Anyone know if they fixed the keyboard on this one? The one I got last year still can't accept touch typing: you must type slowly. So rapidly typing "asdf" will generate "assdf" or sometimes "asdsf". Pretty unusable unfortunately.
This is really a question of statistics not of mathematics. Having done experiments on MBA students, we found that a well written multiple choice question is more accurate than 4 well written essays. The fact that we can easilly have 50 multiple choice questions and a maximum of 8 essays makes it a no brainer that multiple choice is much more accurate.
So it isn't a matter of how you reward guessing (which psychologist will say that rewarding guessing actually gets better accuracy). It is a question of how well written the questions are. Further the pass rate has absolutely nothing to do with the fraction needed to pass. Even high school students understand this one. So he seems totally confused.
In the quote given, RMS isn't critizing the companies. He is critizing the government. So yes, companines should try to maximize share holder value. But the government should protect the "people" since that is how they represent. Of course, it is us people that need to keep the government in line. So, I think he is smart enough to view his critism as being directed at people like me--those how don't vote.:-)
I find that using one of those blue ice pads along with a towel to be a wonderful way to cool your lap. Just putting a towel on your lap means that the heat you generate yourself is still reflected back to you. But if you put an ice pad (I use the squishy ones) on top of the towel, it will keep cool for an hour or two. THen just switch it with one that is in the freezer.
later,
Dean
p.s. My girlfriend made me a tray that I now use. She tiled it with small tiles in the pattern of two penguins. You can probably guess which operating system I use.:-)
I disagree. Think of this as an anti-smap enabling technology. It allows you to KNOW where the email orginated in a fashion that can't be spoofed. Further it can't be denied to have orginated there.
This means that there are two ways you can do spam.
Use free email accounts.
grab lots of domains register lots of public keys.
The first one already is close to solved. The owners of free email accounts don't want spamers using their resources. So they will work hard to keep these sources down. The second method is easier to stop. For example, don't recieve mail until a public key has been registered for at least 24 hours. That give pleanty of time for the spamer to be located and added to a black hole listing.
So I agree that in and of itself, this technology can be used by spamers to sneak under the radar. But since the attacks back at them will be so much more precise, they will end up being hit alot harder in the end.
Back in the good old days, IBM made a PC, and pretty much only they made it. They put the phrase
copyrighted by IBM (1980)
in the BIOS. This then ended up in the ROMs that were burned on to the boards. When the clones came along, some code started testing to see if it was running on a "real IBM PC" or a clone by looking for this copy right message.
My favorite way of fight back by the clones was inserting a message:
some code expects to find at this location the phrase "copyrighted by IBM (1980)"
Amazing how much two double quotes can change the legal status of a message. I wonder if this can be used as an unfortunate precedence in this situation. I hope not.
All he is exccluding are gravity-waves. These are different then the basic curvature of space that generates gravity itself. Basically they are little ripples that float on top of the curvature. So blocking them won't levitate us.
It isn't necessary for ISP's to opt in for a RBL to be effective. All we need is full information.
An ISP can do nothing--and the black hole either lists them as good or bad.
An ISP can opt in--in which case they are treated as above, BUT, it is now listed as having opt'd in.
An ISP can opt out. Now its only listing is that it has opted out.
This is similar to the way google handles copywrite violations--ask and they will remove copywrited material from their cite.
Of course, many people will want to refuse mail from those who have opt'd out. But that is their choice for which the RBL isn't responsable.
The principle here is from economics--there is not need to require information to be public. Simply having the lack of information being public is good enough. Anyone who doesn't want to have their information public is considered to have something to hide.
The only way the government could possible allow a little cryptography without giving away everything is to have EVERY message signed. that means every TCP/IP packet. Then the burden decrypting the message lies with the person who signed the message. If they double encrypt, they have to double decrypt when forced by the government. If they refuse, this would legally be taken as admission of guilt.
Then all the government has to keep track of are public keys. Of course all public keys would have to be registered to physical users.
Any scheme that has anoynomous trafic would be required to decrypt all messages just to check that they could be decrypted. This would then be equivalent to a no-crypto system as far as the government reading of message would be concerned.
If you have an option and haven't heard of Black-Scholes, you are in trouble. Having to explain what the Black-Scholes equation is to someone who holds an option would be like having to explain what a subroutine was to someone who programmed a computer. There might be programmers that clueless, and there might be employees that clueless. But, they shouldn't be the target audience of the article.
(Full disclosure: I actually teach statistics at Wharton. I don't know these two guys. But if there is one equation in all of economics that actually correctly describes the world, it is the Black-Scholes equation.)
Stalman said "freedom zero" -- the freedom to run the software for any purpose is the most basic right. This is in contradiction to the GPL which says that I can't run the program as a subroutine unless I open source my code. Thus, he is arguing that the correct liscense is the LGPL.
If you take carbon and burn it to C02 it releases energy. If you then add light to seperate back into carbon and O2 it takes energy. Pretty much the exact same amount of energy you got out of it the first time. So if this "system" were to actually work, it would be the perfect perputual motion machine!
When playing non-zero sum games, kids will often still try to see who gets "more." So effectively turning in a non-zero sum game into a zero sum game.
I would think that most things that don't follow this pattern are typically called "play" rather than called "games."
But there have been some good cooperative games written over the years for computers. My favorite is a very old game called bubble bobble (orginal nintento!)
Here is my rather long (and negative) review of Schneier's book. For those unwilling to wade through it, my key point is that being a good mathimatician doesn't necessarilly qualify one to be a good programmer. He truely doesn't understand programming and hence doesn't believe that a single secure piece of software could ever be written.
After writing a wonderful book on Applied Cryptography, Bruce
Schneier lost his faith in mathematics. This loss of faith came from
looking at truly applied cryptography, namely looking at actual
source code. This code so scared him that he wrote a book saying that
cryptography is not The Answer(tm). I beg to differ.
He thinks real code should scare you so much that you should hire his
company on continuously monitor your computer. Not a onetime
vetting -- you should pay him every day for the rest of eternity.
Not a bad racket.
The key points he makes are as follows:
There are about 5 - 15 bugs per 1000 lines of code.
Software has been doubling in complexity and size every year or two.
Windows NT has 35 - 60 million lines of code and hence about 100k
bugs.
Therefore no modern product will every actually be secure.
Modern software will generate new bugs at a faster rate than even the
"many-eyeballs" of open source can squash them.
But code doesn't have to be written this way. You can put all of your
risky code in a small enough package that it could be checked for
errors. The word kernel comes to mind.:-)
But, he also says that Linux suffers the same problem that MS has.
Unfortunately, I don't know the kernel well enough to comment on how
much it has grown and he doesn't provide data on the growth of Unix
kernels. Somehow I think this absence of information might reflect
the fact that the current Linux kernel is not 1000 times bigger than say a
Solaris kernel of the early 80s.
But under Linux, is even counting the lines of code a good measure?
Somehow I think the kernel is modular enough so that if I load a new
PCMCIA module, it wouldn't automatically be given rights to read and
write to arbitrary files on the system. Please correct me if I'm wrong, and I'll
sleep much less well at night. So not all the code in the kernel
should be counted as being the same.
I would be much happier with his analysis if he had looked at
contrasts between sendmail (which is notoriously buggy) and qmail (which
doesn't appear to be as buggy). The software point is that the
dangerous code in qmail is all in one program--and that program
doesn't trust any of the other pieces that make up qmail. So if that
part is actually programmed bug-free, then there shouldn't be ANY
possible bug in the rest of the code that can undermine security.
This is good design. Almost any line of the sendmail
program could undermine the security of the system. This is a truly
a monolithically bad design.
To list another example, almost all of current open source pgp (namely
gpg and its supporting material) uses gpg for the actual encryption
and some other program for the viewing. So no matter how stupid the
viewing program is, it is impossible for it to undermine security.
(OK, it could send a copy of the plain text after it sends a copy of
the encrypted message--but that would be a easy bug to catch.)
Even viruses like the ILOVEYOU worm in a hopelessly insecure operating
system should be fairly easy to avoid. If you simply had Visual Basic
always run in something equivalent to a change-rooted environment, it
would have been impossible to write such a virus. Whether this could
be done in windoz isn't the issue--instead the point is that people
have known about this sort of problem for years and there has been a
simple fix for years.
In his defense, he does seem to spend most of his time working in the
MS world. That he worries about someone running a game server on
their machine without having vetted all of the code would be a very
rational worry in MS. But, there are ways this could be done under
Linux that would maintain total security of the machine it ran on
without looking at even one line of source code (run the program as a
regular user in a chroot environment sounds safe to me).
So I see the picture something like this.
Cryptography is not a solution to all problems:
Digital cash probably won't catch on.
Smart cards probably won't ever work.
All the fancy algorithms for voting and sharing information
will never replace the voting booth.
Playing poker will probably use a trusted intermediary instead
of a cryptographic protocol.
Cryptography can solve some things: SSH, GPG and VPNs all work.
But, the key reason a system will be cracked into is not new
mathematics but bad coding.
There are ways of coding (see Lakos for many good ideas) that
will lead to secure programs.
Users will always be a weak link, but a good system (say Linux)
should only compromise what that user had access to and not the whole
network.
Conclusion
Schneier is incorrect when he says that security is a process.
Instead, security is a solvable software engineering problem. In
fact, I think a few small pieces of it have actually been solved. I
think mail handling has been solved (qmail) and telnet has been solved
(ssh2 with public/private keys). Certainly serving static web pages
is solved (apache).
Keeping users from getting the root access should be a solvable
problem, but I don't know if it is currently solved or not on
Linux systems. Once that is solved, serving CGI scripts, running
arbitrary servers, downloading arbitrary code off the net and running it
on your local machine should all be safe things to do. (Now I don't
think the automatic updates to GNOME is going to pass security muster
anytime soon.)
So let me make a statement that most clearly separates Schneier's
position from my own. Consider the following two systems:
A Linux system running ssh2 and qmail that is never patched. Total
passive management. (Of course the ssh2 would require public
key/private key pairs instead of passwords.)
An NT system (or whatever is the latest and greatest MS
product) that has an active administrator who installs all MS patches
within 24 hours of their release and upgrades to the newest version
whenever it comes out.
Which do you think has a higher chance of being secure over the next
few years? Schneier argues that active management is the only way of
providing reasonable security, so my strawman version of him would
pick the NT system. I think the Linux machine would probably be safe
for 10 years. (I'd go longer, but don't trust the key length of ssh2
to protect against all new mathematics and hardware past about 10
years.)
If you went with NT, read Schneier's book. He will give you good
arguments to believe that active management is the only answer. If
you went with a limited Linux system, then join the open software
movement and see if we can add more features to the Linux box without
compromising security.
As a professor, citations are my livelyhood. Not to cite someone is the worst crime one can do in academia. The usual concept is expressed as "you can critize me as much as you like, just spell my name correctly."
On the other hand, open source truely is trying to make information have a life of its own. For example I was part of a group who designed a course bidding system for Wharton. Rest assured--that if Harvard wanted to buy (or use) our system, they would definitely NOT want to have a Wharton logo on it. Since this basic level of freedom is already in comerical code--we should allow it in open source code also.
e-voting would generate a perfect market for votes
on
Online Voting?
·
· Score: 1
If you have any way of making sure who you actually voted for, then you can use this exact same proceedure to convince someone else who you voted for. Thus, you can then sell them your vote--and more importantly, they will be happy to pay since they know how you voted.
There are two responses to this. The easy way, is to view the market as the Right Answer(tm) to all things and view this as a feature. In this case, we might as well make it easier and give each user a chit than can be used to make their vote. This chit then could be traded on ebay at the going rate.
On the other hand, for those who feel that democracy is supposed to implement one-person one-vote instead of one-buck one-vote would want to undermine this market. The only way of doing that is to make it very difficult to make place a vote. For example, you might require the person to send dozens of emails back and forth to the system--any one of which can change the result of the final vote. (For example, use a parity function.) Then unless the purchaser watches all the emails over a period of weeks, they wouldn't know who they voted for.
Unfortunately the democratic solution only works if you make e-voting truely an anoying and costly way of voting.
Bummer that not everything can be solve by computers.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect most of their value is in the ads on the side of the phone booth.
Finally--some intelligence! I was worried the simulation of slashdot had crashed and only NPC were posting.
Anyone know if they fixed the keyboard on this one? The one I got last year still can't accept touch typing: you must type slowly. So rapidly typing "asdf" will generate "assdf" or sometimes "asdsf". Pretty unusable unfortunately.
This is really a question of statistics not of mathematics. Having done experiments on MBA students, we found that a well written multiple choice question is more accurate than 4 well written essays. The fact that we can easilly have 50 multiple choice questions and a maximum of 8 essays makes it a no brainer that multiple choice is much more accurate.
So it isn't a matter of how you reward guessing (which psychologist will say that rewarding guessing actually gets better accuracy). It is a question of how well written the questions are. Further the pass rate has absolutely nothing to do with the fraction needed to pass. Even high school students understand this one. So he seems totally confused.
In the quote given, RMS isn't critizing the companies. He is critizing the government. So yes, companines should try to maximize share holder value. But the government should protect the "people" since that is how they represent. Of course, it is us people that need to keep the government in line. So, I think he is smart enough to view his critism as being directed at people like me--those how don't vote. :-)
later,
Dean
p.s. My girlfriend made me a tray that I now use. She tiled it with small tiles in the pattern of two penguins. You can probably guess which operating system I use.
This means that there are two ways you can do spam.
The first one already is close to solved. The owners of free email accounts don't want spamers using their resources.
So they will work hard to keep these sources down. The second method is easier to stop. For example, don't recieve mail until
a public key has been registered for at least 24 hours. That give pleanty of time for the spamer to be located and added
to a black hole listing.
So I agree that in and of itself, this technology can be used by spamers to sneak under the radar. But since the attacks back at them will be so much more precise, they will end up being
hit alot harder in the end.
copyrighted by IBM (1980)
in the BIOS. This then ended up in the ROMs that were burned on to the boards. When the clones came along, some code started testing to see if it was running on a "real IBM PC" or a clone by looking for this copy right message.
My favorite way of fight back by the clones was inserting a message:
some code expects to find at this location the phrase "copyrighted by IBM (1980)"
Amazing how much two double quotes can change the legal status of a message. I wonder if this can be used as an unfortunate precedence in this situation. I hope not.
Dean
All he is exccluding are gravity-waves. These are different then the basic curvature of space that generates gravity itself. Basically they are little ripples that float on top of the curvature. So blocking them won't levitate us.
This is similar to the way google handles copywrite violations--ask and they will remove copywrited material from their cite.
Of course, many people will want to refuse mail from those who have opt'd out. But that is their choice for which the RBL isn't responsable.
The principle here is from economics--there is not need to require information to be public. Simply having the lack of information being public is good enough. Anyone who doesn't want to have their information public is considered to have something to hide.
Then all the government has to keep track of are public keys. Of course all public keys would have to be registered to physical users.
Any scheme that has anoynomous trafic would be required to decrypt all messages just to check that they could be decrypted. This would then be equivalent to a no-crypto system as far as the government reading of message would be concerned.
Dean
(Full disclosure: I actually teach statistics at Wharton. I don't know these two guys. But if there is one equation in all of economics that actually correctly describes the world, it is the Black-Scholes equation.)
Stalman said "freedom zero" -- the freedom to run the software for any purpose is the most basic right. This is in contradiction to the GPL which says that I can't run the program as a subroutine unless I open source my code. Thus, he is arguing that the correct liscense is the LGPL.
Damn, have to type faster next time!
Dean
I would think that most things that don't follow this pattern are typically called "play" rather than called "games."
But there have been some good cooperative games written over the years for computers. My favorite is a very old game called bubble bobble (orginal nintento!)
dean
Here is my rather long (and negative) review of Schneier's book. For those unwilling to wade through it, my key point is that being a good mathimatician doesn't necessarilly qualify one to be a good programmer. He truely doesn't understand programming and hence doesn't believe that a single secure piece of software could ever be written.
After writing a wonderful book on Applied Cryptography, Bruce Schneier lost his faith in mathematics. This loss of faith came from looking at truly applied cryptography, namely looking at actual source code. This code so scared him that he wrote a book saying that cryptography is not The Answer(tm). I beg to differ.
He thinks real code should scare you so much that you should hire his company on continuously monitor your computer. Not a onetime vetting -- you should pay him every day for the rest of eternity. Not a bad racket.
The key points he makes are as follows:
- There are about 5 - 15 bugs per 1000 lines of code.
- Software has been doubling in complexity and size every year or two.
- Windows NT has 35 - 60 million lines of code and hence about 100k
bugs.
- Therefore no modern product will every actually be secure.
Modern software will generate new bugs at a faster rate than even the "many-eyeballs" of open source can squash them.But code doesn't have to be written this way. You can put all of your risky code in a small enough package that it could be checked for errors. The word kernel comes to mind. :-)
But, he also says that Linux suffers the same problem that MS has.
Unfortunately, I don't know the kernel well enough to comment on how
much it has grown and he doesn't provide data on the growth of Unix
kernels. Somehow I think this absence of information might reflect
the fact that the current Linux kernel is not 1000 times bigger than say a
Solaris kernel of the early 80s.
But under Linux, is even counting the lines of code a good measure? Somehow I think the kernel is modular enough so that if I load a new PCMCIA module, it wouldn't automatically be given rights to read and write to arbitrary files on the system. Please correct me if I'm wrong, and I'll sleep much less well at night. So not all the code in the kernel should be counted as being the same.
I would be much happier with his analysis if he had looked at contrasts between sendmail (which is notoriously buggy) and qmail (which doesn't appear to be as buggy). The software point is that the dangerous code in qmail is all in one program--and that program doesn't trust any of the other pieces that make up qmail. So if that part is actually programmed bug-free, then there shouldn't be ANY possible bug in the rest of the code that can undermine security. This is good design. Almost any line of the sendmail program could undermine the security of the system. This is a truly a monolithically bad design.
To list another example, almost all of current open source pgp (namely gpg and its supporting material) uses gpg for the actual encryption and some other program for the viewing. So no matter how stupid the viewing program is, it is impossible for it to undermine security. (OK, it could send a copy of the plain text after it sends a copy of the encrypted message--but that would be a easy bug to catch.)
Even viruses like the ILOVEYOU worm in a hopelessly insecure operating system should be fairly easy to avoid. If you simply had Visual Basic always run in something equivalent to a change-rooted environment, it would have been impossible to write such a virus. Whether this could be done in windoz isn't the issue--instead the point is that people have known about this sort of problem for years and there has been a simple fix for years.
In his defense, he does seem to spend most of his time working in the MS world. That he worries about someone running a game server on their machine without having vetted all of the code would be a very rational worry in MS. But, there are ways this could be done under Linux that would maintain total security of the machine it ran on without looking at even one line of source code (run the program as a regular user in a chroot environment sounds safe to me).
So I see the picture something like this.
- Cryptography is not a solution to all problems:
- Digital cash probably won't catch on.
- Smart cards probably won't ever work.
- All the fancy algorithms for voting and sharing information
will never replace the voting booth.
- Playing poker will probably use a trusted intermediary instead
of a cryptographic protocol.
- Cryptography can solve some things: SSH, GPG and VPNs all work.
- But, the key reason a system will be cracked into is not new
mathematics but bad coding.
- There are ways of coding (see Lakos for many good ideas) that
will lead to secure programs.
- Users will always be a weak link, but a good system (say Linux)
should only compromise what that user had access to and not the whole
network.
ConclusionSchneier is incorrect when he says that security is a process. Instead, security is a solvable software engineering problem. In fact, I think a few small pieces of it have actually been solved. I think mail handling has been solved (qmail) and telnet has been solved (ssh2 with public/private keys). Certainly serving static web pages is solved (apache).
Keeping users from getting the root access should be a solvable problem, but I don't know if it is currently solved or not on Linux systems. Once that is solved, serving CGI scripts, running arbitrary servers, downloading arbitrary code off the net and running it on your local machine should all be safe things to do. (Now I don't think the automatic updates to GNOME is going to pass security muster anytime soon.)
So let me make a statement that most clearly separates Schneier's position from my own. Consider the following two systems:
-
A Linux system running ssh2 and qmail that is never patched. Total
passive management. (Of course the ssh2 would require public
key/private key pairs instead of passwords.)
- An NT system (or whatever is the latest and greatest MS
product) that has an active administrator who installs all MS patches
within 24 hours of their release and upgrades to the newest version
whenever it comes out.
Which do you think has a higher chance of being secure over the next few years? Schneier argues that active management is the only way of providing reasonable security, so my strawman version of him would pick the NT system. I think the Linux machine would probably be safe for 10 years. (I'd go longer, but don't trust the key length of ssh2 to protect against all new mathematics and hardware past about 10 years.)If you went with NT, read Schneier's book. He will give you good arguments to believe that active management is the only answer. If you went with a limited Linux system, then join the open software movement and see if we can add more features to the Linux box without compromising security.
On the other hand, open source truely is trying to make information have a life of its own. For example I was part of a group who designed a course bidding system for Wharton. Rest assured--that if Harvard wanted to buy (or use) our system, they would definitely NOT want to have a Wharton logo on it. Since this basic level of freedom is already in comerical code--we should allow it in open source code also.
There are two responses to this. The easy way, is to view the market as the Right Answer(tm) to all things and view this as a feature. In this case, we might as well make it easier and give each user a chit than can be used to make their vote. This chit then could be traded on ebay at the going rate.
On the other hand, for those who feel that democracy is supposed to implement one-person one-vote instead of one-buck one-vote would want to undermine this market. The only way of doing that is to make it very difficult to make place a vote. For example, you might require the person to send dozens of emails back and forth to the system--any one of which can change the result of the final vote. (For example, use a parity function.) Then unless the purchaser watches all the emails over a period of weeks, they wouldn't know who they voted for.
Unfortunately the democratic solution only works if you make e-voting truely an anoying and costly way of voting.
Bummer that not everything can be solve by computers.