Slashdot Mirror

A long time ago, at an installation far, far away...
      It is a time of intra-system war, as forces of the User Alliance
struggle to break the iron grip of the evil Admin Empire. Now, striking
from a hidden directory, they win their first victory.
      During the battle, User spies manage to snarf source of the Empire's
ultimate weapon; the dreaded "rm-star", a privileged root program with the
power to destroy an entire file system at a keystroke.

To be continued...

The SPIES wiretap archive, now owned by Area.com, and moved to HTTP from Gopher but the content is still there. First place I learned about Phreaking and Rainbow Boxes, as well as Core Wars, a ton of great old practical jokes.

http://wiretap.area.com/

Here is the version I had given to me back in the 80's (still have it on my shelf, too!): http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Library/Humor/Jokes/litebulb.jok

3CPU you dolt

For reference to all you young-un's Unix Wars

God that makes me feel old.

Not to sound unkind, but you are reading the law ten years back: Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988

If you check out these benchmarks you'll see that even the Cray Y-MP could only crunch 67 MFLOPS.

My point was that it would take 75,000 20 year-old PC's (sure, it would take less Y-MP's, but they have their own power and size issues) to equal the processing power (in FP) of a single current technology CPU. And there are more powerful processors than the Opteron x48 out there. The 2.0Ghz G5 can crank 6.0 GFLOPS. That's a 100,000 PC XT/AT's.

Many moons ago, we had a 10 MegaWatt transformer just outside of Phoenix blow. And I do mean blow. People over ten miles away heard the explosion! It is simply not practical to run 75,000 20 year-old computers. 5MW is a practically insane amount of power.

Also my new computer which cost over 100 times what it would cost to build a 20 year old computer can do 5 things at once. Hmm why not spend that money on 100 older computers and do 100 things at once?

Because my computers are running SETI@Home. To get the same performance out of, say IBM PC XT's (or even the Compaq Portable I that I still own and was originally released in 1984), I would need a hell of a lot more than 100 of them. Check this out:

A Zenith Z-100 using 8088/8087 chip(s) running at 10.67 Mhz will do 0.0596 MFLOPS (Millions of Floating Point Operations a Second). That's almost 60 thousand FLOPS.

An Opteron x48 cranks about 4.5 GFLOPS. That's 4.5 Billion FLOPS. That's 75,000 times more work.

Let's do the math, shall we?

75,000 Compaq Portable I's (even tho running at only 4.7Mhz and no 8087 co-proc)
X
70W Power Supplies (IIRC)
=
5.25 MegaWatts! Which is just about 4/10 of 1 percent of the total output of the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant.

Hmmmm... 5.25 Million Watts or 400? I think I'll take the smaller of those two numbers, thank you very much. And I'm sure my neighbors and SETI@Home would agree.

A nice article has been published in a recent Harper's magazine (April 2004), titled "Lie down for America - How the Republican Party Sows Ruin on the Great Plains". I wish it were online, but it's not.

You can see tha mag cover anyway here: http://www.harpers.org/Newsstand200404.html

Oh wait, it *is* online. Someone typed it up. Once again, Google saved my day:

http://vax.area.com/marc/liedown.txt

In order to understand what causes nerdism, we must first look to the nerds themselves. The most obvious observation one could make is that nerds are statistically nearly always male. While nerds routinely come in a splendid variety of shapes and sizes and hues, it is rare to see a nerd of the fairer sex. Since we know that nerdism is the fascination with tools and systems, and we know that nerds are predominantly male, we would likely gain insight in asking ourselves why females are not so driven to tinker.

There is no basic mental difference between men and women, and so there is no reason to believe that women would be mentally any less tinker-inclined than men. Therefore, in order to determine the reason why there are so few female nerds, we must turn our attentions to the ways in which men and women are known to differ: the physical ways. Immediately, the answer becomes plain. Women do not need to glut their tendencies by tinkering with computers or cars or guns because of their reproductive systems, which require a great deal more attention and maintenance than those of their male counterparts. Simply put, women tinker with their parts, and so have no interest in tinkering with electronic substitutes.

Penises and testicles, despite their initial lustre, grow boring early on. They do not exhibit quirky, moody, fixable behavior. Rather, they hang loosely and idly in a man's crotch and rarely get more attention than any other body part, and at those times that they do, tinkering is not foremost on the subject's mind. Particularly in the case of an circumsized penis, very little extra maintenance is ever needed. Contrast this, then, to the vagina, which must be carefully wiped after every use, and regularly cleaned to preserve womanly freshness. Females learn early in life that the vagina must be treated with respect, and in return they have the incomparable, primal joy of upkeep.

Women may contentedly seek non-nerdy sources of entertainment, safe in their knowledge that every month will bring them more new and exciting vaginal adventures. While some men profess to be unnerved or even disgusted by menstruation, their true feelings are probably closer to envy. Women, lucky women, may peruse those exotic aisles at the supermarket in search of feminine hygiene products, products that they need, they absolutely need, in order to keep their systems fully operational. Men never know the intimate thrill of personally dealing with menstruation by applying a tampon just in the nick of time, or the sense of deep personal satisfaction that comes with regularly eating yogurt and so having a

Um, no. qmail has patches available to add components to the MTA. Show me one race condition or even a "fix" on something other than changing functionality like allowing more concurrent remote connections.

he's written the license to make it very difficult for anyone but him to distribute modifications

I was under the impression that qmail (and all of djb's software) was completely unlicensed. He doesn't believe that software licenses would stand up in court, so he just relies on his copyright on the software. Basically, if you do violate his copyrights in a way he doesn't like, he'll sue you for copyright infringement. He has neither the right (under US law), nor the desire to prevent people from distributing modifications , as long as they keep them in patch form only. This is only a little bit inconvenient, not "very diffcult" as you say. In fact, a very large number of people have contributed patches.

My theory about the new internet - the new internet will be as wildly popular as new Coke.


You might be closer than you realize - New Coke probably served it's purpose well (possibly to cover up a planned formula change from expensive sugar, to sweeter corn syrup in the origional product; or as a means of attracting massive amounts of media attention as Negativland suggested on one of the tracks of Dispepsi).

Announcing a NEW! SHINY!! network with lots of NEW! SHINY!! content would catch the eye of the overstimulated, media saturated, passive good little consumer we are all supposed to be. Get AOL or MSN on board, running your special protocal, with maybe a lone proxy allowing communication with the oldnet (Old BAD! see how slow it is? Ohhhh! Shiny Link!!!) Simplify it, and make it gradually as passive of an experience as you can.

That's how you kill off the old net...

• Get to know the night staff - I eat my lunch at about the time the janitors finish, so I usually sit around with them and talk for a while. I've heard some amazing stories
  
• Read manuals - check the tops of racks of equipment that outside people (like EMC) maintain. Sometimes they'll leave the manuals there.
  
• Read documentation - SGI and Apple have lots of cool reading, not to mention Other Places.
  
• Write throwaway code - They may own it, so just try things out. See how fast you can get a parallel matrix multiply to go when you spread it over all 16 or so of the processors of a nice beefy box.
  
• Automate things - write scripts to make life easier for everyone, and give yourself even more free time to worry about!
  
• Read good books - I've been catching up on my reading backlog.
  
• Check HR's web page to double check your benefits - I found a nice discount on books from fatbrain that I had missed.
  
• See if the zone where managers sit has better toilet paper in the bathrooms.
  

first of a new kind of digital library

What about wiretap?

What makes this a 'new kind'?

--

The wiretap archives (after the opening page) are still accessible via gopher.

Kinda makes one long for the olden days, no? Before cookies, pop-ups, censorship, and cease and desist orders . . .

The days when Usenet was big, everyone was on Prodigy "Classic&quot and SPAM as we fear it today was still limited to the snail mail variety . . . ah . . .an Internet sin Corporations . . . those were the days . . .

--

ok..you host it. download from here :
http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Library/ clicky here

The first time I tried, I got the 404, then I messed around a bit. It seems to be some kind of web foible. FTP works, Gopher Works, and ...

• wiretap.area.com generates the 404.
• wiretap.area.com/index.html gets me to the actual site.

I'm glad it's not gone.

The first time I tried, I got the 404, then I messed around a bit. It seems to be some kind of web foible. FTP works, Gopher Works, and ...

• wiretap.area.com generates the 404.
• wiretap.area.com/index.html gets me to the actual site.

I'm glad it's not gone.

You just have to check it out via Gopher. You do remember Gopher, don't you? You can also access it through FTP.

You just have to check it out via Gopher. You do remember Gopher, don't you? You can also access it through FTP.

don't forget
Gopher!

My proxy at work has that service blocked but from the looks of it it ought to work...

Or am I missing something somewhere?...

• gopher://wiretap.area.com/

Internet Wiretap
P.O. Box 4436
Mountain View, CA 94040-0436

Internet Wiretap
P.O. Box 4436
Mountain View, CA 94040-0436

gopher://wiretap.area.com/ It's just not running a web server is all. Gopher still works just fine, although since I've never been there till now, I wouldn't know if that's a trimmed down archive or not.

or is this not it: gopher://wiretap.area.com/?

Right now it appears to be slashdotted. I guess the prospect of reading "Wuthering Heights" was too much for most slashdotters to pass up.

Me, I just wanted to have sex with a horse.

We searched on "sex" on a major search engine and started clicking down the list of hits. By hit #9, we were looking at"Amanda's Gallery," a page of explicit photos from "Amanda's Senior Year in High School" where she apparently spent a great deal of time with her clothes off. "Upskirts, freecam, sex diary" - all were allowed by SmartFilter.

Not to bad here, I can still get pr0n

To illustrate the problems that censorware manufacturers have, we went back to the Wiretap archive. This archive contains public domain text like George Washington's Farewell Address, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, and most of Shakespeare's tragedies - all of which were blocked in September. Now that it is unblocked, SmartFilter is happy to show us "how-to" instructions on having sex with a horse, making drugs, and even building an atomic bomb.

And I can even get high, fool around with a horse, then build a nuclear weapon when I'm done! After they deposit all that nuclear waste a Yucca Mountain I'll be ready to go!

We searched on "sex" on a major search engine and started clicking down the list of hits. By hit #9, we were looking at"Amanda's Gallery," a page of explicit photos from "Amanda's Senior Year in High School" where she apparently spent a great deal of time with her clothes off. "Upskirts, freecam, sex diary" - all were allowed by SmartFilter.

Not to bad here, I can still get pr0n

To illustrate the problems that censorware manufacturers have, we went back to the Wiretap archive. This archive contains public domain text like George Washington's Farewell Address, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, and most of Shakespeare's tragedies - all of which were blocked in September. Now that it is unblocked, SmartFilter is happy to show us "how-to" instructions on having sex with a horse, making drugs, and even building an atomic bomb.

And I can even get high, fool around with a horse, then build a nuclear weapon when I'm done! After they deposit all that nuclear waste a Yucca Mountain I'll be ready to go!

We searched on "sex" on a major search engine and started clicking down the list of hits. By hit #9, we were looking at"Amanda's Gallery," a page of explicit photos from "Amanda's Senior Year in High School" where she apparently spent a great deal of time with her clothes off. "Upskirts, freecam, sex diary" - all were allowed by SmartFilter.

Not to bad here, I can still get pr0n

To illustrate the problems that censorware manufacturers have, we went back to the Wiretap archive. This archive contains public domain text like George Washington's Farewell Address, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, and most of Shakespeare's tragedies - all of which were blocked in September. Now that it is unblocked, SmartFilter is happy to show us "how-to" instructions on having sex with a horse, making drugs, and even building an atomic bomb.

And I can even get high, fool around with a horse, then build a nuclear weapon when I'm done! After they deposit all that nuclear waste a Yucca Mountain I'll be ready to go!

We searched on "sex" on a major search engine and started clicking down the list of hits. By hit #9, we were looking at"Amanda's Gallery," a page of explicit photos from "Amanda's Senior Year in High School" where she apparently spent a great deal of time with her clothes off. "Upskirts, freecam, sex diary" - all were allowed by SmartFilter.

Not to bad here, I can still get pr0n

To illustrate the problems that censorware manufacturers have, we went back to the Wiretap archive. This archive contains public domain text like George Washington's Farewell Address, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, and most of Shakespeare's tragedies - all of which were blocked in September. Now that it is unblocked, SmartFilter is happy to show us "how-to" instructions on having sex with a horse, making drugs, and even building an atomic bomb.

And I can even get high, fool around with a horse, then build a nuclear weapon when I'm done! After they deposit all that nuclear waste a Yucca Mountain I'll be ready to go!

You can write filter scripts! See the documentation for javascript mail filters and the filters of the guy who implemented them.

"The War Inevitable"
A speech by Patrick Henry
March 1775
http://wiretap.area.com/Gop her/Gov/US-Speech/liberty.ph

-Imperator