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Seems to mostly work on debian potato with python 1.5

In my many... uh... months of using Bearshare, I don't think I ever once saw a query list that was as clean as the one in their screenshot. I only count four porn searches, and none of them have anything obscene in the query. Nice job, guys.

The care given to the interface is not entirely surprising since one of them (Danyel Fisher) is specializing in human-computer interaction...

These guys disected the Gnutella protocol and used the Furi interface (which provides network status screens and gives users info about nodes they're connected to) for their project. I was looking over the source code briefly and it looks very tight. It's nice to see college students interested and working on projects like these. If you go to the website and read over their final paper it is very interesting. You'll find a lot of stuff about the guts of Gnutella and what is unique about this project. They toyed with interfaces for a long time and rejected a great deal of them. It seems they spent a lot of time making this a very easy to use tool. They even worked hard on getting the color scheme down (hence this rejected scheme). Seeing a few people that are this poetic in refining their tools so that the user can use them best is rare.

The final visualization was createed with Python and Tkinter ("Tk interface"-- the de-facto Python interface to the Tk GUI toolkit). Tkinter is not the only GUI for Python. However, they chose it because it is commonly used and is easily portable between Unix and Windows (how thoughtful of them!)

CFS and PAST are P2P readonly file systems a la Napster/Gnutella/Freenet. Both had papers in this year's SOSP. Both are based on log(N) P2P overlay routing/lookup substrates.

OceanStore seeks to be a more general (writable) global storage system.

And several P2P conferences have formed and will continue to form.

Some of these projects have been going on for years. So you shouldn't buy the "Academic networking/CS researchers are a bunch of P2P haters" line without a few grains of your favorite seasoning.

Benford's "Artifact"

No, wait.

Wheeler's "The Krone Experiment" (now a major motion picture!)

Ah never mind.. This one's probably been done to death.

From a preservation perspective, the problem is not too little raw material, but too much. We are swimming in massive amounts of information with very little sense of which parts should be preserved over time.

Long-term preservation of digital materials is extremely resource-intensive, largely due to issues of hardware and software obsolescence. The problem is picking out the gems and keeping them accessible into the future, not needing to send more out-takes to the archives.

Or you use the best of both worlds - a database system like Cheshire which parses XML into a flat RDBMS (in this case the open Berkeley DB3). Cheshire is Free, as in almost. (Not-for-profit licence from UCB)

We use Cheshire for serving large documents which you can search based on the indexes built at database load time. While in theory you may want to search on arbitrary XML paths, 99% of the time what you really want is a simple named search. (author, title, subject, keyword, full text etcetc.) so by reducing the XML into a flat format you don't lose any significant functionality. 99.99% of people would be confused by searching on a 'tag' or 'XPATH' -- they have a concept in mind of what they're looking for, and how you represent that in your underlying data is irrelevant to them, as it should be.

-- Azaroth

Don't confuse waves and particles.

This holographic sonar communications system relies on the interference patterns of pressure waves in water (sound). Internet packets do not behave like waves, they behave like particles. There is no interference between them, nor are multiple packets ever combined into one packet.

Quantum effects allow the merging of particle and wave features, but we don't have that sort of technology in place in the internet at this time.

(Though such things ARE being researched.)

~ Chris

From the NewsForge column:
there's probably a better chance that the city of Berkeley, Calif., would open up a municipal rifle range before that happens

Uh Oh... We're all in trouble now... It's already happened![www.csua.berkeley.edu] Quick! Stop using Linux/*BSD, it's only a matter of time before the authorities are closing in on you...

Maybe, ti just might be that the hackers and crackers are just not "evil" as they are made out.

I think the theory outlined in this 1985 paper about "hackers" (ok, crackers) ethics is still valid : these are mostly young teenagers whose idea of what's wrong and what's right isn't better or worse than that of most kids this age. The author argues that kids breaking into a computer system are at the same level of moral developement as other kids hot-wiring a car for a joyride. Both are just immature vandals, but the thing is that damage caused by computer vandalism is usually much worse.

This is the common myth that troubles European countries because they believe it and implement laws based on it.

Productivity increases of any type -- cheaper labor, more automation, better manufacturing techniques, revolutionary ideas -- all increase the overall quality of life for society, whatever the temporary bumps.

If everyone still works a 40 hour week, then quite simply, all that much more work is done, and everyone lives a better life. Europe trades off that productivity increase by decreasing hours worked. This gives more free time (good) but you don't get that for free. This makes inefficiency, leading not to decreased unemployment, but increased unemployment.

The ultimate of this, of course, is to have Reed Richards invent a machine that produces copies of anything, including itself, and start passing them around.

By European, or the "oh no, this is progress?!?!?" theory of economics, everyone will be out of a job and starve. Yet what would happen is exactly the opposite. For a few $ a year of energy, people will have all the food, excellent items, big houses, and whatnot that they could desire.

"Multimedia" compression is without exception lossy compression

I think I've heard of lossless compressed-audio codecs, but I can't recall any names off the top of my head. For video editing, WAV has been sufficient as the few hundred megs needed for audio is nothing compared to the tens of gigabytes needed for video. As for MP3, I've been using 160-kbps VBR lately with LAME for CD rips. I can't tell the difference, but then I don't claim to have "golden ears" either. Tape rips get 128-kbps VBR as there's already been a fair amount of loss introduced when the tape was produced.

I worked over the summer at a federally funded research and development corporation (think ``military industrial complex'') in a department that develops various remote sensors such as are flown on General Atomics' ``Predator'' unmanned aerial vehicle. Nearly all of the engineers in my department preferred Linux to Windows, but due to Navy requirements they were required to deliver a Windows NT-based product. Their response was essentially to bring unix to NT. By using Cygwin they were able to program in what looked and smelled liked a Linux development environment, yet it was really Windows NT. Furthermore the code could easily be adapted for customers who were more open minded about Linux. I found Cygwin to be very impressive indeed.

I also have worked at LBL where Linux is nothing short of pervasive. We even have experiments at the south pole run by Linux machines, such as the AMANDA project, a giant neutrino telescope embedded kilometers down in the ice at the pole.

The most preposterous thing about high-priced journals is that the "value-added" part of a journal is the peer review, which is done almost always for free. When an article is submitted it is sent out for review to someone whose research is close enough to understand the work. Getting an article to review is a chore; it can take many months to thoroughly review an article, many are poorly written and have annoying minor mistakes, and there is no recognition or pay associated to it. When it turns out that the journals are priced outrageously, that is the final straw for many. In general, reviewing articles is considered a nescessary public service, and since the editors of the highest-priced journals tend to be the super-big shots, it is not easy to refuse to review something. Hopefully, things will improve! The arXiv is great for preprints but the reviewing process is an important part of disseminating research so it will take more than that for things to get much better.

The most preposterous thing about high-priced journals is that the "value-added" part of a journal is the peer review, which is done almost always for free. When an article is submitted it is sent out for review to someone whose research is close enough to understand the work. Getting an article to review is a chore; it can take many months to thoroughly review an article, many are poorly written and have annoying minor mistakes, and there is no recognition or pay associated to it. When it turns out that the journals are priced outrageously, that is the final straw for many. In general, reviewing articles is considered a nescessary public service, and since the editors of the highest-priced journals tend to be the super-big shots, it is not easy to refuse to review something. Hopefully, things will improve! The arXiv is great for preprints but the reviewing process is an important part of disseminating research so it will take more than that for things to get much better.

The most preposterous thing about high-priced journals is that the "value-added" part of a journal is the peer review, which is done almost always for free. When an article is submitted it is sent out for review to someone whose research is close enough to understand the work. Getting an article to review is a chore; it can take many months to thoroughly review an article, many are poorly written and have annoying minor mistakes, and there is no recognition or pay associated to it. When it turns out that the journals are priced outrageously, that is the final straw for many. In general, reviewing articles is considered a nescessary public service, and since the editors of the highest-priced journals tend to be the super-big shots, it is not easy to refuse to review something. Hopefully, things will improve! The arXiv is great for preprints but the reviewing process is an important part of disseminating research so it will take more than that for things to get much better.

It wasn't the first. distributed.net got cracking (!) in 1997, whereas SETI didn't start accepting clients until May 1999.

And that's why I'm with d.net

Why oh why are they not *OPEN SOURCEING* these distributed projects?

The Seti@home FAQ says about this:

"We decided not to make source code available for security reasons and for science reasons as well. We have to have everyone do the exact same analysis, or we can't have any control over our research and be confident in our results. We were also worried that there may be a few people that want to deliberately try to screw up our database and server."

They actually do recheck old data (even, before 3.x all data pieces where sent to at least 2 people) Quote from seti's website:
SETI@home has enough volunteers such that we can process each piece of data more than once and compare the potential signals detected by different computers to one another.
And: There are also many work units that were processed by more than one version of the SETI@home client.

This picture shows what has been scanned, and how many times.

For those who doesn't know it they (SETI@home) recently reached the Zettaflop (10e+21 floating-point operations) mark which is a world record. The last 24 hours "they" (read the users) performed 6.104916e+18 flops which is about 70.66 Teraflops/sec. This can be compared to the Terascale Computing System that theoretically could reach a maximum of 6 teraflops per second *laugh*. SETI's total cpu-time lies around 750 000 years, _pretty cool_ eh?

99% of people install Seti, then don't like how it uses their computer (what did they think was going to happen?), so they uninstall it.

I wouldn't be suprised if that big lump in the graph around the beginning of the month is all the morons going back to school installing it on school computers, and the drop off it the administrators finding it and taking it off.

For what it's worth, SETI@home recorded an average of nearly 40 teraFLOPs/sec in the last 24 hours. Makes that supercomputer look positively pokey by comparison. :-) And it appears they're gearing up to handle even more data...

1. You can work with other people while thinking out your solution, even to the point of working out some very high level pseudo-code together.
2. When it comes time to write the code (or other solution), it better be your own.

It made it very easy to check for people who had copied and modified code, or worked from the same printout. If you feed it examples in the book or from the lectures along with the submitted solutions, you can also find out who worked independently from a common starting point.

After completing the program there, I can say that it definitely did create an environment where students could learn from each other without having to worry about being accused of cheating. We frequently left our collaborative discussions with a much greater understanding that if we would have simply done the assignment alone, and that type of learning is something a school should allow, foster, and encourage.

Besides, didn't the DMCA outlaw reverse-engineering?

Definitely not. First, reverse engineering is entirely legal: Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc., and Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America, Inc. I know there are several more cases involving reverse engineering of boat hulls and other, more tangible things.

As I understand it, the DMCA outlaws things like making and distributing tools for encryption circumvention. Reverse engineering in and of itself isn't made illegal, just the tools to do so.

This issue was already explored by the Internet community, and the cypherpunk manifesto From Crossbows to Cryptography explains the issue, though some of us find our collective selves on the other side of the coin from the cypherpunks this time.

The issue is power, which privacy confers because anonymity is impunity. Authorship being one of the critical facts concealed by any encrypted parcel. Technology originates in the powerful, in order to confer more power to them. However the technology itself is information which escapes by multiplying itself in unacquainted minds, eventually in those minds outside the power elite which devised the technology. The balance of power falls back to somewhere between the power elite and the subject people.

Now all of this exists independant of ethics. No doubt the power elite would like the subjects to restrain their use of the technology on a principle that does not bind the power elite. Ethics are weak (subjective and voluntary), but they are at least sometimes effective.

Where this leads us is to the question: should we develop new encryption technology? Should we implement Key Escrow? I urge you to think long and hard about the cold facts of how any of those possibilities can be abused. Experts agree that without strong cryptography (even for terrorists) democracy will fail. This is a new world and requires acute wisdom to set the direction we move next. Freedom of speech is not an option or a priviledge, it is a right whithout which people cannot guarantee governance by consent.

http://ai.about.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm
http://www.forbes.com/2001/02/13/0213robot.html
http://www1.cnn.com/TECH/9612/11/interactive.robot s/
http://www.daily.umn.edu/daily/1999/12/07/news/new 2/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 112000/1112411.stm
http://internet.cybermesa.com/~haddrill/robots.htm l
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/97lega cy/robot.html
http://www.it.umn.edu/inventing/98fall/cover/
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/21/1934206.shtm l
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.03/robots.htm l
http://ai.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm

Likewise, there are a lot of evolutionsts who don't know anything about science saying there's a lot of evidence for it.

there are a lot of crazy people who don't know anything about anything saying all kinds of stuff-- for a really good example, click on the link listed as my homepage (which unfortunately isn't really mine). That doesn't mean that you or anyone else should give them a serious audience.

that doesn't change the fact that for the last 300 years, people have been poking around the issue, and that the idea of evolution that is taught in credible universities today is the product of much real-world experimentation. You just can't say the same for creationism, becuase the idea of faith simply rules out the possibility of rational discussion.

Likewise, there are a lot of evolutionsts who don't know anything about science saying there's a lot of evidence for it.

there are a lot of crazy people who don't know anything about anything saying all kinds of stuff-- for a really good example, click on the link listed as my homepage (which unfortunately isn't really mine). That doesn't mean that you or anyone else should give them a serious audience.

that doesn't change the fact that for the last 300 years, people have been poking around the issue, and that the idea of evolution that is taught in credible universities today is the product of much real-world experimentation. You just can't say the same for creationism, becuase the idea of faith simply rules out the possibility of rational discussion.

Incidentally, this case really frightens me.

RC4's "goodness" is very dependent on how it is used. Many of the attacks on WEP would work as well regardless of the stream cypher used; the problem was the poor implementation (e.g. the integrity check, weak key generation, small IV space). See, e.g. (In)Security of the WEP algorithm.

The "Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm for RC4" paper (PDF or Postscript) also describes significant attacks on RC4. However, RC4 can be used in other ways; example would be to use RC4 output bytes as successive keys to a block algorithm (e.g. DES, or multiple DES with a separate key for each); there are other ways to use a stream cypher output in more secure ways.

Gee, you mean like this?

I can just hear Jack Nichelson's voice: "Where does he get all of those toys?"

http://ai.about.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm
http://www.forbes.com/2001/02/13/0213robot.html%20
http://www1.cnn.com/TECH/9612/11/interactive.robot s/
http://www.daily.umn.edu/daily/1999/12/07/news/new 2/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 112000/1112411.stm
http://internet.cybermesa.com/~haddrill/robots.htm l
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/97lega cy/robot.html
http://www.it.umn.edu/inventing/98fall/cover/
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/21/1934206.shtm l
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.03/robots.htm l
http://ai.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm

For those of you that might be interested, I just launched a new site dedicated to models of human language acquisition. Over time I hope to provide a repository of relevant news on researchers, conferences, papers, and books from fields including A/I, computational linguistics, developmental psychology, machine learning, and cognitive science.

I will also use the site to share information about my own work. Like HAL, my model learns (and "learn" should always be taken with a grain of salt) from the bottom-up, but the words it acquires are grounded in visual perception. The basic idea is to resolve nouns to objects and verbs to actions/relationships in short spatial-motion videos. My work is based on work by Jeffrey Mark Siskind, David Bailey, Jan Norris, and Katherine Nelson.

Upon completion of my dissertation, I hope to release some or all of the Java code for my model on the site.

Point your employer to this Berkeley study, showing increased productivity from telecommuters.

If you love New York, your heart will break when the smoke clears. Something about the city is busted for good, no matter what the mayor says.

One has only to think of London under the blitz or the San Francisco earthquake to know that great cities can recover from great disasters.

According to seminal urbanologist Jane Jacobs, cities are inherently resilient to catastrophe. More damage is done by misguided urban planning.

The World Trade Center, as its name suggests, serves a national and international market. The demand for the products and services that the companies in the World Trade Tower provided is still there. Compared to the damage caused by hurricanes in Florida, the cost to rebuild is manageable.

If New York could thrive despite a crime rate that killed many more people than the terrorist over the last 10 years, it can survive this single event.

I suspect that the most lasting effect is that architects will reconsider the need for 110 storey buildings.

Here is something that is worth thinking about at a time like this.

http://safe.millennium.berkeley.edu/

The page also has links to other similar sites.

http://safe.millennium.berkeley.edu/

755 reports so far. Links to other sites with the same purpose.

I've already reported those I know of so far whom I've personally verified to be OK. Please do so yourself if you're able.

Russell

=== Report the survivors! === this is a clearinghouse for reporting people you know made it out alive.

Please report everyone you know of who has survived the attacks.

U. Berkeley has apparently supported this with a few hundred servers. GO TO IT AND SPREAD THE WORD!

A friend writes that:

This site will register people who are safe:
http://do.millennium.berkeley.edu/

You can query this site to search for people:

http://do.millennium.berkeley.edu/find.php

Please spread the word

(And it looks like this site should withstand the slashdot effect.)

A friend writes that:

This site will register people who are safe:
http://do.millennium.berkeley.edu/

You can query this site to search for people:

http://do.millennium.berkeley.edu/find.php

Please spread the word

(And it looks like this site should withstand the slashdot effect.)

Bullshit warning: I'm about to pull a lot of numbers out my ass. I hope to be semi-reasonable and conservative, but it's guesswork nonetheless.

Let's suppose for the sake of argument the NSA can in fact intercept any transmission and beyond that can convert any spoken words in any language to flawless text.

5 minutes of phone time per person per day worldwide
6 billion people
at least 1 word every 3 seconds
2 people in the typical conversation
8 character average word length (w/ space)
= 2.4 Terabytes per day

200 important daily newspapers
50,000 words per issue
= 80 Mbytes per day

5,000 magazines / periodicals
median time of 2 weeks
100 pages on average
average 400 words per page
= 114 Mbytes per day

15,000 worldwide radio stations
35% of time is spoken
1 word every 2 seconds in spoken segments
= 1.8 Gigabytes

7 million new webpages a day (source)
10k average size
= 70 Gigabytes per day

500 million email users
average 0.5 email sent per user per day
18k average email size (source)
= 4.5 Terabytes per day

Total = 7 Terabytes per day

If the NSA really were out to track everything, suffice it to say, it's one monster of a computer engineering problem. We are generating more information than ever and don't have the same kinds of well defined enemies. And how many actual analysts are required to make any sense of all that? Is it any wonder they might be falling behind?

Of course I'm sure there are lots of sources of information, such as TV, that I haven't even covered.

Check out Steve Weber's work on the topic. WP 140, "The Political Economy of Open Source," articulates some interesting stuff.

A team at Berkeley is researching jokes using collaborative filtering (or is it the other way around?). The project is called Jester and works like this:

- You are exposed to fifteen different jokes, which you have to rate according to how funny you find them
- Then your humour profile is compared to all the other profiles, they have
- Based on the matches, they will show the jokes, which best suit your sense of humour.

This seems like a much more likely way of finding the funniest joke in the world, because here you can find the funniest joke in the world according to your taste.

Give it a shot. You dont have to fill in a working email address to get it to work.

The European Society of Cardiology (referenced in the Times' article) are having their conference this week.
No mention of coffee - except for the generously long breaks that they're getting...

According to these links, between 20% and 25% of American homes have neither cable or satellite.
Of course of fair few of them are not going to watch over-the-air TV either.

Progeny may have terminated their NOW project, but Progeny was not the first, and will not be the last to build NOW clusters.

Please, when refering to this, call it the Progeny NOW project, to distinguish it from the NOW project.

I'm surprised not to have seen any post mentioning this modded up to my threshold. AMD has already used a non MHz identification in the past, with the K5 series of microprocessors.

Here is a Press Release for the K5-PR100.

With the release of the K6 series, and AMD's initial clock speed lead over Intel, they seemed to have dropped the PR designation.

I support AMD and their products, but seriously people, don't try to paint this as anything other than a marketing ploy to sell more CPUs.

As soon as they have the lead again, AMD will most likely return to advertising clockspeed. Such is the way of the world.

secure the 802.11b protocal first before you go any further... thanks...