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Story made me think of this old manifesto http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/manifesto.html

Hmm... isn't being a IT/Geek/Nerd pretty much Darwin Award material as itself?

Not since the 90s my friend ;}

As geek/nerd is not passed down genetically, the trait has nothing to fear from Darwin.
The funny thing about this trait is that it can pop up in anyone, even when neither of the parents share that trait. In fact in my experience all but one of my geek friends absolutely do not have geek parents. A fairly common random mutation.

If we were all rounded up and destroyed, geeks would reappear. After all, you may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all.

Let Darwin put that in his pipe and smoke it :o~

I would imagine their reasoning relates directly into bad parenting, human beings are social creatures and these kids have probably spent A LOT of their lives on the computer to get good enough to break into enterprise systems at a young age. I seriously remember getting this from several people in college a few years ago...
http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/manifesto.html . I seriously think some hacker's morals are strongly affected by this, and its basically a one may fall many will rise kind of deal.

I don't know if new generation would be a good way to put it, more like FOBs to the scene. I really hope they at least used Linux if only for the tighter granular control, though reading the hidemyass.com story here a day or so ago, makes me wonder, and thus my conclusion: script kiddie.

I'll also be straight forward here: Kevin Mitnik (overconfident ahole) and a few others were the ONLY professional hackers really caught for anything. They nail people for identity theft and stuff all the time, but do you hear the names of the people who hacked the credit card companies coming up? No, google brings up nil.

Lastly, to below post: C developers make fun of .NET developers all the time cause of the low level closer to the processor commands approach. Assembly coders (too nerdy to meet in r/l?) probably look down on C developers for using one of them compiler thingies. There is a concrete definition though: a script kiddie is somebody who runs hacking tools w/o the proper knowledge of them. So using ettercap without knowing what it actually does will intercept passwords for you if you follow the how to, but the dumb hacker goes in from their place of residence, gets their IP logged, and we don't hear from them for a decade out of DOC.

A big criticism of Julian Assange is his constant courting of the media

Seasoned intelligence analysts have warned that Assange may be arrested or "disappeared" due to the leaked information. His best defence against this is to be very visible. Courting the media also helps to further the mission of Wikileaks and Assange's aims of "just reform". Why, exactly, is talking to the press a problem, when your aim is to leak information and get the attention of said press?

Be cautious of stories that try to smear Assange, for they may well not be true. The Guardian said: "Since the release of the Apache helicopter video, there has been some evidence of low-level attempts to smear Wikileaks. Online stories accuse Assange of spending Wikileaks money on expensive hotels (at a follow-up meeting in Stockholm, he slept on an office floor); of selling data to mainstream media (the subject of money was never mentioned); or charging for media interviews (also never mentioned)."

his past, which is hardly whiter than white given all the suspected hacking he has done... Assange isn't angel or particularly 'moral'

Having once been a hacker does not make one immoral. I'm reminded of this quote: "We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals."

The only thing which seperates him from older, more seasoned leaking website owners is that he is talented at courting PR and media

Except that Wikileaks was famous before Assange became famous, or to say it another way - Assange is famous because of Wikileaks; Wikileaks is not famous because of Assange. At the end of the day, Wikileaks can only leak material that is in turn leaked to them. If the only thing that they offered were better PR, why did initial leakers choose to leak via Wikileaks, rather than some other web site? And if they do indeed offer better PR, and you believe some information you have is so important to the public that it should be leaked, then surely good PR is exactly what you want?

It's been a few generations since the plastic was clear and painted, it's been solid white plastic for a couple years now.

Now you have to paint them because there are so many around, it's hard to find the right one.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

It holds today just as it did 20 years ago.

OK kids.
Let's all get together and sit in a circle and read aloud together.
I would like Arzach to click on the following link and read aloud the first bullet point to the class: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/appendixc.htm l/

I would someone else to read the definition of the term "Hacker" click on the following link and read aloud:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html /
(I can't hear you.)

Now let's discover the term called "Cracker". Can I get a volunteer to read this one aloud?
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/cracker.htm l/

Now let's investigate as to why we Slashdotters believe that this sentence may be too harsh...lets see, this may provide some insight:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker-ethi c.html/

For your homework assignment please read the following:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php/
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/introduction. html/
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/distinctions. html/
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style .html/

Must read before posting on Slashdot
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/email-style.h tml/

Background info
http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/manifesto.html/

So sayeth a guy with his own website.

Blogs are no different from what you have up ("I like shakespeare, I'm a geek, here's stull I think is funny..."). The ONLY difference is that bloggers use software.

Basically, if you have a webpage with info about you, you can't say squat about weblogs.

Software architectures already exist which could be used. COSM is a free example, though I suspect the licensing may rule that out in a commercial environment. More stuff here: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Computer _Science/Distributed_Computing/Platforms/

Golem@Home is my favorite. Use spare cycles to design/evolve new robotic 'lifeforms'.

Entropia has several science and medical oriented research projects underway.

Popular Power is working on new influenza vaccines.

Folderol is doing Human Genome stuff.

There are dozens of others out there, but if nothing turns you on, the folks at the Cosm Project have an open source platform for building your own distributed computing project.

"Network functions" is just one group of functions among 17 other groups like memory, UI, CPU etc...
"distributed computing", "peer-to-peer", "file-sharing", and "cycle-sharing"? Here is a whole list of functions to easily build any of those types of applications in a weekend :
v3NetOpen v3NetSend v3NetRecv v3NetSendUDP v3NetRecvUDP v3NetListen v3NetAccept v3NetClose v3NetDNS v3NetRevDNS v3NetMyIP v3NetACLAdd v3NetACLDelete v3NetACLTest v3NetACLFree
What is buzzword-compliant around here?

Adam Beberg of distributed.net fame has been working hard on a distributed, encrypted system named Cosm.

Check it out here:

http://cosm.mithral.com/

If you want to start your own project right now, today, go get the Mithral CS-SDK. It was pre-released a few days ago, and came out of the Cosm project.

It will let you put together a d.net/SETI style project in a few days (I would know). Finding something worth doing is up to you :)

I heartily agree... glibc is an evil creation; libc isn't supposed to be portable.

What you need is an abstraction layer to allow the same set of code (read: your code) to be compiled without alteration or other system dependance on various platforms -- this means more than ten versions of Linux/FreeBSD. The Cosm CPU/OS layer is designed to do just that. With a Cosm library for a given platform, your code will compile without modification.

Cosm is still in development (slow, but what do you want for free.) The Cosm API source is available via http, ftp, and CVS. Most of the functionality one would need is there. We would welcome your input and feedback.

I heartily agree... glibc is an evil creation; libc isn't supposed to be portable.

What you need is an abstraction layer to allow the same set of code (read: your code) to be compiled without alteration or other system dependance on various platforms -- this means more than ten versions of Linux/FreeBSD. The Cosm CPU/OS layer is designed to do just that. With a Cosm library for a given platform, your code will compile without modification.

Cosm is still in development (slow, but what do you want for free.) The Cosm API source is available via http, ftp, and CVS. Most of the functionality one would need is there. We would welcome your input and feedback.

I heartily agree... glibc is an evil creation; libc isn't supposed to be portable.

What you need is an abstraction layer to allow the same set of code (read: your code) to be compiled without alteration or other system dependance on various platforms -- this means more than ten versions of Linux/FreeBSD. The Cosm CPU/OS layer is designed to do just that. With a Cosm library for a given platform, your code will compile without modification.

Cosm is still in development (slow, but what do you want for free.) The Cosm API source is available via http, ftp, and CVS. Most of the functionality one would need is there. We would welcome your input and feedback.

I heartily agree... glibc is an evil creation; libc isn't supposed to be portable.

What you need is an abstraction layer to allow the same set of code (read: your code) to be compiled without alteration or other system dependance on various platforms -- this means more than ten versions of Linux/FreeBSD. The Cosm CPU/OS layer is designed to do just that. With a Cosm library for a given platform, your code will compile without modification.

Cosm is still in development (slow, but what do you want for free.) The Cosm API source is available via http, ftp, and CVS. Most of the functionality one would need is there. We would welcome your input and feedback.

I heartily agree... glibc is an evil creation; libc isn't supposed to be portable.

What you need is an abstraction layer to allow the same set of code (read: your code) to be compiled without alteration or other system dependance on various platforms -- this means more than ten versions of Linux/FreeBSD. The Cosm CPU/OS layer is designed to do just that. With a Cosm library for a given platform, your code will compile without modification.

Cosm is still in development (slow, but what do you want for free.) The Cosm API source is available via http, ftp, and CVS. Most of the functionality one would need is there. We would welcome your input and feedback.

I heartily agree... glibc is an evil creation; libc isn't supposed to be portable.

What you need is an abstraction layer to allow the same set of code (read: your code) to be compiled without alteration or other system dependance on various platforms -- this means more than ten versions of Linux/FreeBSD. The Cosm CPU/OS layer is designed to do just that. With a Cosm library for a given platform, your code will compile without modification.

Cosm is still in development (slow, but what do you want for free.) The Cosm API source is available via http, ftp, and CVS. Most of the functionality one would need is there. We would welcome your input and feedback.

I heartily agree... glibc is an evil creation; libc isn't supposed to be portable.

What you need is an abstraction layer to allow the same set of code (read: your code) to be compiled without alteration or other system dependance on various platforms -- this means more than ten versions of Linux/FreeBSD. The Cosm CPU/OS layer is designed to do just that. With a Cosm library for a given platform, your code will compile without modification.

Cosm is still in development (slow, but what do you want for free.) The Cosm API source is available via http, ftp, and CVS. Most of the functionality one would need is there. We would welcome your input and feedback.

In the meanwhile COSM hasn't released anything but bloated headerfiles with only comments, no code.

And you are going to release something you call a client-server developerkit because COSM isn't coming in the near future at all.

And even on your website (here), you admit that there are weeks that you do NOTHING.

We'll see when (if?) you release that precious Cosm and have it bugfree from the beginning.

You should be glad that the guys over at distributed.net found this bug within 1 week of the OGR start.

Now d.net is continuing to develop their clients that support more and more projects in a more modular way and "they" want off implement the beautiful Cosm, starting from scratch.

A) I also agree that slashdot is a great place for things that aren't news, but about discussing things that could exist or would be a good thing to exist.

B) I also agree that there needs to be some sort of idle-cycle eater.

Hence: cosm

Check out where the project is headed. They have a mostly done CPU/OS abstraction layer, and a utility layer is just coming into the works.

It is going to sport a neat OpenGL interface and should completely blow away anything else near it. Just think distributed.net with the flexibility to say that you want to be looking at the stars today, instead of rendering some feature film, or helping out with genetic stuff, or perhaps even a little crypto breaking. Or, make your own project, have it do all the fun stuff.

But the CPU/OS layer can work for anything. When the gui is done it could be used for many more projects than just cosm...

And now the good news: This project exists and is in the works. It is real and called goes by the name of "Cosm". Check it out.

They don't have a client yet, but there is a CVS server with code that is being developed as you read this.

It really worries me that this gets a score of interesting, when it bears no relation to the reality of the story.

The post on slashdot says 3 windows a day, the
article says 3, 30 minute windows per day. That means they require to process the data in roughly
7 and a half hours, even without assuming time to formulate a useful signal.

18 hours a day processing time means they miss 2 potential windows. If an infrastructure was in place that would allow distributed clients to be quickly assembled and spread this could be potentially useful. I doubt that this can be done in this case. This does not preclude it being useful in the future.

There is already effort by ex distributed.net people to put such an infrastructure in place.

Check out cosm for such a project.

Distributed computing has been around for 30 years now, and all these problems have been solved, you just have to know where to look and how to apply them. Most of them aren't easy to use in a client-server environment like d.net/SETI/ECDL, and so the solutions are of limited use.

These solutions have been brought to the attention of distributed.net and others, but they find the solutions unacceptable, so continue to use other methods, which is their choice to make. I chose to move on instead.

There is such a project called Cosm already well underway to create a system like you describe.

As for determining "worthy", that is a choice for the user to make, and noone else.

What your talking about is already being done.

http://cosm.mithral.com

COSM is what distributed.net was meant to be. Adam (Distributed.net founder!) left D.net so his work on cosm would continue unhindered.

If your a programmer, go help them out. At least check out their webpage for more detailed information.

d.net was going to make v3 this beautiful general distributed computing client but they decided they could not wait for cosmo to be completed. See another comment I made.

Adam Beberg was one of the founders of distributed.net. While their first contests were all encryption related Adam really wanted to pursue general distributed computing problems. v3 of the D.net client was supposed to have a plugin type model which would allow people to run one client and pick the problems, be it encryption, primes, ogr or even seti. It seems that the timing was off because Adam decided to leave d.net to work on cosmo, the client that would have been v3.
Why can't everyone stop fighting over which project to support and show enthusiasm for cosmo. Once it has large install base much more work could be completed. Each new problem would not require a whole new client. People could easily work on SETI when they have unchecked data and look for large primes, or fit circles into boxes the rest of the time. Currently each of these projects require a seperate download and process fighting for my spare cycles.

Adam Beberg was one of the founders of distributed.net. While their first contests were all encryption related Adam really wanted to pursue general distributed computing problems. v3 of the D.net client was supposed to have a plugin type model which would allow people to run one client and pick the problems, be it encryption, primes, ogr or even seti. It seems that the timing was off because Adam decided to leave d.net to work on cosmo, the client that would have been v3.
Why can't everyone stop fighting over which project to support and show enthusiasm for cosmo. Once it has wide spread use much more work could be completed. Each new problem would not require a whole new client. People could easily work on SETI when they have unchecked data and look for large primes, or fit circles into boxes the rest of the time. Currentlt each project requires a seperate download.

Oh please. DNET is a dying cow for various reasons. Their biggest problem is their lack of speed in getting anything done. They had a CSC core long before they deployed it. They've been working on OGR for two years (I was the first person to work on it.) They've had very simple solutions to prevent "cheating" for years yet they've done nothing. It's taken how long to get updated clients and some still haven't been updated? They want their name plastered all over everything but they fail to give credit to those who have contributed to their work. I did some work to retool the stats processing, but I guess it made nugget look too bad as no one ever looked at it -- a full days run can be done in less than 15 minutes and not require gigs of "temp" space; in fact, sans ranking, it could be near real-time. And to make matters worse, they "secretly" harrass their founder and former president for several months over a domain name they never used and never will. I bet you didn't know DCTI filed three suits against Adam L. Beberg, Mithral Communications and Design, Inc., and "those in concert therewith" a few weeks ago -- right before Christmas.

Bovine's explaination of netrek only shows his lack of understand of how "blessed binaries" work(ed). There is no "date" in the key itself. Expiration is completely artificially added by the key service agent along with other bits of data -- it was not to prevent people from recovering the secret key but more to push people to upgrade their client(s). Netrek uses (used) 128bit RSA numbers ("secret key", "private key", and "public key"). In the modern world, factoring a 128bit RSA number is not difficult. Recovering the secret key embeded in the client is _NOT_ easy. Unlike Xing, the key is not in one place; it's randomly scattered throughout a very large static binary. (The key is generated and destroyed by the build.) In ten years of working with netrek, I've never known of anyone to recover the key from the client. I have personally regenerated the secret key by factoring the public data, but that was (at the time) a very non-trivial task.

I must admit, I'm starting to truely dislike DCTI and their current attitude. The CSC clients are duplicating work. They don't tell anyone this until it's obvious -- over 100% of the blocks have been checked in. They continue to have trouble with stats -- two years and counting now.

Shoot. Cosm is at http://cosm.mithral.com/. I thought I checked that link.

Check out cosm, a open project for distributed computing. It is implementing much of what you are looking for.

Doesn't this sound exactly like Cosm?

You have to check out Adam Beberg's Cosm.
It was going to be distributed.net's v3 client until "Cosm" split from dn in April. I still don't have a clue why that happened but would love to see Adam's project succeed and replace S@H, d.n, etc.

but if you're using a wide-area distributed computing network, it could make a *lot* of sense

What about WAN CPU process communication? Lets say I have 50 processers of equal strength on the net working collabratively that were dynamically grouped to do something for a few hours then deallocated for another project. Those hosts all agreed to be on a project of this type and so on and so forth. When is DCTI going to get away from "Hey, its the contest money" and "Hey, this global climate change stuff is neato! Lets let *the people who want to code it* code it and *actually get to use the network and cpu code thats allready done*. It's being done, without DCTI -- and without "day-to-day operations".

It is called Cosm

DeepCrack can process DES information in a few days, but they spent months designing it to be fast. It takes a matter of seconds to transfer a block and then hours to process them. The hour long process is the one I'd work on optimizing.

Yes, DCTI is "slow", but no one is getting paid to do anything, so unless you've donated something, I'd say everyone is getting what they paid for *grin*

OGR? I'm the one who did the very first work on OGR -- taking garsp32(?) and breaking it down into something that could be stoped and restarted. OGR doesn't have any discrete "blocks", so it's taken a long time (over a year) to get it working. Granted, this is no small task, but how much grief did people give Duncan over "v3"? People don't care about how complicated things are; they just want results. ("v3" became Cosm and is coming along nicely.)

"normal day-to-day operational work"? Would you outline some of this work? Maybe things have changed dramatically in the past 8 months, but I don't remember any consuming "operational work." I hosted a full proxy -- hell, it was the keymaster for a week or two -- and it took very little overhead from me or dbaker. The ever present stats problems are the only thing that I would say qualifies, but only a handful of people manage(d) stats -- and nugget ignored the work I did on speeding up stats. The most consuming "work" was babeling in #dcti :-)

Note: I'm not bitter. Despite all of my contributions to the effort (beyond cracking keys), the only mention of my existance is in the ledger as having donated a motherboard and two NICs -- one NIC burned out and DCTI never used the brand-new motherboard (that I know of.)

See also: Cosm

The Cosm source code is available via anonymous CVS -- every single line of it. I'd have NextStep 3.3 buildable if I had hardware old enough to run it :-) (All my x86 hardware is too new to be supported. And my friend's NeXT's hard drive burned up.) It's installed on a Sparc5 (w/16M or RAM mind you) in the office next to mine but I'm out of network connections :-(.

You're welcome to assist with code development, porting, or just watching us go...

See also: Cosm

The Cosm source code is available via anonymous CVS -- every single line of it. I'd have NextStep 3.3 buildable if I had hardware old enough to run it :-) (All my x86 hardware is too new to be supported. And my friend's NeXT's hard drive burned up.) It's installed on a Sparc5 (w/16M or RAM mind you) in the office next to mine but I'm out of network connections :-(.

You're welcome to assist with code development, porting, or just watching us go...

See also: Cosm

The Cosm source code is available via anonymous CVS -- every single line of it. I'd have NextStep 3.3 buildable if I had hardware old enough to run it :-) (All my x86 hardware is too new to be supported. And my friend's NeXT's hard drive burned up.) It's installed on a Sparc5 (w/16M or RAM mind you) in the office next to mine but I'm out of network connections :-(.

You're welcome to assist with code development, porting, or just watching us go...

See also: Cosm

The Cosm source code is available via anonymous CVS -- every single line of it. I'd have NextStep 3.3 buildable if I had hardware old enough to run it :-) (All my x86 hardware is too new to be supported. And my friend's NeXT's hard drive burned up.) It's installed on a Sparc5 (w/16M or RAM mind you) in the office next to mine but I'm out of network connections :-(.

You're welcome to assist with code development, porting, or just watching us go...

See also: Cosm

The Cosm source code is available via anonymous CVS -- every single line of it. I'd have NextStep 3.3 buildable if I had hardware old enough to run it :-) (All my x86 hardware is too new to be supported. And my friend's NeXT's hard drive burned up.) It's installed on a Sparc5 (w/16M or RAM mind you) in the office next to mine but I'm out of network connections :-(.

You're welcome to assist with code development, porting, or just watching us go...

Yes, it would be much better to work on a unified system. Unfortunately, organic life as we know it (especially male life) does not work that way.

Things are driven by conflict and competition. You can bet had dcypher not appeared, distributed.net wouldn't have beta CSC clients out. Nor would we be able to nuke the planet 200 times over without the Cold War - we'd still be stuck wiping out one species at a time the old fashioned way.

The idea of Cosm is to unify all Distributed Computing efforts into a common framework. ["common" doesn't really apply to client/server systems] Computers work together wonderfully, but humans have alot of trouble doing that.

There is a project that provides this generic framework that you're trying to describe, it's called Cosm.

The Netscape Portable Runtime offers non-GUI cross platform operating system facilities. It offers threads, I/O, memory management, networking, and shared library linking. Here are the docs at mozilla.org. It's been used in Netscape browsers and other enterprise products from the beginning, so it's well tested too. It's written in C.

There is also Cosm, which is a set of protocols for distributed things like cracking DES and sifting SETI data. Probably a little too focused for your needs, but it looks cool, so I'd plug it ;-)

Cosm.

Cosm is distributed.net ex-president Adam Beberg's current project. It's a distributed computing architecture which is sort of a generalization of the distributed.net software. This is the project formerly known as distributed.net "v3", for those of you who remember it.

It's being designed to work with a keyserver/proxy/client model, like the existing d.net structure but somewhat more flexible. Anyone will be able to set up their own network for private projects. Clients will be driven by drop-in "cores" that contain the actual processing code for specific projects. There are also features planned not currently in d.net, like a distributed filesystem and built-in security through cryptographic signatures.

The project is in design/early implementation stages currently. It's being developed under a quasi-open source license (it wouldn't meet the Open Source definition, because it's restricts modification too much). The CVS tree is open to anonymous access.

Somebody out there (I know, I've forgotten who. . .) was putting together a generalized framework for distirbuted computing applications.

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Not at all, alive and well, but it's called Cosm now.

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