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I read this usenet post every now and then when I'm trying to fix something, and it makes me want to cry every time I do.

Let's try this again ... man, the one time I forget to preview, I botch the link.

call-2003-08-05.txt

I'd appreciate it if someone would copy the whole text into a slashdot comment so that people can read it without slashdotting my poor suffering ISP.

A mere 371 bits suffice to encode a universal combinator equivalent to ...(a) universal Turing machine:

11100110010100110010110011000010001110010101110010 110
01100101001100101100101001100101100101011100110010 100
01101110011001100110001011010110100101011100101011 100
10110011001010011000010001110011001010010010100101 100
01110001011100110000100011011100110010100110010110 010
10011001011001010111001100101000110111001100010110 110
00110111001100101001100110010100110000100011000110 001

Dan Brumleve has a written a combinator interpreter in Perl that may be capable of evaluating Tromp's strange machine.

I agree that MySQL isn't ready for primetime yet, but it isn't the only open-source free RDBMS.

There's places where all these wonderful OS applications don't work nearly as well as a proprietary solution and databases is definitely one of those places.

In otherwords, be businessmen.

It appears the corporate establishment types are so concerned about real money going into the hands of young guys with an attitude that they would rather subject the Internet community to unnecessary risks, and their stockholders to violations of their fiduciary trust than pay the grey hats what they are worth.

For example, Dan Brumleve, the developer of DBarter (which won the Hackers Conference prize for "best work in progress" last year) was quite young when he discovered his first Netscape exploit Tracker. Netscape subsequently gave credit for finding the "Tracker" hole to a guy from Bell Labs. Their excuse for doing this was that they already knew about the Tracker exploit, having been told of it by Bell Labs -- an act that might have been rational if the Bell Labs exploit had been the one posted to Dan's web site. The problem was, Dan's exploit still functioned under the Netscape's fix to the Bell Labs exploit.

Dan has documented the behavior of corporate establishment types in this fiasco.

Inspired by such wisdom from corporate establishment wisdom, Dan went on to discover and publish other exploits.

At no time was Dan offered more money by Netscape than he was making as an independent contractor hacking Perl scripts for e-commerce web sites, although Dan did ask for such compensation.

Each time Dan published one of his exploits, Netscape stock went down 5%, and some of Dans friends made some money shorting Netscape on advanced knowledge of these exploits before Netscape was finally bought out by AOL.

OK, Dan's exploits may not have caused the Netscape stock price drops (though, try telling that to the guys who made money assuming they did). But even so, this attitude toward grey hats, that controlling them by legislating against them, is going to drive them underground. Society has "punkified" a lot of these young men already so threatening them with prisoner gang rape isn't going to twist their heads around that much -- aside from being a morally reprehensible, not to mention unconstitutional, way of dealing with any problem.

In otherwords, be businessmen.

It appears the corporate establishment types are so concerned about real money going into the hands of young guys with an attitude that they would rather subject the Internet community to unnecessary risks, and their stockholders to violations of their fiduciary trust than pay the grey hats what they are worth.

For example, Dan Brumleve, the developer of DBarter (which won the Hackers Conference prize for "best work in progress" last year) was quite young when he discovered his first Netscape exploit Tracker. Netscape subsequently gave credit for finding the "Tracker" hole to a guy from Bell Labs. Their excuse for doing this was that they already knew about the Tracker exploit, having been told of it by Bell Labs -- an act that might have been rational if the Bell Labs exploit had been the one posted to Dan's web site. The problem was, Dan's exploit still functioned under the Netscape's fix to the Bell Labs exploit.

Dan has documented the behavior of corporate establishment types in this fiasco.

Inspired by such wisdom from corporate establishment wisdom, Dan went on to discover and publish other exploits.

At no time was Dan offered more money by Netscape than he was making as an independent contractor hacking Perl scripts for e-commerce web sites, although Dan did ask for such compensation.

Each time Dan published one of his exploits, Netscape stock went down 5%, and some of Dans friends made some money shorting Netscape on advanced knowledge of these exploits before Netscape was finally bought out by AOL.

OK, Dan's exploits may not have caused the Netscape stock price drops (though, try telling that to the guys who made money assuming they did). But even so, this attitude toward grey hats, that controlling them by legislating against them, is going to drive them underground. Society has "punkified" a lot of these young men already so threatening them with prisoner gang rape isn't going to twist their heads around that much -- aside from being a morally reprehensible, not to mention unconstitutional, way of dealing with any problem.

Jon,

In 1998 I came up with the Cache-Cow family of Netscape exploits, and like you decided to publish my work. On the advice of a friend I gave my story to John Markoff at the NYT. He wrote an article which basically made me out to be the good guy (perhaps protecting me from corporate wrath), and this aspect of it was faithfully imitated by the hordes of follow-up articles in other publications.

On the other hand, this same journalist helped put Kevin Mitnick in prison. Now I don't feel so good about advancing his career.

And now you've been arrested for writing a program. Suddenly I don't even feel so good about writing exploits anymore.

My question is, what do you think about the role of the media in seperating the "good hackers" from the "bad hackers"? Has the media slant created by the MPAA been a factor in the lawsuit, your arrest, etc.? Is it possible to successfully publish software by using the media rather than being abused by it?

I have a Palm V and it can only give a beep with one frequency just like PC speaker. Some WinCE handheld has actual stereo/mono audio mic/earphone jack. (Casio?) To me the audio feature is more attractive than color display.

A Palm with audio can have:

1) act as a memo recorder: 1 minute of 8 kbps mp3 is 60K. so you can reasonably record 10 min. of
speech.

2) dial phone number using touch tone
frequencies listed here

3) more configurable clock alarm sound and other silly gags.