Slashdot Mirror

is here.

http://channel.nytimes.com/2001/04/10/health/10STE M.html
Often replacing the www with channel will bypass the login requirement at the NYTimes.

... is Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, one of the mainstream journalists who "gets" the big picture of the internet and always has. Read his column today for a more balanced view of the motivations behind the current standoff.

I believe the first 200 miles is the EEZ is it not? The Exclusive Economic Zone, where the country has economic rights to oil, fish, etc.

The Russians have done very close fly-bys of Alaska and there were some articles at NYTimes online. Here is a link to the "summary" as the article is Archived.

obligatory no login link

http://channel.nytimes.com/2001/04/08/technology/0 8SPEC.html?pagewanted=all

Let's just hope that this here will not eat up their future profits. I want RH to succeed.

They still haven't figured out a way to close their no-registration backdoor.

By Pass Free Reg Required:

http://channel.nytimes.com/2001/04/03/business/03F LAW.html

As some of you may be aware, in Hollywood there is an impending strike between screenwriters, represented by the Writers Guild of America, west (WGAw) and the film companies, represented by the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP) curiously made up of the same companies you'll find in such organizations as the MPAA.

One of the issues the writers are disputing with the megacorporations is over the Internet. Let me quote the WGA's report on the negotiations:

The AMPTP... have also proposed that for the reuse of motion pictures and television programming on the Internet they would pay nothing for any product produced before May of 2001. They expect to get them for free.

That's right. The film companies want sell movies on the Internet. They want to profit from it. But they're intending to compensate the writers of the movie....NOTHING. Sound familiar?

http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/03/27/science/27QU AN.html

http://channel.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/world/25CLON .html if you didn't know already ;-)

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http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/weekinreview/25J OHN.html?pagewanted=all

there you go

For a great short piece on this issue as it applies to Amazon, see this NYT article.

You can tell that "cult in control" in a religion is in full effect when;

1) They want to hide from you unfavorable opinions - from todays Salt Lake Tribune;

Somebody Blinked
CNN has pulled from its Web site a story alleging Utah is a difficult place to live because of the influence of the LDS Church. It was pulled after a stinging response sent by Bruce Olsen, managing director of the church's Public Affairs Department. He wrote: "Not only have you insulted the 11 million members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but you have done harm to the economic development of Salt Lake City with your misleading report."
Olsen forwarded his response to the Anti-Defamation League, the National Conference for Community and Justice, the Columbia Journalism Review and the Utah Division of Business and Economic Development.

2) Or stop you from learning how to leave their cult (NY times article);

http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/12/cyber/cy berlaw/10law.html

Compared to CNN, the guys at Slashdot are true warriors.

I stumbled across this article (reg. req.) in NYT today about Kyocera "Putting Palm and Phone in One Hand". Looks like someday soon we'll have only one gadget in our pocket...

Article at the times.

The main points are:

• It is only applied on 40% consumables creating an economic distortion.
• That it is a "double" tax, since most sales tax is paid by businesses and they pass that extra cost onto consumers through higher prices.
• The remote/local problem is bad for states. (Amazon has a huge warehouse in Nevada just over the CA border because they don't want a presence in CA.)

The article is interesting, but I don't think congress will give it a second thought.

By sheer coincidence, William Safire has a column on the invasion of privacy through relentless monitoring in the NYT.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/opinion/12SAFI.h tml

The reason Taiwan has such a small pipe is because all Net connections go through a government data center for security reasons - a justifiable degree of paranoia considering that mainland China is anxious to invade, execute the current government leaders, and harvest their organs for transplants.

Try http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/science/08SU PE.html. (Replace the `www' with `archive'. `Partners' doesn't work any more.)

www10.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/science/08SUPE.html (just has a '10' in there)

http://channel.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/science/08SU PE.html

now of course, Lucent has a website, with the press release here. The page with photos of the team can be found here on the bell labs site.

As Usual, the story was first reported in NATURE (NOTE - free registration gives some access, paid registration gives more)

The difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is that the freedom fighter fights against military and political targets while a terrorist attacks innocents. When someone blows up people standing in a crosswalk it's terrorism. Not that I'm excusing the fundamentally racist government that is in place in Isael, not am I condoning the generally poor way in which the Arabs are treated by the Jews in that region. There are two sides to every story, but they can both be in the wrong.
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Article without registration.

Isn't that a similar story to how the Pentium 4 is Slower Than Its Predecessor?

Gee - this upgrade every year thing just doesn't seem to be working out for these monopolistic companies...

On Sunday, the New York Times had a far less complimentary review here.

Ita a bit tooo wordy for me, personally.

Ita a bit tooo wordy for me, personally.

Is here Sorry

In general, it's a good idea to test you links before posting, and it can be done via the preview page. I thought this would be obvious...

In case someone missed my other post, the correct link is here.

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here
Or you could use the classic slashdot2000/slashdot2000 username/password pair
On an OT note, how long do you think it will be before NYT catch on to this and eliminate it?

here.

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As this story will show, it appears that forwarding securities related spams to the SEC is very effective.

As it says "The S.E.C., announcing its fifth nationwide Internet fraud sweep, said the people accused used so-called spam e-mail messages, electronic newsletters, Web sites, hyperlinks, message boards and other Internet media in cases involving both publicly traded securities and privately held companies."

You use your methods and I'll sic the feds on them.

> From what I've heard, MSIE on Macintosh is the
> most standard-compliant browser out there, which
> is not easy to do. It looks like Microsoft is
> innovative, that deep pockets can make valuable
> software.

Do you want another example? Microsoft Outlook Express is one of the best email applications for the Macintosh. And the latest versions of Office for the Mac have been some of the best. But the thing that all of these have in common are they were developed after the DOJ started looking into Microsoft's monopolist behaviors.

The point is, if the DOJ hadn't begun investigating Microsoft, these products never would have seen the light of day. I remember Word 6 for the Mac, and you can't imagine how terrible it was. It was buggy, bloated, and incredibly slow. Microsoft actually crippled the product to the point that if you ran Word 6 for the Mac and then ran Word 6 for Windows on the same Mac with a Windows-emulator (like Soft Windows or Virtual PC), it was faster in the emulator. The other MS apps were no better for the Mac during the time. Consider that Gates threatened to kill Office for the Mac if Apple didn't bundle IE with the new Macs.

I can see it now. The day MS prevails in court, expect to see a gloating press release about it. At the bottom, in small letters, they'll mention that they're dropping Mac versions of Explorer, Outlook Express, Office, and everything else for the Mac because of a "poor sales." If you think the annual fee for Windows was innovative, you'll probably love what comes after that.

... here.

There is another obit (a little longer) that is in the NYTimes (<p>I am really sorry that I never go to meet him, he is certainly one my heros. His picture and Richard Feynman's are above my desk. I hope he makes it onto a postage stamp some day. I don't think a lot of CS people realize that without Shannon, they wouldn't know about Boolean algebra (well this is a bit of an exageration), but he was the first one to really make the link between boolean algebra and it's use in circuits and then computers. He was actually in the MIT electrical engineering department, I believe. Even though he was really a mathematician.</p>

The New York Times Obit can be found here. Of course this will expire way to quickly because the NYT is only the newspaper of record for the current week.

... The NY Times gives his birthdate as April 30, 1916. That'd only make him 84. Not that this is really all that important.

1. Always select "printable" to ease readability

2. Always select "single-page format" to reduce necessary clicks (and artificial pageviews)

I already pay for newspapers. I already pay for magazines. If someone can get me better information in a better package than what I can currently get on the Internet, then why not?

Look, I know full well I can go to, say NY Times (free registration required) and get a pretty good read that way. But what if I'm looking for something that's a bit more insightful? Let's face it. Alot of the web sites out there right now are nothing more than, say, a fancy newsletter. Sure, they get updated everyday, but there aren't really alot of Pulitzer prize winners writing for Ars Technica for instance.

What if there were a service that paid the authors a small amount, and you were able to customize which authors you received. So each morning, your favorite writers would show up, bring you the news and their opinions (since anyone can give you the news for free), and you'd pick which articles you liked, and the site would continually customize itself for you. Now THAT would be worth something!

Bad news though: according to today's Times you'll see more of these .. an advertising trade group is standardizing on them.

This is the sort of story that should be turned into a mass mailing to your local and national news outlets.

Here's a few addresses:

letters@nytimes.com

letters@sjmercury.com

dmnweb.dallasnews.com/letters

AP Bureaus by State

(I get a kick out of their triple-bank rolodex logo. Someone needs to add one of those to Aqua.)

--Blair

There is even an obligatory quote from a BMG exec about not being able to pin down what the problem is.

The always reliable Arts and Letters Daily links to an interview with de Soto, a review and extract in the NYT and reviews here and here.

I haven't tried this before, but here goes, link.

Donation dollars at work?

Time to send more $ to the EFF, that's for sure.

Here's the link

Ted Bardusch writes "Since the news that the human genome only contains 30000 genes or so (speculation had been like 142000), the model of one gene, one protein seems to be broken. As the NY times put it in the op-ed pice by Gould http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/opinion/19GOUL.h tml the model is now going to have to be far more complex. And the more complex it gets, the harder it is to see how a "simple" change can produce a series of mutations that leads to macro-evolution working. Like the irreducible complexity argument that Behe uses, this provides further fuel to the need to revisit the validity of Darwin. After all, Darwin himself stated that his theory would be invalid if there were complexity found at the cellular level. This shows there is huge complexity at an even deeper level. "

There are several assumptions in what I garner from Rabin's press release(s). And, as we all know, it is often the assumptions that are the holes in any plan. I'm not going to target the "secret forever" problem - i.e. a message is discovered in a house and it's encrypted with Rabin's code, but rather the real-time problem: The encrypted message is being intercepted via a man-in-the-middle attack. I target this because the only real use of this cryptographic scheme is real-time traffic; otherwise no one can ever translate the message (might as well just write over your message with the random stream) because they won't have access to a random stream from some time past. And if they DID, well, that would mean someone is storing the stream - expressly against the design of the algorithm and destroying it's one strength.

As a few others have pointed out (adamwood, KFury, etc), the start code is probably the weakest link...
Rabin Assumption 1: The start code cannot be cracked fast enough to locate the start of the random sequence.
Refutation 1A: The start code will need to be trivial enough that unequal computers can decypher it and start on time, thus a computer several magnitudes larger than either of these machines can likely decypher the key in an equal amount of time.
Refutation 1B: The start code would need to identify an "up-and-coming" sequence in the random stream. Therefore, either the stream needs to be partitioned (so much for a random start point), the start needs to be a frequently repeating random point (the next "A" in the stream), or the algorithm must be willing to wait for a less frequent random set (the next "ZZZ" in the stream) which would open it up to the problem from 1A.

Rabin Assumption 2: The random stream exists only in a single, linear time.
Refutation 2: Sorry if that sounded a bit trekky, but what if I set up a "reasonably" large computer that echoed the random stream with a 5 minute delay? And what if you did the same, but echoed my stream with a 5 minute delay? We could even do instantaneous echoes and use the slowdown rate of the internet to act as the time delay. I doubt this could go on infinitely, but it is entirely plausible that the net could act as a half hour repeater for all available random streams. This again opens up the problem from 1A. Refutation 2-corollary: If the streams are being slowly repeated, once the start code is decrypted by the rogue computer, it could pick up an ongoing conversation at the current point, even if it can't translate all of the previous-content.

Rabin Assumption 3: The key disappears instantly.
Refutation 3: No key disappears instantly. If a calculation was run on the start code, then there is a chance to target the code and clue in to the start sequence. Is it possible either of the communication machines can instantaneously translate the stream? Either part of the stream must remain temporarily in memory while the complete key is being gathered or the machine must be decrypting piece-by-piece. In either case, it would be possible to read some of the middle of the random stream, determine where it came from (see refutation 2) and then a bit of brute forcing could determine the start and stop of that key. Finally, the random stream (and it's location) could be determined by monitoring the source of incoming packets to the communicating computers; activity fingerprints (how quick the machine handles other requests, etc) could determine when the processing started and thus where the start sequence may have been.

Rabin Assumption 4: There is order in chaos.
Refutation 4 (not-so-sound): The only order in the disordered, random stream is that it is consistently random. As a result, it may be very difficult to carry out the high levels of math that current algorithms use; thus the computations would need to be trivial. Since (as described in my intro) the purpose of this crypt is real-time messages, it is likely it would be used for a streaming communication. Thus, a brute force attack using small random elements against small pieces of the message, piped through the simple algorithm, may well be a plausible decryption technique.

debunk away...

Si Druid
response to: The Key Vanishes: Scientist [Michael Rabin] Outlines Unbreakable Code
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/20/science/20CODE.h tml

Article without registration.