The level of preparation was what is novel. The chimpanzee carefully collected the rocks, including breaking larger rocks down into smaller ones, during the preparation phase of this attack. He not only developed a plan, but the plan involved tools that had to be created before actually executing the plan. The animal was not placed in a situation meant to deliberately encourage the use of tools, either (as he would have been had it been a well planned experiment).
Re:All this stuff is just made up crap.
on
The Shadow Factory
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, we know some of what the NSA is doing, because some of it is not SECRET or TOP SECRET. For example, the NSA publishes recommendations for computer security, and together with NIST certifies products that comply with those recommendations. The NSA also evaluates cryptographic algorithms and hardware, and CPU enhancements that may have cryptographic uses (for example, when HP was working on a CPU instruction set that included a bitwise permutation operation, some NSA agents showed up). Some of the evaluation techniques are secret, but the fact that the NSA is doing this is well known.
"30 years from now, people will think how stupid it was that you had to wait for your favorite TV show to come on at a specific time, rather than watching it whenever you wanted."
I'm not sure about the school in question, but my high school (here in America) had more than 3000 students. There was simply no way for the staff to know every student, so we had to show an ID card to enter and leave the building (the cards had out lunch period printed on them, so we couldn't leave during class hours). I do not see how facial recognition is any better than the ID card system at my school, but I can understand why school administrators need to use a system (when it involves humans or machines or a combination) to keep track of students rather than "building trust."
Of course, times have changed. I hear that these days, students at my high school need to swipe their ID cards and pass their bags through an X-ray before entering the building...
What will happen? Massive incompatibilities between device makers on either side of this war. The only solution is for consumers to install the EXT2 driver on their Windows PC, which is asking a lot for most people (really, I am not kidding, it is asking a lot).
Windows NT was once compiled for PowerPC; I doubt Microsoft would have a lot of trouble getting it to *run* on a mainframe. Getting it to run *well* is another story...
Mainframes are not dead, just overshadowed. New mainframes are still being installed, old mainframes are still being upgraded, and a single mainframe can compete with thousands of rack mounts for typical business workloads. We are not talking about reverting back to IBM terminals, we are talking about systems that act as servers -- refrigerator sized systems that can perform a billion business transactions in a 24 hour period, with power requirements in the 10kW range and diminished cooling requirements. Beyond just the practicality in large businesses, there is also the matter of reliability -- mainframes can be configured to double check every machine language instruction, which is important for certain applications (erroneous results from CPUs do happen from time to time, especially are the CPU temperature increases; imagine a system that is controlling satellites having a "hiccup" like that).
BIG customers. A lot of large corporations need to run Windows Server for things like Exchange, and to a lesser extent.NET. Those same large customers are attracted to mainframes, which offer very high availability and reliability, and can consolidate hundreds (or even thousands) of rack mounts into a single refrigerator sized system, drawing only 10kW~ in the process. $2M/year for a mainframe and mainframe operators could be justified in some cases if the cost of electricity and personnel needed to maintain a large, commodity server based datacenter is added up (this depends on the workloads; the commodity servers will also win sometimes).
The most common use of virtualization is running Exchange. Many companies just cannot break the Exchange "habit," even when they migrate to Linux servers. Being able to run Exchange on a mainframe would be a boon to many of these businesses, especially given the high level of reliability a mainframe provides. In a tough economy, even the high price of a mainframe might be attractive if it means eliminating a large number of rack mounts and personnel devoted to keeping Exchange online (as well as all the other servers typically found in large corporations).
"This new system will require the government to pay for the band width, development, and administration of the streaming site."
Which costs very little, considering that half of that is already in place (a web server is already online). The amount of money spent on this is a fraction of a percent of what we just spent bailing out the banking industry.
"It still depends on Flash as well."
Which is unfortunate. The Library of Congress should host Ogg encoded files for each of these videos, for people who need (or just want) non-streaming copies.
"I just hope they block overseas views so our taxes don't pay for that bandwidth. Just like the the BBC does with it's feeds."
Why? The LoC doesn't block overseas visitors, why should this?
irrelevant. It takes *ONE* person to do it and distribute the file. You missed the "and OCR it"."
Which is not a DRM break, it is an exploit of the last mile problem. It also fails to grant TTS functionality to anyone who wants it; it really grants to anyone who wants it for the specific media that someone with the equipment to scan the book has decided to scan.
"I wonder why the Authors' Guild doesn't complain about them?"
Because by law, the blind must have access to TTS, and therefore the authors' guild cannot make money on it. In this case, they see a money making opportunity, and want to capitalize on it at the expense of consumers.
"how hard could it be to set up a robot finger to press "Next Page" + a digital camera to photograph each page + OCR if desired????"
Most people cannot set that up. The point of DRM is not to be un-hackable, it is to be un-hackable by most people, and a system that requires the assembly of a robot is beyond what most Kindle users can set up. In fact, Kindle would be the most successful DRM system ever if it required a robotic finger to defeat, because that is a circumvention measure that cannot be distributed as a file over the Internet, the way systems like deCSS can be.
Amazon could easily disable TTS in an un-hackable way. Assuming these books are PDFs, Amazon could replace every other word with a picture of that word; it would look identical to the original, but would kill TTS. I do not know the hardware specification of Kindle, but I assume it has enough storage space for that and that OCR would be tough on its CPU.
Personally, I would demand lower prices for TTS-disabled books. I should not be paying the same amount that I would for a non-disabled book, and I certainly should be paying more for a book that is not disabled. Maybe I'll just go back to reading books from Project Gutenberg until this all settles down...
Dell desktop with Windows Vista (cheapest I could find in
Apple dekstop with OS X (cheapest I could find in
And one more thing:
1 year RHEL license for desktops: $80
So, in short, you do pay more to acquire Apple products, and there is no valid reason to deny that. You can try to claim that Apple products are better and therefore should cost more, but that is an entirely different argument.
No, if you RTA you will see that he specifically exempts people who are legally considered impaired. Not that I agree with his stance, nor do I think that his exemption is practical, but we should at least attack him for valid reasons. First and foremost, why should a blind person be required to go through special channels to get an audiobook, when there is no technical reason for that? Second, why should we pay more for an ebook because we *might* use a TTS engine to read it? What happens when a competing ebook reader, without TTS, is released, but we still have to pay for TTS royalties even when we cannot use TTS?
"If MSFT hosted them you don't think that Mozilla and Opera and Google wouldn't pitch a fit because they aren't getting the clicks anymore?"
Mozilla doesn't throw a fit when other OSes (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.) host Firefox builds. In fact, Mozilla's build team does a lot of work to make that possible. I do not think that Mozilla would be particularly angry if Microsoft hosted Mozilla builds, but if they did get their nickers in a twist, Microsoft could always grab Icecat and use that instead.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. These cameras do not just record criminals, and there is nothing stopping them from being used on ordinary citizens.
First, the cameras will be used to catch the dangerous guys: murderers, armed robbers, rapists, etc. Then, realizing that the ROI was not what they expected, the government will use the cameras to catch people for ticketable offenses: spitting, littering, not cleaning up after a dog, etc. After a while, a politician, playing up the "tough on crime" angle, pushes laws that make it illegal to circumvent the surveillance (for example, shining a laser pointer into a camera to overload the CCD), and some time after such a law is passed, someone is prosecuted for wearing a mask in public; the law cannot be used against everyone, of course, so specific groups of people become targets (depending on their skin color, religion, etc.).
Of course, that would never happen, because the privacy advocates are there to defend you. They are the people who DO mind being filmed/monitored in any public space.
Actually, leaving Facebook is the equivalent of a boycott on a retail chain. Facebook thrives by collecting and selling market information to advertisers; if people were to stop using Facebook, even for a week, it would hurt that business model.
Why bother to fight DRM? DRM is not the problem, the problem is that distributing DRM workarounds is illegal. Instead, why not go after the root problem, the DMCA?
"would the NSA spend money on software they can't use?"
Yes. Modern national security includes cybersecurity, which means that the NSA has an interest in securing the software that banks, financial markets, etc. are using.
"Also look at external offerings. Why run your own mail server, when you can do google apps - I think it's free for non-profits and.edus. Gmail, and instantly, you just saved a bunch of money, and a bunch of work. Now those people can be put to working on other higher priority stuff."
But it is not free-libre. You cannot study or modify the gmail codebase, with the exception of the web front end. Google can pull the plug at any minute, and suddenly an entire university is without email. Google could also suddenly decide (perhaps following investor pressure) that universities will no longer receive free service.
.
A competent sysadmin can set up a mail server without too much effort. Unless your university is tiny and not technically oriented, I do not think asking for competent sysadmins is terribly unfair.
Slashdot Mirror
The level of preparation was what is novel. The chimpanzee carefully collected the rocks, including breaking larger rocks down into smaller ones, during the preparation phase of this attack. He not only developed a plan, but the plan involved tools that had to be created before actually executing the plan. The animal was not placed in a situation meant to deliberately encourage the use of tools, either (as he would have been had it been a well planned experiment).
Actually, we know some of what the NSA is doing, because some of it is not SECRET or TOP SECRET. For example, the NSA publishes recommendations for computer security, and together with NIST certifies products that comply with those recommendations. The NSA also evaluates cryptographic algorithms and hardware, and CPU enhancements that may have cryptographic uses (for example, when HP was working on a CPU instruction set that included a bitwise permutation operation, some NSA agents showed up). Some of the evaluation techniques are secret, but the fact that the NSA is doing this is well known.
"30 years from now, people will think how stupid it was that you had to wait for your favorite TV show to come on at a specific time, rather than watching it whenever you wanted."
Funny, people still listen to the radio.
I'm not sure about the school in question, but my high school (here in America) had more than 3000 students. There was simply no way for the staff to know every student, so we had to show an ID card to enter and leave the building (the cards had out lunch period printed on them, so we couldn't leave during class hours). I do not see how facial recognition is any better than the ID card system at my school, but I can understand why school administrators need to use a system (when it involves humans or machines or a combination) to keep track of students rather than "building trust."
Of course, times have changed. I hear that these days, students at my high school need to swipe their ID cards and pass their bags through an X-ray before entering the building...
What will happen? Massive incompatibilities between device makers on either side of this war. The only solution is for consumers to install the EXT2 driver on their Windows PC, which is asking a lot for most people (really, I am not kidding, it is asking a lot).
Windows NT was once compiled for PowerPC; I doubt Microsoft would have a lot of trouble getting it to *run* on a mainframe. Getting it to run *well* is another story...
Mainframes are not dead, just overshadowed. New mainframes are still being installed, old mainframes are still being upgraded, and a single mainframe can compete with thousands of rack mounts for typical business workloads. We are not talking about reverting back to IBM terminals, we are talking about systems that act as servers -- refrigerator sized systems that can perform a billion business transactions in a 24 hour period, with power requirements in the 10kW range and diminished cooling requirements. Beyond just the practicality in large businesses, there is also the matter of reliability -- mainframes can be configured to double check every machine language instruction, which is important for certain applications (erroneous results from CPUs do happen from time to time, especially are the CPU temperature increases; imagine a system that is controlling satellites having a "hiccup" like that).
BIG customers. A lot of large corporations need to run Windows Server for things like Exchange, and to a lesser extent .NET. Those same large customers are attracted to mainframes, which offer very high availability and reliability, and can consolidate hundreds (or even thousands) of rack mounts into a single refrigerator sized system, drawing only 10kW~ in the process. $2M/year for a mainframe and mainframe operators could be justified in some cases if the cost of electricity and personnel needed to maintain a large, commodity server based datacenter is added up (this depends on the workloads; the commodity servers will also win sometimes).
The most common use of virtualization is running Exchange. Many companies just cannot break the Exchange "habit," even when they migrate to Linux servers. Being able to run Exchange on a mainframe would be a boon to many of these businesses, especially given the high level of reliability a mainframe provides. In a tough economy, even the high price of a mainframe might be attractive if it means eliminating a large number of rack mounts and personnel devoted to keeping Exchange online (as well as all the other servers typically found in large corporations).
"This new system will require the government to pay for the band width, development, and administration of the streaming site."
Which costs very little, considering that half of that is already in place (a web server is already online). The amount of money spent on this is a fraction of a percent of what we just spent bailing out the banking industry.
"It still depends on Flash as well."
Which is unfortunate. The Library of Congress should host Ogg encoded files for each of these videos, for people who need (or just want) non-streaming copies.
"I just hope they block overseas views so our taxes don't pay for that bandwidth. Just like the the BBC does with it's feeds."
Why? The LoC doesn't block overseas visitors, why should this?
irrelevant. It takes *ONE* person to do it and distribute the file. You missed the "and OCR it"."
Which is not a DRM break, it is an exploit of the last mile problem. It also fails to grant TTS functionality to anyone who wants it; it really grants to anyone who wants it for the specific media that someone with the equipment to scan the book has decided to scan.
"I wonder why the Authors' Guild doesn't complain about them?"
Because by law, the blind must have access to TTS, and therefore the authors' guild cannot make money on it. In this case, they see a money making opportunity, and want to capitalize on it at the expense of consumers.
"how hard could it be to set up a robot finger to press "Next Page" + a digital camera to photograph each page + OCR if desired????"
Most people cannot set that up. The point of DRM is not to be un-hackable, it is to be un-hackable by most people, and a system that requires the assembly of a robot is beyond what most Kindle users can set up. In fact, Kindle would be the most successful DRM system ever if it required a robotic finger to defeat, because that is a circumvention measure that cannot be distributed as a file over the Internet, the way systems like deCSS can be.
Amazon could easily disable TTS in an un-hackable way. Assuming these books are PDFs, Amazon could replace every other word with a picture of that word; it would look identical to the original, but would kill TTS. I do not know the hardware specification of Kindle, but I assume it has enough storage space for that and that OCR would be tough on its CPU.
Personally, I would demand lower prices for TTS-disabled books. I should not be paying the same amount that I would for a non-disabled book, and I certainly should be paying more for a book that is not disabled. Maybe I'll just go back to reading books from Project Gutenberg until this all settles down...
Ahem that is:
Dell: $394
Apple: $599
Dell desktop with Windows Vista (cheapest I could find in
Apple dekstop with OS X (cheapest I could find in
And one more thing:
1 year RHEL license for desktops: $80
So, in short, you do pay more to acquire Apple products, and there is no valid reason to deny that. You can try to claim that Apple products are better and therefore should cost more, but that is an entirely different argument.
No, if you RTA you will see that he specifically exempts people who are legally considered impaired. Not that I agree with his stance, nor do I think that his exemption is practical, but we should at least attack him for valid reasons. First and foremost, why should a blind person be required to go through special channels to get an audiobook, when there is no technical reason for that? Second, why should we pay more for an ebook because we *might* use a TTS engine to read it? What happens when a competing ebook reader, without TTS, is released, but we still have to pay for TTS royalties even when we cannot use TTS?
"If MSFT hosted them you don't think that Mozilla and Opera and Google wouldn't pitch a fit because they aren't getting the clicks anymore?"
Mozilla doesn't throw a fit when other OSes (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.) host Firefox builds. In fact, Mozilla's build team does a lot of work to make that possible. I do not think that Mozilla would be particularly angry if Microsoft hosted Mozilla builds, but if they did get their nickers in a twist, Microsoft could always grab Icecat and use that instead.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. These cameras do not just record criminals, and there is nothing stopping them from being used on ordinary citizens.
First, the cameras will be used to catch the dangerous guys: murderers, armed robbers, rapists, etc. Then, realizing that the ROI was not what they expected, the government will use the cameras to catch people for ticketable offenses: spitting, littering, not cleaning up after a dog, etc. After a while, a politician, playing up the "tough on crime" angle, pushes laws that make it illegal to circumvent the surveillance (for example, shining a laser pointer into a camera to overload the CCD), and some time after such a law is passed, someone is prosecuted for wearing a mask in public; the law cannot be used against everyone, of course, so specific groups of people become targets (depending on their skin color, religion, etc.).
Of course, that would never happen, because the privacy advocates are there to defend you. They are the people who DO mind being filmed/monitored in any public space.
Actually, leaving Facebook is the equivalent of a boycott on a retail chain. Facebook thrives by collecting and selling market information to advertisers; if people were to stop using Facebook, even for a week, it would hurt that business model.
Why bother to fight DRM? DRM is not the problem, the problem is that distributing DRM workarounds is illegal. Instead, why not go after the root problem, the DMCA?
Wikipedia now creates the truth. If they say 2+2=5, then 2+2=5. You will learn to love Big Wiki.
It might be the one thing they managed to get right with the 4.0 release, and it is working even better in 4.2.
"would the NSA spend money on software they can't use?"
Yes. Modern national security includes cybersecurity, which means that the NSA has an interest in securing the software that banks, financial markets, etc. are using.
"Also look at external offerings. Why run your own mail server, when you can do google apps - I think it's free for non-profits and .edus. Gmail, and instantly, you just saved a bunch of money, and a bunch of work. Now those people can be put to working on other higher priority stuff."
But it is not free-libre. You cannot study or modify the gmail codebase, with the exception of the web front end. Google can pull the plug at any minute, and suddenly an entire university is without email. Google could also suddenly decide (perhaps following investor pressure) that universities will no longer receive free service.
. A competent sysadmin can set up a mail server without too much effort. Unless your university is tiny and not technically oriented, I do not think asking for competent sysadmins is terribly unfair.