Some security experts believe hackers are becoming more interested in writing nasty code for Macs precisely because of reports of its relative immunity to security woes
This is what I've been saying for a while. Really, it's kind of a self-evident thing. Let's face it, the hacker (and/or cracker) mentality is often to do things to see if/because it's possible. It's the entire point. Just like government targets have historically been more tempting because they're supposed to be more secure, the more 'impossible' it is to do something, the higher that temptation. It's about cred and skill and kung fu. And there are people that think that way that have destructive, rather than constructive aims with this. Especially given the attitudes of some Mac users. Finagle knows it ain't all of them, but honestly, there are plenty that even I occasionally wouldn't mind seeing taken down a peg or two.
Everyone (at least anyone who writes code) knows any non-trivial system is going to have bugs, and weaknesses, of some sort. Will there be a pandemic like with Windows boxen? I doubt it, but on the other hand, I also doubt that all Macs have 3 inch hypersteel plating with regenerating plasma shields and a cloaking device. Maybe that's just me, though.
If they don't get it out by November, they'll miss the holiday season rush. I doubt Japan has anything so big in spring, so they won't lose much by pushing back that release. My bet is that they'll finagle the Japan/whatever release however they need to, to ensure that they get in on the holiday season here.
Now, IANAP, but I believe the deal with Cherenkov radiation is that it occurs when a charged particle (such as an electron) exceeds the speed of light in a medium. Since the propogation speed of light changes based on the medium through which it travels, in some media, this can be accomplished. The denser the material, the slower light propagates through it. Water is something like 0.75c. Diamond, I believe, is somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.4c. See Refractive Index for more information.
The general idea is that nothing can exceed c, the speed of light in a perfect vacuum. Which, if I'm not incorrect, is what ChowRiit was referring to when s/he said "That's right: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, not even information."
According to the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which, IIRC, is the most recent measuring of the Hubble Constant, the value for the Hubble Constant is 71 ± 4 km/s/Mpc. This would give the universe an age of 13.7 ± 0.2 billion years.
Other findings of WMAP include the makeup of the universe as 4% matter, 23% dark matter, and 73% dark energy, and a flat geometry for the universe.
Best estimates for the age of our solar system are currently about 4.6 billion years. Life ostensibly started very quickly, on a cosmological timeline. IIRC, earliest evidence of life points to around 3.5 billion years ago.
But your point about it being a lot more recent on a cosmological scale are correct.
I don't mind people being on the phone in public. I mind people being on the phone loudly in public. I don't mind people having conversations in public. I mind people having conversations loudly in public.
Personally, I don't think it's the cell phones that are the problem. I think people being rude is the problem. I don't see anything wrong with considerate use of a cellphone in public spaces. My cell phone is my only phone. I have it with me pretty much wherever I go, but I'm polite about its use. I don't leave the ringer on in movie theatres or the like, I don't talk on it loudly, and I generally try and be as unobtrusive about it as possible. I tend to think that if people wouldn't mind my talking to a friend, they shouldn't mind my talking to a friend on the phone.
People would just be fine with an Internet Browser, and a way to organize their photos.
I'm not so sure about this. My previous experiences in retail would seem to say otherwise. I mean, there are still similar devices available; MSN TV still exists. I've even sold one.
One. To an old lady who kept coming back to the store once a month for 6 months to look at it before buying it.
In contrast to hundreds of computers. Even people who only want simple internet access seem to prefer to buy a full fledged (if bottom of the line) computer. It may be a $300-after-mail-in-rebates-celeron machine, but they seem to avoid anything else like it's the plague. Not that I blame them.
That being said, specific purpose machines (e.g. TiVo for digital video recording) do tend to find their niches and can do very well. I just don't know that an internet photo box is ever going to be a viable standalone product.
In other news, Mr. Wozniak declined a match in Adelaide, Australia, saying "I can't. My iPod doesn't have those timezones. It wouldn't remind me, and I'd probably miss the match." Like most brilliant engineers, Wozniak often loses track of time.
The attacker does have the option of using three dice though, assuring at least 1 kill per throw.
That turns out not to be the case. You can only lose as many armies as you defend with (i.e. one or two) in a given round. I don't have the rules on me, but they clearly state it. It even says so in the Wikipedia article:
"If the attacker is using more dice than the defender, the remaining dice are ignored."
For the most part, it always requires less skill to break something than to get something working
I agree, to a point.
Haphazard destruction doesn't generally require skill. On the other hand, speaking as someone with Integration & Test experience, the deliberate breaking of something that is engineered to be resistant in that manner does require skill.
Constructive destruction, I guess is what I'm referring to. Sticking RAM in an acid solution could conceivably cause BSODs, but that doesn't mean you've hacked Windows.
One point I'd like to make is that if the government would like it that way, the government could, potentially, make it that way.
With defense contractors, for example, there are certain restrictions that the companies absolutely have to abide by, if they want to remain eligible for US government contracts (and others that they have to abide by if they want to do any business in the US). Since the US government is by far the biggest money pool for defense contractors, they very much go to great lengths to ensure that they obey those laws. Hell, there are even laws governing the use of bribery in countries where that's a part of doing business.
So while the situations are slightly different, it's not like the US government can't do things about it if they want to.
No kidding. Besides which, with the skill and numbers of Linux fanboys, I'd almost have expected Linux to beat OSX to the punch, ya know? Dollars to doughnuts that they would've, given an equal shot at it.
First, let me say that human stupidity is how the vast majority of malware spreads, and can generally be relied upon. It's one of those, ya know...universal constants. As Einstein said: "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." Moreover, if Apple picks up marketshare, especially with iMacs (e.g. more of a consumer level product), as it could be poised to do with the Intel deals struck, the average level of user savvy will drop. So stupidity can be relied upon to increase. Especially since knowledgable users are more wary of Intel procs in general (though the mobile chips are somewhat excepted here). However, it is, as you imply, worthy of note that it doesn't exploit security holes.
Anyway, I can't help but idly wonder if/. mightn't have had something to do with this, what with the article that appeared a month ago. Sort of a proof of concept challenge, if you will.
i'm not, at least in most cases. i am, when someone says "hey, i'm not stealin' nothin!" it seems, to me, akin to saying "i didn't kill no one! i manslaughtered 'im!"
i'm not against it when it serves a valid or useful purpose. when people use it to try and justify or distance their behavior, then getting to the essence of that behavior is useful.
i'm as pedantic as the next guy (well, maybe not on/....), but i'm not talking about the legal aspects of copyright. in fact, i think the current copyright system is pretty shoddy (actually, i've done some interesting reading on the subject, and your points are well taken). and please note that i'm not a lawyer--though i have considered the career. i'm not talking about the legalities of petty larceny vs. grand larceny vs. copyright violations. i'm not sure any legal system is equipped to deal with the nature of incorporeal property, which is where we're at. i'm talking about the fundamental fact that if you copy a creation of someone else's without that person's consent, you are depriving them of something--whether it be money that they could've made from the copy or merely the right to determine what is done with their creation. i may be wrong, but i find it hard to belive that anyone would argue that people creating things shouldn't have any say in what is done with them. copyright may be a bad way to enforce that say, and allow for the creation of culture, but again, that's not what we're talking about. we're talking about ethics, here, and what is fundamentally going on (which, let's face it, often has little to no bearing on legality). as i said, i see the taking of a physical product as rather different than a copy, but let's be clear..."it's not theft" is more of a rationalization than a legitimate excuse.
a primary reason there's a distinction between intellectual and physical property is that you can't make even an analogue copy of something physical without it being a different physical object. intellectual property is an entirely different beast. and let's be clear here. i understand (enough) about licenses and whatnot. they primarily stem from the complications of having 'property' without a physical form. anyway, to address:
So NO you are not stealing anything in the legal sense.
please not that i didn't say anything particular about legal definitions of theft vs. copyright violations. i'm talking about the functional equivalent. you're not stealing the media itself. kudos. see what i said:
let's not kid ourselves about what we, fundamentally, are doing, alright? (emphasis added)
so if you need to tell yourself that you're not stealing so you can sleep better at night, by all means, go ahead. i sleep just fine.
In high school, I took a course called "Information Technology in a Global Society"; it was an IB course The gist of the course was a combination of the ramifications of technology, an overview of ethics and law with technology, and some basic instruction in important aspects of technology (web design, databases, e-mail, programming, etc). While I was never in need of the fairly trivial instruction on the how-to of the technological aspects, those were not the focus of the course--the idea being that to learn about the ramifications of something, one must first have some grasp of the nature of the beast. I found the remainder of the course, however, to be particularly intellectually stimulating, not to mention useful. The point of my story is to agree with you, but to posit that the scope of this is far too narrow. These things are important now, and far too many people understand even one of them, let alone many of them. Tomorrow, they'll be even more important.
to me, it seems that the gist of your argument is that since you haven't gotten your hands on a physical thing, you haven't stolen anything. you aren't depriving a retailer of a product or the money they could have gotten in exchange for it. i submit that a physical object is not necessarily required for theft. if you're a gamer, does it incur your ire when someone steals from you in game? if you developed a neat idea and had it on your hard drive, would it bother you when someone copied it onto their USB drive, and distributed it or claimed it as their own? how about your digitized poetry? your art? i'm not using these as exactly analogous to downloading a movie, but the concept of a noncorporeal object of value is important.
you also speak of downloading off the internet something which you wouldn't've purchased for. to be pedantic, that is not strictly speaking, true. by downloading it, you are spending clock cycles, storage space, bandwidth, and at least some of your own time to obtain said item. now, it may be true that you wouldn't spend $15 for a dvd copy of it, but would you pay $0.01 to see it, or download it? how about $0.40? if it's worth downloading for you, either you want to just have it for the sake of having it, or you've got mild interest in seeing it. either way, there's some price point where you'd be willing to exchange something of value for it. taking even a copy of it without reimbursing the 'owner' is, in a word, a theft. moreover, you don't get to set the price that you pay for it.
moreover, stealing is (amongst other things): to take (the property of another) without right or permission the act of theft to get or effect surreptitiously or artfully
not to get into a slashdot debate about intellectual property, but legally, a movie is, generally speaking, the property of Some Entity Not You. you can be sure that said Not You entity will not give you right or permission to obtain said movie without paying.
now, that being said, i'm a proponent of p2p filesharing in the general case. i loathe the RIAA and the MPAA and their tactics. i think they've taken entirely the wrong tack. not all theft is inherently immoral, mind you, though i'm notably quiet about the morality of filesharing. i'm not saying i do it, and i'm not saying i don't. and i think that you're right that downloading a file is significantly different from stuffing one's outerwear at walmart, but hey--let's not kid ourselves about what we, fundamentally, are doing, alright?
I don't know that that system would work well in the US.
For one thing, not everyone can give blood, due to certain restrictions. I, for example, cannot, where the Red Cross is concerned, since I lived in Western Europe for more than 6 months since 1980. The FDA bars anyone who has spent 6 months or more in the UK between 1980 and 1996(?) from giving blood, but the Red Cross' rules are slightly more stringent (3 mo in UK/6 mo Western Europe).
There may be other FDA regulations that I'm unaware of, but with the Red Cross' rules, that rules out quite a number of people who have foriegn service jobs. Given the fact that there may be other FDA rules for other areas of the world with potential infectious agents, this might not be feasible in the US. I've only ever been able to donate blood to myself for surgery.
Why would they want to waste their money collecting everybody's garbage?
simple.
they must be developing artificial intelligence! a worldwide neural net! feed it garbage from everyone on the planet, and it'll soon comprehend everything and everyone! it is gNet.
Slashdot Mirror
Some security experts believe hackers are becoming more interested in writing nasty code for Macs precisely because of reports of its relative immunity to security woes
This is what I've been saying for a while. Really, it's kind of a self-evident thing. Let's face it, the hacker (and/or cracker) mentality is often to do things to see if/because it's possible. It's the entire point. Just like government targets have historically been more tempting because they're supposed to be more secure, the more 'impossible' it is to do something, the higher that temptation. It's about cred and skill and kung fu. And there are people that think that way that have destructive, rather than constructive aims with this. Especially given the attitudes of some Mac users. Finagle knows it ain't all of them, but honestly, there are plenty that even I occasionally wouldn't mind seeing taken down a peg or two.
Everyone (at least anyone who writes code) knows any non-trivial system is going to have bugs, and weaknesses, of some sort. Will there be a pandemic like with Windows boxen? I doubt it, but on the other hand, I also doubt that all Macs have 3 inch hypersteel plating with regenerating plasma shields and a cloaking device. Maybe that's just me, though.
Yep. They call if the "golden quarter."
If they don't get it out by November, they'll miss the holiday season rush. I doubt Japan has anything so big in spring, so they won't lose much by pushing back that release. My bet is that they'll finagle the Japan/whatever release however they need to, to ensure that they get in on the holiday season here.
Now, IANAP, but I believe the deal with Cherenkov radiation is that it occurs when a charged particle (such as an electron) exceeds the speed of light in a medium. Since the propogation speed of light changes based on the medium through which it travels, in some media, this can be accomplished. The denser the material, the slower light propagates through it. Water is something like 0.75c. Diamond, I believe, is somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.4c. See Refractive Index for more information.
The general idea is that nothing can exceed c, the speed of light in a perfect vacuum. Which, if I'm not incorrect, is what ChowRiit was referring to when s/he said "That's right: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, not even information."
According to the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which, IIRC, is the most recent measuring of the Hubble Constant, the value for the Hubble Constant is 71 ± 4 km/s/Mpc. This would give the universe an age of 13.7 ± 0.2 billion years.
Other findings of WMAP include the makeup of the universe as 4% matter, 23% dark matter, and 73% dark energy, and a flat geometry for the universe.
Best estimates for the age of our solar system are currently about 4.6 billion years. Life ostensibly started very quickly, on a cosmological timeline. IIRC, earliest evidence of life points to around 3.5 billion years ago.
But your point about it being a lot more recent on a cosmological scale are correct.
I don't mind people being on the phone in public. I mind people being on the phone loudly in public. I don't mind people having conversations in public. I mind people having conversations loudly in public.
Personally, I don't think it's the cell phones that are the problem. I think people being rude is the problem. I don't see anything wrong with considerate use of a cellphone in public spaces. My cell phone is my only phone. I have it with me pretty much wherever I go, but I'm polite about its use. I don't leave the ringer on in movie theatres or the like, I don't talk on it loudly, and I generally try and be as unobtrusive about it as possible. I tend to think that if people wouldn't mind my talking to a friend, they shouldn't mind my talking to a friend on the phone.
People would just be fine with an Internet Browser, and a way to organize their photos.
I'm not so sure about this. My previous experiences in retail would seem to say otherwise. I mean, there are still similar devices available; MSN TV still exists. I've even sold one.
One. To an old lady who kept coming back to the store once a month for 6 months to look at it before buying it.
In contrast to hundreds of computers. Even people who only want simple internet access seem to prefer to buy a full fledged (if bottom of the line) computer. It may be a $300-after-mail-in-rebates-celeron machine, but they seem to avoid anything else like it's the plague. Not that I blame them.
That being said, specific purpose machines (e.g. TiVo for digital video recording) do tend to find their niches and can do very well. I just don't know that an internet photo box is ever going to be a viable standalone product.
Especially if there's going to be a $100 laptop.
In other news, Mr. Wozniak declined a match in Adelaide, Australia, saying "I can't. My iPod doesn't have those timezones. It wouldn't remind me, and I'd probably miss the match." Like most brilliant engineers, Wozniak often loses track of time.
5. ???
6. Profit!
The attacker does have the option of using three dice though, assuring at least 1 kill per throw.
That turns out not to be the case. You can only lose as many armies as you defend with (i.e. one or two) in a given round. I don't have the rules on me, but they clearly state it. It even says so in the Wikipedia article:
"If the attacker is using more dice than the defender, the remaining dice are ignored."
For the most part, it always requires less skill to break something than to get something working
I agree, to a point.
Haphazard destruction doesn't generally require skill. On the other hand, speaking as someone with Integration & Test experience, the deliberate breaking of something that is engineered to be resistant in that manner does require skill.
Constructive destruction, I guess is what I'm referring to. Sticking RAM in an acid solution could conceivably cause BSODs, but that doesn't mean you've hacked Windows.
How does that work with sleep being for the weak and the dead?
Wait a second, here--
.
.
.
Most Geeks rarely sleep.
That explains so very much about slashdot...
One point I'd like to make is that if the government would like it that way, the government could, potentially, make it that way.
With defense contractors, for example, there are certain restrictions that the companies absolutely have to abide by, if they want to remain eligible for US government contracts (and others that they have to abide by if they want to do any business in the US).
Since the US government is by far the biggest money pool for defense contractors, they very much go to great lengths to ensure that they obey those laws. Hell, there are even laws governing the use of bribery in countries where that's a part of doing business.
So while the situations are slightly different, it's not like the US government can't do things about it if they want to.
No kidding.
Besides which, with the skill and numbers of Linux fanboys, I'd almost have expected Linux to beat OSX to the punch, ya know? Dollars to doughnuts that they would've, given an equal shot at it.
There's a huge difference.
Switching to the metric system would be smart.
First, let me say that human stupidity is how the vast majority of malware spreads, and can generally be relied upon. It's one of those, ya know...universal constants. As Einstein said: "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." Moreover, if Apple picks up marketshare, especially with iMacs (e.g. more of a consumer level product), as it could be poised to do with the Intel deals struck, the average level of user savvy will drop. So stupidity can be relied upon to increase. Especially since knowledgable users are more wary of Intel procs in general (though the mobile chips are somewhat excepted here). However, it is, as you imply, worthy of note that it doesn't exploit security holes.
/. mightn't have had something to do with this, what with the article that appeared a month ago. Sort of a proof of concept challenge, if you will.
Anyway, I can't help but idly wonder if
i'm not, at least in most cases. i am, when someone says "hey, i'm not stealin' nothin!"
it seems, to me, akin to saying "i didn't kill no one! i manslaughtered 'im!"
i'm not against it when it serves a valid or useful purpose. when people use it to try and justify or distance their behavior, then getting to the essence of that behavior is useful.
i'm as pedantic as the next guy (well, maybe not on /....), but i'm not talking about the legal aspects of copyright. in fact, i think the current copyright system is pretty shoddy (actually, i've done some interesting reading on the subject, and your points are well taken). and please note that i'm not a lawyer--though i have considered the career. i'm not talking about the legalities of petty larceny vs. grand larceny vs. copyright violations. i'm not sure any legal system is equipped to deal with the nature of incorporeal property, which is where we're at. i'm talking about the fundamental fact that if you copy a creation of someone else's without that person's consent, you are depriving them of something--whether it be money that they could've made from the copy or merely the right to determine what is done with their creation. i may be wrong, but i find it hard to belive that anyone would argue that people creating things shouldn't have any say in what is done with them. copyright may be a bad way to enforce that say, and allow for the creation of culture, but again, that's not what we're talking about. we're talking about ethics, here, and what is fundamentally going on (which, let's face it, often has little to no bearing on legality). as i said, i see the taking of a physical product as rather different than a copy, but let's be clear..."it's not theft" is more of a rationalization than a legitimate excuse.
a primary reason there's a distinction between intellectual and physical property is that you can't make even an analogue copy of something physical without it being a different physical object. intellectual property is an entirely different beast. and let's be clear here. i understand (enough) about licenses and whatnot. they primarily stem from the complications of having 'property' without a physical form. anyway, to address:
So NO you are not stealing anything in the legal sense.
please not that i didn't say anything particular about legal definitions of theft vs. copyright violations. i'm talking about the functional equivalent. you're not stealing the media itself. kudos. see what i said:
let's not kid ourselves about what we, fundamentally, are doing, alright? (emphasis added)
so if you need to tell yourself that you're not stealing so you can sleep better at night, by all means, go ahead. i sleep just fine.
In high school, I took a course called "Information Technology in a Global Society"; it was an IB course
The gist of the course was a combination of the ramifications of technology, an overview of ethics and law with technology, and some basic instruction in important aspects of technology (web design, databases, e-mail, programming, etc). While I was never in need of the fairly trivial instruction on the how-to of the technological aspects, those were not the focus of the course--the idea being that to learn about the ramifications of something, one must first have some grasp of the nature of the beast. I found the remainder of the course, however, to be particularly intellectually stimulating, not to mention useful.
The point of my story is to agree with you, but to posit that the scope of this is far too narrow. These things are important now, and far too many people understand even one of them, let alone many of them. Tomorrow, they'll be even more important.
allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment
to me, it seems that the gist of your argument is that since you haven't gotten your hands on a physical thing, you haven't stolen anything. you aren't depriving a retailer of a product or the money they could have gotten in exchange for it.
i submit that a physical object is not necessarily required for theft. if you're a gamer, does it incur your ire when someone steals from you in game? if you developed a neat idea and had it on your hard drive, would it bother you when someone copied it onto their USB drive, and distributed it or claimed it as their own? how about your digitized poetry? your art? i'm not using these as exactly analogous to downloading a movie, but the concept of a noncorporeal object of value is important.
you also speak of downloading off the internet something which you wouldn't've purchased for. to be pedantic, that is not strictly speaking, true. by downloading it, you are spending clock cycles, storage space, bandwidth, and at least some of your own time to obtain said item. now, it may be true that you wouldn't spend $15 for a dvd copy of it, but would you pay $0.01 to see it, or download it? how about $0.40? if it's worth downloading for you, either you want to just have it for the sake of having it, or you've got mild interest in seeing it. either way, there's some price point where you'd be willing to exchange something of value for it. taking even a copy of it without reimbursing the 'owner' is, in a word, a theft. moreover, you don't get to set the price that you pay for it.
moreover, stealing is (amongst other things):
to take (the property of another) without right or permission
the act of theft
to get or effect surreptitiously or artfully
not to get into a slashdot debate about intellectual property, but legally, a movie is, generally speaking, the property of Some Entity Not You. you can be sure that said Not You entity will not give you right or permission to obtain said movie without paying.
now, that being said, i'm a proponent of p2p filesharing in the general case.
i loathe the RIAA and the MPAA and their tactics. i think they've taken entirely the wrong tack. not all theft is inherently immoral, mind you, though i'm notably quiet about the morality of filesharing.
i'm not saying i do it, and i'm not saying i don't.
and i think that you're right that downloading a file is significantly different from stuffing one's outerwear at walmart, but hey--let's not kid ourselves about what we, fundamentally, are doing, alright?
Yeah! We don't care much about privacy, but we'll be damned if we let censorship stand!
...unless we deem something immoral.
But seriously, it's harder to monitor what someone thinks, if you've got them buttoned down tight with censorship.
I don't know that that system would work well in the US.
For one thing, not everyone can give blood, due to certain restrictions.
I, for example, cannot, where the Red Cross is concerned, since I lived in Western Europe for more than 6 months since 1980. The FDA bars anyone who has spent 6 months or more in the UK between 1980 and 1996(?) from giving blood, but the Red Cross' rules are slightly more stringent (3 mo in UK/6 mo Western Europe).
There may be other FDA regulations that I'm unaware of, but with the Red Cross' rules, that rules out quite a number of people who have foriegn service jobs. Given the fact that there may be other FDA rules for other areas of the world with potential infectious agents, this might not be feasible in the US. I've only ever been able to donate blood to myself for surgery.
Why would they want to waste their money collecting everybody's garbage?
simple.
they must be developing artificial intelligence! a worldwide neural net! feed it garbage from everyone on the planet, and it'll soon comprehend everything and everyone!
it is gNet.
Not me! I encrypt all my headers, too!
.
.
.
The e-mail doesn't really go anywhere. But Boy is it secure!
Well, Senator Stevens does, but I have my doubts about many of the others. Remember, a lot of them are old. And very busy.
However, the Intellectual Property Action Committee is trying