But what happens when someone starts trolling the trolls? (i.e. bringing fraudulent lawsuits against people claiming that they were filing fraudulent lawsuits)
Re:Is there a way to permanantly disable this?
on
Another Sony Rootkit?
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· Score: 1
If I understand the situation correctly, the reason this can't be permanently disabled is that the Sony software is installing a driver. A driver basically amounts to a way to inject code into the kernel, so the Sony software is actually replacing the Windows API functions in the table where they are looked up. The pseudo-code would look something like the following (appologies for wrong signatures or function names):
One solution to this problem is to have drivers run in user-mode instead of kernel-mode (which is possible on Linux), but even with such a system there is likely to be other ways to do this.
Bottom line, any driver you install can open up this sort of security hole (possibly unintentional due to bugs in the code). This is why installing a driver usually required adminitrator rights.
Sounds to me like this could easily backfire. Most strategies have a counter strategy. The classic example of this is rock, paper, scissors. If I can predict what move you will make, then I can choose the strategy that will beat it. If you (in an attempt to predict my strategy) are using a computer program to choose your moves, then you become easier to predict and thus easier to defeat.
People have been trying to do this for the stock market for decades. At best you can get a temporary advantage, until everyone else starts using the same system. (It's actually something like the Gödel incompleteness theorem, in that a (sufficiently advanced) system can't predict what will happen when their is also a copy of itself working against it.)
I'm not trying to be combative, I'd just love to see some real statistics. The only things that I have seen, actually indicates that SMTP only accounts for a couple of percent of the total network traffic. (Those stats had a number of flaws so I'm not going to stand by them or post them, but they do raise the question of whether E-mail uses that much bandwidth.)
I would have thought the GDP was exponential since money tends to breed more money.
Even if it wasn't, wouldn't the presence of exponentially growing companies force the GDP to go exponential after a while. Maybe such companies will quickly die before they get big enough to do that, but a bad business strategy that leads to a quick death sounds like a bad business strategy (modulo the Enrons and SCOs of the world).
So does that mean I shouldn't host an online game or use Remote Desktop to connect to my machine? For that matter, since UDP is connectionless, are you going to call an incoming UDP packet a server?
But I'm not *going* to his site. He is voluntarily(*) giving me a copy of his web page. After that, what I do with the web page is completely up for grabs (**). I might view the web page with ads. I might view the web page without ads. I might just index it for my search engine. I might feed it to my random number generator (works best when the bits have a low information content;-)). But whatever I do, it is up to me. He is not entitled to anything (**).
(*) Technically he is advocating turning away certain groups based on their software-lifestyle, but I'll let others deal with that not so minor detail.
(**)... so long as I don't do anything that would trigger copyright law like distributing it to someone else.
Novell to Open Source Unix?
on
SCO Loses
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· Score: 1
I'm not completely following all of this so correct me if I'm wrong. It sounds like the courts said that Novell owns the Unix copyrights. If so, could (would?) Novell release the code so no one ever has to question whether Linux contains parts of Unix.
I'm saying that while it *is* a "cool idea" and might possibly lead to new physical insights or techniques, it doesn't "solve" NP-Completeness either practically (the energy requirements are ridiculously large) or theoretically (it's just a massively parallel computer which the computer theoreticians already knew about).
The people who wrote the paper knew this (thus the disclaimer they put in the abstract), but people still insist on making noise trying to claim they did something that they didn't.
The tests are bogus and I welcome any technology to remove them from the equation.
The tests may very well be bogus. I won't debate you on that point, but if the software has a bug that has led to false convictions then it is also bogus. Technology doesn't automatically imply better, but it does make more people willing to blindly accept the answers it gives.
That said, the odds are against the device having such a bug, so this is probably either a desperation move or being pursued for the principal of the matter.
I think the most moronic part about that is that they claim their mark is being misused or diluted or whatever. But because of its widespread use in modern media and the like EVERYONE is going to know by the age of 10 what the symbol means...Medical Help Here! I might be wrong about this, but from what I can tell, technically speaking "Medical Help Here" isn't what the symbol means. A better translation would be "Neutral, Medical Entity. Don't shoot!" I don't think a hospital that refused to treat enemy wounded would be allowed to use the symbol. I'm pretty sure you're not even allowed to use a gun if you wear that symbol because if you use a gun you wouldn't be neutral any more.
Is the "expert" a native English speaker? "Botnet, Trojan, and Back Door are example of malicious codes..." Aside from the grammatical atrocities, I have never heard of my fellow software engineers referring to software programs as "codes." A back-door is not a "code" or a program, nor are botnets. Bots are, Trojan (Horses) are, and they can open back doors. Precision, please?
First, this is an ad hominem attack.
Second, it's not even a very good ad hominem attack. There are a lot of (native English speaking) people that use the plural form (i.e. "codes") instead of treating it as a mass noun (i.e. "code"). It seems to be more common among the older generations of programmers. (I personally think it should be a mass noun, but I'm just pointing out that a significant minority use the plural form. Sort of like "ketchup" vs "catsup".)
I do high performance numerical computation research, and something like this would help a lot.
As part of my research I have to hand tweak and tune the inner most loops of our algorithms. Unfortunately, the performance of moderns processors behaves so counter-intuitively when pushing the floating-point units to the max, that it is basically impossible to guess whether a certain change will speed up or slow down the computation. Being able to know *exactly* what in in the CPU would greatly help with this.
V = Value (positive or negative) of that event occuring
To maximize E you should consider influencing events with large P*|V|. If |V| is large enough, it can compensate for a small P.
Disclaimer: This is only a first order analysis. A more complex analysis would consider things like statistical variance, the likely hood of gambler's ruin, events that are non-additive, etc.
Heh, cute, but I fear that would just teach everyone to constantly do an irish jig. Humans are very good at adapting in ways you don't expect.
Since AA is an army based offense/defense game it would also kind of defeat the style of the game. An effective defensive team may spend 5-10 min waiting for the offense to advance to the point that they have chosen to defend. The offense takes that long to get there because they have to carefully clear each room so they don't get shoot in the back while taking the objective. When your job is to defend a certain objective and one bullet kills with no respawn, "camping" is a very legitimate tactic.
That said, I still think banning the word "camping" was silly.
The key word there is "threat", as in something-that-hasn't-happened-but-might. (The running away argument is a straw man, because most jurisdictions don't allow that anyway. (Even though the police could shoot you in the back if you were running away from a crime.))
Reminds me of when Amarica's Army tried an unusually way of filtering for a while. Instead of blocking the word, they substituted it with less offensive synonym. For example if I said "Joe is camping", you would see "Joe is using tactics". Three things came out of that:
It took me a while to figure why everyone was complaining about tactics.
People quickly learned to miss-spell certain key works (e.g. "campting" became "kamping").
I think AA gave up on the idea b/c anything like this is to easy to defeat. (See #2)
I have to wonder what sort of plausibly deniable setups you could have to destroy any such hard-drive evidence without being cited for contempt of court or destruction of evidence.
1) "Here's my hard drives... Yes, your honor, they are encrypted, but the key was destroyed 2 years ago in a *ahem* fire and I'm still working on trying to get that data back. I expect to have cracked the encryption around 2025." (In truth I burned the key after memorizing the key.)
2) "Here's my hard drive... Yes, your honor, they are just randomly generated data. But don't destroy the data I need it as a key to decrypt something else completely unrelated to the present matter that isn't on any of these hard drives." (In truth the hard-drives are encrypted but using one of those encryptions that are impossible to distinguish from random data.)
Would these work legally? Other ideas that might work?
Thank you for the link. I will definitely give some thought to your suggestion of being a poll worker.
From the looks of it, this won't handle stray marks. So unless you reject on undervotes (bad for people who choose not to vote on a particular race), the case of someone circling outside a bubble would be missed. Having the computer fill-in-the-bubble for you, would help with that (and in my mind is the only good reason for e-voting).
To be clear, I would like to see a voting system that has one machine produce a human (and machine) readable hard-copy that is then counted by a different machine. The hard copy is the ultimate arbiter in a recount. (Of course this might only replace hanging chads with low toner and smudged or jammed paper.)
My home county uses a fill-in-the-bubble system, but I have never seen any indication that it would do what you describe. But it does sound like a good idea. Can you provide documentation to back up your claims?
"I hate to see some many trees being cut down in the name of democracy to create those paper ballots."
At least in the USA, paper is made from trees that are grown for that very purpose on tree farms. They are never taken from the rainforest (it would be to expensive to ship overseas) and local forests are considered less advantageous than farms because the trees on a farm are a lot easier to harvest and tweak to meet our needs.
So if you love trees please remember: using more paper = more demand for trees = more tree farms = more trees. Support both democracy and more trees; use paper ballots.
Encrypt the hard drive with a nice long, randomly generated key. Never look at the key or store it anywhere except RAM. When the police confiscate your computer, they unplug it and destroy the only copy of the key. "Sorry, your honor, I can't produce the key because the police destroyed it."
How would this play out in law? Could get prosecuted for destruction of evidence?
As stated this scheme has a number of flaws so feel free to refine it. For one, you would want a UPS to protect against data loss due to power outages. For another, it lacks in the plausible deniability area (e.g. "Your honor, I didn't expect the police to unplug-my-machine/open-the-case/etc. so I didn't warn them not to do that.").
I think the GP is making a distinction between knowing the factors of every prime number ahead of time and given a prime being able to find its factors. The former would imply a finite set of factors and thus that there exist a finite number of primes which contradicts the well known proof that there are an infinite number of primes.
Slashdot Mirror
But what happens when someone starts trolling the trolls? (i.e. bringing fraudulent lawsuits against people claiming that they were filing fraudulent lawsuits)
If I understand the situation correctly, the reason this can't be permanently disabled is that the Sony software is installing a driver. A driver basically amounts to a way to inject code into the kernel, so the Sony software is actually replacing the Windows API functions in the table where they are looked up. The pseudo-code would look something like the following (appologies for wrong signatures or function names):
One solution to this problem is to have drivers run in user-mode instead of kernel-mode (which is possible on Linux), but even with such a system there is likely to be other ways to do this.
Bottom line, any driver you install can open up this sort of security hole (possibly unintentional due to bugs in the code). This is why installing a driver usually required adminitrator rights.
Sounds to me like this could easily backfire. Most strategies have a counter strategy. The classic example of this is rock, paper, scissors. If I can predict what move you will make, then I can choose the strategy that will beat it. If you (in an attempt to predict my strategy) are using a computer program to choose your moves, then you become easier to predict and thus easier to defeat. People have been trying to do this for the stock market for decades. At best you can get a temporary advantage, until everyone else starts using the same system. (It's actually something like the Gödel incompleteness theorem, in that a (sufficiently advanced) system can't predict what will happen when their is also a copy of itself working against it.)
Are there any stats to backup your claim?
I'm not trying to be combative, I'd just love to see some real statistics. The only things that I have seen, actually indicates that SMTP only accounts for a couple of percent of the total network traffic. (Those stats had a number of flaws so I'm not going to stand by them or post them, but they do raise the question of whether E-mail uses that much bandwidth.)
I would have thought the GDP was exponential since money tends to breed more money.
Even if it wasn't, wouldn't the presence of exponentially growing companies force the GDP to go exponential after a while. Maybe such companies will quickly die before they get big enough to do that, but a bad business strategy that leads to a quick death sounds like a bad business strategy (modulo the Enrons and SCOs of the world).
So does that mean I shouldn't host an online game or use Remote Desktop to connect to my machine? For that matter, since UDP is connectionless, are you going to call an incoming UDP packet a server?
But I'm not *going* to his site. He is voluntarily(*) giving me a copy of his web page. After that, what I do with the web page is completely up for grabs (**). I might view the web page with ads. I might view the web page without ads. I might just index it for my search engine. I might feed it to my random number generator (works best when the bits have a low information content ;-)). But whatever I do, it is up to me. He is not entitled to anything (**).
... so long as I don't do anything that would trigger copyright law like distributing it to someone else.
(*) Technically he is advocating turning away certain groups based on their software-lifestyle, but I'll let others deal with that not so minor detail.
(**)
I'm not completely following all of this so correct me if I'm wrong.
It sounds like the courts said that Novell owns the Unix copyrights.
If so, could (would?) Novell release the code so no one ever has to
question whether Linux contains parts of Unix.
Ah, well. It's probably a pipe dream.
I'm saying that while it *is* a "cool idea" and might possibly lead to new physical insights or techniques, it doesn't "solve" NP-Completeness either practically (the energy requirements are ridiculously large) or theoretically (it's just a massively parallel computer which the computer theoreticians already knew about).
The people who wrote the paper knew this (thus the disclaimer they put in the abstract), but people still insist on making noise trying to claim they did something that they didn't.
The tests may very well be bogus. I won't debate you on that point, but if the software has a bug that has led to false convictions then it is also bogus. Technology doesn't automatically imply better, but it does make more people willing to blindly accept the answers it gives.
That said, the odds are against the device having such a bug, so this is probably either a desperation move or being pursued for the principal of the matter.
From the last line of the abstract, "The proposed method is meant purely as a gedankenexperiment."
Translation, "We know this wont ever work; we just think it's cool."
Even better is in section five where they cite Wikipedia for the definition of a quantum computer.
First, this is an ad hominem attack.
Second, it's not even a very good ad hominem attack. There are a lot of (native English speaking) people that use the plural form (i.e. "codes") instead of treating it as a mass noun (i.e. "code"). It seems to be more common among the older generations of programmers. (I personally think it should be a mass noun, but I'm just pointing out that a significant minority use the plural form. Sort of like "ketchup" vs "catsup".)
I do high performance numerical computation research, and something like this would help a lot.
As part of my research I have to hand tweak and tune the inner most loops of our algorithms. Unfortunately, the performance of moderns processors behaves so counter-intuitively when pushing the floating-point units to the max, that it is basically impossible to guess whether a certain change will speed up or slow down the computation. Being able to know *exactly* what in in the CPU would greatly help with this.
To maximize E you should consider influencing events with large P*|V|. If |V| is large enough, it can compensate for a small P.
Disclaimer: This is only a first order analysis. A more complex analysis would consider things like statistical variance, the likely hood of gambler's ruin, events that are non-additive, etc.
Heh, cute, but I fear that would just teach everyone to constantly do an irish jig. Humans are very good at adapting in ways you don't expect.
Since AA is an army based offense/defense game it would also kind of defeat the style of the game. An effective defensive team may spend 5-10 min waiting for the offense to advance to the point that they have chosen to defend. The offense takes that long to get there because they have to carefully clear each room so they don't get shoot in the back while taking the objective. When your job is to defend a certain objective and one bullet kills with no respawn, "camping" is a very legitimate tactic.
That said, I still think banning the word "camping" was silly.
The key word there is "threat", as in something-that-hasn't-happened-but-might. (The running away argument is a straw man, because most jurisdictions don't allow that anyway. (Even though the police could shoot you in the back if you were running away from a crime.))
Reminds me of when Amarica's Army tried an unusually way of filtering for a while. Instead of blocking the word, they substituted it with less offensive synonym. For example if I said "Joe is camping", you would see "Joe is using tactics". Three things came out of that:
I have to wonder what sort of plausibly deniable setups you could have to destroy any such hard-drive evidence without being cited for contempt of court or destruction of evidence.
... Yes, your honor, they are encrypted, but the key was destroyed 2 years ago in a *ahem* fire and I'm still working on trying to get that data back. I expect to have cracked the encryption around 2025." (In truth I burned the key after memorizing the key.)
... Yes, your honor, they are just randomly generated data. But don't destroy the data I need it as a key to decrypt something else completely unrelated to the present matter that isn't on any of these hard drives." (In truth the hard-drives are encrypted but using one of those encryptions that are impossible to distinguish from random data.)
1) "Here's my hard drives
2) "Here's my hard drive
Would these work legally? Other ideas that might work?
Thank you for the link. I will definitely give some thought to your suggestion of being a poll worker.
From the looks of it, this won't handle stray marks. So unless you reject on undervotes (bad for people who choose not to vote on a particular race), the case of someone circling outside a bubble would be missed. Having the computer fill-in-the-bubble for you, would help with that (and in my mind is the only good reason for e-voting).
To be clear, I would like to see a voting system that has one machine produce a human (and machine) readable hard-copy that is then counted by a different machine. The hard copy is the ultimate arbiter in a recount. (Of course this might only replace hanging chads with low toner and smudged or jammed paper.)
My home county uses a fill-in-the-bubble system, but I have never seen any indication that it would do what you describe. But it does sound like a good idea. Can you provide documentation to back up your claims?
"I hate to see some many trees being cut down in the name of democracy to create those paper ballots."
At least in the USA, paper is made from trees that are grown for that very purpose on tree farms. They are never taken from the rainforest (it would be to expensive to ship overseas) and local forests are considered less advantageous than farms because the trees on a farm are a lot easier to harvest and tweak to meet our needs.
So if you love trees please remember: using more paper = more demand for trees = more tree farms = more trees. Support both democracy and more trees; use paper ballots.
Encrypt the hard drive with a nice long, randomly generated key. Never look at the key or store it anywhere except RAM. When the police confiscate your computer, they unplug it and destroy the only copy of the key. "Sorry, your honor, I can't produce the key because the police destroyed it."
How would this play out in law? Could get prosecuted for destruction of evidence?
As stated this scheme has a number of flaws so feel free to refine it. For one, you would want a UPS to protect against data loss due to power outages. For another, it lacks in the plausible deniability area (e.g. "Your honor, I didn't expect the police to unplug-my-machine/open-the-case/etc. so I didn't warn them not to do that.").
I think the GP is making a distinction between knowing the factors of every prime number ahead of time and given a prime being able to find its factors. The former would imply a finite set of factors and thus that there exist a finite number of primes which contradicts the well known proof that there are an infinite number of primes.