Plus we have a long history of killing monarchs who get a bit beyond themselves, which I feel ought to motivate in ways that mere Prime Ministers and their weenies are, sadly, not.

Actually, it could be a really cool thing to do. Audio engineers such as yourself set the 'preferences' for the song, so a player would play that unless told otherwise. That means the average shmo hears is as you intended (and presumably how it got signed off by the record company/artist or whatever). I guess there'd be some limit to the number of constituent tracks though, so I guess a few would end up getting permanently blended together.

However, other musicians, or audio folk could adjust levels or perhaps even extract the separate tracks. From that any number of derivatives could be created, leading to all sorts of new innovations and art.

Chances of any of the major labels ever letting any of this happen? Yeah, zero. Shame though :-(

Slashdot editors fail to spot dupe, and fail to fix it - even though it's on the frikkin' home page. Wow, that really is news ;-)

Timothy, you've surpassed yourself. Tonight, when you go home to your SO and they ask you "how was your day, dear", you can proudly say "I really rocked today - I did some awesome stuff, I really moved the needle, I pushed the envelope, I really excelled!".

GTMs haven't historically done geo lookups of the DNS request because it's way, way too expensive and slow (and only gives you the address of the end-user's local resolver - not the actual end user). Instead, they approximate by assuming your DNS request got routed by around about the most efficient way to whichever data centre it arrived at. It's then a reasonable guess to say that you should be using the web servers located in the same data centre.

These days, some providers are starting to have geo capability on DNS lookups. However, it'll be a while before they all do, and even longer until all of their customers are using it. Even if it was 100% adopted, it would still fail if you happen to use a DNS resolver miles away from your connection to the Internet.

I believe Google proposed a change to the DNS protocol to include the IP of the requester in all communications out of the resolver. That ostensibly solves this whole problem and lets the end-DNS server do full geo on the end-user. It has some privacy issues though - the likes of Google, Facebook etc will know even more about you than they do right now.

No no no. Just make the plane go up into the sky and wait for the earth to rotate to the correct location and then come back down again. No flying involved - in fact, you could just use helicopters and then no planes would need to be involved either. How many people die in trans-continental helicopter trips? None, that's how many. Clearly they've got to be better than all these flying coffins we call 'aeroplanes'.

Of course they are - the US satellites watch the Chinese ones and the NSA just tap the Chinese ground link to get the pictures ;-)

I always thought Blu Ray was a pr0nstar - whether he has HTML or not is unclear, but with his skillz he needn't worry about being replaced by MP3 any time soon.

Actually, I'd like a way to remotely control my heating, and so that dumb thermostat isn't going to cut it. I used to have a home-brew thermostat that I could control from the Internet - it meant I could turn the heating on as I landed at the airport so it was warm when I got home. I travelled a fair bit, so used this facility a fair bit. It's not too terrible to come home to a cold house and wait 1-2 hours for it to warm through, but why not use all this new technology to make things a bit nicer?

FWIW, I've got a wireless thermostat these days - it uses an insecure wireless protocol that I'm told is vaguely hackable. I figured if I get time, I could hack it to provide me with the same functionality but have more "wife acceptance factor".

However, as has been noted above, Cisco (and Nest, and countless others) aren't about making things better for you, they're about making it better for them. As a result, I'm not interested.

I'd like to see things get Internet connected, and have phone apps to control them. However, I'd like to see any intermediary servers on the Internet become simple pass-through conduits, with my phone and the device communicating securely without the intermediary being able to listen in. They'd know I was doing something, I guess, but wouldn't know what. Better yet, let me run my own conduit server. Trouble is, I'll never see this because none of the players in the market have any interest in doing what I want :-(

Although, much like the paramedics on bicycles or motorbikes, getting somewhere first, even if you can't get back out again is sometimes useful.

As someone above said though, lugging a couple of these about the place, just in case you need to get one person somewhere really quickly seems like an awful overhead for a one-time, niche use.

I think the idea here is to be able to say "hello world" to your Tor proxy, and have it communicate with the network such that "n" recipients get the message, but no one knows that you just did that, and definitely don't know what you just said. You don't know who or where those recipients are, you don't know anything about them, other than you're communicating with them.

If you imagine a way where I can tell you I'm on the Tor Chat Net - I don't tell you anything about myself, but instead I generate some sort of identifier that's unique between us - some sort of key that is only useful for the two of us. You do the same for me - now we have two different, linked and unique keys. This key is used to authenticate with the network, along with a password that's unique to each of us. The network then magically connects us together and we can communicate. You can't communicate with anyone except me using they key I generated for us.

The important thing here is that I don't actually know anything about you - I don't know your name, your location or your inside leg measurement or whatever. All I have is a "key" that I communicate with. Let's say we have a mutual friend - even they can't confirm that I'm talking to you, even if I give them everything I have because the keys they use to talk to you are different from the ones I use. Sure, if it turns out that you always sign off saying "ttfn - banana gribble aardark", then we could probably say with some certainty we were talking to the same person, but that's behavioural matching, as opposed to technical matching.

Since I'm very popular, I have a dozen people in my contacts list. I have to authenticate separately to talk to each one, and so I need a way to differentiate between them. Since you've never told me your name, I'm going to just assign the human-readable name " Slashdot Friday" to you. If you ever reveal that you like to be called GeekWithAKnife, or Derrek or whatever, then I could update my nickname for you, but otherwise, all I have is some made-up name that bears no resemblance to reality.

If the NSA get the magic key that you use to talk to me, then they need to authenticate to the network with it to use it. They'd have to rubber-hose your password out of you to be able to do that, but otherwise the key is useless. Assuming they get your password, they can of course impersonate you, and arguably get me to reveal that I live at 123 Fake Street. If they then break in and make a copy of my contacts list, they can't actually be certain that you and I communicate with each other - it's not like they can just match up the keys. They'd have to rubber-hose my password out of me and then authenticate and actually see the communication working between us to be able to prove we're able to talk to each other - all that still doesn't prove we actually have been chatting though (much less what we've been talking about).

This honestly does sound like it's very cool indeed. It opens up a whole world of questions and new challenges to get over though - not least because bot nets will use this to communicate rather than anything more traceable. Making sure you're talking to the person you think you are is going to be the biggest hurdle. Arguably this has always been the case, but until this we've always been able to skip over a lot of the details and go on trust for a large part of that identification step. Not so when it's as anonymous as this would be.

PS. I thought the Snowden leaks showed that the NSA couldn't break Tor per-se. There have been cases of people being identified even though they're using Tor, but not because they were able to trace the communications to them, but rather that they gave themselves away in some other form.

So we need less reliable hardware so that plenty of people have jobs...? We need to kill off the trains so that truck drivers keep their jobs? ;-)

It wasn't so long ago that the computer (word processor) put hundreds of typists out of work. Email put hundreds of post-room workers out of a job. Yet still, we don't have vast settlements of out of work typists and posties.

I don't know what the future holds, or how we'll deal with it. What I can tell you is that during the Industrial Revolution here in the UK, the world seems so unbelievably scary that the majority of the working class were absolutely pickled on gin.

My point here is that sure, there were less people required to work in the fields than before, and sure, some of them were out of work. However, where formerly there been little market for gin, suddenly there was a massive market for it. Whilst I doubt there'll be truck driver jobs for long, there'll be some other spin-off job that will take off. The net is still less people in work, but some people who are pretty lowly today will suddenly find themselves getting rich. Those rich people will need something, and so the cycle goes on.

Literally 10 seconds of googling found this: https://www.osha.gov/dts/hib/h...

When I did some RF stuff at college, they talked about the possibility of a spark coming off a (high) power antenna if various other factors all came into play at the same time (intuitively it makes sense - you've got a whole lot of energy in the antenna, which you're providing an easy release for). I assume it to be true, although I've never seen it (because I don't do any RF work to speak of).

I'd imagine that way-back-in-the-day, the first generations of mobile phones were literally hand-held cookers. There was some story where some BT engineers were going a bit doo-lally and it was supposed their phones were the cause. I don't know if that's true, but I do know that modern phones use a lot less power than their older counterparts, so I presume the risk of sparking to be as good as zero these days. I still wouldn't want to find out I was wrong in the presence of petrol fumes that ignite rather easily though.

As for this study, it's really saying exactly what we expect them to say. There was no way a 'proper' study was going to say there was any risk using a phone. As I say though, I'm rather glad I didn't have one of the first generations of phones - I seriously doubt they were safe in the longer term (and no, I can't prove it).

Both wrong.

If the book contains obviously non-public information, then, as soon as you realise this, you're not allowed to read any further, and you're not allowed to re-publish any of it, and you should notify the home owner of the problem. This guy didn't do any of those things, even though he knew the files to be non-public, that's why they prosecuted him.

If he's downloaded a bunch of files, read them, and then told the agency that these files were publicly accessible and that he'd deleted the copies he had of them, he'd have been just fine. He knew they were non-public, but decided to make them public by republishing them. That's what made him a criminal.

One could argue that had he done the right thing, they'd have come after him anyway. That may be true, and one would hope that he'd be acquitted rather rapidly with the prosecution given a strong ticking off by the judge. I doubt it would be quite as happy and rosy as all that, but at least this guys would have had morality on his side.

I don't really care who wrote it, but I do care who spec'ed it, who tested it and who's got plenty of money that they don't want to lose when it goes out to the public.

The point here is that you can actually have an out-sourced programming goon from elbonia write the code, or you could have the genius aliens from the planet Zod do it for you. You still need to test it actually works. Since you can't trust a vendor to test their stuff responsibly enough, you have to have anti-vendor weapons, like being able to strip them of their money/assets/etc when they make a mess of it. You could have a third party do the testing (like government regulators), but they tend to be pretty inept and a lot less accountable.

As for whether everyone should code or not - everyone should, just as everyone should learn to speak in a second language. You don't need to become fluent and able to blend in any situation, but having a passing knowledge of it makes you a more rounded person, and thus more able to think in different ways as the situation demands. Whether or not you actually do any coding or not in your future life is largely irrelevant.

Sorry if this looks like I'm a shill...

At $werk we had a company called Cedexis come in to see us. They have a service where they 'ping' their customers infrastructure from end-user's web browsers. The idea being that $user on $provider hitting $cloud gets different service levels for different values of $provider and $cloud (where $cloud can be anything, including your own datacentres). Thus, if $provider == Verizon, then maybe using MS Azure is better than AWS. If that was the case, then Netflix could use Cedexis to automatically route Verizon customers to Azure at the times of day when Verizon do their throttling, whilst leaving everyone else on AWS. It's actually possible to see what they would be doing for you right now on their website (they publish the core data publicly).

I realise this doesn't solve the problem, but it works around it. Solving the problem means telling Netflix their service sucks and you're leaving, whilst doing the same to Verizon. Once Netflix starts hurting, they'll start lobbying, and once $other_provider starts doing better than Verizon, maybe they'll rethink their approach. Maybe.