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*NITSCAP
*DITSCAP
*Common Criteria
*FIPS 102 Not to mention all the other FIPS criteria, esp. regarding crypto and PKI.
*NIAP (Information Systems Certification Procedures and Assessment Scheme)
*A Plethora Of Schema and Policy
*Ye Olde Rainbow Series
*MIT GASSP [warning, .doc file]

And these are just US criteria...other nations have their own. These are becomming very important, if typical job requirements on security-jobs list are any indication. Need a BS, a clearance, and 5 years practical experiance in everything from LAN wiring, vulerability finding and exploit production, penetration testing, firewalls and IDS, to the evaluation and application of these federal criteria, and everything in between. And that will get you an entry level position!

I could try to write it in a GPL-type way allowing readers to contribute "patches" with me acting as the benevolent dictator. Presumably, since I would be teaching the class, I'd be adequately qualified as a benevolent dictator. If not, then someone else can take the parts of my book they like, and "fork" it into a different book. As an instructor, I'd be delighted if every time I taught a class, I could go online, and "build" my own text book by choosing chapters like they were kernel modules.

This situation is different from a web novel because the subject (differential equations) is fairly objective. There may be stylistic disagreements between contributors, but all should agree upon (correct) mathematics. In this way, such a book would be very similar to code. Programmers may not agree on coding style, but either the code works or it doesn't, and that is objective.

I suspect that this is one possible direction that the OpenCourseWare project at MIT might be heading. Does anyone know of any similar "open source" text book projects?

Who needs FOX, when we've got MIT.

Nice!

Humperdink: A technicality that will shortly be remedied...but first things first.. [He draws his sword] To the death!

Westley: [slowly sitting up] No! To the pain!

Humperdink: I don't think I'm quite familiar with that phrase?

Westley: I'll explain, and I'll use small words so that you'll be sure to understand. You wart-hog-faced buffoon!

http://www.mit.edu:8001/activities/mitcbf/princess _bride.html#Scene_15

The Internet used to be about openness and trust. Back before Canter & Siegel; the "Green Card Lawyers", back before the Net was opened-up for the Dot Com's and commercial postings.

Back then, having an open relay was no big deal (it was even expected) because we were all friends working for the betterment of the Net, and each other. There was no "cut off their air" because the Internet was a cooperative; their air was our air. A network gains strength as a whole whenever any part of it is strengthened.

That was the Internet that Gillmore grew-up on (and helped found). Perhaps you can't remember, or perhaps you were just too young to remember what it was like back then.

That was back before the Fall of '93.

First it was spamming shutting down USENET groups, which begot CancelMoose.

Next we started seeing email SPAM, which begot procmail and it's necessary filters.

Then port 25 was blocked, and peer-to-peer email was to be nevermore.

Now we're starting to reap what we have sown.

The Internet will soon be owned by one or maybe two large network providers (AOL/Time Warner and/or MSN) and every packet you send will travel only with their permission; through paid transport or non at all. Intelligent routers will give these network providers the ability to block (or charge for) any activity they think they can make a buck off of.

And once there's a single majority player, it's all over. Internetworking always benefits the smaller organization more than the larger one (because it gains access to more resources in the bargain) but only benefits both sides until one gains a majority (at which point providing network access for your competitor cost more incrementally than providing the resource yourself).

We have lost the Internet to those who would claim it as their own and carve it up over those who come in good faith and trust to build and to share.

Think about those whom you loath the most, and what characterizes them all. We hate airline shoe bombers because they exploit the trust inherent in our air travel system to harm us where we are vulnerable. As a result, we must all remove our nail clippers when we fly.

We hate the RIAA and the MPAA because their actions to shutdown legitimate sharing of copyright materials. Their actions are a response not to the person who wants to rip the CD for their car, but to those who abuse the trust by ripping a track and making it available to all comers over the internet. And we (most of us here, anyway) hate them because of the price we must now pay as a result. We may find ourselves losing Fair Use forever because of the actions of a few individuals who's use was anything but fair.

We rant for columns on end about Microsoft's abuses of the market; and what we complain about is the abuse of trust we have placed with them. Then we complain about the latest Microsoft security vulnerability, and again it's about trust misplaced.

We complain about spyware, about online privacy, about the rights we've lost, about abuses of the GPL, and in each case it's the trust we've lost, and usually about how many Karma points we're going to grant to whichever post points this out in the funniest way.

So when Gillmore sticks his nose out and actually still trusts the community he helped to create, you shoot the messenger when you should be shooting the message.

It's not the open relay that's harming your computer; it's the virus, and the impure pond scum who wrote it!

You want the RIAA off your back? Give them a reason to trust you.

You want Microsoft to change their ways? Stop paying them for the trust they've stolen from you.

You want to keep spammers from sending UCE to you? Spread the word that spammers lie.

And if you want a free (speech) Internet where ideas are judged by their merits, rather than by the forum where they are delivered? Speak up and be heard.

Or don't. This Internet is already lost. Trust takes decades to build and seconds to destroy, and all of it which was once here is now gone for good.

You want to know what built the free software community? Trust is the operating system of the free software movement. Destroy that trust and free software will not survive. That's one reason why it's so important to assign your copyrights to the FSF (so they can defend them) and to contribute to the EFF (who understand all this stuff).

Kerberos has been around since '88, opensource (MIT license). It is not developed at the breakneck pace of the more modern SSH and to my knowlege has had fewer exploit bugs in 14 years than the assembled flavors of (commercial *&* open) SSH have exhibited in the last 2 years.

Krb5 is not slick as SSH, you can't use it for a poor-man's VPN; it uses a more expensive cypher (3DES) for both auth and fully encyphered network connections. Rsh, rlogin rcp all available with strong encryption. It's not as easy to setup, nor well suited to very small networks but for my money where applicable it's a far more solid solution.

And yeah OpenSSH's seriously checkered security record has done very little to make me think of applying OpenBSD .. thoughts?

I've been doing a little bit of work in this area--it seems that the VisMod group at MIT released a simple face recognition system about 10 years ago. It uses the eigenface method, which is generally considered the standard (though there have been other models proposed).

I've ported the code to Linux and BSD, and it works all right, though it takes a lot of configuring, and uses a strange format for the images. I'll get around to making a HOWTO at some point, but until then, if anyone wants to play around with the program, they can grab the source for Linux and BSD.

Since these are open source, and the method is fairly easy to understand (there are docs all around about it), I hope that some OSS programmers will take some time to improve on this.

The Teach Scheme Project and the "How to Design Programs" web sites have some very good arguments in favor of using Scheme as a first computer language.

There are real-time garbage collectors, which are guaranteed to not take longer than a fixed time.

Most modern garbage-collected languages can use generational garbage-collection, which, although not hard real-time, generally avoids long pauses, and is very efficient when much garbage is being generated quickly.

Malloc and free are generally not hard real-time.

Try reading the Garbage Collection FAQ

Ok, I did the math. At 9,972 undergraduates, graduates, and professors, that works out to

- one desktop computer
- one notebook computer
- one library computer
- 12 toilets
- 1,667 coke machines

per each person

Yes, I'm sure that name is correct.

I am a Computer Engineering student at a well respected canadian university, and 95% of all Comp.Sci is Linux based. Only a few of the first year courses (where you learn MS Office or Java) are done on windows.

...the bear is evil?

I'm surprised nobody has posted this yet.

The ping in the last picture on the Teddy Borg has the IP 18.238.3.106 listed. I can ping it from here.

I dunno, maybe it's just me but I woulda used red for the bear's eyes

And as far as his "vain hope of attracting women" goes, well, dude thay're the vainest! (ie don't cross your fingers, and wait for the phone to ring)

:)

replaced one of their Lab ethernet switches with this without the knowledge of the staff, THEN this would have been worthy of an MIT hack. Otherwise its just some guys with too much spare time. ;-)...

Not that I do anything useful with my spare time ;-)...

The Money Shot!

Here is a direct link to The MIT Open Courseware Program

Last time it was Unix-based, developed X Windows for an interface, and was offered out for license by other institutions.

This time it's some interpretation of the idea "Open" (MIT-style which is usually pretty good) and now with infrastructure widely available they're concentrating just on syllabi & courseware.

Nice how they've delineated what MIT-as-an-educational-experience-offers and how that's different from using their materials; that giving the latter away doesn't devalue the former.

I think a lot of the problems people have is that too often, proponents of educational digital games aren't really clear about what it means "to learn" or "to teach." We know that cross-words and other classic game types can be used for drill and practice. And, we know that people can develop skills from hi - fidelity simulations. And, a game like Carmen Sandiego did a nice job at getting kids to do learn some basic facts -- by using a context to get kids to look up information and then reinforcing it through game structures. Supply and demand is pretty easily done through games, as are other things like population dynamics. In general, I think that letting kids experiment with systems that are defined by known rules is something we can do. Basically, you're taking a system simulation -- and then wrapping it around a narrative context to let users' develop goals, but then constraining their actions through a game mechanic, such as limited resources, health, access to space etc.

I find the Civilization comments particularly interesting, as my dissertation is looking at how playing Civ3 affects players' and students' understanding of history. I agree that there are several excellent learning opportunities in the game -- particularly around geography -- but there are several other unanswered challenges as well. A game like SimCity or Civilization has all kinds of opportunities for players to learn misconceptions about history -- like that the Pyramids allow free government changes, or whatever the rule is. Having used SimCity in both schools and after-school settings, I've found that the whole thing is pretty complex. Most students realize pretty quickly that cranking up the taxes for a few months isn't really realistic -- or they start asking why that doesn't happen more often, creating a teachable moment for a teacher. Any time you talk about a game "teaching" something, you're opening up a can of worms because learning is a much more active process of interpreting experience and constructing understandings than it is passively receiving the values or biases of a game.

In fact, most educational research shows that when looking at games as an instructional strategy, the reflection, debriefing, and extension activities surrounding gameplay are at least as important as the gameplay itself. You can imagine the difference between playing Civilization just for fun, versus playing the game and comparing it to historical timelines, or deconstructing its simulation biases. Generally speaking, games can get factual knowledge relatively easy -- and I think playing Civilization on a realistic map provides interesting geographical lessons. However, I agree with the skeptics here that we shouldn't assume that people are necessarily developing valuable academic skills through playing the game. But, the same can be said for lectures and problem sets, as well.

For anyone that's curious, I'll be taking up this issue on an E3 panel this year with Doug Church (Looking Glass), Will Wright, Brenda Laurel, Henry Jenkins, and a few others.

On a related note, I'm working on the games-to-teach project at MIT, where we've been developing prototypes of what next-generation educational software might look like.

Gah. You're not "first world". America is the "new world" (aka 2nd).

No. The first world was countries that fought on the U.S. side in the cold war (U.S., Canada, western Europe, etc). The second world was the Soviet Bloc (no relation to Soviet blocks). Countries too small for either superpower (USSA or USSR) to notice came to be known collectively as the third world; after the cold war ended, "third world" continued to refer to developing countries.

Poll: Which world will achieve 50% adoption of IPv6 first?

It doesn't seem to work on my browser. Good luck!

The README stated that:

Spacewar! is in the public domain, but this credit paragraph must accompany all distributed versions of the program.

However, it comes with a typo:

We typed in in again...

According to the requirement, we must pass it on with the typo, forever.....gotta be careful when writing similar README. :)

Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)

from my blog at kisrael.com

Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)

from my blog at kisrael.com

How to celebrate it more than to actually mass-play Spacewars?

"A DEC PDP1 emulator running the original version of Spacewar! is online Here"

If your want to download it, read the README carefully.

The New York Times is also covering the article (free reg) or you could just go to The Audio Spotlight's home page for a more detailed account of their technology.

I haven't had any SFS problems for over 6 months, since 0.5i. But the notice is correct - your mileage may vary, and use with caution. I've seen SFS tickle bugs in the Linux NFS implementation, but the latest Linux NFS support is much improved over 2.2. On Open/FreeBSD, it's quite solid, IMHO.

For further info, browse the SFS-users mailing list. It's a good way to get a feel for the issues involved in running SFS.

(Obligatory disclosure: I'm not one of the developers, but my office is across the hall).

Little "analog" sensor-actuator robots... a little too reminiscent of the homework I should be working on...

Check out the MIT Press book
Beowulf Cluster Computing with Windows
.

Click here

Oops, my bad, it was Lotus vs. Borland. (That explains why I couldn't find it on Google!) I was confusing it with Apple vs. Microsoft, 'cause they were both look and feel cases.
---
Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!

The pool thing has already been done with a heads-up display:

http://vismod.www.media.mit.edu/people/jebara/stoc hasticks.html

Some interesting research into human-powered computer systems has been done at MIT Media Lab. Here are some links:

• Human Powered Wearable Computing
• A Heat Dissipation Tutorial for Wearable Computers
• Parasitic Power

Before you know it we'll all be wired for sound, uh MPEG-3. Stph

Some interesting research into human-powered computer systems has been done at MIT Media Lab. Here are some links:

• Human Powered Wearable Computing
• A Heat Dissipation Tutorial for Wearable Computers
• Parasitic Power

Before you know it we'll all be wired for sound, uh MPEG-3. Stph

Some interesting research into human-powered computer systems has been done at MIT Media Lab. Here are some links:

• Human Powered Wearable Computing
• A Heat Dissipation Tutorial for Wearable Computers
• Parasitic Power

Before you know it we'll all be wired for sound, uh MPEG-3. Stph

Also of interest: a set of predictions from 1950 entitled "Miracles of the Next Fifty Years".

Among them, a somewhat silly but remarkably prescient prediction of World-Wide-Web-like tech:

Of course the Dobsons have a television set. But it is connected with the telephones as well as with the radio receiver, so that when Joe Dobson and a friend in a distant city talk over the telephone they also see each other. Businessmen have television conferences. Each man is surrounded by half a dozen television screens on which he sees those taking part in the discussion. Documents are held up for examination; samples of goods are displayed. In fact, Jane Dobson does much of her shopping by television. Department stores obligingly hold up for her inspection bolts of fabric or show her new styles of clothing.

It's amazing how much harder some things turned out to be than was anticipated:

• Automatic electronic inventions that seem to have something like intelligence integrate industrial production so that all the machines in a factory work as units in what is actually a single, colossal organism. In the Orwell Helicopter Corporation's plant only a few trouble shooters are visible, and these respond to lights that flare up on a board whenever a vacuum tube burns out or there is a short circuit. By holes punched in a roll of paper, every operation necessary to produce a helicopter is indicated.
• One of the more remarkable electronic machines of 2000 is a development of one on which hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent in the middle years of the 20th century by Dr. Vladimir Zworykin and Dr. John von Neumann. The purpose of this improved Zworykin-Von Neumann automaton is to predict the weather with an accuracy unattainable before 1980. It is a combination of calculating machine and forecaster. The calculator solves thousands of separate equations in a minute; the automatic forecaster carries out the computer's instructions and predicts the weather from hour to hour. In 1950, meteorologists had no time to deal with the 50-odd variables that should have been mathematically handled to predict the weather 24 hours in advance.

• "50-odd variables"... :)

Yeah, there are so few CD playing applications out there... I'm sure they all check for registerd drivers...

CD players maybe not, but future versions of Windows Media Player will. And future CDs will force Windows Media Player because the CD-ROM can't recognize the broken Red Book tracks.

And everyone uses Windows...

What other OS is available pre-installed on x86 based machines available at Best Buy stores?

*Blink* Who are you?

I am Fuck. Fuck of the Mountain. No seriously, I'm Damian Yerrick, a student at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

What the hell is going on?! I would NEVER believe it if it wasn't on MS website! Does it mean that everyone has the source code of Microsoft Windows, but no one knew about it?! Is anyone doing anything useful with it? Has anyone anything interesting to tell us about it? I'm still trying to believe it's not a joke!

I think it depends. Sure, I agree that the educational value "educational games" is quite doubtful. On the other hand, if your young kids are spending time doing stuff like logo or Mindstorms then you probably don't want to stop them from doing so. Since they're already playing with Lego, introducing them to mindstorms might turn out great.

Alltogether I agree with the article though. Schools teaching "how to use the internet" is a joke. And I think stuff like office, online collaboration using things like , etc. are better taught at a later age.

Me too!! Although I was not impressed with the screen.

I'll wait for retinal projection.

As for input they have a arm mounted half-keyboard similar to this

or you can use a twiddler

When I grow up I want to be just like these folks (see bottom for pic)

...well, when it comes to this arena anyway.

MIT's 'borgs have been using prototype retinal scanning displays from various companies that have offered them for at least half a decade.

Back around '97 I was really interested in wearables, but the availability of this type of display was always a problem, and all the suppliers that the MIT crew had listed no longer sold the devices (and they were only selling them as dev-kits anyway)

Read up on MIT's "Lizzy." The most popular display back then was a single LED (red) scanning display, with 320x240 resolution, but it was the same exact technology.

As happens too often, this proposal concentrates entirely too much on distributed computation, and pretty much ignores the problem of distributed storage. They're quite different problems, each requiring its own solution, even though it's intuitively obvious that any true "Internet Scale Operating System" would have to deal with both.

If you're interested in this "other half of the problem" here are some links:

• Farsite (Microsoft; focus on many nodes, not long distances, but still relevant)
• OceanStore (UC Berkeley)
• CFS (MIT)
• Publius (ATT/NYU)
• Intermezzo

There are many more. The bibliographies for the above will mention many earlier systems, while a quick Google search for these project names will show more recent ones.

http://www.ai.mit.edu/lab/sysadmin/cluster.html

There are several limitations to what MOSIX can
currently do. Java native-threads is one thing,
since MOSIX cannot migrate apps using shared
memory all native-threads applications will stay
on the node they started on, green-thread
based application can migrate though the
internal threads aren't exposed to the OS so no
real parallelism is achieved. MOSIX also can't
migrate sockets so I/O bound problems also
stay at home. Mixed I/O and CPU jobs can
migrate for CPU cycles, but are brought back for
the I/O ops. In the limited testing to date,
processes that can't take advantage of MOSIX
don't seem to be hindered at all by it

The Byzantine fault tolerance described in the article sounds much like a paper
we read in an MIT systems course, from OSDI, 1999.

Linked Here

Surely there will be major scalability problems with something like this, a la Gnutella

That's why it's research. I've met and talked to Bill Bolosky (Farsite project lead); he's very clueful wrt scalability in general, and well aware of the problems that networks like Gnutella (an unusually naive protocol, BTW) have run into. However, like the folks working on OceanStore or CFS or many other projects, the Farsite folks have a fairly formidable arsenal of innovative techniques they can apply to the problem. The details are still being worked out, of course, because that's what research is all about, but the people working in this area do seem to be making real progress toward solutions that could scale to such levels.

As much as I would like to say the world was simple enough to say "Open Source: Good, Closed Source: Bad", it just isn't that simple.

Of the three reasons you report your university as giving, I'd say numbers 1 and 2 are perfectly valid.

First they said it would cost too much to implement because of retraining users, etc. It would indeed be expensive. How expensive in comparison with the Microsoft contract we can't say without lots more facts. Quick, knee-jerk answers are seldom accurate. There are several good open alternatives to Office, but I have yet to see one that matches Office for the average worker. It doesn't matter if it works great for me if the bulk of the staff needs help. For open source software to succeed in the mainstream it has to replace Microsoft products. For any product to replace another it has to be a perceptibly better experience than the one being replaced, not just equivalent. At the moment I'd say the open alternatives to Office are almost equivalent. Does that mean I think open source sucks, Hell no, but let's not kid ourselves. There's a long way to go and we're up against a jugernaut whose products many users love.

Which brings us to the third argument given by the university: real world companies by and large do use Microsoft products and a kid graduating from a university had better know how to use them. Rant and rave all we like, this is a fact. Facts do not change themselves to suit us. If we wish to do battle successfully, we must do so with a clear understanding of what the battlefield conditions are, not what we would like them to be. (See Sun Tzu's Art Of War

The world of academia is a closed environment that gives a very skewed view of the world that most people will not be living in. 98% of graduates will work in the private sector or government, not academia. Let's take an example. Our (US) tax code is pretty universally disliked. There are many alternatives that have been proposed. Some people like the idea of a flat tax. A flat tax could save some people lots and lots of money. Let's say we are a university and we universally agree that a flat tax is better than the prevailing tax code. Do we do our students a disservice if we teach them only about the flat tax system we agree is more logical and beneficial than the current tax system? Even though the flat tax makes more sense and would save money, the students wouldn't be too happy the first year they have to file their income taxes! They would feel like we should have shown them how the real (ie mainstream) world works.

A better approach would be to find areas where you can get the IT people to agree that open source is a viable alternative. The criteria, obviously, need to be the counter of the reasons they gave. In other words, where can open source be plugged in without costing too much to implement, being hard to support or giving students a false impression of what they will see after graduation? Suddenly we're back in the "Linux on the server" arena. If the university is using bunches of Windows boxes as servers, they could greatly reduce their support and licensing bill with Microsoft by switching to open source.

However, don't expect to suddenly convert every server and save money. If the university is, for instance, using Microsoft Exchange as its primary mail service, it would be quite expensive to try to change. Even more so would be the hodge-podge of custom apps every organization public or private has accumulated over the years. Does Public Safety have an NT-only system for tracking fines and tickets? Good luck replacing that. The moment you say you are going to replace a custom app, blink your eyes, show little dollar signs in those peepers and say "Ka-Ching" because somebody's going to spend a bunch of money whether they buy or build the new system.

That's my essay for the day. Flame me if you will, but I'd rather see a well reasoned rebuttal... For anyone who would rather flame me, then Nyah Nyah Nyah, your mama is one too.

Todd

1. the brain runs at a MAXIMUM of 2,000 Hz in any given part of it. (A neuron cannot fire more frequently).
   
2. There are 20,000,000,000 (twenty u.s. billion) Neurons in the adult brain. (With an upper bounds of 50 ubillion in some estimates.).
   
3. Each neuron is connected to 2,000-5,000 other neurons.
   
4. The greatest frequency with which an individual neuron can fire is 250-2000 hertz. (Estimates vary).
   

Virginia and Maryland passed the UCITA
laws, part of which is supposed to validate shrinkwrap EULAs.