I wonder if Intel's marketing team considered the possibility that calling the technology "Intel Insider" might backfire on them, by creating an association between "DRM" and "Intel" (and perhaps their slogan, "Intel Inside").
That is not how "content protection" is generally understood. TLS does not attempt to prevent the receiver of a message from forwarding the message to your adversary; "content protection" usually refers to systems that do attempt to prevent the receiving party from forwarding the message.
I think the idea is that there is a certain size beyond which these buffers will create more problems than they solve, or perhaps more accurately that there is a threshold ratio of buffer size to the bandwidth of a link which, once exceeded, will create problems. Bufferbloat is just an easy term to refer to this condition.
But I am not the author, so perhaps he can chime in.
Ross Anderson's security engineering textbook discusses this problem, as well as how cryptographic systems like Keeloq might be attacked, and some other related topics. I am going to guess, though, that the manufacturer's view is that a thief with the technical skills needed to take advantage of these vulnerabilities is rare (not saying I necessarily agree) and that most thieves will just smash the window and try to steal the radio before the cops arrive (do people still steal car radios?).
Well yeah, I basically have to agree with you there. Actually, the PS3's configuration is extremely limiting for a lot of problems -- I have a table somewhere comparing a PS3 (using OtherOS) to an IBM server with Cell processors, and the server really kicked the pants off of the PS3. Still, there are some uses cases where the PS3 comes out ahead, and OP was asking why anyone would want to run custom firmware on their PS3 (presumably for reasons other than the reasons people have run NetBSD on toasters).
I'm not being a troll here, I'm asking a serious question. Wouldn't we be better off for it?
No, we will not be better off for it, any more than we were better off for it when a Sherlock Holmes film was released that did not show Holmes in all his cocaine-injecting, tobacco-smoking, misogynistic glory. What is wrong with acknowledging that at one time, racial slurs were commonplace, and that the literature of that period reflected it? Is it not better if, when your children read this book, you then explain to them that society has moved on from those days, instead of trying to construct a delusional view of history in which such days never existed?
Why can't you just use your PC? Everything you need is available there...
The Cell BE? I know it is a bit dated, but it is still a fairly powerful CPU, and while it is not as "sexy" as GPGPU, it is still competitive considering the price you pay for a PS3.
Another option is 802.11y, and I have a friend working on setting up an ISP in a rural area using it. With 11y, you pay a yearly fee for each base station, but it is fairly small; if enough people were to work together, the fees would basically be irrelevant.
The reason HAM came to mind, for me, is that HAM has a much longer range than 11y. I am not convinced that the density of people who want to fork the Internet is high enough for 11y to make sense, although I could be wrong. HAM may be low bandwidth, but that would be tolerable early on, at least if people were dedicated to the cause.
Like I said, I might be wrong about the number of people who would be committed to maintaining a new internet.
Interestingly, Mac OS X (last I checked) did not have a built in MLS policy framework; Windows 2000 and up do, and enterprise GNU/Linux distros do. It really comes down to a question of competence, namely, are these systems configured to actually take advantage of their security systems? Unfortunately, the answer appears to be no; you can sneak data out of secure environments using a CD, you can have a random program from the net read classified documents, etc.
Most GNU/Linux systems (and I assume but cannot really say for sure about Mac OS X) will not just execute an arbitrary file that you download. Generally you have to at least set execute permissions on the file to get it to run, or feed it to its interpreter on its own (if it is a script). Additionally, for a secure desktop, one would generally set "noexec" on the home directories partition, so that users cannot just execute random code.
Really though, this is all superficial by comparison with multilevel security systems, which for someone with top secret clearance seems like an obvious measure. MLS policies should forbid a program that you download from some random website from even opening a file that is "Top Secret," let alone sending a copy to some other system. A lot of research went into such systems, which are designed around the assumption that the threats are internal (e.g. a malicious program that is already running on the system) and that the goal is to prevent leaks (as opposed to the more common goal of restricting unauthorized access).
The people entrusted with these sensitive documents are not trained to check for digital signatures on emails that come from "the white house?" Do these people even bother to sign their messages?
Well that really depends on a few things. Technically, we already have the technology to do such a thing over HAM radio, although the barriers to entry are fairly high (licensing process, equipment, etc.), so I doubt that such a network would become a hotbed of pedophile activity. Personally, I think doing it over HAM radio would be great, since it would mitigate a lot of the costs currently associated with the Internet (like running cables); however, I do acknowledge that such a move would shut out most of the Internet's current users.
Usenet wasn't driven out over by one web board, it was driven out by millions of them so it's still distributed
Clearly, you have a different idea about what "distributed" means. Do the web's message boards exchange messages with each other?
Finally regarding locked down devices, even as "general" as the iPhone and pretty much everything else with a CPU is I consider it more of an appliance.
Which is, of course, precisely what Steve Jobs and the Apple Marketing Team want people to view it as.
You forgot (5) AOL. AOL, which directed millions of people to Usenet without giving them even the most brief introduction to etiquette or how to even be polite. A couple thousand university freshman can be told how to be polite on Usenet by its existing users; millions upon millions of random people from across the country are far more than the existing users could have handled, and Usenet was basically overrun.
Of course, there is good news: Usenet is alive and well, and at least some newsgroups still have interesting discussions that do not get flooded by the world's lunatics.
Right, so, how would you define a "smartphone" and what differentiates it from, say, a "dumb phone?" CPU and RAM? What sort of software it has installed? What sort of software it is capable of running? What sort of input devices it has? None of these definitions work; either they fail to capture certain models, or they exclude phones that are too old (or will come to include all phones after a certain amount of time).
You may not like it, but there are no modern cell phones which are not properly called "computers." They may have less computing power, but that is frankly irrelevant; it does not take a lot of computing power to, say, connect to a POP3 server and download an email message. You would be hard pressed to find a cell phone produced over the past five years that does not have sufficient computing resources to do such a thing, even if it perhaps lacks the software to do so. No, you are not going to play 3D games on some random low-end cell phone; nor are you going to process terabytes of radiotelescope data on your laptop.
NOT enough RAM, NOT enough CPU power, NOT a capable enough CPU
Oh, well, since we are making distinctions based on computer power, I guess that PC from 1975 must not be a computer, since it has less computing resources and power than the microcontrollers I used in my undergrad courses. Hey, I know, I'll just say that because your laptop does not have as much computing power as the Cray sitting in my department's server room, your laptop is not a computer!
Clearly, you have some misconceptions about what a computer is.
Here we have an ordinary cop with full access to your phone, who has no computer forensic training and no oversight
Not entirely true. It is true, most cops are not experts in computer forensics, but if you look through cryptome, you will see that police departments are putting out manuals for dealing with computer evidence. My favorite example is "catch him with his encryption down," which explains to arresting officers how to deal with suspects' use of whole disk encryption. As for oversight, the police do have to follow certain evidence handling procedures, regardless of whether or not the evidence is digital, and failure to do so would be grounds for dismissing the evidence.
For me, the question is not whether or not the police are competent to handle computer evidence; it is whether or not they should be allowed to do so without a warrant. They should not be able to search through any computer (cell phones included, even "dumb phones") that I own without a warrant, regardless of whether or not I am carrying it around. They certainly should not be able to use a computer that was in my possession to gain access to other computer systems that they would otherwise require a warrant to access. The police should not be able to make an end-run around the constitution just because there is new technology involved.
Why would they have to do that? You have to remember, it's all really simply clicking on an app button. That's it. End of story. No looking for passwords or hunting for a computer or whatever. Just click an app.
...and a competent defense lawyer would immediately claim that the police were performing an illegal search if they allowed the phone to connect to some computer system somewhere. Believe it or not, the police do have to follow certain procedures, and defense lawyers do get evidence dismissed on the grounds that the procedures were not followed. Take a look through cryptome some time, and you will see some examples of procedures that the police need to follow while collecting computer evidence (some legal, some technical -- the point is, the police do not just look through these things willy-nilly).
There are still a bunch of phones sold that do no more than make calls and send/receive text messages
Go ahead and open up one of those phones, and tell me what you see. Just because the phone does not allow you to extend its capabilities does not mean that it is not a computer; it is just a computer that has been locked down and severely restricted.
"Some are just regular texting phones" -fixed that for you.
That is an artificial distinction. The phone has everything needed to meet the definition of "electronic computer," it just happens to have been deliberately restricted by the manufacturer and sometimes the cell phone carrier. The fact that you are only supposed to use it for sending text messages or making phone calls does not mean that it is not a computer.
Even if they understand such a distinction (if one ever enters into ruling/precedent/law), nowadays, it's getting harder to differentiate between the two, with so many services and apps that blur the line between locally stored stuff and stuff stored in the cloud. Making the situation worse is that some of the normally locally stored stuff nowadays is often stored in the cloud (like my contacts).
In which case, your defense lawyer could try arguing that the police obtained the evidence illegally by connecting to a server they did not have a warrant to search. It is no different than the police using your house keys to enter your home while you are under arrest. (A competent prosecutor may, however, argue that it is better described as the police reading a pocket notebook and learning a secret phrase that must be spoken for an undercover agent to engage a drug dealer; I am sure that, in the wake of this ruling, there will be such a case.)
Of course, data stored "in the cloud" could be searched by the police without your being arrested and without them entering your home or touching any of your property, so the point is moot.
I did not say that I agreed with the ruling, I just gave my understanding of it. As far as I can tell, the judges are equating a cell phone with a pocket notebook -- the police can look through a pocket notebook, so why not cell phones and other electronics as well?
As for the level of access your cell phone might give them...that is, frankly, irrelevant. First of all, the police cannot arrest you, and then use your housekeys to enter your home and perform a warrantless search of your house, so I doubt that a court would allow the police to use passwords stored on your smartphone to access computers in your home (from TFA, it appears that the case in question involved the police viewing a text message stored on the arrested person's phone). As for the data stored on online services, the police could search that without even informing you of the search, and may even be able to look through it without a warrant. There is no good distinguishing characteristic of "smart phones" that could be used to differentiate them from "dumb phones" -- all modern cell phones are mobile computers, some are just less restricted than others.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if Intel's marketing team considered the possibility that calling the technology "Intel Insider" might backfire on them, by creating an association between "DRM" and "Intel" (and perhaps their slogan, "Intel Inside").
That is not how "content protection" is generally understood. TLS does not attempt to prevent the receiver of a message from forwarding the message to your adversary; "content protection" usually refers to systems that do attempt to prevent the receiving party from forwarding the message.
I will say that Intel Insider is NOT a DRM technology.
So Intel created Intel insider, an extra layer of content protection
Talk about doublethink.
...because Apple doesn't make personal computers? Or did you mean, "us Windows users?"
I think the idea is that there is a certain size beyond which these buffers will create more problems than they solve, or perhaps more accurately that there is a threshold ratio of buffer size to the bandwidth of a link which, once exceeded, will create problems. Bufferbloat is just an easy term to refer to this condition.
But I am not the author, so perhaps he can chime in.
Ross Anderson's security engineering textbook discusses this problem, as well as how cryptographic systems like Keeloq might be attacked, and some other related topics. I am going to guess, though, that the manufacturer's view is that a thief with the technical skills needed to take advantage of these vulnerabilities is rare (not saying I necessarily agree) and that most thieves will just smash the window and try to steal the radio before the cops arrive (do people still steal car radios?).
Well yeah, I basically have to agree with you there. Actually, the PS3's configuration is extremely limiting for a lot of problems -- I have a table somewhere comparing a PS3 (using OtherOS) to an IBM server with Cell processors, and the server really kicked the pants off of the PS3. Still, there are some uses cases where the PS3 comes out ahead, and OP was asking why anyone would want to run custom firmware on their PS3 (presumably for reasons other than the reasons people have run NetBSD on toasters).
I'm not being a troll here, I'm asking a serious question. Wouldn't we be better off for it?
No, we will not be better off for it, any more than we were better off for it when a Sherlock Holmes film was released that did not show Holmes in all his cocaine-injecting, tobacco-smoking, misogynistic glory. What is wrong with acknowledging that at one time, racial slurs were commonplace, and that the literature of that period reflected it? Is it not better if, when your children read this book, you then explain to them that society has moved on from those days, instead of trying to construct a delusional view of history in which such days never existed?
Why can't you just use your PC? Everything you need is available there...
The Cell BE? I know it is a bit dated, but it is still a fairly powerful CPU, and while it is not as "sexy" as GPGPU, it is still competitive considering the price you pay for a PS3.
Another option is 802.11y, and I have a friend working on setting up an ISP in a rural area using it. With 11y, you pay a yearly fee for each base station, but it is fairly small; if enough people were to work together, the fees would basically be irrelevant.
The reason HAM came to mind, for me, is that HAM has a much longer range than 11y. I am not convinced that the density of people who want to fork the Internet is high enough for 11y to make sense, although I could be wrong. HAM may be low bandwidth, but that would be tolerable early on, at least if people were dedicated to the cause.
Like I said, I might be wrong about the number of people who would be committed to maintaining a new internet.
It's not hard at all to install FireFox in userspace
It can be, if you mounted the home directories partition with "noexec".
Interestingly, Mac OS X (last I checked) did not have a built in MLS policy framework; Windows 2000 and up do, and enterprise GNU/Linux distros do. It really comes down to a question of competence, namely, are these systems configured to actually take advantage of their security systems? Unfortunately, the answer appears to be no; you can sneak data out of secure environments using a CD, you can have a random program from the net read classified documents, etc.
If anything, we should blame the IT staff.
To be fair, though, there is at least one government agency that uses the latest and greatest (or so we think) and that has remained secure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
Most GNU/Linux systems (and I assume but cannot really say for sure about Mac OS X) will not just execute an arbitrary file that you download. Generally you have to at least set execute permissions on the file to get it to run, or feed it to its interpreter on its own (if it is a script). Additionally, for a secure desktop, one would generally set "noexec" on the home directories partition, so that users cannot just execute random code.
Really though, this is all superficial by comparison with multilevel security systems, which for someone with top secret clearance seems like an obvious measure. MLS policies should forbid a program that you download from some random website from even opening a file that is "Top Secret," let alone sending a copy to some other system. A lot of research went into such systems, which are designed around the assumption that the threats are internal (e.g. a malicious program that is already running on the system) and that the goal is to prevent leaks (as opposed to the more common goal of restricting unauthorized access).
The people entrusted with these sensitive documents are not trained to check for digital signatures on emails that come from "the white house?" Do these people even bother to sign their messages?
Well that really depends on a few things. Technically, we already have the technology to do such a thing over HAM radio, although the barriers to entry are fairly high (licensing process, equipment, etc.), so I doubt that such a network would become a hotbed of pedophile activity. Personally, I think doing it over HAM radio would be great, since it would mitigate a lot of the costs currently associated with the Internet (like running cables); however, I do acknowledge that such a move would shut out most of the Internet's current users.
Usenet wasn't driven out over by one web board, it was driven out by millions of them so it's still distributed
Clearly, you have a different idea about what "distributed" means. Do the web's message boards exchange messages with each other?
Finally regarding locked down devices, even as "general" as the iPhone and pretty much everything else with a CPU is I consider it more of an appliance.
Which is, of course, precisely what Steve Jobs and the Apple Marketing Team want people to view it as.
You forgot (5) AOL. AOL, which directed millions of people to Usenet without giving them even the most brief introduction to etiquette or how to even be polite. A couple thousand university freshman can be told how to be polite on Usenet by its existing users; millions upon millions of random people from across the country are far more than the existing users could have handled, and Usenet was basically overrun.
Of course, there is good news: Usenet is alive and well, and at least some newsgroups still have interesting discussions that do not get flooded by the world's lunatics.
Right, so, how would you define a "smartphone" and what differentiates it from, say, a "dumb phone?" CPU and RAM? What sort of software it has installed? What sort of software it is capable of running? What sort of input devices it has? None of these definitions work; either they fail to capture certain models, or they exclude phones that are too old (or will come to include all phones after a certain amount of time).
You may not like it, but there are no modern cell phones which are not properly called "computers." They may have less computing power, but that is frankly irrelevant; it does not take a lot of computing power to, say, connect to a POP3 server and download an email message. You would be hard pressed to find a cell phone produced over the past five years that does not have sufficient computing resources to do such a thing, even if it perhaps lacks the software to do so. No, you are not going to play 3D games on some random low-end cell phone; nor are you going to process terabytes of radiotelescope data on your laptop.
NOT enough RAM, NOT enough CPU power, NOT a capable enough CPU
Oh, well, since we are making distinctions based on computer power, I guess that PC from 1975 must not be a computer, since it has less computing resources and power than the microcontrollers I used in my undergrad courses. Hey, I know, I'll just say that because your laptop does not have as much computing power as the Cray sitting in my department's server room, your laptop is not a computer!
Clearly, you have some misconceptions about what a computer is.
Here we have an ordinary cop with full access to your phone, who has no computer forensic training and no oversight
Not entirely true. It is true, most cops are not experts in computer forensics, but if you look through cryptome, you will see that police departments are putting out manuals for dealing with computer evidence. My favorite example is "catch him with his encryption down," which explains to arresting officers how to deal with suspects' use of whole disk encryption. As for oversight, the police do have to follow certain evidence handling procedures, regardless of whether or not the evidence is digital, and failure to do so would be grounds for dismissing the evidence.
For me, the question is not whether or not the police are competent to handle computer evidence; it is whether or not they should be allowed to do so without a warrant. They should not be able to search through any computer (cell phones included, even "dumb phones") that I own without a warrant, regardless of whether or not I am carrying it around. They certainly should not be able to use a computer that was in my possession to gain access to other computer systems that they would otherwise require a warrant to access. The police should not be able to make an end-run around the constitution just because there is new technology involved.
Why would they have to do that? You have to remember, it's all really simply clicking on an app button. That's it. End of story. No looking for passwords or hunting for a computer or whatever. Just click an app.
There are still a bunch of phones sold that do no more than make calls and send/receive text messages
Go ahead and open up one of those phones, and tell me what you see. Just because the phone does not allow you to extend its capabilities does not mean that it is not a computer; it is just a computer that has been locked down and severely restricted.
"Some are just regular texting phones" -fixed that for you.
That is an artificial distinction. The phone has everything needed to meet the definition of "electronic computer," it just happens to have been deliberately restricted by the manufacturer and sometimes the cell phone carrier. The fact that you are only supposed to use it for sending text messages or making phone calls does not mean that it is not a computer.
Even if they understand such a distinction (if one ever enters into ruling/precedent/law), nowadays, it's getting harder to differentiate between the two, with so many services and apps that blur the line between locally stored stuff and stuff stored in the cloud. Making the situation worse is that some of the normally locally stored stuff nowadays is often stored in the cloud (like my contacts).
In which case, your defense lawyer could try arguing that the police obtained the evidence illegally by connecting to a server they did not have a warrant to search. It is no different than the police using your house keys to enter your home while you are under arrest. (A competent prosecutor may, however, argue that it is better described as the police reading a pocket notebook and learning a secret phrase that must be spoken for an undercover agent to engage a drug dealer; I am sure that, in the wake of this ruling, there will be such a case.)
Of course, data stored "in the cloud" could be searched by the police without your being arrested and without them entering your home or touching any of your property, so the point is moot.
even remote connections to data not on my phone
At what point did they rule that the police can do that?
I did not say that I agreed with the ruling, I just gave my understanding of it. As far as I can tell, the judges are equating a cell phone with a pocket notebook -- the police can look through a pocket notebook, so why not cell phones and other electronics as well?
As for the level of access your cell phone might give them...that is, frankly, irrelevant. First of all, the police cannot arrest you, and then use your housekeys to enter your home and perform a warrantless search of your house, so I doubt that a court would allow the police to use passwords stored on your smartphone to access computers in your home (from TFA, it appears that the case in question involved the police viewing a text message stored on the arrested person's phone). As for the data stored on online services, the police could search that without even informing you of the search, and may even be able to look through it without a warrant. There is no good distinguishing characteristic of "smart phones" that could be used to differentiate them from "dumb phones" -- all modern cell phones are mobile computers, some are just less restricted than others.