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Comment Re:I blame Microsoft (Score 1) 148

Yes. There is only one possible name for addressing a file. For a case-aware, but case insensitive, you get up to 2^n variants for a name n letters long. And you _can_ have the same name with different capitalization in a directory as result of errors.

Funny, since Linux does everything it can to break a canonical name model with symlinks. In fact, you could mimic a case-insensitive system with 2^n symlinks like /foo/bar/COnFiG -> /foo/bar/config. And the captialization is the cause of errors in mixed environments:

1) Create file on Windows called "Foobar.txt".
2) Copy it to your Linux machine.
3) Rename it to "FooBar.txt"
4) Do lots of work on the text
5) Copy it to your Linux machine
6) Copy the Linux directory back to Windows.

There's now a 50-50 chance that your work just got overwritten by old crap from step 2). Of course you might argue that Windows is the problem here since it wouldn't happen on two Linux systems, but then it wouldn't happen on two Windows systems either. They just don't play nice with each other.

Comment Re:Unrelated to Github (Score 2) 148

Tag: NOTABUG and WONTFIX. Case aware filesystems so you can have normal names and not like AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS from the DOS days is great, case sensitive file systems are a really bad idea. Is there any kind of sane situation where you'd like to have two files "Config" and "config" actually coexist that isn't just begging to be confused/abused/exploited? For a marginal performance optimization all POSIX systems have shitty usability. Why am I not surprised? I guess for a server it just doesn't matter, but for the desktop you should file this as a bug against Linux, not Windows and OS X.

Comment Re:$25 Million? (Score 2, Funny) 56

he demise of the Apollo program was probably the worst thing that ever happened to American space technology. We are just now regaining knowledge and capability we had in the 70s.

But now...we in the US can just go pick up new rockets at the Kwik-E-Mart (albeit at slightly elevated prices).

Thank you....Come again!!

Comment Re:Some people better be out of a job... (Score 1) 110

Peer Name Resolution.

The problem is that it's patent encumbered, by Mickeysoft, so it's useless.

There is also something called Hierarchical DHT-based name resolution.

Abstract:

Information-centric network (ICN) architectures are an increasingly important approach for the future Internet. Several ICN approaches are based on a flat object ID namespace and require some kind of global name resolution service to translate object IDs into network addresses. Building a world-wide NRS for a flat namespace with 10^1^6 expected IDs is challenging because of requirements such as scalability, low latency, efficient network utilization, and anycast routing that selects the most suitable copies. In this paper, we present a general hierarchical NRS framework for flat ID namespaces. The framework meets those requirements by the following properties: The registration and request forwarding matches the underlying network topology, exploits request locality, supports domain-specific copies of binding entries, can offer constant hop resolution (depending on the chosen underlying forwarding scheme), and provides scoping of publications. Our general NRS framework is flexible and supports different instantiations. These instantiations offer an important trade-off between resolution-domain (i.e. subsystem) autonomy (simplifying deployment) and reduced latency, maintenance overhead, and memory requirements. To evaluate this trade-off and explore the design space, we have designed two specific instantiations of our general NRS framework: MDHT and HSkip. We have performed a theoretical analysis and a simulation-based evaluation of both systems. In addition, we have published an implementation of the MDHT system as open source. Results indicate that an average request latency of (well) below 100ms is achievable in both systems for a global system with 12 million NRS nodes while meeting our other specific requirements. These results imply that a flat namespace can be adopted on a global scale, opening up several design alternatives for information-centric network architectures.

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm...

--
BMO

Comment Re:Stupid (Score 1) 396

That said, GP nails it: the problem with SSL is not the tech, it's the that the CAs are money grubbing semi-competent boobs, and the trusted certificate lists are administered by either OS or browser producers leaving a huge open arena for politics and perverse incentives.

Which is why it was really sad when chrome backed off on supporting DANE

Comment Re:seems a lot like human vision to me (Score 1) 130

I think it was fairly clear what was going on, the neural networks latch on to conditions that are necessary but not sufficient because they found common characteristics of real images but never got any negative feedback. Like in the peacock photo the colors and pattern are similar, but clearly not in the shape of a bird but if it's never seen any non-bird peacock colored items how's the algorithm supposed to know? At any rate, it seems like the neural network is excessively focusing on one thing, maybe it would perform better if you divided up the work so one factor didn't become dominant. For example you send outlines to one network, textures to a second network and colors to a third network then using a fourth network to try learning which of the other three to listen to. After all, the brain has very clear centers too, it's not just one big chunk of goo.

Comment Re:About Fucking Time (Score 5, Insightful) 435

While starting completely new ones. Hooray!

Indeed, Hooray! (I'm glad you get it - so few kneejerk anti-American morons do.) The US is at its best when it is saving innocent people, like Libyans and Yhazdis, from genocide. It returns us to what is best about this country.

*cough* bullshit *cough*

Yes indeed! Your quote IS bullshit! I'm glad you noticed! You can't claim a policy failed by arbitrarily changing the yardstick. We've never measured by U6. No time to start now.

Hooray though, we added 300,000 jobs in the last quarter. The economy did that in most years of the 1960s, when the population of the United States was significantly less than today. Success!

Yet again, you are completely correct! This is an amazing Success! The economy in the 1960s was aided by the fact that most of the rest of the world was still recovering from WW2, and half of it was under the ideological sway of Communist regimes fundamentally opposed to economic reality. Further, the U.S. had many more controls in place in those days to reduce economic inequality, since people still had a long memory of what Republicans did to cause the Great Depression. Tax rates on corporations in the 1960s reached as high as 90%, with fewer loopholes. This allowed many states to give a free college education to anyone who had the grades to get accepted, no matter what their economic background. All which provided massive demand for U.S. employment.

Alas, we ended all that. Self-defeating "trickle-down" is now more or less a religion (except Jesus and his miracles can't be actually disproven, like all these bullshit Republican economic theories have), so now we're stuck with people voting in Republicans on grandiose promises that this-time-it'll-work-for-sure, the inevitable economic crash, Democrats voted in to fix it, and then Republicans again to punish the Democrats for fixing the Republican mess, because this-time-it'll-work-for-sure.

Comment Re:It's required (Score 1) 170

It was the 1960s. You were lucky to have a 300 baud modem, they wanted to save two bits by chopping the "19" off 1960 and encryption was regulated as munitions. Heck, even in the 1990s they wanted to restrict my browser to 40 bits so I didn't have "export grade" cryptography. I still hear cost for servers and battery life on clients as an argument for why sites don't move to HTTPS, The very idea to build the Internet with strong encryption by default was ridiculous on technical merits and I don't recall anyone even suggesting it so feel free to quote some sources.

Yes, MITM attacks are possible. But unlike wiretapping they're also detectable and I don't just mean in the theoretical sense. You could still use CAs to "boost" the credibility of an IP encryption key fingerprint (The CA signs my cert, I sign a message saying my IP uses fingerprint aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff), you can verify by proxy (connect to your server from friends/family/open wifi/proxy or ask a third party to what certificate fingerprint they see) or you can use in-band ad hoc verification. For example you're in a chat and it says at the top "finger print for this session is aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff" you might say "reverse it and you get ff:ee:dd:cc:bb:aa" or "third pair is a double c" or "last two are 255 in hex" as part of the conversation. Even better if it's voice communication, think they can MITM a buddy saying the fingerprint?

MITM only works if there's a protocol you can use to automatically block/filter any information about the key. For example imagine you take a photo, overlay the fingerprint semi-transparently and display it on your website. Now they have to create a very custom solution for your site to create an identical photo to replace it with. Transparent MITM in an interactive process - not just your cell phone checking your mail - is going to be really tough to do on a mass scale. It won't have the perfect theoretical characteristics, but it sure will work for most people most of the time.

Comment Re:A different kind of justice for multinationals (Score 1) 137

If so, this boils down to can a court compel a property owner to direct his property to do something (such as forward a document in that properties possession), even if the property happens to be in another country?

That depends. For example many countries have laws regarding historical artifacts, you can own them but you can't take them out of the country. Or you can legally buy cryptography chips in the US that needs an export license. Just because Microsoft Ireland can legally possess the customer data in Ireland, doesn't mean they're free to ship it around the world or provide access to it in violation of Irish law.

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