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A couple of interesting references are this article where they basically experiment with using a household fluroscent tube as an HF antenna. Or page where a few more references are given.

I have to ask myself with all of this though, what the point of having an radar invisible antenna, that is optically highly visible. I have visions of fluro lit battlefields... D.

New surveys suggest that ubiquitous technological tools are killing off leisure time, especially for younger workers and students -- that would be you -- who are working longer hours, taking fewer and shorter vacations

This article (link) explains that annual working hours for America are around 2000, whereas "Dutch and Norwegian workers average around 1400 hours per year, or about two-thirds of the US level." The Dutch have cell phones and computers too, so this would seem to indicate that technology does not inevitably lead to more work and less free time. It may have this effect on Americans, though. So what's wrong with us?

Julie Tolmie has just submitted a Ph.D. all about visualization of these numbers, also known as the Farey sequences (it is what Knuth calls them!). Read about it (or just look at the pictures) here.

These Brocoult trees are also known as Farey sequences by the mathematicians.
The farey sequence is known to naturaly enumerate the buds of the mandelbrot set. Julie Tolmie at math anu edu au has just finished a PhD thesis in this area.
Check it out; lot's of great pictures.

The best, in my very humble opinion, references are online, but they aren't as nice to read as the Building Linux and OpenBDS Firewalls book, but are an excellent suppliment.
http://coombs.anu.edu.au/ipfilter
http://www.obfuscation.org/ipf/

See the prior of the web pages for a mailing list (Majordomo). The author (Darren Reed) of IPFilter actively participates in this mailing list, which is helpful, and often appreciated.

Hope that helps
Brian

1) This is not 'one of the few cases'! As far as straight (civil) libel goes, existing 'cyberlaw' goes back to the 80's, with mailing lists and BBSs and has definitely been upheld internationally. "international" is important, because you can be sued in jurisdiction where the 'damage' occurs or where the 'victim' resides. Here are some cases/sources:

• Here's a Richmond Law Review (Va.) article suggesting unified approaches to cyber-defamation.
• Here's a Harvard Law Review article on cyberlaw.
• Here's a Georgia State review article of Alabama cyber defamation law (for details and contrast with Utah)
• Blakeley v. Continental Airlines is a 1999 case involving a private company-only BBS
• Rindos v. Hardwick was a famous case where an American was successfully sued in Australian courts for defamation on a e-mail list. [Summary] [Judgement]
• A CyberLibel FAQ -- primarily non-US 'British tradition' (Australia, Canada) useful as a basis for further understanding.
• Here's a 1994 Australian review of Defamation laws in cyberspace.
• Here's a course reading list (with links to cases and other resources embedded in the course outline) for a comparison of in the US and Australia with references to other law (Roman, English, Dutch, etc.) It hits some very relevant points in vey few words.
• Here's a review of British cyber-defamation law (incl. BBS and e-mail)
• Similar US Criminal Libel cases against students have been reported widely in the media for years (names are not cited, because they are minors): [Colorado, 1997 (ACLU) and verdict, 1998]
• Nervous? maybe you should be Here's a (English language, published in Denmark) peer-reviewed law journal article on 'Defamation Havens' ('peer-review' is when articles are reviewed by experts before publication)

2) Do a websearch for "criminal libel" and you'll find that its primary use worldwide, historically and currently is against journalists . One of the 'Inciting Abuses' that contributed to the American Revolution was a (then British) court verdict that a newspaper was guilty of defaming the reputation of the Governer-General of New York by (accurately) revealing his corruption.

• Criminal Libel use.abuse is often cited in the annual US State Department Human Rights reports on each country. [Gabon, 1999]
• In Ireland, journalistic websites get away with a great deal that print journalism can't.

3) To address another of Katz's points, here are mini-case studies in dysfunctional human behaviour on the net

Katz was on my 'exclude list' for a few months, not because I dislike his writing, but because his loose use of facts and analogies leads to a sloppy, infuriating discussion. A profesional writer should investigate his facts and limit his speculation to what those facts support; If he doesn't, the readers will certainly go hogwild. This is the first Katz article I've read in a while. I am not pleased.

From the IP Filter site here:

Packet state filtering

Packet state filtering can be used for any TCP flow to short-cut later filtering. The "short-cuts" are kept in a table, with no alterations to the packet filter list made. Subsequent packets, if a matching packet is found in the table, are not passed through the list. For TCP flows, the filter will follow the ack/sequence numbers of packets and only allow packets through which fall inside the correct window.

#
# Keep state for all outgoing telnet connections
# and disallow all other TCP traffic.
#
pass out on le1 proto tcp from any to any port = telnet keep state
block out on le1 all

For UDP packets, packet exchanges are effectively stateless. However, if a packet is first sent out from a given port, a reply is usually expected in answer, in the `reverse' direction.

#
# allow UDP replies back from name servers
#
pass out on le1 proto udp from any to any port = domain keep state

Held UDP state is timed out, as is TCP state for entries added which do not have the SYN flag set. If an entry is created with the SYN flag set, any subsequent matching packet which doesn't have this flag set (ie a SYN-ACK) will cause it to be "timeless" (actually, the timeout defaults to 5 days), until either a FIN or RST is seen.

This sort of thing is also possible using the ipfw facility in FreeBSD:

# Allow TCP through if setup succeeded
$fwcmd add pass tcp from any to any established

# Allow setup of incoming email
$fwcmd add pass tcp from any to ${ip} 25 setup

# Allow setup of outgoing TCP connections only
$fwcmd add pass tcp from ${ip} to any setup

# Disallow setup of all other TCP connections
$fwcmd add deny tcp from any to any setup

Regarding Linux, it can kind of do that sort of thing currently, but only if you use IP Masquerading in conjunction with your firewalling. The idea there is that the only way to get a TCP packet past your Masquerading proxy is for it to be in response to a packet generated from inside your network. Of course, since you'd be doing many-to-one NAT in that scenario, the usual complications apply eg., since there is only 1 externally visible IP, you can't choose to allow specific incoming ports for multiple clients.

From what I understand, netfilter, which will be available in a stable release as of Linux 2.4.x, will make a more elegant method of doing this possible.

IP Filter

IP Filter

Here's an opinion on our useless Government's farcical privacy bill.

If you have something to say to the Government, tell the Parliament what you think by May 12.

alexgp

Isn't IPF (assuming that stands for IP Filter) written by a third party not associated with OpenBSD? Certainly, IPF on OpenBSD does rock, but so does IPF on FreeBSD, IPF on NetBSD, etc...

The economics of solar power are held back by the fact that traditional carbon based sources dont need to pay for their waste production (CO2). Carbon trading may alter these economics considerably with the additional cost to coal etc. and the reduced cost to solar from credits for reducing current emmisions. Not all solar cells suffer from increased heat. Titania Cells. ANU and Solahart in Australia have worked on using concentrators and cooling systems to reduce costs below that of diesel power systems. You can always make a wind turbine for cloudy days.

"Widespread non-compliance cannot be effectively constrained, and will demonstrate the irrelevance and inappropriateness of the law."

Suggestion : UK /.ers start calling ISPs now. Complain about random pages that don't actually mention you. The ISPs will presumably at least check the pages before yanking them, which will start absorbing significant amounts of time. The ISPs will quickly start pressurising the DTI -- the govt will have the choice of changing the law of waving goodbye to UK-based servers.

I'm sure there are things wrong with this idea, what have I missed ?

\a

--

Here is a list of other interesting wireless links
found at FreakTech

Plasma antennas are radiofrequency antennas that employ plasma as the guiding medium for electromagnetic radiation.
DIRC is a self learning, intelligent, and self organising network of small transmitting and receiving stations.
Impulse Radio a whole new wireless medium.
AIRNET Adaptive Interferometric Radio Network Enhancement Technology.

One of the things that has worried me about this 2.4 freeze was a number of features that were added last minute (during the 2.3.99 series). One of these such features was a multilink implementation by Paul Mackerras.

What was disturbing about this feature add is that several people had been working on other implementations of MLPPP for Linux for some time (including, but not limited to: The PPP Multilink Protocol (MP) for Linux, Chris's Multilink PPP for Linux, and Babylon (by Spellcaster)).

I am particularly touched by Chris Pascoe's e-mail:

Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 08:42:14 +1000 (EST)
From: Chris Pascoe
To: linuxmp@listbot.com
Subject: Ceasing Development

Greetings,

As of Linux 2.3.99-pre1, there is support for
Multilink PPP in the kernel PPP driver 2.4.1. It's not my code, and doesn't
appear to be Michael Bruck's either.

At first glance, it appears to resolve many minor
issues that I know about, that were fixed in a release I was about
to make (probably in a few days) of my code.

Thus I am ceasing support for my drivers as of
this morning. I'm glad that some people have been able to use my code to
their benefit as time has passed and thank those few people that have
written and thanked me for my code which pulled them out of tricky
situations or just plain worked for them.

Regards,
Chris Pascoe

What disturbes me is that I wrote Paul, the present PPP driver maintainer for Linux, asking him if he would like help testing his new MLPPP code before 2.4 final and if he has a new PPP daemon capable of using his new driver. I, and Chris Pascoe are still waiting for the reply. This seams very counter-productive to the open-source model of development. The last time I mailed Chris he said that we was going to get one of his friends to go knocking on Paul's door at the college where he resides to see if he is still alive...

Anybody heard more on PPP?
Anybody seen anymore recently added code during freeze time?

-AP

At this university, at least, for both undergrads and postgrads our intellectual property is, in general, our own. The exceptions are only in cases where either university staff are also entitled to IP (such as joint projects) or where extra university resources above those normally available to students have been provided specifically for the production of that IP.

The Australian National University's IP policy is here the relevant section for students is s5.

At this university, at least, for both undergrads and postgrads our intellectual property is, in general, our own. The exceptions are only in cases where either university staff are also entitled to IP (such as joint projects) or where extra university resources above those normally available to students have been provided specifically for the production of that IP.

The Australian National University's IP policy is here the relevant section for students is s5.

I agree that I can't see the point of cutting real-world code instead of doing this kind of course. *But* - once you've actually done that, you might want to move into playing with the real linux kernel. Don't start your own project unless you come up with a brilliant idea (like implementing an rsync based network filesystem :). Instead, go and find an interesting project (like USB, ReiserFS, or CODA) and work on that...

It was now perceived that such phrases as "self-government," and "the power of the people over themselves," do not express the true state of the case. The "people" who exercise the power, are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised, and the "self-government" spoken of, is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power...... the "tyranny of the majority" is now generally included among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard.

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise.

and it has nothing to do with the availability of information. How many Americans would ever read the Communist Manifesto? How many Americans would read Atheism: A Philosophical Justification or consider polyamory? Some, I admit, but the fact of the matter is that if you teach them young enough and from all angles that one view is right and the other is absurd, fringe, radical, or evil, the vast majority will reject that view outright, regardless of whether the information is readily available; they simply won't be willing to read it, or take it seriously in the rare case that they do. They certainly won't wait to read both sides before coming to a conclusion. There's more than one way to prevent a society to read, and it seams the censorship of the future is to grind it into them at a young enough age not to question the authority of the government. A few will slip by, but not enough to convince the rest. 90% of the world's humans practice the religion of their parents - the lasting and enormous power of childhood censorship and propaganda cannot be seriously denied.

Hi Jon,
FreeBSD does indeed support NAT. Please see the appropriate FAQ entry.
You can also get the same functionality on FreeBSD using Darren Reed's ipfilter program.

Second consider using OpenBSD as the OS on the web server. Use the included IP Filter software that ships with OpenBSD, in addition to the packet filter in step 1.

If you are using Apache for your HTTPd, compile it with as few modules as possible, and no dynamic module support.

To really go whole-hog on security, you could block ALL protocols except HTTP and HTTPS, and have all user uploads and other account management go through cgiwrap on a HTTPSD instance.

Personally what I do for friends who want FTP access is use a One Time Password (S/Key or the like), but the average user probably won't be willing to deal with OTP.

All machines except for those in a DMZ should be denied all incoming packets by default. Opening up all ports on all hosts (as default) is just plain stupid--why even have a firewall?

--

...since the US has already adopted Communism.

"The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat."

Or are you just another one who doesn't know the difference between communism, socialism, command economies, and totalitarianism?

• Socialism - an economic system based on labor, wherein the "means of production" are controled by the workers. Some forms of socialism call for a strong central government to implement this control, other forms are based on decentralized "bottom-up" structure. Contrast with "capitalism", wherein the "means of production" are primarily controled by a small population of private owners.
• Communism - a form of socialism invented by Karl (with a "K") Marx. The main idea is that humanity is divided into two classes, and that the working class should revolt and form a powerful government to estabish a new order. The state then fades away. As you may have noticed, this is the part that fails severely. "When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character." Problem is, (almost) no government gives up political power.
• Command economy - an ecomony where the government decides what is to be produced. Seen in communist nations (though not a part of Marxist doctrine) and occasionally in capitalist ones in times of war or emergency, and in a lesser form of public goods. Contrast with a market economy where producers and consumers trade freely.
• Totalitarianism - a form of government where the state can control any aspect of life that it pleases. Meant to be a temporary feature of communism (but it's not), also found in capitalist states such as Singapore.

But SNA would take business away from Microsoft's SNA Server product. I believe there's also a Linux-SNA project but it seems to have moved, and the new site is not responding yet.

Socialism is a form of government which runs most essential industries such as medicine, power, and telecommunucations; controls the people's access to these industries; and charges high taxes. Wealth is redistributed by a central government.

Communism is an _economic_ system where the workers own the means of production and the wealth created is shared by all. Any form of government can be involved in a communist economy but it is usually socialist' this is why many people get the two confused.

to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

rsync would need additional capabilities in order to recognize and uncompress the .debs at both ends. Experiments have been conducted showing that binary diffs are often a factor of 5 smaller than the original code. This is in comparison to a ~1% source diff though. If you haven't already downloaded an earlier version of the .deb you still have to get the whole thing. Changes in compiler versions or optimizations can also change bytes throughout a binary, leading to very little bandwidth savings.

In short, it's a lot of work for not as much gain as people may hope. unstable-chasers will probably be the only ones to benefit at all. Bypassing the webcache hierarchy isn't very backbone-friendly either, though rproxy may be able to fix that in time.

-not-an-apt developer

I assume that the gravity lensing difference between the two stars can easily be picked out because although they both throw a lot of light, they don't have the same spectrum, and probably not even the same redshift. You can then subtract out the closer star because you very carefully observed it when there was nothing significant behind it.

This is not gravitational lensing, but gravitational microlensing. From the BBC text I guess it's the planet's gravitational field modifying the star's light curve. The light curve is a plot of light intensity vs time. For a main sequence star, i.e., a "regular" one, say, Sol, there's no reason for the light curve to change over a small period of time (400 days or less, typical in microlensing events). Now, what puzzles me is an Earth sized planet's gravitational field isn't strong enough for the effect to be measurable.

You can look here and here if you are interested in more information about gravitational lenses. I couldn't find more details at Mount Stromlo Observatory's homepage.

Samba

Chuck

First, the Keck observations are on the net at Titan, with plenty of info on the adaptive optics technology they used to get a better view than Hubble or Voyager I.

Next, visit "The Nine Planets" and their page on Saturn or Titan to get a broad view of what is being researched and who is doing it.

This leads us ot Cassini and the expected observations of Titan. Thanks to the Keck observations, there should be a lot of interest in Cassini's Titan probe. As noted on the Huygens Titan Probe site, on their Why Titan page, the peculiar nature of Titan, with its plentiful organics and opaque atmosphere, have been well known and of great interest since Voyager.

But anyone who wanted to know already knew. So why are we makig a slashdot fuss over mass media coverage of anything scientific?

First, the Keck observations are on the net at Titan, with plenty of info on the adaptive optics technology they used to get a better view than Hubble or Voyager I.

Next, visit "The Nine Planets" and their page on Saturn or Titan to get a broad view of what is being researched and who is doing it.

This leads us ot Cassini and the expected observations of Titan. Thanks to the Keck observations, there should be a lot of interest in Cassini's Titan probe. As noted on the Huygens Titan Probe site, on their Why Titan page, the peculiar nature of Titan, with its plentiful organics and opaque atmosphere, have been well known and of great interest since Voyager.

But anyone who wanted to know already knew. So why are we makig a slashdot fuss over mass media coverage of anything scientific?

First, the Keck observations are on the net at Titan, with plenty of info on the adaptive optics technology they used to get a better view than Hubble or Voyager I.

Next, visit "The Nine Planets" and their page on Saturn or Titan to get a broad view of what is being researched and who is doing it.

This leads us ot Cassini and the expected observations of Titan. Thanks to the Keck observations, there should be a lot of interest in Cassini's Titan probe. As noted on the Huygens Titan Probe site, on their Why Titan page, the peculiar nature of Titan, with its plentiful organics and opaque atmosphere, have been well known and of great interest since Voyager.

But anyone who wanted to know already knew. So why are we makig a slashdot fuss over mass media coverage of anything scientific?