Two answers:

First, software exists outside the physical world. Every piece of software is an algorithm, and algorithms are pure math, and pure math, by very long-standing precedent, isn't patentable. Hence, the argument goes, software isn't patentable, because doing so is equivalent to patenting the pure math behind it.

Second, the real reason software shouldn't be patentable is because of all the policy reasons given in this discussion. They just cause more trouble than they're worth. The "software is math" argument is just the vehicle we're using to pursue our policy goals. That's not to say it's not a good legal argument -- it is -- but the reason we like to make this legal argument is because software patents are bad policy, and we think it will be easier to get courts to interpret the existing law to exclude software patents than it would be to get Congress to change the law to explicitly outlaw software patents.

Yeah, and the body of someone who never exercised a day in his life is likely to look better than an Olympic athlete's...

Other ways you could defeat this:
- Take a picture of the screen with your camera phone. Yes, they don't allow camera phones, but you could probably smuggle one in. This obviously doesn't work with anything that's too long.
- Download an executable with the magic number changed to get past the proxy, edit it in notepad to restore the magic number, and then use it to encrypt the media, then upload it to a server under your control, which won't raise red flags because it doesn't see any "bad keywords" because you encrypted it. XOR encryption would probably work here. This requires you to be able to execute programs, yes, but, uh, you could probably use JavaScript in a browser if you really had to. Local site that uuencodes or similar any binary data that you paste in one window and displays it in the other window. Banned local sites, okay, set up a site outside the firewall that does this and gets past the proxy because the proxy doesn't see anything wrong with it because it's not expecting this.

It would really be pretty hard to do this so it can't be compromised by a motivated attacker. Impossible? If you consider that the system can't be so locked-down no one can work on it, perhaps yes.

Other programming possibilities: Macros in Word. Java applets. FLASH (shudder) applets. These would be much easier to get working right than a JavaScript thing. You can't use the Internet without JavaScript. Can you use the Internet without Flash? Maybe. Or maybe it would annoy your employees so much they quit because you're making it too hard to do their jobs.

Really the hardest part of doing this, now that I'm thinking about it, would be the "hex dump" step. Once you've installed the equivalent of a hex dumper -- some way, some how -- you can manipulate that hex however you want to get it past the proxy. After you can dump the secret data to hex, it's game over.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot:

FUCK BETA!

---linuxrocks123

If you think terrorists are scary, you should never drive or get in a car ever again, because doing that is much more likely to get you killed than the big bad oh-so-scary terrorists you're going on about.

Is the world "scary"? Well, everyone dies eventually, and I guess death is scary, so sure. What's scariest about it? Cancer and heart disease. Yup. If you're going to worry about stuff that could kill you, worry about cancer and heart disease. Because it's about 80% likely that that is what will kill you. Terrorists well let's see they're like #2000 on the list of stuff that is likely to get you killed, if that. So, no, it is not we who are not understanding what's happening around us. It is you who needs a crash course in statistics. Badly.

---linuxrocks123

It's simply a wrong comment. The NPAPI version of Flash is _NOT_ unsupported. 11.2 is the last version that will be made available as an NPAPI Linux plugin, but Adobe plans to keep fixing security issues in the 11.2 version plugin indefinitely.

---linuxrocks123

> What online dating suffers from is 75% of the participants are dudes...

No true, except possibly on AdultFriendFinder.

http://www.nextadvisor.com/blo...

Question for anyone who knows: how the hell did KlearGear report a debt to a credit reporting agency in the first place? The credit reports are indexed by SSN, and they only have other identifiers like credit card numbers to go by if you don't have that. They paid by PayPal. Doesn't PayPal hide your credit card number from the merchant? With just a name, how did they report it? Does anyone know?

MythTV works fine for me and many other people. I'm not sure what went wrong in your case, but your experience is not representative. Encrypted QAM is supported through the HDHomeRun Prime and other CableCARD recorders, though you have to make sure the provider flags the channels you want copy-freely before going that route. I've never had database corruption issues, and I haven't heard it to be a common problem.

Hey, I do the same thing in the US! *High-five*! My biggest problem is mobile phones that like to get their time from the server. I have an Android phone, so I disable server time sync and use the NTP-based ClockSync program to avoid that issue.

Sorry, the keys never leave the debug registers -- the keys are not computable from anything in RAM.

The security gain comes from the fact that it is feasible to perform a side-channel attack on RAM but infeasible to perform a side-channel attack on CPU registers. The data to recreate the keys is scrubbed from RAM; the keys never leave RAM. I have done work on a similar project to TRESOR, called Loop-Amnesia, which uses MSRs instead of the debug registers to perform the same task and does not require AES-NI support.

---linuxrocks123

Canadian courts do, eh?

Was this footage made public? If not, why not?

The report states that "the engine N1's were at about 55%". I'm not a pilot, but 55% doesn't sound like anywhere near full thrust to me.