Alan Turing proposed a simple test for machine intelligence. Based on a parlour game where players try to tell if a hidden person is a man or a woman just by passing notes, he suggested we define a computer as intelligent if people can't tell it from a human being through conversations with both over a teletype.
It's more and more common today to see software that is capable of easily or automatically updating itself to a new version. Sometimes the user must confirm the update, in some cases it is fully automatic or manual but non-optional (ie. the old version won't work any more.) This seems like a valuable feature for fixing security problems as well as bugs.
But rarely do we talk about what a giant hole this is in general computer security. On most computers, programs you run have access to a great deal of the machine, and in the case of Windows, often all of it. Many of these applications are used by millions and in some cases even hundreds of millions of users.
When you install software on almost any machine, you're trusting the software and the company that made it, and the channel by which you got it -- at the time you install. When you have auto-updating software, you're trusting them on an ongoing basis. It's really like you're leaving a copy of the keys to your office at the software vendor, and hoping they won't do anything bad with them, and hoping that nobody untrusted will get at those keys and so something bad with them.
At various times I have been part of dinner groups that meet once a month or once a week at either the same restaurant or a different restaurant every time. There's usually no special arrangement, but it's usually good for the restaurant since they get a big crowd on a slow night.
I've written before about ZUI (Zero user interface) in crypto, and the need for opportunistic encryption based upon it. Today I want to further enforce the concept by pointing to mistakes we've seen in the past.
In the SF Bay Area, there are carpool lanes. Drivers of fuel efficient vehicles, which mostly means the Prius and the Honda Civic/Insight Hybrids can apply for a special permit allowing them to drive solo in the carpool lanes. This requires both a slightly ugly yellow sticker on the bumper, and a special transponder for bridges, because the cars are allowed to use the carpool lane on the bridge but don't get the toll exemption that real carpools get.
One growing technique for use in anti-spam involves finding ways to "fail" on initial contacts for sending mail. Real, standard conformant mail programs try again in various ways, but spammers, in writing their mail blasters, tend to just have them skip that address and go to the next one in their list.
Two common approaches include simply returning a "temporarily unavailable" status on any initial mail attempt that might be spam. Another approach is to have dead MX records both at the "try first" and "try last" end of the MX chain.
Radio technology has advanced greatly in the last several years, and will advance more. When the FCC opened up the small "useless" band where microwave ovens operate to unlicenced use, it generated the greatest period of innovation in the history of radio. As my friend David Reed often points out, radio waves don't interfere with one another out in the ether. Interference only happens at a receiver, usually due to bad design. I'm going to steal several of David's ideas here and agree with him that a powerful agency founded on the idea that we absolutely must prevent interference is a bad idea.
My overly simple summary of a replacement regime is just this, "Don't be selfish." More broadly, this means, "don't use more spectrum than you need," both at the transmitting and receiving end. I think we could replace the FCC with a court that adjudicates problems of alleged interference. This special court would decide which party was being more selfish, and tell them to mend their ways. Unlike past regimes, the part 15 lesson suggests that sometimes it is the receiver who is being more spectrum selfish.
Here are some examples of using more spectrum than you need:
As noted, some of these rules apply to the receiver, not just the transmitter. If a receiver uses an omni antenna when they could be directional, they will lose a claim of interference unless the transmitter is also being very selfish. If a receiver isn't smart enough to frequency hop, or tell its transmitter what band or power to use, it could lose.
Since some noise is expected not just from smart transmitters, but from the real world and its ancient devices (microwave ovens included) receivers should be expected to tolerate a little interference. If they're hypersensitive to interference and don't have a good reason for it, it's their fault, not necessarily the source's.
Update: Several of the spam bounces of this sort that I got were traced to the same anti-spam system, and the operator says it was not intentional, and has been corrected. So it may not be quite as bad as it seemed quite yet.
I have a social list of people I invite to parties. Every time I mail to it, I feel the impact of spam and anti-spam. Always several people have given up on a mailbox. And I run into new spam filters blocking the mail.
A recent story that United had removed all instances of the word "God" (not simply Goddamn) from a historical movie reminded me just how much they censor the movies on planes.
Here they have an easy and simple way out. Everybody is on headsets, and they already offer different soundtracks in different languages by dialing the dial. So offer the censored and real soundtrack on two different audio channels. Parents can easily make sure the kids are on whatever soundtrack they have chosen for them, as the number glows on the armrest.
(Note I have a simpler article for those just looking for advice on how to get their Widescreen TV to display properly.)
Very commonly today I see widescreen TVs being installed, both HDTV and normal. Flat panel TVs are a big win in public places since they don't have the bulk and weight of the older ones, so this is no surprise, even in SDTV. And they are usually made widescreen, which is great.
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