A lot does depend on the actual circumstances for the bad RNG. If you had a good method of recognizing the valuable sites (anything involving money or maybe email?) it might be more practical considering a botnet would be just fine for this sort of computation.
Not really - it does make a difference between amateur attackers and professional, but the potential value is high enough that there will probably be plenty of well funded attackers.
Somewhat disappointing, but not surprising that they did not describe their actual calculation technique for finding the connected primes. It strikes me that there isn't a good excuse for having bad random numbers with the computation power we now have. A simple bitwise addition of various sources of supposedly random numbers is strictly stronger than any subset of its components. So we can combine lots of questionable strong sources and get a very strong source.
Generating the primes locally with insufficient independence seems more understandable than that the same primes are used by independent parties. That hints at a more severe problem with random number generation. Regardless, assuming this is confirmed, it is a significant problem that needs to be hunted down.
Somewhat disappointing, but not surprising that they did not describe their actual calculation technique for finding the connected primes. It strikes me that there isn't a good excuse for having bad random numbers with the computation power we now have. A simple bitwise addition of various sources of supposedly random numbers is strictly stronger than any subset of its components. So we can combine lots of questionable strong sources and get a very strong source.
Generating the primes locally with insufficient independence seems more understandable than that the same primes are used by independent parties. That hints at a more severe problem with random number generation. Regardless, assuming this is confirmed, it is a significant problem that needs to be hunted down.
This is quite important. The main lock in effect of a Elsevier journal is the impact factor. Researchers careers are made on the regard for their papers, and the most visible component of that is the citation rate. The academics who can afford to refuse to publish in Elsevier journals are the well known and well regarded ones. So getting the top academics - such as Gowers - to publicly disavow Elsevier is the first step.
That worked, thanks. Now I wonder when they will change the color choice of the text. The difficulty of reading off-white text on a light blue background with random off-white motif is high.
Is anyone else getting a 'Sorry, we are unable to retrieve the document for viewing or you don't have permission to view the document. ' when you click on the image?
So is there a good explanation (link to those lawyer analyses mentioned by Hayes perhaps) of specifically how US sites are affected? My understanding is that if someone posts a circumvention method (eg. link to new domain) then the site on which it was posted have liability. Is this correct?
They could just put a coil in the bullet and a permanent magnet along the barrel, then measure frequency produced by the temporary dynamo to calculate velocity (based on known rifling). Then use a timer to measure distance.
I do think we should be worried about letting google get too strong a walled garden. The most worrisome thing about google is that we depend upon so many google products, that it might be difficult to see what we are missing if they started to overly favor google offerings. I don't think google has gone there yet, but it is something to keep track of. That being said, twitter has no excuse to complain if they did simply remove themselves from google's results. I suspect that in fact they negotiated and got a better deal going exclusive with bing.
Thanks, that is just the type of information I was looking for. I do wonder whether non-technically savvy users would run into firewall or redirection problems, as tahoe runs as a simple server. Perhaps it could use bittorrent?
One thing that worries me is how difficult it makes it if you get some data corruption. For example, I had a hardrive that had full disk encryption start to fail, and found pulling the data off much more difficult because I had to decrypt the whole lvm to get any access. I'm actually not confident how exactly corruption maps from cyphertext to plaintext in various modern crypto systems. I would guess that you would get out gibberish though.
Actually I feel like people have had a thing against godaddy for a long time, and try to make a big deal about unimportant PR stuff. I don't care about sexy advertisements, I don't care about the CEO shooting elephants. I do care about questionable DNS behavior and SOPA.
He rather defeats his point at the last by pointing out that subcultures that specifically deny artificial or damaging fitness indicators would then take over. It seems unlikely that some few out of billions wouldn't make a different choice, and pass that choice on to their children.
I would agree that calling ext3 obsolete is odd, but I don't know enough about the particulars of file system performance to understand why data=ordered is or is not problematic. This leads to the interesting problem of judging the opinion of several contradicting, but apparently similarly qualified people. I'm sure someone on HN is able to decisively explain: can someone do so?
That's some great points. Thanks for the effort to lay out the costs involved. It's a good point to consider how there are often good reason for doing things the way we have been (caveats about this situation not withstanding).
The excitation of the higgs field corresponding to higgs boson's like we are looking for at LHC are 'manifested' so to speak. The higgs that cause mass are virtual carrier particles that exist in a state of quantum in betweenness. Photons, for example are the carriers of the electromagnetic force. They are not the same, however, as the photons transmitted to your eye. So you don't see photons being traded between magnets when you hold them together, but can see the photons bouncing off the magnets from the sun. In the same way we can't see the higgs carrier particles, but can see (hopefully) the higgs bosons at LHC.
To make the Higgs detectable means making a sufficiently high concentration of energy to make a Higgs particle. That concentration of energy is dependent on the mass of the particle (and hence energy by e=mc^2). The Higgs boson is theorized to exist at relatively high mass, hence making it difficult to create. This higgs particle will decay into a shower of other particles and these particles will decay, and all these remnant are detected and analyzed to recreate the original event. So no, Higgs is quite well understood and we expect to find it for strong reasons.
The big question is whether it is actually unreasonable for them to have 2.4 or 4.8 million in inventory. As he points out 700k isn't that much - not really enough to compensate for the proposed difference between reasonable and unreasonable excess inventory. Without much knowledge, I doubt that over estimating demand by a factor of ~4 is unreasonable.