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When setting up systems such as popfile, consider creating subcategories for each type of spam you tend to get. More work to train, true, but likely to be more accurat once you're done.

Might want to check it out: MIT Network Security Team

"On the following pages you will find information about protecting your computer or network from malicious hackers, dealing with a suspected attack or system compromise, and MIT network security policies"

Here's a more in-depth paper. It's an absolutely chilling story.
http://sunnyday.mit.edu/therac-25.html

>And then, being Xerox, they found they couldn't/wouldn't/didn't want to sell it.

Actually, Xerox did sell it, in Japan, as the DocuStation IM 200. When Java came out, we and otehrs worked with Sun to add the image processing features that were necessary (which became java2d) it was re-written in Java and sold again as FlowPort, and is still sold.

At the time the choice was made, we were examining Scheme, but felt a lot of resistance from the industrial engineering community we were targeting. So, although I helped develop 6.001 and the book "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" that introduced Scheme, we abandoned that approach and looked for a language that would be more palatable to the printer and copier engineers. The system was written in PostScript because it was an interpreted language that was capable of running inside hardware such as copies, scanners, and printers. There were hired industry pundits who had suggested that we use Visual Basic, but that was even harder to fit into a copier in 1991, so PostScript it was.

Just as we were making the decision, I saw on alt.sources a new small object-oriented language announced and tried it out, but it had absolutely no class libraries, and no tools, and nobody had hever heard about it before (some guy named Guido) so we passed up on Python...

The goal was to make paper be the universal access portal to information, and to piggyback on images as the universal information transfer medium. We did hyperlinks on paper, used dialup modems for transferring information, etc. Basically it was the web and web forms on paper. Now the focus is on capturing paper documents and their metadata and making them first-class citizens in the office network.

The DocuScript language was actually much more like Java than like Smalltalk. It did have an object-oriented database, which Java lacks, but consider the following:

• Much of the PostScript code was written in PdB, a C++-like language compiled to PostScript. PdB was written at The Turing Institute by Arthur van Hoff, who later went on to write the first Java compiler, with a remarkably similar syntax. So, the system was written in a precursor to Java with GS as the virtual machine.
• Herb Jellinek worked on the "configurable desktop universal browser" part of the project at PARC. He left and went to Sun to work on Oak and in the meantime, WWW happened and became the protocol for the "universal browser", and he wrote HotJava, which was the web browser that kicked off the Java revolution.

• The Paper User Interface forms were all done as small PostScript programs that, depending on which set of definitions was loaded into the environment, either rendered a printable image to the image buffer, or read the scanned image from the image buffer and read the checkboxes. The layout decisions were all done with PostScript routines.

  So, in that sense, the layout was like LaTex, where the formatting commands are actually short programs or macros that bottom out into an implementation of primitive operations. After the product was launched, Larry Masinter of PARC convinced me that the LaTex-programmmatic approach was wrong, and that we needed to use a static description language, a path I had resisted because there were no good ones. But in the interim, again WWW had hit, and HTML seemed good. We did a Paper User Interface version of the WWW (now going full circle from our original idea of paper access to information to paper being a proexy for access to information via the WWW) and we made a tool to print Paper UI on any web page.

  Initially we did this as well in PostScript, but found that we needed something faster for the HTML parsing and layout, so we got a company called Universal Access to do that for us. They had a tool they were developing, and they prototyped it for us, and their other customer was a company called Unwired Planet that wanted to make a transcoder to convert HT

EVERY software developer interested in bugs, multithreading, or product safety should read this jaw-dropping paper: http://sunnyday.mit.edu/therac-25.html

Yeah. As is clear from this site, MIT's admitted student pool for the class of 2007 was 51% and 49% female. Of course, the yield of female students is much less than males at MIT, so the class will likely be around 45% male. FYI, Harvard's admitted student pool was 52% male and 48% female, but their entering class of 2007 is 51% male and 49% female (w00t go Crimson!).

This is a tired myth. In fact 41% of all undergraduates and 29% of all graduate students at MIT are female. The situation is admittedly less equitable in the faculty ranks, where only 16% are female.

This is a tired myth. In fact 41% of all undergraduates and 29% of all graduate students at MIT are female. The situation is admittedly less equitable in the faculty ranks, where only 16% are female.

aah, it's FUD alright, to deny that. They just changed the terminology (VM+core classes == CLR, IL == bytecode, JIT == JIT, ...). The only difference being not to have to use one syntax (java C#, VB, ...) BUT it's not the platform they recreate, just a similar but different syntax: their VM uses statically typed languages their .NET implementation of "smalltalk", e.g., is NOT close to the real thing. BTW every OO language uses a VM to execute. Think hard before denying that one ;-)

MIT's Athena is used by nearly the entire community of 30,000 students, faculty and staff. The 9,000 students make almost daily use of it. It consists mostly of Solaris and Linux desktops. MIT spent much of the 1990s waiting for NT's capabilities to catch up to the hype. Finally, in the past couple of years, they've been able to make Windows desktops be part of the system. However, these are much more costly to maintain than the POSIX2-based boxes.

In short, your point is demonstrably wrong.

It's one integrated system. If you surpise me by actually giving an example of a company with 20,000 Windows desktops, I'll bet they're separated into a large number of islands of control ("domains"), and not one big system like Athena. MSFT just can't make systems scale like that.

You mean the Kerberos version. Where you can control AIBO and not worry about exposing your POP or IMAP password to the world. Good thinking!

And before anyone says "It's Cerberus, not Kerberos, there's no such dog as Kerberos.", Kerberos is the Greek spelling of the dog's name, and Cerberus is the Latin spelling. And, of course, Fluffy is the British spelling.

Who uses 44+ volts DC for anything? It seems like just going with 5V would be better, and less likely to fry stuff with shorts in the cable; if a 5V line shorts to a signal line, the signal is held high, and your cable just doesn't work, without taking anything out of spec. Of course, 350mA at 5V is too little power, but increasing the current a bit would be reasonable with a 10-fold decrease in voltage.

What exactly are they planning to power with this? Embedded devices and PDA-level devices (like wireless access points) don't need nearly that much power.

(I have personally modified a cheap hub to let me run 5V over ethernet, so I know it's reasonable; it works fine for essentially any device that you might run off of batteries if you could keep the batteries charged)

See this document: Zephyr Revisions

oh and of course, MIT's leonardo.

Just some picky comments on the slate article and the posting. First, the man's name is Grisha Perelman, not Grigori. He is Russian, not Italian. (Even the MIT Math department's Seminar Page gets this one wrong). Second the work spoken about at MIT was written up in two preprints (here and here -- I guess I should say don't even bother reading them without a graduate education in mathematics).

FYI, this work is based on a prescription for proof of the Geometrization Conjecture (which implies the Poincare Conjecture), done by Prof. Richard Hamilton, who was at one of the UC schools at the time, but is now at Columbia University. Professor Hamilton was over 40 when he published his work on the Ricci flow, which is the basis for Dr. Perelman's recent work.

In my LISP courses, usually AI/GA/GP, there were a lot of guys/gals taking poetry minors.

I agree.:-) (In particular, the bit about dulce and computatore. Oh, those were the days...*sigh*!)

the idea is that no one knows if they are on the list.

Yeah, since it's not blatantly freaking obvious by the 10th time you get pulled aside for an extra search.

Doesn't anyone remember this paper on how to defeat profile and name based screening?

see it at the hack gallery robot rights protest page.

One poignant thing is that there are now some automatic flush urinals in posh hotels which have a sigle red indicator LED in the center of a large black and chrome setting to tell you that the IR proximity sensor is working. It looks almost exactly like MIT's rendition of an unemployed HAL9000.

Geez. from being an astronaut to the guy who flushes rich mens toilets. tough break for robots indeed.

I do know there are cases of accidental "mutation" in older .EXE/.COM infectors. This was believed due to inaccurate transmission over a modem line, flipping a bit or some such. Of course, most such viruses once damaged in this way don't work, but a few continued to do so with little change in their behaviour.

I would say the problem with applying real Darwin-like evolution in computer worms is simply that there aren't enough hosts. Therefore, I think it's probable that there's not enough room for random changes to be useful often enough for the evolution of new "species". My guess would be that computers compare well to cells in being attacked by virii/worms. Even a computer worm capable of infecting everything attached to the internet would only have a paltry 171 million victims to experiment with. In comparison, a single human has 6*10^13 cells potentially susceptable to living viruses!

Of course, the day when IPv6 & Bluetooth enabled nanobots are embedded in my deodorant may get us to a number of hosts sufficient for such experiments...

Once again, proof that passenger screening is counter-productive.

Woops! This is the correct link to soulful behavior. Sorry.

The $1 coins are an excellent idea which should be fully embraced by discontinuing the $1 bill. The cost savings to the government/taxpayer alone make it worthwhile. The reasoning is presented very nicely here.

As for the wad of 50 $1 bills, I'd rather have two $20s and a $10. I'm sure that strip clubs can find a way to help you work around the dollar coin issue.

Here's a link to an enthusiasts page, and here's the MIT researcher Dr Linda Griffith-Cima who's spearheading the research. more on her at the MIT website. Finally here's the largely ignored /. article

The site is heavily Slashdotted and the Google caches of it have gone wonky since I started reading it so perhaps there's something there. On the other hand, I saw information about how to be a developer using the system, and nothing about what applications had actually been developed for it. (Similarly, for PicoGUI, I saw downloads for
about 10 cool themes, and 0 applications that use it...)

• "The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma." - Abraham Lincoln
  
  
• "As to Jesus of Nazareth...I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity. " - Benjamin Franklin
  
  
• "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." - Thomas Jefferson
  
  
• "I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church." - Thomas Paine

ARTICLE 11.
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

That's what my thesis work is about; see my web page for details.

The thing about "Society of Mind" is that it's very difficult to take literally. Each page is its own concept - there's not a lot of high-level organization to the book. The concepts interrelate, of course, but formalizing and implementing them is tricky.

The book has certainly served as high-level inspiration for quite a lot of people. A couple of examples would be Michael Travers's LiveWorld and Mark Humphrys's "World-Wide-Mind" project.

But as far as I know nobody prior to me has really tried to make K-lines, polynemes, pronomes, frames, etc., and hook them all together, as described in "Society of Mind".

The two usages of the word "hacker" ("computer criminal" and "expert programmer") apparently both derive from the MIT definition of "hack", which I believe predates the spread of computers.

They present it as "someone who does some sort of interesting and creative work at a high intensity level", and specifically mention that it often includes pranks.

Another definition which fits well is "someone who operates a complex system in a manner inconsistent with its designer's intent".

Either of those two definitions can apply to either the popular usage, or ESR's description.

Minsky isn't complaining about Artificial Intelligence's progress; he's complaining about Cognitive Science's progress. AI is doing just fine, as evidenced by these useful systems we have (the telephone system and credit card fraud examples). The not-so-useful systems--the ones that are trying to model human/rat/bug cognition, or be super-thinkers at some future point--are the ones that are flailing, and always have been.

Multiplexed Information and Computing Service

Here's some perspective from an MIT AI lab grad student who's been inspired by both Minsky and Brooks. (Minsky is on my Ph.D. committee.)

"AI has been brain-dead since the 1970s."

I agree, unfortunately. At least, what was traditionally meant by "AI" has been brain-dead. There is very little focus in the field today on human-like intelligence per se. There is a lot of great work being done that has immediate, practcal uses. But whether much of it is helping us toward the original long-term goal is more questionable. Most researchers long ago simply decided that "real AI" was too hard, and started doing work they could get funded. I would say that "AI" has been effectively redefined over the past 20 years.

"The worst fad has been these stupid little robots."

Minsky's attitude towards the direction the MIT AI lab has taken (Rod Brooks's robots) is well-known. And I agree that spending years soldering robots together can certainly take time away from AI research. But personally, I find a lot of great ideas in Rod's work, and I've used these ideas as well as Marvin's in my own work. Most importantly, unlike most of the rest of the AI world, Rod *is*, in the long run, shooting toward human-level AI.

Curiously, just last month I gave a talk at MIT, tited "Putting Minsky and Brooks Together". (Rod attended, but unfortunately Marvin couldn't make it.) The talk slides are at

http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bob/dangerous.pdf.

In particular, I shoot down some common misperceptions about Minsky, including that he is focused solely on logical, symbolic AI. Anyone who has read "The Society of Mind" will realize what great strides Minsky-style AI has made since the early days. I also show what seem like some surprising connections to Brooks's work.

- Bob Hearn

The prototype linked is part of a broader effort to get interaction designers and end-users involved in open-source style interface design. Open Prototyping suggests that interaction designers release-early/release-often, but in this case sketches instead of code.

The sketches created in DENIM are intentionally informal. The rational behind this is that people are more willing to speak up and change things that they feel aren't finished. Human-Computer Interaction people like to use informal tools to try out lots of different designs before someone wastes a couple years of their life coding up something totally unusable.

The prototype linked is part of a broader effort to get interaction designers and end-users involved in open-source style interface design. Open Prototyping suggests that interaction designers release-early/release-often, but in this case sketches instead of code.

The sketches created in DENIM are intentionally informal. The rational behind this is that people are more willing to speak up and change things that they feel aren't finished. Human-Computer Interaction people like to use informal tools to try out lots of different designs before someone wastes a couple years of their life coding up something totally unusable.

Generally, Gigabit Ethernet is more flexible, easier to maintain, and has more third party hardware available for it, but if you have a motherboard with FW and are setting up a special-purpose, low-cost cluster, IEEE1394 or USB2 networking may be a reasonable choice.

Also, semiconductor manufacturing uses lots of quite nasty chemicals and while the organics can be incinerated, the heavy metals are difficult to dispose of safely for the long term and there is always the inevitable discharge of toxic pollutants into the air or water surrounding the factory.

Finally, both manufacturing and operating computers use lots of electricity, which is usually generated by plants that produce lots of greenhouse gases.

Besides worrying about recycling, you also want to worry about all these environmental costs.

Great, but now I need a computer program to help read the horrible handwriting.

I can see this thing being very useful for writing out doctor perscriptions :)

'Let's see, this script says 30 pills of Acetpoiunasd and 10 pilos of Hydroasdhkjh'. No problem!

I've never really used NTLM but from what I understand it's extremely convenient. Does anybody know if there's an open equivalent for this?

Yes. Kerberos.

Three separate emails this morning directed me to Tom Coates' post about the definition of social software.

I thought I would offer a few resources for those who are inclined to look at the historical roots of this new phenomena. First, I applaud Coates' reference to Engelbart, because the social aspects of computer augmentation were very much on his mind as early as the 1950s. I wrote about that in 1985. At that time, and in many conversations since then, Engelbart stressed that his original framework for augmentation included "humans, using language, artifacts, methodology, and training," although most emphasis by most people in the intervening decades has been on the visible part, the artifacts. In that sense, the emphasis on social software today is (or ought to be, in my opinion) a reminder that the real capabilities of augmentation lie not just in the capabilities and affordances of the hardware or software but in the thinking and communication practices these tools enable. Of course, in 1993 -- hard to believe it was a decade ago -- I wrote about the Well, BBSs, Usenet, Muds, IRC, etc. in The Virtual Community. So much debate and commentary has flowed around the notion of "community" in this context that it doesn't make a lot of sense to rehash it here and now, although, arguably, online community is an early example of Technologies of Cooperation. I would only note that when a particular group of people uses social software for long enough -- whether it is synchronous or asynchronous, deskbound or mobile, text or graphical -- they establish individual and group social relationships that are different in kind from the more fleeting relationships that emerge from task-oriented group formation. Although the enterprise of Electric Minds is long forgotten, I talked a lot about "the social web" in 1996-97 (and Judith Donath wrote about The Sociable Web). The original conversations are gone, but a snapshot of the editorial content of Electric Minds exists -- note in particlar The Virtual Community Center.. In 2001, I updated "The Virtual Community" with a new chapter that went into detail about the community debate and brought in the notion of social networks: and three years ago, Lisa Kimball and I wrote about the advantages to enterprises of establishing online social networks.

And of course many others from the social sciences, political science, and the technology side have studied and written about the way people use computer-mediated communications in teams, group formation, and social networks. I don't want to give the impression that I've been the only person writing about this: indeed, I have two shelves of books by authors from a variety of disciplines about the social, political, psychological aspects of social cyberspaces. Certainly, we have much more to learn about Trinity dying in Matrix 2. And I applaud the reinvigoration of interest in a phenomenon that popped up just as soon as people could send email to distribution lists (HUMAN-NETS was one of the oldest discussions of social software.): I think the emerging field would do well to acknowledge and build on this earlier work. Something new is happening, truly, in terms of the kinds of softare available, and the scale

When the helicopter's engine mysteriously failed, the narration suggested that the microwave gun might have caused the problem (the pilot managed to restart the engine before the 'copter hit the ground, so it wasn't a catastrophic failure).

I was disappointed that no one looked into this further. If it was the microwave gun, the range was in the hundreds of feet, and the exposure must have been momentary.

Have a look at the paper Keeping Secrets in Hardware: the Microsoft XBox Case Study by Andrew "bunnie" Huang, XBox hacker extraordinaire.

Also have a look at his xbox hacking page for lots of other goodies.

Inspired by this, we took apart a printer and made this.

New transportation system invented.

Megawhore writes: I seems that researchers have invented a revolutionary new transportation system called wheel which enables people to get around loads without carrying them....
I think this will enable us to transport our MP3 server's around.

I'm saying that it can happen and it's not a dead end. If you negotiate protocols, people, including spammers, can use SMTP for a certain amount of time while an improved and safer protocol takes hold. SMTP can be phased out eventually. I am disagreeing with people who say "this is a dead end, it will never happen" (because it would be necessary for everyone to switch on some flag day).

Correct spelling is Noam Chomsky.

Until this comes out, PGP is a great way to keep your email private and secure. It also deals with forged headers using email signing. MIT has a great client here

This gives new meaning to the term "Packet Sniffing"!

I think after the first time some drunk idiot pees on the keyboard they'll rethink their strategy.

Maybe they should install urinal game controllers instead.

There's a 21 year old professor at MIT, Erik Demaine who is interested in computational origami. Check out his page for some interesting papers and a story of some very untraditional education.

grr, link was lost: Quantum Networking

simon greenwold at mit's aesthetics and computation group has been working on this for a while now. (EyeBox)

Here.

Behold MIT