mean it won't be legal to write an anti-virus for it? (that too could be a good way to fight DMCA)
I can do much better with "delete" and "undelete". DOS rules! It had filesystem compression (format/unformat) long before the others.
The message our lawmakers are sending to hackers is clear; leave the copy protection alone and instead just beat the f*cking shit out of the copyright holder.
Hey, that calls for an "Open Beating" project!
But manufacturers can't make money off anything they can't patent.
AFAIK, the patents in MP3 are not owned by the companies who manufacture the players anyway. So supporting Ogg Vorbis would not make them lose money. Actually, it could give them some independence over companies that develop proprietary codecs (Real, MS, Fraunhofer).
no one would knowingly agree to have their computer ransacked by untrustworthy code.
Sure, but how many people actually read the agreement? I'm sure you could write in bold letters "THIS WILL DESTROY YOUR COMPUTER" and people will still click "I agree".
As some suggested, "What if you write that displays a EULA before causing damage?". Since the UCITA gives a lot of power to EULAs, it might be legal. Now if there appears tons of such virii (and you can't presecute the writer, some people are going to like that), the only way to fight that could be to dump UCITA... Of course, it's a bit far fetched, but how knows?
It's funny that everytime a Windows worm/virus propagates and (of course) Linux and other UNIX are not affected, it's just because they don't have much market share and nobody bothers writing a virus for an OS like Linux. Now, it's IIS that's being hit. If it were only about market share, Apache would get twice as much virii/worms as IIS, right? Maybe the most important factor after all is the number of security breach in a product and not market share.
what similarity function would you use?
Manhattan distance, aka L1 norm of the difference.
And the reason I said it should work is that I have already tried that a while ago for a slightly different task. The only thing I'm not too sure it CPU time.
As for histogram randomness, evan if the N-dimension (N ~ 1000) vectors (histograms) don't have a uniform distribution in the 1000-D space. You'd have to be very unlucky to get the same (or approx.) value for all of the 1000 bins.
They could look at the histogram of a bunch of regular emails and just send the spam messages whose histograms are close to a lot of the histograms of the regular emails. This assumes that spammers would have access to the hash function though.
Once again, your assuming there is such a thing as a "normal histogram". Remember, that we're not checking whether the "histogram" is normal or not. We're checking to see if this particular histogram (from a spam e-mail) as been seen more than x times before. Even if the manage to get a piece of spam match to the exact same histogram as a valid e-mail, the piece of spam will still be rejected with the unfortunate side effect that the valid message might be rejected (but since they cannot read your mail, they cannot get one of your e-mails rejected).
As for the CPU time, sure you don't want to make N too large...
certain histogram patterns would be common in non-spam email messages
There is no such thing as a "common histogram". They will all be different. However, two identical messages will have identical histogram. Two almost identical messages will have almost identical histogram (while two almost identical messages usually have very different checksums).
The reverse is usually true (of course, there's not absolute garanty): two almost identical histograms are very likely to come from two almost identical messages. The more you increase N (the bound for the hash result and size of the histogram), the more accurate the result. Also, using trigrams would likely be more accurate.
While it is possible for spammers to vary their messages, they cannot send thousands of messages that are really different one from the other and this is why this technique should work almost all the time. Of course, you'd need to get rid of headers and any html tags and garbage before computing the histograms.
One way that would be much more effective is to take pair of words (eg. in this sentence: "One way", "way that", "that would", ...) and apply a hash function that returns a number between 0 and N (N usually between 1000 and 100000). You then compare the histogram (how many of each hash value) of a mail to the database. If histograms are too close to a spam message, you delete it.
Last time I asked, (I think) Vorbis did not support mid-side stereo encoding. That means that it couldn't take advantage of the correlation between the two channels. It would do better than MP3 on mono signals and worse on stereo. Does anyone know whether it's still the case. That could explain the results.
...and this would have created a blackhole destroying all the universe...
Be realistic. I don't approve Iraq invading Koweit, but what you say is insane.
First, not long before the invasion of Koweit, the americans told Iraq "we don't care about happens between you and Koweit", which led Iraq to invade Koweit. There are two interpretations on this: the official is "somebody screwed up, let's blame that person and that's all". The second interpretation is that it was calculated to allow the US to produce the war.
This war benefited the US. It allowed them to establish bases in Saudi Arabia by convincing them that "we must protect you from the evil Iraq". It also allowed them to test all the new toys (weapons) because there hadn't been any war for a while.
Also the war was VERY good the the big war industry. I wouldn't be suprised to learn that their lobbying had a lot to do with the Gulf war. After all, there are billions of $ at stake... and YOU have been paying for that.
Last thing, how do you justify all the US "preventive strikes" on Iraq after the war. Every time, the UN had been against but the US wouldn't listen. People in Iraq got killed in this, and not just military. Of course, one americal life is worth a thousand Iraqi lives, right?
As for Iraq invading all the middle east and everybody starving, this is just plain ridiculous.