The new option Microsoft authentication approach, as they describe it, is "two-step authentication", not "two-factor authentication". And, while the correct choice among the options they provide might make it two-factor authentication, they don't seem to focus on that in any particular way.
Two-factor authentication is "something you have and something you know" (commonly, the something you know is a password, the something you have is a device generating comfirmation codes.) The options for the second step in authentication (password is the required first step for Microsoft accounts) include a code sent to an email address on file, making it "something you know" (your Microsoft account password" plus "something else you know" (the password to alternative email.)
(Plus, since its sent through regular plaintext email if you are using that option, the second "step", in that case, relies on you supplying back information that Microsoft sends you over a completely insecure channel.)
I understand the *convenience* offered by the alternative to actual two-factor authentication here, but I don't understand why this is done since the convenience in "two-step" authentication that allows you to choose for it not to be two-factor authentication defeats the entire purpose of not using simple one-factor authentication.
Its not a straw man argument at all (its also perfectly true.)
That effect of the influx would be temporary.
See, that's a strawman argument, that is, a rebuttal of a point no one ever argued. No one said the effect would be permanent.
Gold would still be scarce.
Everything is scarce. The relative scarcity of gold would have changed, and gold would experience a (potentially extended, depending on the nature of the mining operation) period of unstable and declining value which would be very bad for it as a store of value and (depending on the volatility and the magnitude of the decline) potentially also as a unit of account and store of value.
One disadvantage of gold is that it depends on the scarcity of the metal.... if Asteroid Mining ever becomes a reality and someone happens to snag an asteroid with thousands of tons of easily extracted gold, the gold market will tank overnight.
Right, or for a slower but more long-lasting version of the same effect (but one that is concrete and historical, rather than theoretical), consider what happened as a result of the new supply of gold entering the European economy through Spain opening up colonies in the New World. That is certainly a real issue.
It doesn't, however, change the fact that gold has built in self-regulation that bitcoin lacks, in that increases or decreases in demand can, ceteris paribus, be expected to increase the rate of extraction in a way which mitigates long-term supply/demand imbalance, whereas bitcoin is consciously designed not to have that kind of self-regulating feature.
To be money, a thing must 1. be a unit of account, 2. a store of value and 3. a means of exchange.
This is, by the way, complete BS. While these are three widely recognized things for which things called money are used, the idea that a thing must be useful for all three to be "money" is deeply wrong (and, indeed, the three are generally inconsistent, and modern fiat currencies are a recognition that its important to have things that work well as #1 and #3 without being desirable as #2, since that encourages the store of value function to be served by productive investment rather than currency hoarding which kills productivity.)
That's what's so odd to me about Steve Forbes' comments. He seems to be a proponent of the gold standard. Well, gold is very similar to bitcoins (i.e. a fixed total amount, people mining to get more, etc.)
Gold is a little better self-regulating than bitcoin, in that (while there is considerable lag, obviously) an increase in demand for gold that drives up its price can increase the resources devoted to extracting gold, increasing quantity supplied and exerting some stabilizing force on the price. Bitcoin has a built in protocol specifically designed (even during the phase where bitcoins are still being produced) to prevent more total resources devoted to mining from resulting in a faster overall rate of bitcoin production.
There is a fixed amount of bitcoins. There isn't a fixed amount of fiat currencies. So if 1 bitcoin is worth $50 today and $100 tomorrow you could argue the bitcoin is the same value both days, but the dollar is worth LESS tomorrow.
There also isn't a fixed amount of most of the useful goods for life which you use currency to buy; both the producing population and the productivity of that population tends to increase over time; population increase may be slowing over the long term, but productivity increases (hopefully) aren't. Even with the mild inflation that fiat currencies are usually managed to target, major fiat currencies are almost certainly more stable in terms of value with regard to the goods used in daily life than any fixed (and even moreso, as is the case with bitcoin once they all have been produced, declining -- as irreplaceable loss can still occur) supply currency would ever be.
Or is it the value of currency fluctuating making the price of gold fluctuate? One could ponder whether gold's value is increasing or whether the fiat currencies are all getting devalued.
I suppose one could wonder that, except that: 1. We can (and regularly do) actually measure the purchasing power fiat currencies have for goods in the economy, and 2. You have the direction of gold prices with regard to major fiat currencies recently backwards.
If Chrome on ChromeOS or on Android supports this standard, why cant the decryption blob be ported to other platforms Chrome runs on and be used that way? If Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera or other browsers choose to support it, the decryption blob can be ported to those APIs too.
I suspect that Netflix doesn't want to port to multiple platforms and multiple APIs (multiple platforms are probably essentially, multiple APIs they want to avoid), so, since they already have a desktop solution that works on the vast majority of desktops, they are waiting to support HTML5 outside of ChromeOS/Android until Encrypted Media Extensions have traction as a crossbrowser standard API, so that they can rely on just porting what they have to different platforms without worrying about different APIs as well, and so that they can stop supporting Silverlight at the same time. I don't think they want to take on the burden of crossplatform support of an HTML5 decryption module and still continuing needing to support Silverlight.
Obviously, if there are valuable platforms where HTML5 is the only viable mechanism, then it makes sense to support HTML5 on those platforms even if they still need to support Silverlight because it works on the desktops they are concerned about, across browsers, while HTML5 w/EME doesn't.
Its interesting that it is allowed in chromebook (a locked down system) but not in chrome in general. will be suspicious that DRM in open source has a future until it is available in Chromium and major content providers support and use it.
EME has been in Chromium since m25 (behind a command-line flag initially) and is currently in Chrome stable and enabled-by-default.
Because Google is held up as the shining example of what the telcos *could* be providing us... yet in Japan Sony is offering twice the speed for less cost.
Its not twice the speed. 2Gbps up/1Gbps down is not twice as fast as 1Gbps symmetric.
Plus, Google Fiber has never been billed (even by its fans, much less Google) as "best in the world", but at best "far better than anything that is currently available in the US at its price". People have often cited is as a push toward the US not being as far behind other parts of the developed world in broadband as it currently is.
That's not really the problem. Sure, it takes more code to define a reusable template than to just use HTML to define a use-one widget, but that's expected. The savings from templates come from reuse, not from using them once.
XBL 2.0 is not a W3C standard, its a W3C Working Note -- which is very far from a standard -- that has a big fat "no one is maintaining or implementing this" on it.
It seems to be dead because the competing HTML Template (current W3C working draft) model was more successful in attracting commitments from implementers.
No you didn't fix it, you made it wrong. Netflix (not the studios) wants to go to HTML5 (the studios couldn't care less about HTML5 vs. Silverlight outside of DRM.) The studios won't licenses content to Netflix without Netflix using DRM, so Netflix also wants to continue to use DRM. (The studios are happy enough not selling to Netflix, since there are plenty of other streaming rental outlets that do use DRM, so if Netflix chooses not to, it hurts Netflix -- who loses content and, shortly afterward, customers -- but not so much the studios.)
etflix is already using HTML5 for Chromebook. [...] How come they can't roll this out to web browsers more generically? Getting the DRM binary blob installed in the client's web browser is an issue or something?
Chrome, unlike "web browsers more generically", already supports the Encrypted Media Extensions discussed in TFS. So, yes, the mechanism they use to support Chromebooks doesn't work more generically.
Just because Regular Joe can't find a use for it, doesn't mean it's of no use to anyone. Already drug dealers and their customers have found it useful. Whether you and I find that morally offensive or not, it's still a practical use.
As long as they are of limited use outside of the black market, that use relies very heavily on the fact that exchange of sovereign currencies for bitcoins and vice versa is fairly unregulated, and at the same time that illicit use it is likely to be among the motivations to increase monitoring and regulation of exchange activities.
My question, what happens when the last bitcoin is mined. does the system then collapse? Or will there be a mechanism and incentive for paying people to maintain the mining operations? If so, that is what I would be working towards right now. Middle men is where the money will be.
The incentive was built-in from the start: bitcoin transactions, when initiated, can include a transaction fee for the miner who processes the transaction, and mining software can prioritize transactions to process by the transaction fees included in the transaction.
BitCoin, by design, makes itself a power waster until it runs out of coins to 'mine'.
Mining is always important to bitcoin, over time (as the pace of bitcoin generation slows by the design of the protocol) the "producing new coins" reward declines and, the intent is, the "transaction fees" reward increases.
Fractional reserve banking doesn't create more US dollars
No, actually, it exactly creates more US dollars in circulation. Sure, some of them are only account notations rather than physical bills or coins, but since you can use those for all the purposes of US dollars -- including the government purposes which are the ultimate focus of fiat money -- those notations of account are exactly as much a part of the US dollar money supply as physical dollars.
So once 21 million is hit...no more power is needed, because you can't generate more?
"Mining", over time, becomes less about gaining rewards from getting a share of the new bitcoins generated and more about getting rewards from share of the transaction fees on the network. Both are distributed to miners based on share of processing power devoted to mining.
I've tried and tried to wrap my head around this, but it makes no sense to me. How can you have fractional-reserve banking if the coins have to match a digital signature?
The same way you had fractional reserve banking when the official currency was commodity-based (gold, silver, or bimetallic standard); bank notes -- physical or virtual -- are traded which are denominated in and redeemable for the base currency.
And if they are just used as backing for a fiat currency, who is to say that someone kept enough bitcoins in stock to cover the fiat money?
Fiat is irrelevant -- its a fractional-reserve representation currency money that is being discussed, independently of whether it is made official by a government (and has some value support from this fact), which is what makes a "fiat currency".
And fractional reserve means, by definition, that there is not enough deposit to convert all the currency in circulation to the backing commodity. That would be a full-reserve representational currency, which doesn't increase the circulating currency supply (but may be useful if the commodity is inconvenient to trade.)
ASIC miners are the near future of bitcoin mining and they have drastically reduced power requirements for drastically higher Gh/s mining rates.
Which doesn't, however, necessarily reduce the overall energy demand, since it just means that people spending the same energy cost with newer gear get a bigger share of the bitcoins mined, but since the processing it takes to mine bitcoins scales with the processing power in the bitcoin network, decreasing the energy cost per unit of processing power doesn't necessarily do anything to the energy cost per bitcoin.
IMO, that's arguably the BEST part of the whole bitcoin thing! It's a working experiment in creating a new, world-wide currency free of any central banking controls.
Its not free of central banking controls. As others have pointed to when theoretical weaknesses of the existing protocol were pointed out, the protocol can be (and has been) evolved by consensus of a sufficient subset of those mining (verifying transactions, even once actually producing new bitcoins is no longer a function.) As that's weighted by processing power that parties can afford and dedicate to the function, its essentially just like having a "central bank" with the power to set policy that is a coalition of the most powerful banks in a system -- sort of exactly like the Fed, without the weak public accountability provided by the tie between the Fed and the government.
So now prosecutorial misconduct that would get any civilian prosecutor disbarred is going to indefinitely delay the release of any prisoners who happen to be innocent.
Its actually not yet clear that the leakage of information (which appears to have gone both ways) was "prosecutorial misconduct" so much as poor isolation of IT systems which are used by both the prosecution and the defense.
Some of them aren't, but largely they are, hence why TFA indicates that the order not to use government computers for defense information came from "Col. Karen Mayberry, the chief military defense counsel".
and some of them are quite outspoken against their client's treatment.
Some of the most outspoken, from the beginning of the military tribunal system, have been the military defense counsel. (Also, some of the military judges. And, IIRC, even some of the military prosecutors have raised issues with the treatment of detainees.)
> [What kind of moronic "defense" lawyer...]...would use government (prosecution) computers in the first place?
There's a pretty big clue in the second paragraph of TFA: "The breach prompted Col. Karen Mayberry, the chief military defense counsel, to order all attorneys for Guantanamo detainees to stop using Defense Department computer networks to transmit privileged or confidential information until the security of such communications is assured."
The defense lawyers are, largely, like the prosecutors, US military officers. Using their employer-provided, and hence government, computers for their work is normal and expected for them.
If there were several other companies like Google who were willing to roll out fiber, THEN it would put tremendous pressure on the current monopolies. But it's never going to happen. Google will do Austin and maybe 1 or 2 other cities and that will be it. It takes too long and costs too much. Google has a lot of money, but even Google can't afford to run fiber to more than about 1 percent of the U.S.
The estimates I've seen say 15% of the US for ~$11 billion -- less than the Motorola Mobility acquisition.
Slashdot Mirror
The new option Microsoft authentication approach, as they describe it, is "two-step authentication", not "two-factor authentication". And, while the correct choice among the options they provide might make it two-factor authentication, they don't seem to focus on that in any particular way.
Two-factor authentication is "something you have and something you know" (commonly, the something you know is a password, the something you have is a device generating comfirmation codes.) The options for the second step in authentication (password is the required first step for Microsoft accounts) include a code sent to an email address on file, making it "something you know" (your Microsoft account password" plus "something else you know" (the password to alternative email.)
(Plus, since its sent through regular plaintext email if you are using that option, the second "step", in that case, relies on you supplying back information that Microsoft sends you over a completely insecure channel.)
I understand the *convenience* offered by the alternative to actual two-factor authentication here, but I don't understand why this is done since the convenience in "two-step" authentication that allows you to choose for it not to be two-factor authentication defeats the entire purpose of not using simple one-factor authentication.
Its not a straw man argument at all (its also perfectly true.)
See, that's a strawman argument, that is, a rebuttal of a point no one ever argued. No one said the effect would be permanent.
Everything is scarce. The relative scarcity of gold would have changed, and gold would experience a (potentially extended, depending on the nature of the mining operation) period of unstable and declining value which would be very bad for it as a store of value and (depending on the volatility and the magnitude of the decline) potentially also as a unit of account and store of value.
Right, or for a slower but more long-lasting version of the same effect (but one that is concrete and historical, rather than theoretical), consider what happened as a result of the new supply of gold entering the European economy through Spain opening up colonies in the New World. That is certainly a real issue.
It doesn't, however, change the fact that gold has built in self-regulation that bitcoin lacks, in that increases or decreases in demand can, ceteris paribus, be expected to increase the rate of extraction in a way which mitigates long-term supply/demand imbalance, whereas bitcoin is consciously designed not to have that kind of self-regulating feature.
This is, by the way, complete BS. While these are three widely recognized things for which things called money are used, the idea that a thing must be useful for all three to be "money" is deeply wrong (and, indeed, the three are generally inconsistent, and modern fiat currencies are a recognition that its important to have things that work well as #1 and #3 without being desirable as #2, since that encourages the store of value function to be served by productive investment rather than currency hoarding which kills productivity.)
Gold is a little better self-regulating than bitcoin, in that (while there is considerable lag, obviously) an increase in demand for gold that drives up its price can increase the resources devoted to extracting gold, increasing quantity supplied and exerting some stabilizing force on the price. Bitcoin has a built in protocol specifically designed (even during the phase where bitcoins are still being produced) to prevent more total resources devoted to mining from resulting in a faster overall rate of bitcoin production.
There also isn't a fixed amount of most of the useful goods for life which you use currency to buy; both the producing population and the productivity of that population tends to increase over time; population increase may be slowing over the long term, but productivity increases (hopefully) aren't. Even with the mild inflation that fiat currencies are usually managed to target, major fiat currencies are almost certainly more stable in terms of value with regard to the goods used in daily life than any fixed (and even moreso, as is the case with bitcoin once they all have been produced, declining -- as irreplaceable loss can still occur) supply currency would ever be.
I suppose one could wonder that, except that:
1. We can (and regularly do) actually measure the purchasing power fiat currencies have for goods in the economy, and
2. You have the direction of gold prices with regard to major fiat currencies recently backwards.
Unless, say, you discover either an unexpected new easily exploitable source of gold or a new mechanism of extracting gold efficiently
I suspect that Netflix doesn't want to port to multiple platforms and multiple APIs (multiple platforms are probably essentially, multiple APIs they want to avoid), so, since they already have a desktop solution that works on the vast majority of desktops, they are waiting to support HTML5 outside of ChromeOS/Android until Encrypted Media Extensions have traction as a crossbrowser standard API, so that they can rely on just porting what they have to different platforms without worrying about different APIs as well, and so that they can stop supporting Silverlight at the same time. I don't think they want to take on the burden of crossplatform support of an HTML5 decryption module and still continuing needing to support Silverlight.
Obviously, if there are valuable platforms where HTML5 is the only viable mechanism, then it makes sense to support HTML5 on those platforms even if they still need to support Silverlight because it works on the desktops they are concerned about, across browsers, while HTML5 w/EME doesn't.
EME has been in Chromium since m25 (behind a command-line flag initially) and is currently in Chrome stable and enabled-by-default.
There's a big difference.
Whether you personally have a use for it is a different question.
Its not twice the speed. 2Gbps up/1Gbps down is not twice as fast as 1Gbps symmetric.
Plus, Google Fiber has never been billed (even by its fans, much less Google) as "best in the world", but at best "far better than anything that is currently available in the US at its price". People have often cited is as a push toward the US not being as far behind other parts of the developed world in broadband as it currently is.
That's not really the problem. Sure, it takes more code to define a reusable template than to just use HTML to define a use-one widget, but that's expected. The savings from templates come from reuse, not from using them once.
XBL 2.0 is not a W3C standard, its a W3C Working Note -- which is very far from a standard -- that has a big fat "no one is maintaining or implementing this" on it.
It seems to be dead because the competing HTML Template (current W3C working draft) model was more successful in attracting commitments from implementers.
No you didn't fix it, you made it wrong. Netflix (not the studios) wants to go to HTML5 (the studios couldn't care less about HTML5 vs. Silverlight outside of DRM.) The studios won't licenses content to Netflix without Netflix using DRM, so Netflix also wants to continue to use DRM. (The studios are happy enough not selling to Netflix, since there are plenty of other streaming rental outlets that do use DRM, so if Netflix chooses not to, it hurts Netflix -- who loses content and, shortly afterward, customers -- but not so much the studios.)
Chrome, unlike "web browsers more generically", already supports the Encrypted Media Extensions discussed in TFS. So, yes, the mechanism they use to support Chromebooks doesn't work more generically.
As long as they are of limited use outside of the black market, that use relies very heavily on the fact that exchange of sovereign currencies for bitcoins and vice versa is fairly unregulated, and at the same time that illicit use it is likely to be among the motivations to increase monitoring and regulation of exchange activities.
The incentive was built-in from the start: bitcoin transactions, when initiated, can include a transaction fee for the miner who processes the transaction, and mining software can prioritize transactions to process by the transaction fees included in the transaction.
Mining is always important to bitcoin, over time (as the pace of bitcoin generation slows by the design of the protocol) the "producing new coins" reward declines and, the intent is, the "transaction fees" reward increases.
No, actually, it exactly creates more US dollars in circulation. Sure, some of them are only account notations rather than physical bills or coins, but since you can use those for all the purposes of US dollars -- including the government purposes which are the ultimate focus of fiat money -- those notations of account are exactly as much a part of the US dollar money supply as physical dollars.
"Mining", over time, becomes less about gaining rewards from getting a share of the new bitcoins generated and more about getting rewards from share of the transaction fees on the network. Both are distributed to miners based on share of processing power devoted to mining.
The same way you had fractional reserve banking when the official currency was commodity-based (gold, silver, or bimetallic standard); bank notes -- physical or virtual -- are traded which are denominated in and redeemable for the base currency.
Fiat is irrelevant -- its a fractional-reserve representation currency money that is being discussed, independently of whether it is made official by a government (and has some value support from this fact), which is what makes a "fiat currency".
And fractional reserve means, by definition, that there is not enough deposit to convert all the currency in circulation to the backing commodity. That would be a full-reserve representational currency, which doesn't increase the circulating currency supply (but may be useful if the commodity is inconvenient to trade.)
Which doesn't, however, necessarily reduce the overall energy demand, since it just means that people spending the same energy cost with newer gear get a bigger share of the bitcoins mined, but since the processing it takes to mine bitcoins scales with the processing power in the bitcoin network, decreasing the energy cost per unit of processing power doesn't necessarily do anything to the energy cost per bitcoin.
Its not free of central banking controls. As others have pointed to when theoretical weaknesses of the existing protocol were pointed out, the protocol can be (and has been) evolved by consensus of a sufficient subset of those mining (verifying transactions, even once actually producing new bitcoins is no longer a function.) As that's weighted by processing power that parties can afford and dedicate to the function, its essentially just like having a "central bank" with the power to set policy that is a coalition of the most powerful banks in a system -- sort of exactly like the Fed, without the weak public accountability provided by the tie between the Fed and the government.
Its actually not yet clear that the leakage of information (which appears to have gone both ways) was "prosecutorial misconduct" so much as poor isolation of IT systems which are used by both the prosecution and the defense.
Some of them aren't, but largely they are, hence why TFA indicates that the order not to use government computers for defense information came from "Col. Karen Mayberry, the chief military defense counsel".
Some of the most outspoken, from the beginning of the military tribunal system, have been the military defense counsel. (Also, some of the military judges. And, IIRC, even some of the military prosecutors have raised issues with the treatment of detainees.)
> [What kind of moronic "defense" lawyer...] ...would use government (prosecution) computers in the first place?
There's a pretty big clue in the second paragraph of TFA: "The breach prompted Col. Karen Mayberry, the chief military defense counsel, to order all attorneys for Guantanamo detainees to stop using Defense Department computer networks to transmit privileged or confidential information until the security of such communications is assured."
The defense lawyers are, largely, like the prosecutors, US military officers. Using their employer-provided, and hence government, computers for their work is normal and expected for them.
The estimates I've seen say 15% of the US for ~$11 billion -- less than the Motorola Mobility acquisition.