Slashdot Mirror

mpost4 writes "This last week the CMU Robotics Institute showed off some of the stuff they were doing. They were showing the new stuff they were working on. I with two of my coworks drop by there and we got this video of it, so you can see some of the cool stuff they are doing."

lucabrasi999 writes "The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a story today on the 2004 inductees to the Robot Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University. The highlight of the ceremony was apparently a handshake between Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) and ASIMO (Honda). Well, at least Robby the Robot finally made it in. Now I can sleep easy at night."

Project Massive, a Carnegie Mellon University study into the habits and tendencies of Massively Multiplayer Gamers, has completed research into their first wave of questions. The results are available on their site, and include some interesting observations (nearly 30% of players spend time in a MMOG to interact with real-life friends). If you're interested in participating, their second wave of questions is available. Similar projects include Nick Yee's The Daedalus Project, the TerraNova Blog, and Constance Steinkuehler's Selected Papers. Thanks to clampe for the submission.

touretzky writes "Carnegie Mellon University announced on Tuesday that The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had donated $20 million toward the cost of a new building to be called the "Gates Center for Computer Science". Some faculty have suggested that in acknowledgment of Mr. Gates' profound influence on the computer software industry, the building should be painted bright blue."

touretzky writes "Carnegie Mellon University announced on Tuesday that The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had donated $20 million toward the cost of a new building to be called the "Gates Center for Computer Science". Some faculty have suggested that in acknowledgment of Mr. Gates' profound influence on the computer software industry, the building should be painted bright blue."

superid asks: "I'd like to get opinions and real world experiences that people have had with database centric applications that rely extensively on stored procedures. I believe that most enterprise class databases such as Oracle, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL, DB2 and others implement stored procedures. MySQL has been criticized for not supporting stored procedures and will be adding them in MySQL 5. The ANSI-92 SQL Standard also requires implementing some form of stored procedure (section 4.17). So, I'm asking Slashdot readers: if you were architecting a highly data-centric web based application today from a clean slate, how much (if at all) would/should stored procedures factor into your design? Where are they indispensable and where do they get in the way?" "The arguments for stored procedures are pretty straightforward: 1) Centralized code; 2) Compiled SQL is faster; 3) Enhanced security (as our application is over 15 years old, and consists of much legacy code, reimplementation and feature creep that now includes over 3000 stored procedures). At one time we had a client/server architecture so those three advantages were relevant. However, in the past 4 years we have moved everything to web front ends and I have argued that this is no longer true. Does it really matter if my business rules are centralized in stored procedures or in a set of php/asp scripts (ie, in the web tier)? Is it really important to shave compilation time when connection and execution times dominate? (and overall response is ok anyway?) Since the focal point is the webserver, shouldn't security be done there, rather than the DB?

In addition, you either have to have a dedicated T-SQL or PL/SQL coder who then is the weak link in your coding chain, or your pool of developers must become fluent in both your scripting language of choice as well as the SP language. I have experienced both of these approaches and found this to cause bottlenecks when 'the database guy' is unavailable and learning curve problems (bugs) with new coders getting familiar with the db language.

Finally, after staying with our DB engine choice for all these years we are acknowledging that they may not be around forever. Management has asked us to look into migrating our data and business logic to another DB choice. We'd sure love to just be able to point the web tier at a new data source but that is unattainable due to a convoluted tangle of db specific code."

sameerdesai writes "CNN is carrying a story about Researchers from Carnegie Melon: Myers and a graduate student, Andrew Ko, have developed a debugging program that lets users ask questions about computer errors in plain English: Why didn't a program behave as expected? I guess with recent exploits and bugs that were found this will soon be a hot research topic or tool in the market." We recently did a story about revolutionary debugging techniques; the researchers' website has some papers and other information.

OckNock writes "Carnegie Mellon is offering free courses through its Open Learning Initiative. Unlike MIT's OpenCourseWare which has 700 courses available, Carnegie Mellon currently only has five courses available. However, Carnegie Mellon is unique in that they offer '...courses [that] include a number of innovative online instructional components such as: cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group experiments, simulations,' so rather than just offering course material Carnegie Mellon is pursuing a more interactive, community approach. Carnegie Mellon is also unique in that they offer the courses as an Academic Version which '...is offered through educational institutions for credit awarded by the student's home institution.' Interestingly, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funds both MIT's OpenCourseWare and Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative ('Funding for the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon has been provided by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.') Sadly, the courses are not supported on any open source platforms or even any open source web browsers. More importantly, I'm curious how other universities will start making their courses available freely online."

OckNock writes "Carnegie Mellon is offering free courses through its Open Learning Initiative. Unlike MIT's OpenCourseWare which has 700 courses available, Carnegie Mellon currently only has five courses available. However, Carnegie Mellon is unique in that they offer '...courses [that] include a number of innovative online instructional components such as: cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group experiments, simulations,' so rather than just offering course material Carnegie Mellon is pursuing a more interactive, community approach. Carnegie Mellon is also unique in that they offer the courses as an Academic Version which '...is offered through educational institutions for credit awarded by the student's home institution.' Interestingly, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funds both MIT's OpenCourseWare and Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative ('Funding for the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon has been provided by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.') Sadly, the courses are not supported on any open source platforms or even any open source web browsers. More importantly, I'm curious how other universities will start making their courses available freely online."

Tim Halloran writes "Steve McConnell has updated his book 'Code Complete' a 960 page language agnostic tome about code construction. This is the best book of its type I've ever encountered and the update is welcome (as the first edition is over a decade old...I suddenly feel as I'm getting old :-). More information, and a sample chapter are here. As a programming team lead I have provided this book to team members to get them critically thinking about how they write code."

mrdeathgod writes "The Port Knocking project at SourceForge has just released portknocking_v1.0. Based on my undergrad thesis, this client/server package does not use pre-defined knock sequences, but rather utilizes Blowfish in order to encrypt the client data into a sequence of port numbers. This enables a client with the proper password to remotely manipulate firewall rules without fear of replay attacks. While currently designed for FreeBSD+ipfilter, expanded portability is in the works."

dalangalma writes "Students at Carnegie Mellon University who took the student-led course 98-026: Game Development for the 8-bit NES have finished up their ROMs and made them available for download. Most of these ROMs were developed using NBASIC, which was written by their instructor, Bob Rost. These are some of the first new NES games developed in years, and best of all, the ROMs are legal! You can get the games and learn about the NES (and the software tools developed for this class) at the course web page. You can even start developing your own games!"

Roland Piquepaille writes "Devin Balkcom, a Carnegie Mellon graduate student in robotics, has built the world's first origami-folding robot as the subject of his thesis. Origami, the geometry of paper folding, looks simple when you're a kid. But it's actually quite challenging to design a robot to do it. Movements are quite complex, and paper, because it is flexible, is difficult to be manipulated by a robot. This news release says that the project uses kinematics, the study of mechanisms, to determine how folding is done and how paper can be treated as a flexible and rigid material. You'll find more details and references in this overview, including some frames extracted from videos showing the robot at work." Balkcom's website has movies, information and a couple of academic papers.

An anonymous reader queries: "I'm currently writing a stack oriented interpreter (*ahem* Managed Code Environment) with complimentary compiler (that will be under MIT license), and was wondering if there have been any advances in stack architecture optimization? Some intense Googling turned up this paper, but it seems a bit dated, and focuses mainly on managing local variables, which is inapplicable to me because my interpreter directly supports local vars. Any thoughts or useful links on the topic would be appreciated."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Almost all human faces have common characteristics, such as two eyes and one mouth. Still, some people, affected by face blindness, cannot recognize one face from another one. So it's understandable that face recognition is a major challenge for computer vision systems. In "Facing facts in computer recognition,", the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that a team from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute has developed a very accurate software to find faces within images. By analyzing only 768 pixels, the system can detect 93 percent of the faces in a set of images while falsely identifying four objects as faces. The Face Detector Demo is available online and you can submit an image for analysis and receive the results by e-mail. The technology will be used for security purposes, but also by digital photography companies who want to automatically reduce "red eye" effects. You'll find more details and references in this overview."

An anonymous reader writes "It seems that people are still using print statements to debug programs (Brian Kernighan does!). Besides the ol' traditional debugger, do you know any new debugger that has a revolutionary way to help us inspect the data? (don't answer it with ddd, or any other debugger that got fancy data display), what I mean is a new revolutionary way. I have only found one answer. It seems that Relative Debugging is quite neat and cool."

Joanne Pransky's tongue is firmly in her cheek a fair amount of the time as she answers your questions, but much of what she says is thought-provoking, especially in light of speculations like Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation essays about the inevitable spread of robotic devices in our society.

Human Nature - by skywalker107

Do you think we will ever be able to program robots to understand and possibly copy human nature?

Joanne:

Assuming that you mean human nature as a human conditioning (personality) that has been experienced in human existence, I believe that robots will be comprised of both software and hardware and that the combination of their programs and various sensors will help them to learn, understand, and communicate with humans in a human's environment. In my eyes, it won't be as simple as just downloading a particular 'understanding' program - it will be unique to the combination of the overall structure and systems each robot will have combined with its perceptions and interactions with its surroundings (e.g., a domestic robot will understand humans more than a mining robot will, and a domestic robot in a home with many people of different ages, genders, etc., will understand humans more than a robot who lives with a sole individual). I think robots will be able to communicate with us verbally and to understand what we are saying, but not understand in terms of empathy, sympathy, or in a visceral way. In terms of copying human nature, I foresee an emulation of human nature in order to respond, interact, and work with other humans, and though some humans may perceive a future robo-personality as a 'copy', to me it will always be a robotic nature, though possibly housed in a very human-like shell.

Re: Human Nature - by jbrader

To which I would like to add: do you think there is any reason to try to copy human nature? I can see the point in having machines understand humans as it could make communicating with robots and computers easier. But why try to make an artificial human? It seems as though we have more than enough of the real thing already.

Joanne:

Depending upon how you define artificial, most of us humans are already physically 'artificial' in that we have in some way technologically augmented our organic selves - lasik, pacemakers, structural implants, cochlea implants, neural prostheses, electroactive polymer actuators, and in the next few months, for a few paralyzed individuals, a neural interface implant as part of a U.S. clinical study which will provide them with a permanent interface to a computer.

It is this ongoing quest for humans bettering themselves and wanting to live longer and more qualitatively, that an artificial human will at some point result, whether 'artificial' will be defined as more than 50% of a human's biological body parts merging with technology or whether 'artificial' is an automonous robotic being that looks like a human in order to best serve and work with humans in an environment that is set up for humans. In the latter case, I believe 'copying human nature' will be more of an indirect consequence (a result of an effective response system in sophisticated, higher performing, higher communications robots), rather than as a direct attempt.

Aren't you just another shameless tech self-publicizing... - by Sanity

I spent a while looking through the "publications" section of your website to seek out the "hard academic underpinnings" that Roblimo mentioned, but all I could find there were a selection of puff-piece articles, vaguely gushing about a brave new robotic future (without actually saying anything that Asmov didn't cover years ago, but he did it with infinitely more elegance and forsight). Which brings me to my question: Do you do any scientifically valuable research? I ask because you seem like just another shamelessly self-publicising cyber-pundit, much like the UK's Kevin Warwick [kevinwarwick.org.uk] (who, famously claimed to be the world's first cyborg after implanting a dog-tracking chip in his arm).

Joanne:

I am not a scientist nor an engineer, and therefore my goal has never been to do scientific research. My goal, by humorously proclaiming myself as the World's First Robotic Psychiatrist (and the real Susan Calvin) 18 years ago, was and still is, to educate the public, that group of people that buy the National Enquirer, watch American Idol, and read puff-piece articles. My objective is to make them aware of robotics, a technology that will have more of an impact on their lives than the automobile, PC, and the internet, by 'translating' the technology developed by roboticists so that the public can understand its benefits as opposed to fearing them, something that I think is more common in the U.S. due to how robots have been perceived over the years via the media and Hollywood. Thus, I was immediately interested in the practical, not theoretical applications of robotics, and informing the masses about them.

Here's more detail:

In the 80s, (after graduating from Tufts University in child development - mostly cognitive development, which by the way, Marvin Minsky's book, Society of Mind is based on), I sold computers to small businesses - doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. At the time, this was not an easy task as business operations were manual and few were readily willing to automate them. For those that did, however, the burden usually fell on the secretary, who was typically female, whether she liked it or not. Expectations were way off - the business owners thought the computer and all the information would be up and running in no time, and the secretaries feared they'd lose their jobs to their computers. When personal computers became a commodity in the late 80s, executives bought them - and often they just sat on their desks, never used.

If people can't program their VCRs, nevermind use their PCs, I thought, how will we as a society be ready for a robot in our home to do our dishes? It was then, in 1986, that I proclaimed myself as the World's First Robotic Psychiatrist, and brought Susan Calvin to life. There was no formal course of study for robopsychology. Therefore, I became the first in my field and gave myself credentials (and actually received an official U.S. Trademark later on). I was pioneering unchartered territory.

Being the World's First Robotic Psychiatrist was a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that one day, like pets, when robots co-existed with humans, they may actually develop problems similar to humans. It was a way for me to get the public to think about the future of technology while increasing their current awareness. If a non-engineering 5 ft. tall woman understands the technology, subliminally, so will the rest of the public. (And this is another topic altogether, but I believe females will be the primary purchasers of domestic and household robots, yes, for all types of purposes). Robotic Psychiatry during my lifetime, I believed, would not be to program robots, but to ready the humans (though I always hoped that there would be patients that, like Susan Calvin, I could communicate verbally with and observe their behaviors within their environments). The best way to make the U.S. masses aware is through the medium of television. For years, various people - Joan Embery, Jack Hanna, et al - have been bringing rare animals onto The Tonight Show and the Letterman Show. Millions of people got to see rare monkeys peeing and koalas clinging. It was funny, entertaining yet educational. That's exactly what I wanted to do with robots, especially considering most people had never seen one.

While researching robotic developments that might be of interest to the general public, I decided to engross myself completely in the robotics industry while at the same time learn about robots in science fiction. I met Asimov in 1989 at a World Science Fiction Convention and continued correspondence until he was too sick to do so any longer. He dubbed me the 'Real Susan Calvin' (in writing).

In 1991, I began working for an industrial robot manufacturer. I attended the company's programming and maintenance classes and wrote technical manuals and eventually ended up where I wanted to, in sales and marketing. During the ten years I worked for Sankyo Robotics, I must have visited hundreds of manufacturing plants. You name it and I saw it made: cars, golf balls, jelly beans, eyeglasses, IUDs, robots (in Japan), french fries, and the list goes on. However, in each case, I was there to sell SCARA robots - SCARA, the acronym for a type of robot arm developed in Japan in the 70s that stood for selective compliance assembly robot arm.

Yup, my job was to go into factories and try to justify why they should invest in SCARAs (being from the northeast, it sounded more like Scare Har to me. How did we allow this acronym to become nomenclature in the U.S.??). Regardless if the manufacturing engineering manager was knowledgeable on robotics and could easily justify automating his process, if the executive(s) in charge of the money were not accepting of robotics, even if it saved them $, there was often great resistance at the corporate level. No amount of scientific evidence would change their mind to their opposition to technology. (Though it was fun to get them to try, and one year I succeeded in breaking company sales records.)

Also while at Sankyo in the early 90s, I ran a RoboCamp for kids in the summer in which kids not only built robot kits, but learned about industrial robots. Ten years later, I developed a curriculum for elementary school children called "Robots and Me", a program that fosters the robot/child interaction.

In 1996, I was asked by MCB University Press out of England, to be the U.S. Associate Editor for their journals, Service Robot, Industrial Robot (IR), Sensor Review, and Assembly Automation. My main role was (and still is with Industrial Robot Journal ) to research innovative robotic technologies here in the States, and work with the developers of the technology to get them to contribute a technical article on their findings. Industrial Robot Journal is in its 31st year, is an internationally respected journal, listed in all the important citation indexes and regularly used as the publisher of choice by the world's leading practicing industrial, service and healthcare roboticists. I've published many articles for Service Robot Journal and Industrial Robot Journal and one of them, an article on surgeons' view of RoboDoc, the first surgical robot in the world (which was manufactured by Sankyo Robotics, the robot company I worked for) won a literary award and was referenced by the International Federation of Robotics in their annual World Robotics publication two years in a row. I am now the U.S. Associate Editor for the world's first International Journal of Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery, being launched as you read this. Do I do the scientific research for the medical robotic companies? No, but I help them educate clinicians and surgeons worldwide by getting them published and reporting their innovative applications.

The above represent some of my efforts over the years.

Ongoing research and scientific developments in robotics are a necessity, but without real world exposure and acceptance, the inventions may not survive. Robotics cannot go forward without the simbionic relationship of all those things occurring. I hope, therefore, that you will see that I am not a scientist, but someone helping to bring others' robotic developments to the forefront.

About Human-Robot Relationships... - by MagiGraphX

I've watched too much Chobits perhaps, but is it right for a human to fall in love with an artificially intelligent (and emotional) robot? Just a thought of what could happen...

Joanne:

Is it wrong for a human to fall in love with a sentient robot? Humans have loved all sorts of machines for years - their cars, boats, computers, their Aibos....imagine how we'll feel when the computer-face of our dreams with its robotic body lives with us (I know, this is sounding like the movie Cherry 2000). Robots will offer companionship to those who are lonely, to those who feel more comfortable with a robot than with a human, and falling in love will be a natural phenomenon out of coexisting with them. But will they love us back in the same way? They may love us in terms of being loyal, subservient, trustworthy, etc., but I don't think they'll ever experience how we as humans define "falling in love". And how will this make us feel if a robot does not feel the same way as we do for it?

Falling in love is just part of the issue - will sexual relations between a human and a robot be right? To me, it's more right than those immoral relations that occur between a teacher and student, a parent and child, a priest and altar boy, and the list goes on. Sex with a robot could decrease the rampant spreading of Aids and other diseases and possibly even help to decrease violence.

A whole host of other issues may arise: Will it be legal to love a robot? Will a robot love us back out of being subservient while really loving another robot? Will humans who love other humans feel rejected when their partner falls in love with a robot? I think any of these situations may be feasible, though not in the near future.

Future of robots? - by Merkuri22

We've all seen the movies and read the books about machines in the future, and frankly most of these stories portray robots and AI as terrifying things that humanity will end up battling with for supremicy of the planet. Do you think there are any truths to these stories? Will robots compete with us in the future for jobs and/or living space? Do you ever see robots and humans living side by side as equals, or do you think they will always be subservient machines? Or, even, do you think robots will surpass us one day as the dominant force on the planet?

Joanne:

My view of robots is that they are tools used to assist humans to do the mundane, the dangerous, the difficult, etc. Put more simply, I also see a computer as a tool - attach mobility, manipulators, and sensors to my computer and you've got a robot that can do a lot more for me.

I don't see humans competing with robots for jobs - I see them doing the jobs we don't want or shouldn't be doing, and creating more jobs for humans. This is perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions - that "Robots take jobs away". Robots help companies stay competitive (by helping produce better quality products at a lower cost, and allowing companies to meet the changing demands of customers); thus, robots help save jobs that otherwise may have been lost, and help create new jobs (although not always the same type of job). Perhaps if there were more robotic automation in place, there would have been less jobs going offshore...

As a side note: The Wall Street Journal recently (Friday, April 2) cited some Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predictions back in 1988 and looked at the results through 2000...."Of 20 occupations that the BLS predicted in 1988 would suffer the greatest losses between 1988 and 2000, half actually grew. The agency predicted that the number of assemblers in electrical and electronic factories would drop 173,000, a 44% decrease. Twelve years later, there were 45,000 more, an 11% increase. Neither outsourcing nor robots made as much of a dent as the BLS expected."

Source: Robotic Industries Association

Living space - I don't see us competing there, either. In some of Asimov's stories, robots were actually banned from earth. They didn't need what we humans need to survive and they did their work on other planets.

Robots will be in different sizes and shapes for a multitude of tasks and we've certainly found space for all our appliances, computers and TVs, and thus we will welcome our robotic assistants. Having more robotic assistants that can allow us to stay in the convenience of our home longer may decrease the need for as many buildings such as day care facilities, nursing homes, assisted living care facilities and hospitals, particularly as the worldwide aging population continues to rapidly increase.

I see robots living and working with us side by side, but not necessarily as 'equals'. They are designed to be better than humans at some things (much like computers), but I don't see them as 'equals' either, i.e., having the same needs as humans do. Robots may surpass our own abilities, but having a robot uprise where robots want to dominate the planet, I don't buy it.

Interesting books on the subject by Dr. Hans Moravec, "Mind Children" and "Robot: Mere Machine to Transcedent Mind."

What form will A.I. take? - by mykepredko

A bit of a navel gazing question for you; what form do you think A.I. will take when somebody finally comes up with a program that is accepted as intelligent?

My own feeling is that the first A.I. program will simulate a simple life form (like a worm) instead of a highly complex and communicative form like humans. This goes against what Dr. Minsky believes A.I. should be, but I can't honestly believe that our first interaction with an intelligent mechanism would with something with similar capabilities to ourselves, but with something with the same mental capabilities and capacities as a bug. The important aspects of Aritficial Intelligence will be making sense of its environments and learning from experience. To demonstrate that the Intelligence is learning is observing and testing the Intelligence's application of this knowledge. What are your thoughts?

Joanne:

The definition of artificial intelligence is still an age old debate (right up there with what is a robot), and there are plenty of artificially intelligent forms today (that are accepted as intelligent) being used in both software (AI agents, computer games, etc.) and in robotics. ASCI Purple, built by IBM, is supposedly the world's most powerful supercomputer, capable of carrying out 100 trillion operations per second, which some believe could be approaching the processing power of the human brain. Two famous roboticists share your view of a simple life form (bugs/insects) with their behavior based robotics: Dr. Rodney Brooks who pioneered Subsumption Architecture, which provides an incremental method for building robot control systems linking perception to action; and Dr. Mark Tilden with his processorless, autonomous, intelligent BEAM (Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, Mechanics) Robotics which uses simple analog circuits. (Also, check out his latest humanoid, RoboSapien. It will be a HUGE success.) I agree that the important aspects of artificial intelligence are making sense of its environment and able to learn from its experiences.

My question... - by hookedup

Dr. Joanne Pransky, do you see Asimov's 3 laws of robotics playing a role in our relationship with robots in the future? Since most of our technological advances seem to come from developing warfare systems, will the 3 laws be left by the wayside, or will it become an integral part of robotics in the years to come.

Joanne:

I think safety for humans has and will continue to be a critical part of robotics, but I don't think Asimov's three laws, though brilliant as they are (here goes my entire career as Susan Calvin), will suffice exactly as is as a postulate for all robots.

You brought up a good point - that of warfare systems, something robots are well suited for. As a matter of fact, just last week CNN reported what a great moment for it was for iRobot Corporation when they were told by the Pentagon that one of its PackBots was destroyed in action for the first time, meaning the life of a human may have been saved.

Though Packbots are used for battlefield reconnaisance, in the future, other robots may certainly be utilized in the front line of fire for destroying enemies (not that I'm a proponent of war nor killing humans (nor destroying robots for that matter), but certainly I'd rather see a robot hurt than any human). There are many situations in which we can envision security robots having to injure some humans to protect others and in each situation, a robot would have to make the best decision it can, as we humans must do at times, with its understanding of the information at hand.

For intelligent robots in the real world, the Three Laws as they stand now, will not work effectively, although I believe there will be some other similar safeguards that they will need to adhere to.

Human Features of Robots / Bonding with robots - by jhouserizer

Over the years, there has been a fair amount of debate about whether robots should take on human forms, especially with regards to having detailed life-like faces. Some robot designers, wary of this debate, have settled on giving their creations near human-like faces [theconnection.org].

My question is in relation to this topic. Do you think that people (and "sentient robots" that may exist some day) will be be overall better served if robots are readily distinguishable from humans? How strongly will this affect our "bonding" with robots and their bonding with us? Dogs for instance look quite different from humans, but many a family-pet seems to believe itself to be a real part of the family, and sometimes even seem to think themselves to be human. How will this affect the way we deal with "death" of a robot?

Joanne:

I think it depends on both the task at hand, and who the user is, that will determine if humans will be better served by robots that are readily distinguishable from humans. My Roomba is a robot that is perfectly well-designed for vacuuming so in this case the answer is yes, I am glad that it is distinguishable. Personally, I am more concerned that a robot do its job well and less concerned about what it looks like.

However, I still think that humans in general will relate and bond more easily to anthropomorphic robotic companions. I think it will be easier for most to accept and communicate with robots that look like themselves. Even when we communicate with other humans, we are conditioned to look into someones eyes to gauge how we're doing in the conversation. When someone's wearing sunglasses, it's harder to determine how they're responding to us. I think we're going to want to look into the eyes of a robot to know it's listening to us and we may want it to smile, frown, etc., much like a human face.

But exactly like a human, as you say indistinguishable, is an excellent question. The Uncanny Valley theory, described by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, addresses just this issue. Mori found that people tend to empathize more with robots that are more humanlike, but if the robot becomes too human at a certain point, the robot becomes repulsive to the human. So what's the answer - a robot that is slightly, but not too indistinguishable?

People will bond with their robots regardless of how distinguishable or indistinguishable they physically are, and yes, I do believe that like our pets, we will mourn their "death." I've always believed that our initial relationships with them will be similar to our relationships with pets. That means that some humans will: buy them matching clothes and jewelry; take pictures of them on Santa's lap; pay for an extra seat on the airplane to have them fly with them; make sure that their wills provide for their maintenance contracts and all the latest upgrades when they outlive them; fight over who gets to keep them in a divorce suit; and if owners feel a robot is depressed, they will even take them to a robotic psychiatrist for a weekly family encounter session. Humorous or not, it will no doubt be interesting

Artificial intelligence without embodiment? - by macshune

As an undergraduate philosophy student interested in the theoretical implications of A.I., could you tell me what your thoughts are on the validity of the assumption that artificial intelligence is possible separate from the notion of embodiment? I think the lack of consideration given embodiment is one reason why artificial intelligence researchers have come up empty-handed so far in their quest to synthesize a conscious, self-reflective entity. To ask the question more succinctly, do you think a mind needs a body and possibly and environment to interact with in order to be conscious, or can a mind exist and know itself independent of an external context?

Joanne:

I don't think that the quest of AI researchers has been to synthesize a conscious, self-reflective entity as it has been to emulate the human thought and reasoning process. As part of this, many researchers believe that for an entity to have artificial intelligence, it must have an understanding of and be able to interact with its environment. Some believe it is the form of an embodied robot, but not necessarily - as long as the machine that simulates human intelligence is receiving information from and responding to its surroundings (e.g., an intelligent computer).

I personally believe that nothing artificial will be able to be truly conscious in the same way a human is; however, there could be some kind of machine consciousness that has similarities to human consciousness, and it could be difficult to dilineate the difference. What if, however, we are able to download a human's brain into a machine that had no embodiment. Ten years later, after continuing to receive stimulus from its surrounding and responding to it, would this machine be considered conscious?

Roborights? - by jrpascucci

Do you believe there will come a time that we will have a 'robot rights' movement? Will it be more credible than most of the 'animal rights' movement, or just a good-hearted (but weak-minded) anthropomorphization of our silicon companion machines?

Someone (Dennis Miller?) once said, animals can have rights as soon as they accept responsibilities. Robots obviously can be given responsibilities (your job is to fit tab A into slot B), but ethically, should they get rights? As soon as someone programs a robot to pass the turing test, and then immediately ask for his rights? Or is it something deeper?

Beyond some kind of second-class entity status, will robots become citizens? Do robots have a god-given right (recall, our rights are considered by the Declaration of Independence to be given us either by 'Nature's God' or by their 'Creator') to freedom of expression, association, religion? The right to bear arms? Do robots have a 'right to work'? "One Robot, One Vote"? Will Robots have to file tax returns? Will there be Robot Courts? Robot Lawyers? Robot Jail? Robot Schools? Robotic Members elected to the Legislature? Some day, will we have a Robot President? Is a Robot built in Japan eligible to be president? What if the robot was shipped from Japan as parts with software, and put together here, does that count?

If you start building a robot, and decide to stop, will that be considered to be a robaboration? Or the work of their 'creator'? And if, after building, you switch it on and then decide you don't like it that much, and power it off again and harvest the parts, is that robomurder and disrobomemberment?

Joanne:

I suppose anything is possible, and perhaps I am blinded by the hopes of an optimistic future long after I am dead, but I just can't see the motivation for robots to do a lot of the things you're describing. I see them as extraordinary mechanisms able to physically and mentally perform many tasks/jobs,and though I see them having behaviors and challenges similar to humans from dealing with humans in a human world, I just don't see them with the innate human emotions that drive a lot of the above `rights' such as the desire for greed, power, freedom, control, etc. I see robots as almost the future perfect child - we help to create them, they're like us and we're responsible for them, but yet they remain quite content serving us humans and implementing their tasks.

That's not to say that I don't think a robot would make a better politician (certainly can't be much worse than some of the human ones we have now) nor that certain robots wouldn't get certain responsibilities (police bots that carry guns), but a desire to vote? For what, so that they can vote against humans allowing robots to get destroyed in a robotic sporting event, against the very reason they were designed in the first place?

However, I do see robotic law as possibly the largest field of law (i.e., humans practicing robotic law). Whose responsible for a robot who 'breaks the law'? Is it the company who manufactured the domestic robot or the hacker who purchased it and had it harm someone in his family?

Regarding a robot rights movement - hopefully we will protect the integrity of our robots. Don't we as humans have a responsibility to use our robots properly and not to misuse or abuse them and shouldn't there be laws in place for those who don't? I suppose if we aren't responsible with our robots, then there could be the need for robots to protect their own interests.

where's the positronic brain? - by futuretaikonaut

In Asimov's robot novels, the assumption was that modern science had invented the positronic brain, which was thought to be capable of actual sentient thought, though most of the robots in the books did so on a very basic and childlike level. It was this that actually gave Dr. Calvin a job... seeing as how the brains had the capacity for original thought, even though it was mostly predictable. As it stands today, and into the foreseeable future, we have invented no such thing capable of acting with original thought. Our hardware has, instead, given the appearance of thought, as it is capacble of so many calculations per second that it appears to come up with things on its own. So, my question is, what use is a robot psychologist if every action that a robot can take is already predetermined by its programming? What new field is there to be discovered that is not already known? In the human mind, we are constantly learning new things about the brain, a mechanism we only barely understand, but what is there to derive from a machine we ourselves create?

Joanne:

I don't agree that every action that a robot can take is already predetermined by its programming - there are some highly sophisticated robots out there that are provided with a set of tools for navigating in their environment and the combinations of these systems are often unpredictable. (The autonomous robotic vehicles at the Darpa Grand Challenge are an example. Communicating real-time data between various systems such as correctional decision-making systems, perception sensor systems, navigational systems, and terrain modeling systems, and translating the results into the movement of a military vehicle or HMMWV is not predetermined.)

Yes, we are constantly learning new things about the brain and as humans and machines merge, who knows what fields it will bring? Could anyone have predicted the types of new fields, say in 1970, the computer industry would bring?

Asimov himself, a few years before his death and nearly 50 years after first writing about robopsychology (and after seeing the burgeoning field of robotics take reality) wrote at the end of the 80s, "Robotic intelligence may be so different from human intelligence that it will take a new discipline - "robopsychology" to deal with it. That is where Susan Calvin will come in. It is she and others like her who will deal with robots, where ordinary psychologists could not begin to do so. And this might turn out to be the most important aspect of robotics, for if we study in detail two entirely different kinds of intelligence, we may learn to understand intelligence in a much more general and fundamental way that is now possible. Specifically, we will learn more about human intelligence than may be possible to learn from human intelligence alone."

Interesting Read: The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil

Your favorite fictional robotic character - by Strange Ranger

What is your favorite robot/cyborg character in written or film fiction?

Why?

For instance, I'm happy to admit mine is Data from Star Trek: Next Generation. Most especially the earlier seasons. Reason: I'm not much of a "trekkie" but that character made me consider so many different possible aspects of AI and of being not-human. From trying to understand other humans' emotions to his contrast with 'The Borg' down to what it might be like to have an "internal chronometer". For totally different reasons I loved Douglas Adams 'Marvin the Depressed Robot' in HHGTTG.

Joanne:

I have a lot of favorite robot characters - RoboCop, Bicentennial Man, Johnny Number 5 in Short Circuit, and I'm not sure if it's my favorite or that for the past couple of years he's the one I've been thinking about most, but I'd have to say David Swinton in the movie AI. Perhaps it's my maternal, female side coming out, but my reaction to David was very strong. David 'imprinted' his love solely to his mother - unconditionally and forever, yet there were no requirements for her to do the same for her robot child when she decided to activate his code. Usually this is the opposite - we love our children unconditionally although it's not always the reverse. To have this unilateral condition of a one-way commitment on the part of a robot, I found especially disturbing.

juraj asks: "I'm trying to achieve the following setup: I have two offices connected via a relatively slow ADSL line, and I want a shared fileserver between the offices. I have VPN using IPSec ready, so security is less of a concern, but simply mounting a filesystem (via Samba or NFS) from one office to another is not a solution because of the speed. Also, the ADSL line is sometimes not only slow, but also disconnected. I've tried the CODA distributed filesystem to achieve replication, so that both offices have local copies of their files. The problem is, that the CODA filesystem is just a research project: it is unstable, with the venus daemon constantly falling, and sometimes when recovering from the disconnected state, one side does not recognize the changes and they are simply not propagated. Have you had any good experiences with CODA? Which versions do you use? What kind of setup did you have? How is it configured? I've also heard about OpenAFS, but similar to CODA, I've learned it is unusable in a real environment. Is there any real solution to my problem? Are there any decent solid free distributed file systems for Linux or the BSDs?"

John Jorsett writes "Always wanted to film one of those cool 'walking' sequences, where the camera stays rock-steady as you trudge along? Well, so did Johnny Chung Lee, except he didn't want to lay out major cash for a professional Steadicam rig, so he built his own for $14. He further claims you can do it in about 20 minutes if you know what you're doing. What more could a cheap, impatient Spielberg wannabe ask for?"

Anonymous Coward writes "As of 18:00 March 9th, Carnegie Mellon's Red Team is the only entry to successfully complete DARPA's Grand Challenge Qualification Inspection and Demonstration (QID) before the main event on March 13th. The NY Times has this article detailing this first step towards winning the Grand Challenge."

TrinSF writes "The anonymous author of the DeCSS Haiku has written an article revealing his identity and explaining some of the background. The haiku has been featured in the Gallery of CSS Descramblers and attained some notoriety when it was published in 2001. I'm glad to have played a small role in the article; my comment on /. is included in the text." Apologies to Seth for dropping a "c" from his surname.

mr. squishie writes "Someone important must have gotten an Aibo...According to Wired news, the Army's Tank-automotive and Armaments Command has just awarded a $2.5 million contract to build a prototype of a large robot dog that would follow soldiers into battle and carry food, ammunition, and medical supplies. This is apparently part of a larger movement by various branches of the military investigating the uses of robots based on various types of wildlife, ranging from engine-repairing robot elephant trunks and mine-destroying robot lobsters to the cliched robot-fly-spy-on-the-wall trick. I wonder if they're looking into giant robot anteaters as an alternative to costly bunker-buster bombs?"

Illah Nourbakhsh writes "From the makers of the Palm Pilot Robot Kit comes our newest thing. If you live in SF or in DC you can go to the biggest science centers of them all, the Air & Space Museum or the Exploratorium and interact with miniature Mars rovers we've put in Mars yards there. The robots take panoramic images and track and test rocks, so it's no remote-control toy. All Linux on-board, using a prototype single-board arm-based robotics board (the Intel Stayton). The website 'gallery' has pictures of all of the rover's parts, including the Linux processor and the mechanicals. Gallery also has several videos. We've built 20 of these 'bots and they're in DC, San Francisco and Augusta, Georgia." If these were in toy stores ...

Illah Nourbakhsh writes "From the makers of the Palm Pilot Robot Kit comes our newest thing. If you live in SF or in DC you can go to the biggest science centers of them all, the Air & Space Museum or the Exploratorium and interact with miniature Mars rovers we've put in Mars yards there. The robots take panoramic images and track and test rocks, so it's no remote-control toy. All Linux on-board, using a prototype single-board arm-based robotics board (the Intel Stayton). The website 'gallery' has pictures of all of the rover's parts, including the Linux processor and the mechanicals. Gallery also has several videos. We've built 20 of these 'bots and they're in DC, San Francisco and Augusta, Georgia." If these were in toy stores ...

Martin Berger writes "Turing Award (1991) winner Robin Milner is one of the most influential computer scientists. He may not be as well-known as he deserves to be, but his research contributions are ubiquitous: he developed the first mathematically sound yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction. This research has been continued successfully and led to many useful proof assistants such as HOL, Coq or Isabelle that are being used heavily for verification purposes today." Read on for more information about Milner, and a link to Berger's excellent interview with him. Berger continues "There is also a direct line from this strand of Milner's work to what may be one of the hottest topics in computer science: proof carrying code. Milner also headed the effort to develop ML (best known today by its descendant Ocaml), the first language to include polymorphic type inference together with type-safe exception-handling and module mechanisms. Most modern programming languages can trace some of their advanced features directly back to ML's pioneering efforts. Most of all, he established concurrency theory as a scientific field by creating and studying idealised concurrent programming languages like the Pi-Calculus. That calculus is becoming more and more influential in the design of new programming languages (for example Microsoft's XLANG) and the WWW infrastructure. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Milner. I wanted to find out about the man and the stories behind all this great research. I hope you find it as interesting as I do. The transcript of the interview can be found here."

CMU_Nort writes "Carnegie Mellon University has just unveiled the Robot Hall of Fame. Along with that announcement, MSNBC has an article about the first honorary inductees, including R2D2 and Mars Pathfinder. You also have the chance to nominate other robots."

Gustavo asks: "My company is climbing the CMM ladder and the need for enterprise grade project management tools is growing. Currently we use a mix of MS-Project schedules and Excel spreadsheets, but this doesn't scale when one has a large pool of resources being used on several projects. Moreover, there being Project and Excel files are now scattered all around making it difficult to keep them up-to-date. One option is to go for the MS-Project Server but I was asked to find out if there is something free that we could use instead. Can you help me?"

"What I'm looking for is some web tool in which everyone involved in a project could make changes in their task's status. (Things like number of hours worked and percent completed.) Preferably, all data should be kept in a relational database for easy data gathering and reporting.

MrProject is a nice app but it's Linux only (so far) and doesn't seem to allow for resource sharing among projects.

ToutDoux, another Gnome app, promised much more, but its development stalled a while ago.

I looked at some of the project management tools I found at Freshmeat, like SiteScape, EPIWARE, ITMS, and A.C.E., but none of them satisfied my needs.

MimerDesk is a web-based groupware environment that has a very promising project management tool. It's not complete yet, but it's the best I could find so far.

So, what do your companies use for project management and how is it going?"

touretzky writes "The Court of Appeal in The Hague today rejected all of Scientology's claims in appeal in Scientology's action against XS4ALL, Karin Spaink and ten other internet providers. As a result, Karin Spaink's website, which Scientology sought to remove from the Internet based on copyright claims, is entirely legal in the Netherlands. The court also overturned two lower court rulings, one of which said that linking to material that infringed a copyright was itself actionable. The other ruling said that ISPs that failed to act on credible notification of a copyright violation could be held liable for that. The Appeals Court felt that this was too vague a standard, and thus posed a threat to free speech. More info at ScientologyWatch.org."

Mikkeles writes "From an Associated Press story: 'It sounds like a chapter out of "Spy vs. Spy": Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have launched a project called Camera Watch that lists Internet cameras that monitor public spaces, letting Web surfers try the role of bored security guard.' The site permits searching for an available webcam in the geographical region (US) of your choice. About 600 webcams of 6000 in the pipe are now available."

ejtttje writes "Sony announced today (also here) the ERS-7, the third generation of the AIBO. New specifications include more computational power, improved sensors, and, last but not least, built-in 802.11b WiFi standard! Additional information from the Japanese Flash promo includes this flash video. (8MB, mirror - sorry, no mpg). Sony will also be releasing a new version of the OPEN-R SDK to continue support of third party AIBO developers. (self plug ;) Pre-orders start October 10, and ship early November, for $1599 (in the US)."

An anonymous reader writes "A paper from Rice University appearing at the 2003 ACM Sigcomm Conference presents a new denial of service attack where the attacker only needs to send at a low rate to shutdown TCP flows. The trick exploits the retransmission timeout mechanism in TCP. By sending small bursts of packets at just the right frequency, the attacker can cause all TCP flows sharing a bottleneck link to simultaneously stop indefinitely. And because the attacker only needs to burst periodically, the attacker will not be distinguishable from normal hosts. The presentation, and other presentations from the conference, are available online (live streaming)."

Hui Zhang writes "The 2003 ACM SIGCOMM (Special Interest Group in Data Communication) conference held in Karlsruhe, Germany is being broadcast live over the Internet. There will be sessions on overlay and peer-to-peer networks, Internet routing and measurement, DoS, queue management and traffic engineering, with presentations by leading researchers from universities and research labs. The keynote speech on the first day, by David Cheriton, is entitled 'The Internet Architecture: Its Future and Why it Matters.' We will also have a re-play for each day's program in time periods that are more convenient for viewers in the U.S. Below is the broadcast schedule." The broadcast is using Quicktime, but the linked page addresses watching with Linux using CodeWeavers' CrossOver.

"8/27 Wed 1:00 pm - 10:00 pm EST First Day Program Re-play
8/28 Thr 3:00 am - 11:30 am EST Second Day Program Live
8/28 Thr 1:00 pm - 9:30 pm EST Second Day Program Re-play
8/29 Fri 3:00 am - 11:00 am EST Third Day Program Live
8/29 Fri 1:00 pm - 9:00 pm EST Third Day Program Re-play

Please check out esm.cs.cmu.edu/sigcomm03 for more details.

The broadcast is made possible by End System Multicast peer-to-peer streaming
technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University."

Hui Zhang writes "The 2003 ACM SIGCOMM (Special Interest Group in Data Communication) conference held in Karlsruhe, Germany is being broadcast live over the Internet. There will be sessions on overlay and peer-to-peer networks, Internet routing and measurement, DoS, queue management and traffic engineering, with presentations by leading researchers from universities and research labs. The keynote speech on the first day, by David Cheriton, is entitled 'The Internet Architecture: Its Future and Why it Matters.' We will also have a re-play for each day's program in time periods that are more convenient for viewers in the U.S. Below is the broadcast schedule." The broadcast is using Quicktime, but the linked page addresses watching with Linux using CodeWeavers' CrossOver.

"8/27 Wed 1:00 pm - 10:00 pm EST First Day Program Re-play
8/28 Thr 3:00 am - 11:30 am EST Second Day Program Live
8/28 Thr 1:00 pm - 9:30 pm EST Second Day Program Re-play
8/29 Fri 3:00 am - 11:00 am EST Third Day Program Live
8/29 Fri 1:00 pm - 9:00 pm EST Third Day Program Re-play

Please check out esm.cs.cmu.edu/sigcomm03 for more details.

The broadcast is made possible by End System Multicast peer-to-peer streaming
technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University."

Eric Stats writes "Working as a Network Engineer for web-hosting company that prides itself on uptime and network availability, and moonlighting as a part-time Linux administrator, my managers and clients are starting to expect a level of information security knowledge from me. I decided that if I wanted to take my career to the next level, I needed to develop some security-specific skills. I heard a lot about the open source Intrusion Detection System (IDS), Snort from friends and co-workers (mostly that it was a pain to get running, and an even bigger pain to understand what it was doing)." To get past those frustrations, Eric looked at two more books on Snort (and compares them to the already-reviewed Intrusion Detection with Snort ); read on below for his take on what each offers. Intrusion Detection with SNORT: Advanced IDS Techniques Using SNORT, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and ACID; Intrusion Detection with Snort; Snort 2.0 Intrusion Detection author (See each) pages (See each) publisher (See each) rating (See each) reviewer Eric Stats ISBN (See each) summary (See each)

I ran Snort at home for a while, using the online docs, but I could never get a handle on which output plugin to use (When to log? When to alert?), how to email alerts to myself (I later found out Snort doesn't natively do this), and how to create signatures from packet captures (no online docs at all for this). When I did get The Pig running, it filled up my log directory with thousands of small alert files, which ended up being in tcpdump format. This frustrated the hell out of me, so I decided I needed to find a good book on Snort, as the online docs simply did not describe how to use Snort from start to finish.

In the past few months, an assortment of books have come out on Snort. Because it has begun to eclipse closed-source, multimillion dollar IDSes in terms of raw performance and features, much attention is currently focused on Snort. Naturally, when an open source project achieves this level of notoriety, publishers, venture capitalists, and corporations want to get in on the game. The flood of Snort books is a testament to this, but it doesn't mean they were all created equally. This book review covers the three books on Snort currently available (we will see another two Snort books later this winter). It covers what is good about them, what is bad, and who the target audience is for each. If you are looking to learn intrusion detection the open source way, or simply do not have a million-dollar IT security budget, these books are a good starting point.

Each of these three books serves a different purpose and consequently is appropriate for a different reader. In summary, Rafeeq Rehman's Intrusion Detection with Snort: Advanced IDS Techniques Using SNORT, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and ACID presents a concise, quick-start guidebook to getting Snort up and running fast. He doesn't delve into the details of Snort, and this book makes a perfect choice for a reader who wants to get The Pig up and running quickly and move on to something else.

The whole gaggle of authors that put together Snort 2.0 Intrusion Detection created a much-needed user manual for Snort. This book makes for good desktop reference, but assumes you understand the core concepts of intrusion detection, or have significant field experience with Snort. It is also somewhat convoluted to read; I suppose it's inevitable when you have 12 authors working on a single book, it is going to come out somewhat disjointed and jumbled. If I hadn't read the other two books first, I doubt I would have been able to piece together what this book is talking about in places. (Such as referring to Barnyard logs in one chapter and "unified binary format" in another; how is the reader going to know they are the same?)

Lastly, Jack Koziol's Intrusion Detection with Snort is a guidebook for using Snort in the real world, either on small networks or in large corporate settings. Like any security tool, Snort is only as effective as its operator. Snort can do an enormous number of things, but if you don't understand the "how and why" you aren't going to be able to apply your knowledge in unexpected, different, or new situations. Koziol's book bridges the gap and teaches you the nitty-gritty Snort details not found in online docs, as well as how to apply your newfound IDS knowledge in practice. This book does lack in terms of screenshots and diagrams, which can be frustrating at points. Instead of a paragraph of text, a simple diagram would have sufficed.

Intrusion Detection with SNORT: Advanced IDS Techniques Using SNORT, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and ACID author Rafeeq Rehman pages 288 publisher Prentice Hall rating 7/10 ISBN 0131407333

I first picked up Rehman's Intrusion Detection with Snort: Advanced IDS Techniques Using SNORT, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and ACID. Rehman's book is also a member of the Bruce Perens Open Source Series. All of the books in his series are published under the OPL. Overall, Rehman's book served as a good intro to Snort. I followed the examples, used some of the custom startup and log-rotation scripts, and got Snort working for the first time. I also learned of ACID, which is a PHP-based GUI for Snort, put out by Carnegie Mellon's CERT/CC. It makes managing alerts from Snort much less time-intensive. It was an exciting experience, but the book left me in the dark on a number of concepts that I knew I needed to learn. I still didn't understand what I was getting out of Snort; I had so many alerts I couldn't "tune out the noise." I didn't know when to use log or alert plugins, so I just turned on both for safety's sake. I also found that Snort was dropping packets (meaning it wasn't able to keep up with the traffic load going to my webservers hosted at home), but didn't find any way to fix this problem. This setup was fine for experimenting at home, but I didn't feel I would be able to use Snort in a mission-critical corporate setting yet.

Intrusion Detection with Snort author Jack Koziol pages 400 publisher SAMS Publishing rating 9/10 ISBN 157870281X

I thumbed through Jack Koziol's Intrusion Detection with Snort at the bookstore, and it seemed to have some more detailed descriptions of using Snort. It also had a lot of the planning, deployment, and maintenance activities you never think of until you are faced with one at 2 a.m. (such as how to upgrade Snort in an organized manner after a vicious integer overflow exploit is released for a core Snort component). It is also the most popular Snort book, so I figured I would buy it. When I took it home, I learned where to place Snort on a network, and what advantages and disadvantages there are to different IDS sensor placement strategies, something I had never considered.

Koziol's book also had the technical detail I was in desperate need of. I learned how to use Barnyard to spool alerts, which keeps Snort from dropping packets. I got to write my own attack signatures from scratch by using Ethereal packet captures in an controlled lab environment. I created a targeted ruleset; it enables specific attack signatures based on what I actually have running on my network, simply using nmap and some complicated perl scripts. The targeted ruleset went a long way to reducing false alerts, and is now a selling product from the Snort commercial vendor, Sourcefire. I finally got email alerts working using syslog-ng with Snort. The book ends with some more advanced content, namely using Snort as an Intrusion Prevention device. You can setup Snort to block packets that match a signature, using Inline Snort, or you can have Snort reconfigure routers and firewalls to block offending IP addresses, using SnortSam. I've experimented with Inline Snort as part of a honeypot, but, as the author points out, this is not yet production-safe, as it can easily be used by attackers to disrupt network availability.

Snort 2.0 Intrusion Detection authors Jay Beale, Anne Carasik, Aidan Carty, Scott Dentler, Adam M. Doxtater, Wally Eaton, Jeremy Faircloth, James C. Foster, Vitaly Osipov, Jeffrey Posluns, Ryan Russell, Brian Caswell pages 485 publisher Syngress rating 4/10 ISBN 1931836744

The final Snort book in this review is Snort 2.0 Intrusion Detection. This book has a lot of the screenshots and figures that the Koziol and Rehman books leaves out. It also contains a lot of useful diagrams, about one for every other page, and a CD-ROM with all of the Snort source and a pdf version of the book. This book, and the Koziol book, cover Snort version 2.0, which isn't all that much different from version 1.9 covered in the Rehman book. Still, it is nice to have the most up-to-date documentation, but it doesn't make the Rehman book any less effective. This book has the most reference material in it, over 500 pages' worth, and it has very organized user manual-like descriptions of important Snort components (preprocessors, output plugins, and rules). Keep in mind that this book was created more as a user manual rather than an implementer's guide. You aren't going to see planning, deployment, and maintenance activities as well as technical deployment examples, as in the Koziol book. And, you aren't going to find a concise quick-start guide such as the Rehman book.

In summary, you aren't going to find anything in this book that isn't in the other two. What you will find is lengthy descriptions, and a lot more screenshots. As stated before, Snort 2.0 Intrusion Detection was written by 12 different people (one of them a Sourcefire employee and Snort.org website maintainer, Brian Caswell). This is obviously done by the publisher to get the book out as fast as possible, which is important for technology book publishers as books are outdated quickly, but has the end result of a disjointed book that contradicts itself in many areas. An example: one author stresses how deadly important it is for us to only use the latest Snort version, while another tells us to use the CDROM that comes with the book, which contains an outdated version of Snort.

You can clearly tell a different authors worked on different chapters, as the style and format change frequently. You can also tell that the authors didn't talk to each other much, as you will find one author referring to something in one chapter (unified binary format) that he expected to have been explained in a previous chapter. In print, the concept was not explained until later, which can be really frustrating if you are not a Snort pro. Additionally, there are enough grammatical errors in the book to be distracting, and, much like a vendor-provided user manual, the chapters don't logically flow from one to the next. If you do purchase this book, this slashdotter would recommend it as a supplement to either the Rehman or Koziol book.

You can purchase Intrusion Detection with SNORT: Advanced IDS Techniques Using SNORT, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and ACID , Intrusion Detection with Snort , and Snort 2.0 Intrusion Detection from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Thanks to Wired News for their article discussing the increasing use of games to educate and simulate in the learning field. The article discusses the fact that "...video games have come under tremendous political pressure in recent years because of an increase in violent and sexual content. But schools soon may be using the technology that powers those games to help teach America's children." It goes on to mention a number of academic initiatives, including MIT's Games-To-Teach project, currently developing titles such as Biohazard, which uses the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine, and "...helps train emergency workers to deal with a cataclysmic attack. To succeed, teams must forge new communication lines while fighting a toxic accident."

An anonymous reader writes "Carnegie Mellon's next generation robot just finished its Chilean expedition and achieved a new planetary exploration benchmark, including being the first autonomous rover to cover 1 km on a single command. The other milestones from the Atacama Desert, Chile--the driest place on the planet--centered on over-the-horizon stereo navigation, sun-tracking for efficient solar panel pointing, and fault recovery. CMU shows pictures of the robot, called Hyperion, in action. One of its prime objectives was to plot courses that avoid shade, by finding the position of virtually everything in the solar system."

An anonymous reader writes "Carnegie Mellon's next generation robot just finished its Chilean expedition and achieved a new planetary exploration benchmark, including being the first autonomous rover to cover 1 km on a single command. The other milestones from the Atacama Desert, Chile--the driest place on the planet--centered on over-the-horizon stereo navigation, sun-tracking for efficient solar panel pointing, and fault recovery. CMU shows pictures of the robot, called Hyperion, in action. One of its prime objectives was to plot courses that avoid shade, by finding the position of virtually everything in the solar system."

An anonymous reader writes "Carnegie Mellon's next generation robot just finished its Chilean expedition and achieved a new planetary exploration benchmark, including being the first autonomous rover to cover 1 km on a single command. The other milestones from the Atacama Desert, Chile--the driest place on the planet--centered on over-the-horizon stereo navigation, sun-tracking for efficient solar panel pointing, and fault recovery. CMU shows pictures of the robot, called Hyperion, in action. One of its prime objectives was to plot courses that avoid shade, by finding the position of virtually everything in the solar system."

Phronesis writes "M. Granger Morgan and his graduate student Bill Strauss have a nice article in Issues in Science and Technology about the risks posed by electronic devices in flight. Unlike most articles on the subject, this one neither pooh-poohs the risks ('We have estimated that reported events are occurring at a rate of about 15 and perhaps as many as 25 per year') nor exaggerates them ('RF interference from consumer electronics is unlikely to have figured in more than a few percent of commercial air accidents, if any at all, during the past 10 years.'). Instead, it presents a sensible plan for dealing with the risks that will accompany the inevitable expansion of the range of electronic devices passengers will use in flight, including cell phones and wireless computer networking."

Phronesis writes "M. Granger Morgan and his graduate student Bill Strauss have a nice article in Issues in Science and Technology about the risks posed by electronic devices in flight. Unlike most articles on the subject, this one neither pooh-poohs the risks ('We have estimated that reported events are occurring at a rate of about 15 and perhaps as many as 25 per year') nor exaggerates them ('RF interference from consumer electronics is unlikely to have figured in more than a few percent of commercial air accidents, if any at all, during the past 10 years.'). Instead, it presents a sensible plan for dealing with the risks that will accompany the inevitable expansion of the range of electronic devices passengers will use in flight, including cell phones and wireless computer networking."

Eric Stats writes: "At one point in the not so distant past, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) were network security applications reserved for Fortune 500 companies with enough IT budget to fork up the Big Dollar, or hard core packetheads willing to grep through tcpdump or shadow output. Over the past few years, a new pig on the block, Snort, has put that notion to rest. Instead of having to spring for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a feature-rich, state-of-the-art, IDS; open source fans now have an IDS that meets and beats most of the performance benchmarks and features of commercial, closed source IDSs. Jack Koziol's new book, Intrusion Detection with Snort, presents a comprehensive guide that those either novice to, or richly experienced with, the field of Intrusion Detection can use to get up to speed quickly on Snort." Read on for Eric's review. Intrusion Detection with Snort author Jack Koziol pages 400 publisher Sams rating 9 reviewer Eric Stats ISBN 157870281X summary Handbook on the open source Intrusion

What Koziol implies throughout Intrusion Detection with Snort, but never states outright, is that Snort holds an inherent advantage over closed source IDSs, in that the IDS itself can be tailored and customized for each individual deployment to a level not possible for closed source competitors. If you have had the displeasure of working with a rigid, uncustomizable, IDS you already know where this is going ...

In order for an IDS to be effective, or in some high-bandwidth cases, even usable, detailed network and business context must be applied to the IDS. In a nutshell, IDSs are not as plug-and-play as firewalls or other security applications. For example, if you know you are not running any HTTP traffic on the segment where the IDS is sniffing, you may not want your IDS to waste cycles looking for attacks on Apache. On the other hand, you may feel that the mere presence of HTTP traffic may indicate something innately suspicious, so it is of value to watch for any HTTP traffic. It all depends on what you feel are legitimate threats to the network you are attempting to protect. Snort gives you the power to "watch" for specific attacks, protocol anomalies, or other chatter that has no legitimate business running on your network. Other closed source IDSs don't, or can't, have the same flexibility. Only Snort can implement something as detailed as "Send a page to the CISO's phone if this particular subnet attacks these Apache servers with the chunked encoding exploit."

With Snort, novices can easily write attack signatures (called rules) enable or disable specific protocol decoders, and detect advanced attacks such as exploits utilizing polymorphic shellcode. Without this level of flexibility, you are likely to be flooded with alerts that are not relevant, or, even worse, miss an actual attack that causes irreparable data loss.

Like many open source applications, Snort's biggest downfall has been documentation. Who wants to write boring user manuals when he can write code, right? Well, that's all fine and dandy for Snort developers, but folks that want to actually use all of the neat features can't, unless you tell them they are there, and how to use them. Intrusion Detection with Snort bridges this gap, and offers a clear, concise, guideline that helps plan, implement and maintain Snort-based IDS.

Another oft-cited problem with Snort that Intrusion Detection with Snort addresses is the lack of Snort features that are not directly related to intrusion detection. In essence, Snort's developers have concentrated on creating the world's best application for detecting unauthorized activity, and left everything else to other applications. If you want to organize and manage the alerts generated by Snort you have to use another application (ACID). If you desire alerts via email or pager you need another tool (swatch or syslog-ng). If you want to centrally manage attack signatures for multiple Snort installations, guess what? You need another tool (IDS Policy Manager or SnortCenter). Finding, installing, and getting all of these tools to work right can be frustrating, so Koziol walks us through these issues, and in the end we have an IDS rivaling the expensive commercial solutions.

On to the nitty-gritty of the book. Essentially, this book is organized into logical three sections, even though the author did not choose to make these demarcations in print. The first section introduces us to intrusion detection in general and features of Snort. The second section is a detailed installation guide, which walks through setting up and installing the various components of a distributed Snort setup. The final section focuses on post-installation and maintenance tasks, as well as advanced topics.

In the first section, the different breeds of IDS (Host and Network) are honestly presented, Koziol acknowledging in great detail some of the major shortcomings of IDS technology. The book then moves to describing Snort in great detail in an unbiased fashion. Other books on this subject written by Snort contributors are less forthcoming with Snort's disadvantages. The inner workings of Snort (such as packet decoders and libpcap) and the largely undocumented preprocessors are described in detail, giving tons real world examples. The examples are somewhat current, and describe exploits commonly found 6-18 months ago. Although the actual exploits found in the wild may change over time, the strategies for discovering them with Snort should remain relatively constant. The book then moves into the activities required in planning for a Snort-based IDS installation. Some of this is common sense for experienced security practitioners, such as establishing an incident response plan (the "Oh shit, I've been hacked, what do I do now!?!?"), but is relevant for novices. Other topics introduced in this section are:

Sensor placement: where to place an IDS from a network design perspective for maximum benefit.

Inserting a sensor into an in place network: covers using taps, span ports, and dedicated hubs.

Specific hardware and OS considerations: basically, why a flavor of Unix is best for Snort.

Creating a unidirectional sniffing cable: allows network traffic to flow in a single direction, minimizing risk to an IDS segment.

The second section is a detailed guide to building a distributed or 3-tiered Snort IDS. Getting the three components, the sensor (where Snort is actually installed), the server (database, alert management, and reporting server), and the analyst console (secure place to access other components and store config files and scripts) up and working on Linux takes up the bulk of this section. The analyst console chapter walks through the ever-popular Analysis Console for Intrusion Databases (ACID). Attention is paid to configuring a secured setup that encrypts traffic between the various sensors, servers, and consoles. Various packages and tools are described, as well as condensing all of the Snort tiers onto one physical box. Installing and configuring on Windows is covered as well, although this choice of setup is not as thoroughly explained as the others. The third and final section picks up where most books that deal with a specific application or software package too often leave off, namely, keeping the damn thing working. A chapter is dedicated to tuning Snort, and what thresholds can be configured to maximize benefit and performance. Getting real-time alerting via email working with ancillary tools, is covered in a dedicated chapter. Developing a targeted ruleset (a set of automagically generated signatures that will only detect attacks that have the potential to be successful) using a custom shell script is described.

A very important topic in Snort administration, writing custom rules (attack signatures) gets its own chapter. The syntax for creating rules is clearly described, followed by concrete examples. The book works through writing rules by reading through raw packet captures (last year's Slapper worm is a particularly good example). This is followed by upgrading and managing rules, which is highly useful if you have a number of Snort installations to manage. Finally, Intrusion Detection with Snort closes with a chapter on advanced topics. The advanced topics chapter primarily covers the latest fad 'Intrusion Prevention.' Snort can be made into an IPS device via packet scrubbing or shunting. For packet scrubbing, the Snort Inline patch is used and the box is placed in between a trusted and untrusted network, dropping packets that match specifically created rules. Shunting is accomplished with SnortSam, which basically sends a request to a border router or firewall to block an attacking IP address for a predetermined period of time.

Overall Jack Koziol's Intrusion Detection with Snort is a viable text for learning Intrusion Detection with the worlds premier open source IDS, even if it is light on diagrams and pictures, but it still comes highly recommended from this reviewer.

You can purchase Intrusion Detection with Snort from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Punty writes "CMU has yet again pushed the envelope of robotic technology. After the Quecreek mine incident, technology experts made a quick move to come up with solutions to mine mapping. Well, CMU has made major progress thanks to Red Wittaker, who created the Mobile Robotics Development Course with such goals in mind. It is especially interesting to see that it is the students doing most of the work in such a complex project. The full story, along with links to the "Groundhog" and "Nomad" projects can be found here. . ."

zoneball asks: "What would you use for a distributed file system for Linux? I have several GNU/Linix machines running at home, and wanted to be able to see more or less the same file tree (especially all the ~user directories) regardless of which machine I'm connected to, and where the traversal into the distributed file system space is largely transparent for the end-user. Are there any URLs or documents that compare the features, bugs, road map, stability of these and other distributed filesystems? Which offers the best stability and protection from future obsolescence?"

Zoneball looked at 3 distributed filesystems, here are his thoughts:

" Open AFS was the solution I chose because I have the experience with it from college. For performance, AFS was built with an intelligent client-side cache, but did not support network disconnects nicely. But there are other alternatives out there.

Coda appears to be a research fork from an earlier version of AFS. Coda supports disconnected operations. But, the consensus on the Usenet (when I looked into filesystems a while ago) was that Coda was still too 'experimental.'

Intermezzo looks like it was started with the lessons learned from Coda, but (again from Usenet) people have said that it is still too unstable and it crashes their servers. The last 'news' on their site is dated almost a year ago, so I don't even know if it's being developed or not"

So if you were to recommend a distributed filesystem for Linux machines, would you choose one of the three filesystems listed here, or something else entirely?

Kylose Boondoggler writes "Sony AIBOs play soccer against each other in the American Open 2003, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University in preparation for RoboCup '03. Teams from all over North and South America (including teams from Georgia Tech, Cornell, and UPenn) will compete in various leagues from soccer-playing AIBO to pure computer simulations. Local newspaper coverage is provided by The Tartan. Honda's ASIMO will also make an appearance along with rescue robots constructed by Carnegie Mellon."

Smaz writes "Apparently Carnegie Mellon has set up a Hall of Fame for robots and their inventors. Wonder if it'll have the pull of a RnR Hall of Fame or Baseball Hall of Fame? I'd visit." Any nominees?

prostoalex writes "The Industrial Physicist sums up the recent advances and developments in the world of computer vision. They mention an application for human-computer interfacing using a Webcam, Philips Research Lab Seeing with Sound product, which augments vision for visually impaired, as well as various frontal face detection applications."

UnanimousCoward writes "This Internet Week article describes a research project by Scott Fahlman that looks to limit spam using e-stamps. Here is more detailed description of the system under his CMU homepage along with a link to the original paper." As crappy as it sounds, charging some tiny fee per email would cut spam dramatically. 207 of the buggers so far today. Hundreds of megs a month. I'd love to see something done.

CMU ESM Project writes "Our research group at Carnegie Mellon University has developed a peer to peer streaming video content distribution system called End System Multicast (ESM). The system constructs a self-organizing and adaptive overlay network using the receivers that are tuning into the broadcast events. The system has been used fairly successfully for quite a few events. Now we want test the system with a lot of more users and different user join patterns. We are streaming some very cool video, such as Triumph of the Nerds by Bob Cringely, distinguished lecture by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, ACM SIGCOMM conference paper presentation by Dave Clark, and 2002 Sony Legged Robot Soccer Championship. Here is the detailed schedule. So please tune in, enjoy, and help test our system!" The streaming is based on QuickTime; for Linux users, the project page steps through installation of CodeWeaver's CrossOver plug-in.

CMU ESM Project writes "Our research group at Carnegie Mellon University has developed a peer to peer streaming video content distribution system called End System Multicast (ESM). The system constructs a self-organizing and adaptive overlay network using the receivers that are tuning into the broadcast events. The system has been used fairly successfully for quite a few events. Now we want test the system with a lot of more users and different user join patterns. We are streaming some very cool video, such as Triumph of the Nerds by Bob Cringely, distinguished lecture by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, ACM SIGCOMM conference paper presentation by Dave Clark, and 2002 Sony Legged Robot Soccer Championship. Here is the detailed schedule. So please tune in, enjoy, and help test our system!" The streaming is based on QuickTime; for Linux users, the project page steps through installation of CodeWeaver's CrossOver plug-in.

CMU ESM Project writes "Our research group at Carnegie Mellon University has developed a peer to peer streaming video content distribution system called End System Multicast (ESM). The system constructs a self-organizing and adaptive overlay network using the receivers that are tuning into the broadcast events. The system has been used fairly successfully for quite a few events. Now we want test the system with a lot of more users and different user join patterns. We are streaming some very cool video, such as Triumph of the Nerds by Bob Cringely, distinguished lecture by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, ACM SIGCOMM conference paper presentation by Dave Clark, and 2002 Sony Legged Robot Soccer Championship. Here is the detailed schedule. So please tune in, enjoy, and help test our system!" The streaming is based on QuickTime; for Linux users, the project page steps through installation of CodeWeaver's CrossOver plug-in.