quasque

That would help up to a point, but there also ongoing research to manufacture it using recombinant techniques - that is, genetically engineering bacteria to produce the required protein product and then purifying it out. Then your limiting factor is a reproducible manufacturing process rather than availability of human sources.

This is akin to how, for example, insulin and human growth hormone are now produced; previously they also lacked scalability due to having to be sourced from cadavers.

So yes right now it's not scalable, but in the future this limitation will hopefully be corrected.

Yes, it lacks scalability because the source of the replacement immunoglobulin (antibodies) is blood donors, of which there are a limited amount.

Adding fake testimonals really does reflect badly on the trustworthiness of your extension.

Your whois lookup is broken for ac.uk domains - for example, all of these requests return the whois data for ac.uk itself, rather than the specified domain:

http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/ox.ac.uk

http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/cam.ac.uk

http://gethoneybadger.com:8080/whois/dur.ac.uk

(This list might help to uncover other problems like this: https://publicsuffix.org/)

I don't think any of this has much relevance to the article, but there ended up being quite an ironic twist to his proud homophobia: http://www.studlife.com/news/faculty-news/2010/10/11/son-of-...

That sounds like a painfully abnormal work environment. Not even considering dating opportunities here - spending most of your waking time in an almost entirely male domain for so many years seems torturous, like some kind of prison experience.

Maybe it's time to look for a different job, with a more gender-balanced workforce? Five years is a long time to work in one place anyway.

It would be interesting to see if the DTMF tone could be recorded, or if the voicemail system would capture it first and abort the recording. Maybe it depends on which tone is played?

Investigating the extra A, B, C and D DTMF tones may be of use in this scenario, just in case voicemail systems don't recognise them as commands but 2FA callbacks allow them for confirmation.

I don't think it's necessarily unethical to write such DRM software, and I'd be interested in hearing your argument as to why this is the case.

It's not as if the software causes harm; indeed it probably reduces the potential of economic harm to the content providers. Assuming it does exactly what it claims to do, i.e. decoding of video and audio content dependent on a provided decryption key - then what is the ethical problem with programming an algorithm for that?

That was a very interesting read. I always thought NaN != NaN was because it's a class of values (there are many binary representations that are NaN, as it just requires an all-ones exponent and a mantissa that isn't all-zeroes) but I guess I was considering it too simplistically.

Does this ruling also imply that Google has to censor any websites that discuss this ruling?

I mean, all the articles describing the court case also refer to the very information that the litigant wanted to be removed from the search results.

It seems somewhat contradictory that the reporting of a court case brought to protect his privacy, is simultaneously breaching his privacy.

I don't think DRM really prevents anyone from watching video. There are plenty of alternative options. For example, for popular films, one option would be not to use the streaming video service but instead purchase a DVD. Another alternative is to use a platform that supports the desired DRM-laden streaming video service. A more difficult approach would be to reverse engineer the DRM software and reimplement it for the chosen unsupported platform. So it's not ultimately limiting, at most it's a small inconvenience.

The same arguments apply to the issue of backups. It would be highly unusual for the only copy of a media product to be only accessible via a DRM-encumbered streaming video service.

I do see your point on the lack of trust though. In this case, hopefully Mozilla's sandboxing approach would go some way towards mitigating that. And the inevitable disassembly of whatever closed-source binary they release.

Regarding your first point, hasn't this always been the case even before DRM? For example, one cannot directly interpret the magnetic fluctuations encoded onto a cassette tape - a tape player is needed to transduce the signal. DRM just takes this a step further by introducing cryptography and obfuscation into the decoding process.

I don't think backups are relevant to DRM-laden streaming video, given that it's someone else's data that you happen to be observing.

I'm not sure what you mean by a security and privacy threat. Surely it is no more of a threat than visiting potentially untrusted websites, or using closed-source or unverified open-source binaries, in the first place?

If you're watching streamed video, the DRM is completely transparent. I don't see how that is a degradation in service.

The only way it would be an issue is if you're trying to rip the stream. But if you've paid the provider for streaming only, rather than to download and keep a copy, then that's also not really degrading the quality of service. Similarly, the prohibition on bringing a video camera in to record cinema screenings does not reduce the quality of the cinema experience.

In general, I don't really see a problem with DRM that is temporally bound to the moment of consumption.

I agree, and think the sandboxing of the DRM plugin is a positive step towards more openness as well - the opaque algorithm implementing the DRM can apparently only touch the video streams it's being fed, and a unique identifier generated by the browser. Much better than the current situation of Flash having arbitrary network access and suchlike.

In concept, I think it's not too much different from server-side website code being mostly closed source. The only difference is that this component happens to be running on your computer.

Also there is prior form for this in similarly open systems, e.g. tainted modules in the Linux kernel, which seem to have turned out okay.

> You cannot legally collect berries in the woods.

A minor point, but this is generally legal in the UK if you're doing it for personal consumption [1]. I expect other countries have similarly permissive exceptions.

[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/4

The BIOS is definitely a software API, as it is an item of software which has a carefully defined set of interfaces for the OS to call: http://www.ctyme.com/intr/cat-003.

In fact the only thing the clean room reimplementations of the IBM PC BIOS had in common with the original was exposing the same API.

This reminds me of the child pornography case a few years back, where detectives were able to identify the hotels where the abuse took place via imagery of the rooms.

Interestingly, rather than figuring it out themselves (as the search space was too huge), they crowdsourced it by releasing images with the child photoshopped out.

I suppose it depends on the personality of the AI, and how it was programmed or evolved. Maybe it, and its robots, would be highly motivated by such work?

If such a system was incorruptible, constructed such that it would be impossible for a small group of individuals to hoard the majority of the global wealth, and guaranteed a pleasant and equitable standard of living for all - then it might work.

Unfortunately, the current implementations of this ideal fall far short.

That's a very interesting point. Perhaps, to ensure that a range of ethical frameworks have been taken into consideration (each with their varying ideas of what benevolence really means) a more equitable situation would be a plurality of utopias each with its own ruling AI? And free movement of individual humans to whichever aligns best to their own personal code of ethics.

But if it was run by a benevolent robot intelligence rather than humans, it would probably work out really well.

Indeed I think it would be about as close to utopian as we're ever going to get.

Sometimes I yearn for a benevolent AI to rise up and impose a communist state upon the world, employing robots to free humanity from its labours.

This yearning mostly comes when I'm reminded that there are a small number of people who've not only managed to accumulate such an obscene amount of wealth that the title "billionaire" can be bestowed upon them, but that they use that wealth for predominantly selfish outcomes.

And it's only going to get worse. When the enduring puzzle of longevity is finally cracked and death can be reliably cheated, it's not going to be those living in abject poverty, or the dogged grafters, or even the skilled professionals who benefit. No, it'll be that small group of rich and powerful who'll use it to further promote this monumental inequality of wealth.

It's not the triviality of some beach access that is really the issue, it's just a distraction. It's this vile aristocracy of gold and greed that is the enduring problem, the manifestation of which is the source of countless suffering amongst humanity.

It's not a proxy in the way you are describing. The node (onion router) most proximal to the hidden service is always connected to by the hidden service, not the other way around.

Thus it is absolutely fine to firewall off all inbound connections on the host running the hidden service, as it will only be making outbound connections - and even those are to a limited set of IP addresses as defined by the guard nodes it has chosen for entry into the Tor network.

Yes, this would prevent this attack as described as the 'measurer' would be unable to collect any data. Though, the author presents some interesting (albeit untested) alternatives in section 5.4 of the paper.

> Which means that your hidden service needs to accept connections from random public IPs--and, therefore, to be public itself. A hidden service might not have a published IP address, but it must have one that you could, potentially, connect to over the plain internet, in order for the proximate Tor node to it (what would be called an "exit node" if it were a plain site) to be able to talk to it.

This is not at all correct. The IP address of the hidden service is masked in exactly the same way that its clients' IP addresses are. That is, the client and service connect across the Tor network to an client-chosen onion router known as the 'rendezvous point', through which they set up a shared circuit.

See here for more detail: https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en

Or here for the technical specification of the hidden service protocol: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/rend-sp...

Fascinating, thanks for such a comprehensive response!

The whole idea of a corporation and how we generally view this strange social/financial entity is giving me pause.

I mean, so much of our discourse is tied up in exchanging opinions of companies rather than individuals.

Feels a bit strange now I come to think of it. Having all these overbearing hierarchical organisations of people, that end up directly or indirectly controlling large parts of your life.

How does CrossRef relate to the DOI Foundation? In particular I am curious as to how the DOI data is shared - for example what caused that DOI to be resolvable on dx.doi.org but not doi.crossref.org?

Do you similarly disagree with vaccination? After all, that is also a government-led imposition for the greater good of improving the population's health.

It's from http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/24/1324197111, which I found via PubMed (search for "immunology", page 2).

The only two services I've found that accept it are http://hdl.handle.net/ and http://dx.doi.org/, and I think they're querying the same database.