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there are other examples of this type of QTVR c.f.

http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/oxfordtour/transitofvenus /node2a.html

The climates models are computed using the BOINC platform (distributed computing in your PC, similar to SETI, etc.).

Please, help the project donating your idle CPU cycles, go to: the homesite of the project and download the client.

The client (BOINC) supports Linux, Windows, MAC OS, etc.

Well, here at Oxford, if we want to use this stuff we have to go by the MSDS, given here. It states: Safety (MSDS) data for N,N-diethyl-N-toluamide "Toxicology Toxic if swallowed, inhaled or absorbed through the skin. May cause systemic effects. Experimental reproductive effects. Mutagenic data. May cause CNS disturbances. Toxicity data SKN-HMN TDLO 35 mg kg-1 ORL-WMN LDLO 950 mg kg-1 ORL-MAN LDLO 679 mg kg-1 ORL-RAT LD50 1950 mg kg-1 SKN-RBT LD50 3180 mg kg-1" Furthermore "Personal protection: Safety glasses, gloves, adequate ventilation."
So, the "...are believed by some" tag is entirely valid...

Greets!

So, first things first - I met Ted at The ACM Hypertext conference in Aarhuus in 2001. He gave a keynote and a workshop on ZigZag - which at once seemed totally obvious and very powerful. I played with the ideas for a bit, showed some things to him whilst he was a visting professor at Southampton and have worked with him here at the University of Nottingham before he went off to his current job, at The Oxford Internet Institutehttp://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/. It is a priviledge and an honour to be able to call Ted my friend - he has an incredible mind, a huge vision, and yes, he can code!

I've been working on using ZigZag to represent the deep interrelationships inherent in biological information. We've also been working on ZigZag as a phone/PIM interface and analysing the underlying structures. If you're interested in finding out more, read our published work:

Moore, A.; Goulding, J.O.; Brailsford, T.J.; & Ashman, H. (2004). Practical Applitudes: case studies of applications of the ZigZag hypermedia system. Proceedings of Fifteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, August 9-13, 2004, Santa Cruz, CA, USA pp 143-152 (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1012807.1012851)

Moore, A.; Nelson, T.; Brailsford, T.J.; & Ashman, H. (2004). ZigZag for Bioinformatics. Poster Proceedings of ISMB/ECCB 2004, July 31-August 4, 2004, Glasgow, UK (http://www.iscb.org/ismb2004/posters/axmATcs.nott .ac.uk_923.html)

Moore, A.; & Brailsford, T.J. (2004). Unified Hyperstructures for Bioinformatics: Escaping the Application Prison. Journal of Digital Information: Special Issue on Future Visions of Common-Use Hypertext. Vol.5, Issue 1. Article No. 254, 2004-05-27 (http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Moor e/)

Ted has also published a long paper on the fundamentals of ZigZag:

A Cosmology for a Different Computer Universe: Data Model, Mechanisms, Virtual Machine and Visualization Infrastructure
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i01/Nelso n/

Finally, come visit our website (link in my profile), look around, ask questions - we're always interested in new ideas!

Adam Moore, Postdoc Researcher, ZigZag for Bioinformatics

Wouldn't "dark fibre" be powered by dark suckers instead of light sources? Hence the term "dark fibre"?

Something pretty similar has already been done here. They have an impressive online demo to play with.
It's called Visual Google - You give it a picture, and it returns all the frames in a movie that contain the picture. The clever bit is that it uses a kind of text-retrieval inspired method to do it, so the processing time is essentially zero (just an inverted index lookup, with "visual words")

You get your damaged cells repaired, your brain gets into weird activity (although with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, see http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fmri_intro/ we may soon discover it to be not so bizarre, but this should go into another topic) and a couple other nice things go on. For once, you may enjoy verrry nice dreams! And even encourage them! Is "lucid dreaming" still famous?

And what about what goes before and sometimes after sleep? Specially if in good company...

But enough veering off topic... (though it's been long since I posted and it's difficult...) Something interesting about the article is the fact it's so vague as to be totally worthless: what happens at the extremes, when people start sleeping too little or too much?

(but of course, I cannot think there is such a thing as too much sleep!)

You are missing some crucial facts concerning the theory of natural selection.

It is not the individual as a whole that is important when determining heritability, but rather the collection of their genes.

Given that each sibling of the same parents carries a very similar set of genes, it has been shown that when parents produce a number of offspring it is more likely that the later offspring will be homosexual, this is advantageous, in certain circumstances, for the heritability of the parents genes if the homosexual offspring then help in someway towards the survival of their siblings offspring.

To summarise, if you have alot of brothers and sisters its useful if some of them are homosexual to help out with your offspring, who in effect carry the same proportion of genes, as the homosexual sibling themselves would pass to their own children.

about three comments that made it above a rating of "2". And one was rated "funny"...

Does this mean we have no good ideas on what high school kids are interested in or is it that high school kids are not interested in anything that would be suitable for a school environment?

Just teaching them some critical thinking skills and scientific method to make them less credulous and more logical would be useful in their collective futures.

I recently read Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins and realized that *I* was a bit rusty in my critical thinking and statistical ability.

Humans love coincidence and try to recognize patterns in chaos. I think a "fun" logic course could have a lot of cool examples and make them a little less herd-like.

According to the British Library's website, it contains 150 million items and gains a futher 3 million each year (but it doesn't distinguish between items and volumes - they collect any published item, and receive a copy of EVERY published item in the UK and Ireland).

The Bodelian has only 7 million volumes.

I would suspect that the Brish Library is substantially larger than Stanfords, but the Library Of Congress is recognised as the largest library in the world.

Steve.

The library of the University of Oxford, i.e. the Bodleian Library, was the first "copyright" library in the UK - one of only three - which means that it automatically gets a copy of every book published in the UK.

Aegilops

The library of the University of Oxford, i.e. the Bodleian Library, was the first "copyright" library in the UK - one of only three - which means that it automatically gets a copy of every book published in the UK.

Aegilops

The standard Oxford practice is to spell:

1. words that can be analysed into an English root and an -eyes suffix -ize. There exist rare verbs with a noun in -ition which also end -ize. "recognize" for instance, unlike "ignite", "micturate", "demolish" and "add";
2. all words where the "eyes" sound is spelt using a "y" -yse, not -yze (these are from the Greek verb luo, meaning "I loose"),
3. and words that cannot be analysed as before -ise,...

.... The practice in most other British universities and in the media and novels, is to end "eyes" words in -ise regardless.

So Should I be Running climate prediction.net on my P4 Prescott or not?

People do enough damage to themselves and the world with the current harvest of dangerous consumer products. Gasoline included. Now, if you are trading a lesser evil for a greater evil, that is a step in the right direction sometimes. Sometimes it prevents a much lesser evil or a non-evil from being selected instead (like cure in medicine vs manage, which do you think is normally selected in the current business models?)

In the end, I do not see the need for a focus on distance per unit. I see the focus as being cost per unit (pollution, money) and cost per distance achieved (again, pollution money). If the cost is cheap enough to travel a certain distance on a fuel, then it is cheap enough to double or triple the size or the fuel storage system. Other issues may enter into play, such as consumer safety, but those would be addressed (as they always have been) by consumer protection actions (laws and standards).

InnerWeb

People do enough damage to themselves and the world with the current harvest of dangerous consumer products. Gasoline included. Now, if you are trading a lesser evil for a greater evil, that is a step in the right direction sometimes. Sometimes it prevents a much lesser evil or a non-evil from being selected instead (like cure in medicine vs manage, which do you think is normally selected in the current business models?)

In the end, I do not see the need for a focus on distance per unit. I see the focus as being cost per unit (pollution, money) and cost per distance achieved (again, pollution money). If the cost is cheap enough to travel a certain distance on a fuel, then it is cheap enough to double or triple the size or the fuel storage system. Other issues may enter into play, such as consumer safety, but those would be addressed (as they always have been) by consumer protection actions (laws and standards).

InnerWeb

Gentleman's Magazine Vol. 1 Jan 1731 Unnumbered Page

Oxford University did a trial project to see how difficult it would be to place some 18th and 19th Century journals online. Here is the final report giving some of the difficulties they had. The journals are available here and make for some very interesting browsing.

Oxford University did a trial project to see how difficult it would be to place some 18th and 19th Century journals online. Here is the final report giving some of the difficulties they had. The journals are available here and make for some very interesting browsing.

Oxford University did a trial project to see how difficult it would be to place some 18th and 19th Century journals online. Here is the final report giving some of the difficulties they had. The journals are available here and make for some very interesting browsing.

Your comment got me interested in the question of how inaccurate the process can be, and how these inaccuracies are validated and quantified. One method, which I find compelling, is to date trees, such as bristlecone pines, which live for thousands of years and which also reliably create one ring per year. If you find such a tree that still alive, you can count the rings and know which year each ring was produced. Also, you can use dead trees by correlating tree ring thicknesses (climate-related growth rate) between live and dead trees that were at one time alive simultaneously.

Refer to the following for more info:

http://www.rlaha.ox.ac.uk/orau/calibration.html

Anyway, it appears that the standard deviation for radiocarbon dating is +/-50 years for something that is 5000 years old, or in other words, +/- 1%. That's going to get you within the correct century for anything up to 100,000 years old.

I understand that I can't *prove* this, but I find the evidence compelling. I will keep my mind open for stronger evidence to the contrary. At the moment, I don't see any.

Firstly, I have to agree totally with it being a poor show about a lack of Linux or UNIX clients. My lowly OpenBSD box could be chugging away 24x7: other posters have made similar references to non-Windows kit they could use that is actually of significant value (unlike mine). No argument there.

I just downloaded the agent myself on a WinXP box, and the default install is *NOT* to run as a screensaver. The NT kernel (and 2K, XP etc) supports thread prioritisation, so this process is chugging away right now with the default priority set to Low. You can see this from Task Manager by selecting View, Select Columns, Base Priority. While composing this post I have chugged through 4% of a batch, for what it's worth.

Incidentally, the client is a re-skin and tarting up of the old UD client, as used a few years back for the University of Oxford cancer research project. What's interesting is that back then, UD was getting paid for building the massively distributed client. That in itself is not inherently bad as such, but was worth knowing at the time. I'd expect the same this time 'round, too.

Cheers

Aegilops

Sounds to me like you don't care for slashdot much. If that's the case, why are you here?

It's not that I don't like Slashdot in general, but I don't believe everything I read here.

Oh yes, let's just generalize for the purpose of making him sound like a moron. At least he's sticking to the topic, virus and how it exploits IE.

Everything he said applies to the Linux kernel too. He was trying to say that Windows is broken because it took so long for SP2 to be released. It took at least as long to get from the stable release 2.4 to 2.6 of the Linux kernel, so is that proof that 2.4 is broken? No.
Furthermore, he named no specific viruses, exploits in IE or anything else.

And you know this... How? Oh wait, let me guess, you read it on slashdot, so it must be true...

If it's so easy, then how come there aren't any provably safe/correct OSes in existance? The only provably correct software I am aware of run a few critical functions for orginizations that can afford the development: nuclear reactor computers, some of NASA's software. Nothing even approaching the complexity of Windows or Linux have even been attempted. Information is hard to link to because you have to pay for it. See http://archive.comlab.ox.ac.uk/procos/codesign.htm l, http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/lin91provably.html, http://csd.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/persons/ste phan.kleuker/s-kleuker.hti-abstracts.html.

No, he's not saying the Linux kernel is invulnerable. Far from it. He's saying Windows has far more vulnerabilities. No study necessary. Unless you're a total Microsoft Zealot, you should be able to see that as plain as day.

He specifically said the "heart" of Linux: I can only assume he is referring to the kernel. You've avoided that point entirely. The Windows kernel has equal or less vulnerabilities than the Linux kernel does. I dare you to name even one recent one that allows privlege escilation in SP2. Here is one in 2.6.0, and another in 2.6.6... Just ask Google

So you are saying that your position is so obvious and such common knowledge that you cannot find any support for it? That's called doublethink. If it was obvious, you should be able to provide copious, valid, fair and detailed sources to support your position. Stating that it's obvious without any support at all, as I posted earlier, destroys your credibility. No one is going to believe you just because you say it's true. That's the main problem I had with E-Rock-23, and now you.

Back off him, he does have a good point.

A point cannot be any good without support. He stated his case with zero references of any kind.

Besides, you're the one who posted anonymously

1. I don't see a name at the top of your post
2. What makes you think that's why I posted AC?
3. If your threshold is so high, how did you see the grandparent?

I seem to recall some big physics calculation a long time ago conclusively proving that bees can not fly.

That's an old legend, son.

Don't worry. A lot of other people fell for it, too. And the reason they can fly is interesting.

I attended a talk by Torsten Reil (CEO of Natural Motion) 3 years ago. The Neural Networks are taught using artificial evolution, but already then he was pretty secreative. The techniques are pretty standard by now though so it wouldn't be that hard to replicate.

If you want to know more try to track down his publications. This is his website, but the links are dead: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~quee0818/pub/publications.h tml

Back in 1986, Richard Dawkins, in the Blind Watchmaker wrote one example of how an eye could evolve from simple light sensitive cells to a fully developed eye with a lens, all via a sequence of plausible evolutionary steps. See Chapter 4 of the Blind Watchmaker for details.

The subject is also covered in considerable detail in Dawkin's paper 'Where d'you get those peepers'. This Dawkins paper remarks that multiple independent 'eyes' (in different species) have evolved, and that at least nine different design principals for these eyes have been identified.

While this is interesting news, it's hardly a revolution or likely to put creationist claims to rest.

The quest for CPU power has been largely defeated by bloated software in applications and operating systems. Some programs I wrote in Basic on an Apple II ran faster than when written in a modern language on a G4 Dual-processor Mac with hardware 1,000 times faster.

That is quite odd of him to say. I just checked on seti@home, climate prediction and predictor@home via boinc, I don't see any Apple IIs on top of any lists. Well maybe the distributed computings teams should hire Jef Raskin and his Amazing Basic programming abilities - right?

I think sometimes, you wake up for an interview and haven't had coffee yet and say things that are not quite what you intended - it happens to me all the time ya know...

I don't see any point in continuing this. You are clearly utterly ignorant of Libertarianism and you don't care to learn, otherwise you would have read the Wikipedia article which would have answered your questions.

I expect you will respond that I've failed to make my point and therefore I am not responding to your points. I assert here that I have responded to your points by providing a pointer to a detailed 3rd party article and I now find myself in the position of "trying to teach a pig to sing".

You might also benefit from reading the articles about Cecil Rhodes, Rhodesia, and Zimbabwe. More on Cecil Rhodes is here, here, here, here, and here. Unfortunately, none of those sites support your assertion that the British government couldn't stop him (or that it even wanted to) but then life's not always the way we want it to be.

The dark box isn't necessary if you can restrict the light getting to the film some other way. The article mentioned that the detector would be attached to a telescope, so that would prevent light entering from any place other than the pinhole lens.

Most large telescopes don't have tubes either, since they aren't strictly needed, and they weigh a lot. See the photo of the scope at: http://gemini.physics.ox.ac.uk/photos/geminin-tele scope-lr.gif or at http://www.apo.nmsu.edu/Site/3.5m_Images/telescope 06.JPEG

Some industrial waste is stable. Arsenic waste from tin mining, mercury waste from gold mining, cadmium from discarded rechargable batteries, beryllium from heat transfer uses.

None of this stuff decays at all. Waste that just goes away if you wait long enough looks good by comparison.

More significantly, there is an inverse relationship between half-life and activity. When you take out your spent fuel rods there is some U235 left, with a half-life of 700 million years, and also Strontium 90 with a half-life of 29 years. The Strontium 90 with its short half-life is releasing its energy quickly. This contributes to making the spent reactor very radio-active and very dangerous. But 290 years later 99.9% of the Strontium has decayed. Meanwhile the Uranium, which is releasing its energy too slowly to be dangerous, clouds the issue of how long reactor waste lasts. Long after the waste has ceased to be dangerous, it remains slighty radioactive.

One mind boggling point is that Uranium used as reator fuel supplies about a million times as much energy per unit weight as coal. Coal is a fairly pure product and contains only about 1.5 parts per million Uranium as a contaminant. So about 50% more Uranium goes up the chimney of a coal fired power station as goes into the reactor of a nuclear power station.

That is amusing in a way, but not very important, because the Uranium that goes into a reactor isn't dangerous anyway. The worry with nuclear power is the transmutation of Uranium into short lived, highly radioactive isotopes of other elements. However the point remains that the quantities of waste involved in nuclear power are very much smaller than the quantities involved in producing power from chemical sources.

Why do I care? I was six years old at the time of the Aberfan Disaster, the same age as many of the 116 children who died, suffocated under a slurry of waste from a coal mine after the collapse of a waste tip. The TV pictures of the time showed the gable end of the children's school. It was just like the one I attended and this upset me.

I have never forgotten that quantity is a quality of waste. The waste from the coal mine might as well have been composed of perfectly safe, inert materials. It would not have made any difference. The children were buried and suffocated because there was so much of it, not because it was "dangerous" in the sense that the word is used today.

by what metric is it considered environmentally friendly?

1) Even Sun has succumbed to recursive acronyms, now.

Maybe the specification was written in Z notation? This could explain the "provable data integrity" part, but more likely, that's just marketing hype.

2) Is it just me, or is the post surprisingly bereft of unique details?

According to the article, it's a log-structured file system. It's quite an interesting approach to file system design, but it usually results in poorer read performance than other file systems (write performance tends to be higher, though). However, it's excellent PR. From the article:

"The cost of doing something like a checksum is no longer prohibitive. Burning a small percentage of the CPU to know that data is intact is a price that administrators would gladly pay," says Moore.

Read: "Your new ZFS file system is a bit slow? -- It's part of its reliability, stupid!" (Moore is probably right about the checksumming because hard disk MTBF hasn't grown as fast as hard disk capacity.)

But as for doing this job inside, NO WAY! . Not unless you have access to a fume hood. The LAST thing you want to do is poison yourself with the fumes.

Umm... Isopropyl alcohol is not particularily toxic. The risk of injury from inhaling fumes is almost non-existant. You'd have to be huffing the stuff for a long time.

Isopropyl is about as toxic as ethanol. And we drink that stuff. (MSDS data sheets for isopropyl and ethyl alcohol.)

Note the Occupational Exposure Limit is about a 1 kg/m3 for both. That's a lot.

The fire hazard is of course a real risk.

(Yes, I am a chemist.)

But as for doing this job inside, NO WAY! . Not unless you have access to a fume hood. The LAST thing you want to do is poison yourself with the fumes.

Umm... Isopropyl alcohol is not particularily toxic. The risk of injury from inhaling fumes is almost non-existant. You'd have to be huffing the stuff for a long time.

Isopropyl is about as toxic as ethanol. And we drink that stuff. (MSDS data sheets for isopropyl and ethyl alcohol.)

Note the Occupational Exposure Limit is about a 1 kg/m3 for both. That's a lot.

The fire hazard is of course a real risk.

(Yes, I am a chemist.)

Not a surprise really. Oxford University recently announced that Beaker will be delivering the inaugural lecture for this year's Department of Biochemistry Distinguished Lecture Series. Rumor has it he will address "Neuro-imaging and Neuropathological Studies of Mood Disorders in Primates." Although not widely known, Beaker's contributions to science have far outweighed his achievements in the field of entertainment.

Not a surprise really. Oxford University recently announced that Beaker will be delivering the inaugural lecture for this year's Department of Biochemistry Distinguished Lecture Series. Rumor has it he will address "Neuro-imaging and Neuropathological Studies of Mood Disorders in Primates." Although not widely known, Beaker's contributions to science have far outweighed his achievements in the field of entertainment.

First Google hit for "crow tool use" yields this.

Pretty interesting stuff.

Unit for Cold anyone?

The theory of cold is just a part of thermodynamic theory of darkness .

The unit for cold is derived from unit for darkness and equals D.s, where D is unit for darkness and s is second.

Vanadium is a common alloying element in steel. The two MSDS pages I found indicate that the powdered oxide isn't very good to breathe or eat, but the amount released by breaking a window is probably so small that you wouldn't notice. The biggest hazard would be to people working in the manufacture of such windows.

Here's a link to the Bod, full name : The Bodleian Library

Yes, but in the Bod you're supposed
not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame
on which basis the venerable Librarians may object to the laser part of the proposal...

Just google for "condom failure rate".

The worst part is if you're posting from the US. Buy a name brand. the cheap ones don't meet international standards, which is why they can't be exported (they have to meet the "water balloon test", as reported in Consumer Reports).

Of course not, because anarchy requires an absence of law. By definition, an anarchist cannot be a criminal.

more info here

I'm afraid I have to disagree with your reasoning, though you have definitely thought this through.

SmartDust is currently being commercialized, and while not nanotech scale it is very small, approximate 8mm x 5 mm., shown in this photo

Your points of jamming, memory, and complexity are very valid, but consider the following three technologies being researched:

1. Plastic memory wafers about the same size as SmartDust that will hold 1Gb. They've already gotten the size to 1 inch square holding 1 Gb of memory.
2. Quantum communication replacing their Wi-Fi communication
3. The relative simplicity of the rules needed to simulate predator-prey behavior in Artificial Life. For one such simulation, look here

i refer you to oxford's statutes and regulations on discipline (conveniently linked here, for your clicking pleasure). yes, the admins seem to have been caught with their pants down (to put it mildly), but i think you could make a strong case that they've violated XI.2.1.(a, d, e) and XI.2.1.2. you can't blame bad administrators for the behaviours of bad users.

Good lord, I can't read this thread any longer.

I'm here, I've been a student at Oxford (postgraduate and undergraduate) for 5 years, and I know the OUCS network well.

There are 3 important points that most people have failed to recognise. Many of the have to do with the fact that the colleges are more or less partly-autonomous entities.

1) There are college LANs, supervised by a college IT officer. These (usually) sit behind a college firewall.

1a) same goes for the departments and faculties.

2) there is the OUCS network, linking the colleges and departments to each other and JANET

3) oucs also provides services, e.g. .ox.ac.uk DNS, herald email, HFS backup, site-license software, training, etc. etc. etc. OUCS also run the University level (ox.ac.uk) firewall. They also advise the colleges on network security.

Now, of the various problems observed here, three are pulled out as particularly noteworthy.

1) email passwords stolen.

Herald, oucs's email system, has both plaintext and encrypted authentication modes. Although some use pop3 or imap, most users connect via webmail. This used to live at herald.ox.ac.uk, and users were recommended to login via https protocol. Of course, few users did. They just typed herald.ox.ac.uk in their browser bar. So oucs began to fix this by introducing webamil.ox.ac.uk which requires https. They kept herald on as a lecacy service for a month or two to allow people to trnsition. It was at this point the report was published, as the accounts were opened. The falw was being fixed, and a big education campaign was in place about the new secure service. In addition, herald has always required very strong passwords (one of the main complaints about the oucs systems among users, in fact, is the password requirements).

2) msn messenger conversations listened to

MSN is not an OUCS provided service, they don't control the protocol, or the software. Student personal machines connect to the network, and these nowadays come with msn. If users use software without understanding how secure it is, it's no the university's fault. This is made clear here. These same students ALREADY have pretty private/personal/embarrasing comversations shouted at 3am in the morning in Radcliffe Square!

3)CCTV. Only one college has this problem, and it was due to poor installation by a service engineer of the company. It was a black box solution, selected more by the governing body of the college than the IT office, and the only way to run the cables in a mediaeval college is to use existing networks. Really, the CCTV traffic should have been encrypted, but if the company who installs the solution fails to do this, then the college (i'm sure) will be dealing with the company.

Meanwhile, the important thing to remember is that all students who gain a network address and network access have to sign a contract and code of conduct not to do anything bad

So we have three problems. 1 was in the process of being addressed, and user inertia was the problem. The problem is now solved. 2 is nothing to do with the university. 3 was a localised failure of solution affecting a single college, and has now been addressed.

Move along please, nothing to see..

Good lord, I can't read this thread any longer.

I'm here, I've been a student at Oxford (postgraduate and undergraduate) for 5 years, and I know the OUCS network well.

There are 3 important points that most people have failed to recognise. Many of the have to do with the fact that the colleges are more or less partly-autonomous entities.

1) There are college LANs, supervised by a college IT officer. These (usually) sit behind a college firewall.

1a) same goes for the departments and faculties.

2) there is the OUCS network, linking the colleges and departments to each other and JANET

3) oucs also provides services, e.g. .ox.ac.uk DNS, herald email, HFS backup, site-license software, training, etc. etc. etc. OUCS also run the University level (ox.ac.uk) firewall. They also advise the colleges on network security.

Now, of the various problems observed here, three are pulled out as particularly noteworthy.

1) email passwords stolen.

Herald, oucs's email system, has both plaintext and encrypted authentication modes. Although some use pop3 or imap, most users connect via webmail. This used to live at herald.ox.ac.uk, and users were recommended to login via https protocol. Of course, few users did. They just typed herald.ox.ac.uk in their browser bar. So oucs began to fix this by introducing webamil.ox.ac.uk which requires https. They kept herald on as a lecacy service for a month or two to allow people to trnsition. It was at this point the report was published, as the accounts were opened. The falw was being fixed, and a big education campaign was in place about the new secure service. In addition, herald has always required very strong passwords (one of the main complaints about the oucs systems among users, in fact, is the password requirements).

2) msn messenger conversations listened to

MSN is not an OUCS provided service, they don't control the protocol, or the software. Student personal machines connect to the network, and these nowadays come with msn. If users use software without understanding how secure it is, it's no the university's fault. This is made clear here. These same students ALREADY have pretty private/personal/embarrasing comversations shouted at 3am in the morning in Radcliffe Square!

3)CCTV. Only one college has this problem, and it was due to poor installation by a service engineer of the company. It was a black box solution, selected more by the governing body of the college than the IT office, and the only way to run the cables in a mediaeval college is to use existing networks. Really, the CCTV traffic should have been encrypted, but if the company who installs the solution fails to do this, then the college (i'm sure) will be dealing with the company.

Meanwhile, the important thing to remember is that all students who gain a network address and network access have to sign a contract and code of conduct not to do anything bad

So we have three problems. 1 was in the process of being addressed, and user inertia was the problem. The problem is now solved. 2 is nothing to do with the university. 3 was a localised failure of solution affecting a single college, and has now been addressed.

Move along please, nothing to see..

Of course, in this case they were researching for an article for the university paper.

"Someone" at one of the Oxford colleges though has done their own version of the story:

Strawberry's "flaws in wall transperency system" editorial

Are you kidding? How the hell do you think ammonium perchlorate propels a rocket? With lovely wonderful thoughts ?

I cannot respond to this comment since I only use Linux.

Yesterday I was using xfig to create a figure for a (math) paper I intend to submit (to the Pacific Journal of Math). I wanted to use LaTeX labels for a figure and this was not working. I asked a colleague and he suggested I look at this page. I then had a little problem; "color[0,0,0]" was placed in front of each label (not certain why). I looked at the "figure.pstex_t" file and removed by hand the phrase color[0,0,0] from each label. Everything worked fine after that.

So, how much trouble was this? Anyone (or any mathematician) using LaTeX directly would have no trouble removing "color[0,0,0]" from the very small file figure.pstex_t. The only other thing required is to use the "special" tag for the label and the web page above explains this nicely. In my opinion, using LaTeX labels in xfig is very easy and difficulitites are easily overcome. Since someone directed me to the UK page above, I wondered how difficult it would be to find a good "info/man" page. In Konqueror, I typed "gg: xfig label latex" and got about 2720 links. The UK link above was number 7 on this list. (I did not check to see if the others also solve the problem but they all look reasonable.) Since google is the "standard" search engine, it seems to me that finding the information I needed is fairly quick and easy.

I do not know how the M$ "world" deals with this type of issue. I now know a little more about xfig; since I use xfig or other FOSS software to create graphical content for my research/publications, I am happy that this problem came up (and was easily resolved).

Check out this paper for images.