Slashdot Mirror

HarlanC writes: "The NY Times has an article (registration required) discussing the famous meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941. The conclusion is that Heisenberg revealed to Bohr the existance of a Nazi atomic program in an attempt to obtain assistance from Bohr. The Times of London article is here (long registration process required)" The play "Copenhagen" was based on a fictionalization of this meeting, it was much better than "Proof", I assure you.

e-gold points to this article about tracking Great White sharks by satellite, writing: "Interesting, I'm glad the impulse isn't just to kill them anymore, it's nice to see something is out there that still considers people as nothing more than a small meal, IMO it puts things into perspective. Besides, life isn't a risk-free proposition, even if they track some of the sharks they're unlikely to track them all." In fact, the article says that Australian law carries fines and jail time for killing Great Whites -- even in self-defense.

Maybe it's time to think about becoming an expatriate. Those who still harbor illusions about the accuracy of what pols and the popular media tell us about "geeks," gaming and cyber-culture ought to read one of the most interesting series of studies yet on computer games and the young, published this weekend in the Times of London. The government-funded study by the British Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), finds that computer games are giving a "young Britons a level of co-ordination and powers of concentration equivalent to those observed in top-level athletes." Beyond that, gamers are smarter, more likely to go to college, have more friends, read more, and get better-paying jobs than non-gamers.

Do not look for the results of this study to be reported on your local evening news in the U.S., or on the front page of any newspaper. It will not be there. Those spots are reserved for frantic stories about pedophiles, pornographers and online identity thieves.

So much for the popular view of gamers as oddballs and outcasts, cut off from the world and deprived of healthy social interaction and intellectual activity. That's the portrait widely promulgated in American media and invoked by U.S. politicians, from so-called liberal Democrats like Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, to Republicans like Attorney General Ashcroft and the President.

The British researchers, perhaps unencumbered by uniquely American pandering to so-called "moral" political interests, see it differently. "People who play games regularly seem to develop a mental state that we have seen before only in serious athletes or professionals such as astronauts, whose life depends on concentration and co-ordination," found Jo Bryce, who led the team. "Their minds and bodies work together much better than those of most other people."

Bryce conducted her research by visiting gamers, usually during regional or national competitions around England, and administering a series of psychological tests and questionnaires to nearly 100 of them. The results were then compared with those from similiar tests of athletes and others.

A separate study by the British government's Home Office indicated that those who regularly play computer games when they are young are more likely than non-gamers to go to college and get a high-paying job. They also, said the Home Office study, tended to be more intelligent. The Times also reported that Mark Griffiths, a psychologist at Nottingham Trent University and an expert in computer gaming, found in a study of 800 children that those who play games "moderately" -- generally defined as no more than two hours a day -- had more friends, were better adjusted, and tended to read more.

This rational approach to kids and gaming -- a government actually providing useful information to parents and educators -- stands in jarring contrast to the post-Columbine hysteria still prevalent in America, which holds that gaming commonly leads to addictive, anti-social behavior, even sometimes to violence.

The British researchers did discover that children who use computers to excess could, in fact, develop emotional disorders. One 16-year-old boy spent 70 hours a week at his computer and suffered severe psychological problems. But then, we don't really need a study to tell us that. The same would be true of bicyclists or chess players.

More typically, the ESRC study found, subjects were averaging approximately 18 hours a week on computer games; interestingly, these kids were spending similiar amounts of time on sports or social activities.

"They seemed able to focus on what they were doing much better than other people and also had better general co-ordination," said one of the researchers. "The skills they learned on computers seem to transfer to the real world."

As gaming spreads and becomes mainstream, such findings become important. They are valuable and useful -- not only to gamers, who already know much of this stuff, but to public policy. Parents, employers and educators often appear woefully misinformed about gaming's true and increasingly significant effects. More and more, these studies suggest, parents should be encouraging their kids to game, not to stop. You have to particularly appreciate the comparison to superjocks. The nerds' revenge only gets sweeter.

Nightspore writes: "The Sunday Times is running this article on the results of a study by the Economic and Social research Council (ESRC). The study found that, 'people who play games regularly seem to develop a mental state that we have seen before only in serious athletes or professionals such as astronauts, whose life depends on concentration and co-ordination ... Their minds and bodies work together much better than those of most other people ... They had more friends, were better adjusted and tended to read more.'" Hey it's just a study, but it's amusing.

vortmax(OU) writes: "OK, so it isn't that new, but I hadn't seen it posted on /. yet, so I thought I'd bring it up. According to World's Tallest Buildings, there's a proposal for a new supertall (3,700 ft) Bionic Building" in Shanghai, China. It will house 100,000 people as well as hotels, offices, cinemas, and hospitals -- a "vertical city" as the London Sunday Times put it. If actually built, it will dwarf the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lampur and the Sears Tower in Chicago. It should be interesting to see if it goes forward... The complete story is here."

vortmax(OU) writes: "OK, so it isn't that new, but I hadn't seen it posted on /. yet, so I thought I'd bring it up. According to World's Tallest Buildings, there's a proposal for a new supertall (3,700 ft) Bionic Building" in Shanghai, China. It will house 100,000 people as well as hotels, offices, cinemas, and hospitals -- a "vertical city" as the London Sunday Times put it. If actually built, it will dwarf the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lampur and the Sears Tower in Chicago. It should be interesting to see if it goes forward... The complete story is here."

An anonymous reader sent in a solid story discussing the fifth utility, or, the closed caption surveliance systems in Britain. Lots of background information on encryption and privacy issues. But in the end, a very good story covering a lot of issues that might be second nature to many readers of this site, but maybe not to the average newspaper reader.

Starting the show off with some cool do-it-yourselfer sorta projects: Diederik Meijer submitted the The Silicon Graphics Refrigerator Project (or: How To Turn a $175.000 High-End SGI Challenge DM Server into a Fridge). Next up, mdaughtrey built a Mechanical Hit Counter jrbx1 sent us a link to an in-dash Atari 2600. Even coolor is that the dash its in is attached to a 1978 volkswagon ;) rednax sent us a review of a kit for adding neon to your PC. If you're not skilled enough to hack how it works, at least you can pretend you're cool and hack how it looks! I Nothing is more dangerous then glewtion's link to a story about a sculpture in england that that worries people since the heat it generates cook fry a bird mid-air. Oh, and I lied: even more dangerous then art is amasci's link to making pet ball-lightning. In your microwave, duh. If you've got some spare time, MxTxL submitted something that we've been seeing more of, email games. This one is battlemail, which apparently is glorified addictive paper rock scissors. f you were an Anime character, here's some helpful hints to keep in mind. Hieronymus Coward sent us a bit about The Drew Carrey Show featuring a 2 minute segment based on the sims. I wonder if they will use the vibromatic bed, actually the next expansion comes out soon (today?) so I probably am gonna have to resurrect my neighborhood sometime soon. Thirsty? Dipfan sent in a story about Coke wanting to put soda fountain style coke in every house right next to the water dispenser. Got Carbonated Milk? Finally for a little random product plugging, Rustin H. Wright found a place selling penguin crossing signs. Finally, anotherone noted that you can use Google in full swedish bork bork chef glory.

An unidentified reader writes that a "new type of camera to allow the police to monitor from a laptop has been developed. Cheaper, and with G3 about to come in, faster data transmission," and points to this story in the UK Sunday Times. Unnamed experts in that story say that in Britain "an individual is already likely to be filmed by up to 300 cameras a day."

alangmead writes: "According to this article in the Sunday Times an increasing number of people in their twenties and thirties are suffering from severe memory loss. Doctors blame this problem on their over relience on PDAs and computers for holding information for them. As one doctor succinctly put it, 'Young people today are becoming stupid.' I know that I rely heavily on PDAs for keeping track of things for me, but it was because I was already forgetting things. Maybe my decision to use them is rather short sighted."

Sara Chan writes "There have been lots of claims that cell phones might cause cancer. The Sunday Times of London reports that there now seems to be real evidence to show these claims are true, at least for cancer of the eye. A study found a strong statistical link and a feasible mechanism is known: microwave radiation is absorbed by certain cells (melanocytes) in the uveal layer of the eye (which affects their growing/dividing). The study appeared in the journal Epidemiology and the abstract is available here."

Sara Chan writes "There have been lots of claims that cell phones might cause cancer. The Sunday Times of London reports that there now seems to be real evidence to show these claims are true, at least for cancer of the eye. A study found a strong statistical link and a feasible mechanism is known: microwave radiation is absorbed by certain cells (melanocytes) in the uveal layer of the eye (which affects their growing/dividing). The study appeared in the journal Epidemiology and the abstract is available here."

An unnamed correspondent points to this Sunday Times story, writing: "They have discovered ocean beds on Mars." The "they" refers to NASA scientists relying on information from the Mars Global Surveyor, which has transmitted "detailed pictures of rocks that could only have been created by sedimentation." A full announcement is expected next week from NASA -- wouldn't it be nice if they would simply release news as it happens rather than create News Happenings?

glomph writes: "A priceless Enigma crypto device (only three exist) was stolen this spring from a museum in the UK. The Sunday Times describe in fascinating detail how they fully recovered the item. Codewords hidden in the newspaper, buried video tapes, meetings in dark misty cemeteries and other cloak-n-dagger stuff were used. The Bad Guy was also nabbed. A must-read tale."

Ant writes: " NASA will discover tomorrow whether a prototype airscooter - a jetpack-like device propelled by fans - could really be a viable mode of transport. If successful, the airscooter trial at Nasa's Ames research centre in California could form another stepping stone in the development of personal, individual aircraft that allow commuters to speed over traffic jams, doctors to fly to emergencies and soldiers to leapfrog minefields. The SoloTrek Exo-skeletor Flying Vehicle (XFV) is designed to allow a pilot to stand upright, with fans 3ft in diameter above his head that lift him into the sky, allowing flight at speeds of up to 80mph for up 1Å hours on a tank of petrol." Despite the cool graphic, note that what's being tested is an engine, not the whole rig pictured -- that's just a tease. Consultation with the UK branch office revealed no clue of how long "1Å hours" is. Any ideas?

StDave writes: "It looks like the United Nations is going to set up a SETI listening station of their own to find Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Catch it here. " Says the article: "The £800m machine, called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will be the most sensitive astronomical instrument yet built. ... An agreement to build the new telescope was signed last month at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Manchester. Scientists will spend the next few years designing the technology, with completion due in about 2015." I hope the aliens are at least amused.

More below on what is surely one of the slowest patents ever granted (to our inquisitive friends with the radar domes, no less), and smidgeons of news on such various and sundry as Napster (perhaps you've heard of it?) and Iridium (perhaps you wish you'd never heard of it?), not to mention more on the destruction of the submarine Kursk.

The (cryptographic) wheels of government grind slowly. JOEL-V writes: "In August 2000, the United States Patent Office issued patent #6097812 to the National Security Agency, for 'Cryptographic System.' The patent application was filed in the year 1933, and this invention and patent are actually one version of the famous Enigma machine."

On a similar note, Paul Maud'Dib writes: "The Slashdot crew might be interested in checking out Enigmatic. They have java emulators for the Purple, Sigaba, Enigma, Russian Espionage Cipher and a public domain Bombe. They also have rather lucid descriptions of the various systems used. Interesting reads all."

That which does not kill him makes him stronger. You may recall that some maladjusted script kiddies threw a spanner in the works of the excellent kuro5hin a little while ago. Emmett told you more about the attack and its aftermath shortly thereafter. Looks like it's time for the (all volunteer, cool-content, graphically appealing) kuro5hin to emerge from a quick breather.

pope nihil writes: "kuro5hin.org has an update on their page. things should be back up (according to the update) by Sept 15 or so. check it out." Yes, Go there! Congratulations, guys.

88 bottles of bits on the wall, 88 bottles of bits ... NoWhere Man writes "The bankrupt Iridium venture has received another bid to save the wireless phone company's $5 billion satellite system from being pulled from space and destroyed. A California-based organization named CMC International is offering to pay $30 million to acquire Iridium's 88 satellites and other assets, according to a court filing submitted Friday."

It certainly would be nice if someone could eke out (even a meager) connection from Iridium rather than incinerating the satellites in the atmosphere, but honestly, the Will Burn / Will Fly status of these birds flip-flops enough to put a politician to shame. I'd like them to stay up, if only not to spook other folks from putting data-bouncing satellites up for our browsing pleasure.

In a nutshell, this is the problem with carrying around cavitation weapons. aleclee writes "It now appears that the Kursk was indeed carrying cavitation weapons and that she was sunk by a misfiring rocket. Supposedly, the rocket/torpedo can travel at 200 knots! Details can be found here."

Update: any port in a storm, and this one sounds nice. Patrick Ryan wrote: " Hello, I wanted you to know that CDSA [as mentioned in this slashdot story] has been updated at Intel and now includes a Linux port." Visit http://developer.intel.com/ial/security/ for more information about CDSA, and then the download site for your free-downloading pleasure.

This Sunday Times story about a new office under MI5 scheduled to open later this year with the innocuous name of "Government Technical Assistance Centre" to oversee the content of e-mail sent by and to Britons ought to give pause to anyone interested in online privacy. Though governments will always be several steps behind determined privacy seekers, this bodes ill for anyone who'd prefer to keep the contents of their e-mail even nominally secret. "The security service and the police will still need Home Office permission to search for e-mails and internet traffic, but they can apply for general warrants that would enable them to intercept communications for a company or an organisation," says the article. How comforting.

Great answers to this week's interview questions. Mick Morgan, of the UK's CCTA [Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency] has turned this Q&A session into a truly detailed primer on how to choose the hardware and operating system behind a high-profile Web site - and has dispelled quite a few myths in the process. You'll want to read this interview even if you're not into server mechanics. It contains enough personal insight and wit to be of interest even to Slashdot's least-technical readers. (Click below to see what we mean!)

fprintf asks:
Seems like a simple question, but why Linux? It seems like all the other high powered sites are using BSD of one variant or another.

...and...

Raul Acevedo asks:
In the original Sunday Times article, you are quoted as saying:

"... you can't beat them [Linux on Intel] in the bangs for your buck department. It blows Sun out of the water..."

Could you elaborate on how Linux compares to Solaris? Did you mean that Linux blows Sun out of the water in terms of price/performance (which is obvious since Linux is free), or just in general for your particular needs?

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on Linux vs. Solaris, not just in terms of price, but overall performance, reliability, maintainability, and ease of use. As a developer, I'm seeing Linux considered as an alternative to Solaris in many places, but there's little factual (or even anecdotal) information comparing the two.

ANSWER:

I'll take these two together since the answers overlap.

In retrospect, I wish I /had/ chosen OpenBSD ;-)

And I would certainly choose OpenBSD over GNU/Linux if I were building a firewall, or an intrusion detection system (based on say, Marcus Ranum's NFR) where packet capture at wire speed was important. (No - that tells you nothing about CCTA's network architecture....)

The choice of GNU/Linux seems to have caused all sorts of interest (witness this interview itself) when a *BSD may not have been so "controversial". Frankly I'm a little surprised at the reaction the choice seems to have generated. After all, we are just talking about web servers here. Many ISPs choose GNU/Linux on Intel for exactly the same reasons I have done - best value for money for the task in hand.

Let's put this into perspective first though - and dispel a few myths which seem to have cropped up in the press. I have emphatically /not/ ditched Solaris in favour of GNU/Linux. I still have 14 operational Solaris boxes running on the network. I have GNU/Linux running on 5 Dell Poweredge 2300s (with half a gig of RAM each - the Times article suffered from poor editing). I also run GNU/Linux on my desktop in the office, on my laptop and desktop machine at home and on a couple of internal servers handling DNS and proxy services for CCTA.

The GNU/Linux choice came about for two reasons:

• - I had operational experience of GNU/Linux on a day to day basis.
• - I was faced with replacing life expired Sun hardware (including a SPARC 1000E and a couple of Sparc 20s) as part of the normal process of hardware/maintenance/upgrade.

Having bought a Redhat distribution for my laptop, whenever I needed a quick solution to problem that would normally involve buying another box (such as building a secondary internal DNS server, or a local SMB server) I could simply recycle an old desktop PC with GNU/linux at practically zero cost.

On the second point. When the usual business planning round came up and I had to make decisions about hardware replacement for some of the older servers, it was obvious GNU/Linux on Intel could be a much cheaper option than simple replacement of the Sun hardware. Consider: a Dual 450MHz Pentium II, with 27 gig of disk, internal DDS3 and CDROM and half a gig of RAM costs less than £5000; a dual 300MHz UltraSPARC 2 with similar configuration costs around three times that. Question. Do I need to spend that kind of money simply to run a Web server? So I ran some tests and concluded that - no I didn't need to spend that kind of money (taxpayers money I should add) and plumped for the GNU/Linux on Intel combination on the purely pragmatic grounds of best value for money for the job in hand.

For the purpose of testing I took as a benchmark the maximum real life hit rate I had ever seen on one of the Solaris servers - around 1.5-2 million hits in a day. (By hit, I mean http GET or POST request). Then I doubled that as working assumption of a realistic maximum load in my environment.

For testing I took a fairly standard, but reasonably specced PC (a single Pentium 450MHz processor, 256Mb ECC SDRAM, single 18Gb LVD 10,000 RPM SCSI disk) and loaded Redhat Linux 5.2 running Apache 1.3.3. (Because that was what I had to hand). Apart from the Web server, I turned off all other daemons. I then loaded that server with a complete copy of my main www.open.gov.uk web.

In order to simulate a real life load, I had to find some way of grabbing a randomised list of URLS from the server which reflected the real world as closely as possible. After some testing with a variety of home spun scripts and commmand line web testers (such as webgrab) it quickly became clear that I would bog down the clients long before I made any real demands on the server. Some searching around and questions of colleagues lead me to http://alumni.caltech.edu/~dank/fixing-overloaded-web-server.html which is a useful site pointing to benchmarks and tools. This pointed me to http_load at http://www.acme.com/software/http_load/ which turned out to be pretty nifty since it runs in a single process. And of course, being OSS, I could tweak the code slightly to match my requirements. Thus armed I built some lists of URLs which were deliberately chosen to represent small text/HTML files, medium sized gif/jpeg files and large PDFs since this is the real life world on the public web servers. In load testing the server I then fired up just three client machines (one SPARC 5 running Solaris and two low end Pentiums running GNU/Linux since that was all I had to hand).

In peak load testing over a sustained 4 hour period I managed to get the server to deliver over 13,000 Mbytes in just under 500,000 HTTP transfers. During that period, CPU utilisation never went above 10%, and was usually around the 5% mark. Disk utilisation was minimal. The network connection rate was much higher than anything I'd seen in real life on the existing external servers (some 500 established connections during snapshots on the load testing period). Also during the test, Apache complained that it had reached the MaxClients setting (then 150) with no adverse effects.

Given that such a reasonably low end server handled most of what I could throw at it in my test environment, I concluded that GNU/Linux on only slightly beefier hardware made eminent sense.

----------

anthonyclark asks:
Do you get many cracker/script kiddie attacks on the various web sites you run?

ANSWER:

Yes ;-)

Any high profile site is going to attract unwelcome visitors. My job is made harder, and more stressful, by such attention - but that is what I am paid for. My friends know that I have nightmares about waking up to find graffiti (which is all it is) on one of my customers sites.

Like any other conscientious sysadmin I take a personal interest in the security of my servers. Naturally I will use all the tools at my disposal to minimise the vulnerabilities. But of course I get unwelcome attention.

A plea to the community if I may. And here I can do no better than quote from Fyodor's article in Phrack Volume 8 issue 54 where he discusses remote OS fingerprinting:

"A worse possibility is someone scanning 500,000 hosts in advance to see what OS is running and what ports are open. Then when someone posts (say) a root hole in Sun's comsat daemon, our little cracker could grep his list for 'UDP/512' and 'Solaris 2.6' and he immediately has pages and pages of rootable boxes. It should be noted that this is SCRIPT KIDDIE behavior. You have demonstrated no skill and nobody is even remotely impressed that you were able to find some vulnerable .edu that had not patched the hole in time. Also, people will be even _less_ impressed if you use your newfound access to deface the department's web site with a self-aggrandizing rant about how damn good you are and how stupid the sysadmins must be."

Sysadmins are not stupid. They are simply usually overworked and have to balance the need to provide services to their customer base with the need to minimise the risks to those services. Attacking public servers (whoever owns them) merely serves to irritate sysadmins, and usually nobody else.

I was not overjoyed to notice comments on /. of the form "whoo, so the Royal Web site has moved to Linux. I've got a rootkit with your name on it" (you know who you are). Consider. I have just moved some high profile web sites to the OS of choice to you readers. You want to see that OS taken seriously. Scribbling graffiti all over such a web site would have all sorts of negative impacts on the perceptions of people who matter.

Besides, you'd upset me.

----------

chromatic asks:
If you could add or change three things about Linux to make your job easier or more enjoyable, what would they be?

ANSWER:

1. The ability to read BUGTRAQ, evaluate the threat, consider vulnerability to that threat and auto patch or upgrade accordingly. It should then email me saying "I'm OK now, you can go back to reading /.".

2. An artificial intelligence based real time log watcher and network daemon which could learn network connect patterns and modify either the stack or the services running accordingly. The system should be capable of real-time blocking (a la portsentry) of "hostile" connects, co-operation with external IDS systems and firewalls, real-time reconfiguration of external security components, real-time alerts to other hosts on the lines of "hey guys, I'm being hit by X, watch it." It should then email me saying "I'm OK now, you can go back to reading /." :-)

3. An ASCII character based version of rogue. I miss it.

----------

Ryandav asks:
What kind of redundancy do you build into the server system for such a large and important site, ie. round-robin style servers or large, beefy superboxes, etc...

ANSWER:

You can see from answer above that I do not use "large, beefy superboxes". Frankly you don't need to to run a Web server. Nor do I use round robin DNS or other load balancing such as CISCO local director. In my experience of the sites I run, I don't need to do so. None of the sites gets hit hard enough to warrant the additional complexity of mirrored, load balanced servers. Our most popular site by far is the Royal Household site. That takes around 2-2.5 million hits per week (though I expect that to go up slightly now). The highest consistent hit rate I have seen is around 1.5-2 million hits per day. Any of the servers I have could cope with that. The redundancy we build in is in having backup hardware ready to run.

----------

wowbagger asks:
To what extent is the Royal Family involved with the site (e.g. content creation)?

ANSWER:

The Royal Family take an active interest in both of the royal web sites (one of which is hosted by the Press Association - www.royalinsight.gov.uk -). This interest includes both the current content of the sites, as well as future developments. The Queen herself launched royal.gov.uk in March 1997.

jd asks:
What's the official reaction to these sites running Linux? Assuming the British Government, and Her Majesty, are aware that their public image on the Internet is being presented via software that is non-traditional and non-commercial, what do they think of it all?

ANSWER:

The priority for the heavily visited royal web site is accessibility, balanced of course by reliability and security. These are the important issues, rather than the nature of the server operating system.

----------

Dicky asks:
What is your background? Are you a techie, an admin person, or an other? Do you use Linux personally? If so, did you come from a Unix, Windows or other background?

ANSWER:

I am a techie (though some of my friends and colleagues are a little less complimentary than that). My background is in Unix sysadmin and network management. I joined CCTA in 1993 from the UK Treasury where I was responsible for their Unix based OA system. Prior to that I was responsible for IT security in the Treasury. I have done some small systems development work in the past on MS/DOS machines (way before windows really took off) and CP/M micros. Most of my early career was in specialist support areas such as statistics, though I did a short stint in policy for a while in the mid to late 80's - didn't like it much.

Yes, I use GNU/Linux personally. It is my preferred platform for home use.

Dicky also asks:
And a related question: What is the primary system around your department?

ANSWER:

Depends what you mean by my department. In my area of responsibility the main systems are all *nix based. But the corporate desktop is NT4.

----------

Brian Knotts asks:
The obvious question: Does the Queen read Slashdot? :-/

ANSWER:

No. The Queen's interest in Internet matters is non-technical, although she sees on her visits to a wide variety of organisations the increasingly imaginative uses for the Internet.

----------

Simon Brooke asks: I've been very pleased lately to see Open.Gov's clear policy statement on the use of open standards. I'm personally involved in working with some large UK companies on their own Web standards policies, and having this to point to has been extremely useful to me. How difficult was it to get buy in to these standards by all the people who 'own' different Government sites, and how difficult is it to enforce?

I notice, for example, that the Scottish Parliament's web site, and my local Council's Web site, do not yet conform. Without wishing to point fingers at specific organisations, is it your intention to cajole all sites within .gov.uk to conform to these standards? Is it appropriate for members of the public to draw administrators of these sites attention to these standards?

ANSWER:

CCTA has long been a standards based organisation. My colleague Neil Pawley is CCTA's representative to W3C. Neil is also lead designer on the open.gov.uk site. Since CCTA is a member of W3C it is entirely appropriate that we should take a lead in using standards set by that organisation. Using HTML4, CSS2 and XHML1 for example on a real life server gives us valuable information on usability issues such as browser compatibility. Much of the feedback we have received has been very positive. On occasion we have had to deviate slightly from the standards where their use causes our public difficulty because of some incompatibility with a particular client setup. That experience itself is very helpful, since it allows us to feed back into the standards making process.

CCTA has an advisory role on best practice in the use of IS/IT in the UK Public sector. We have no authority to mandate particular standards, nor would we seek to do so. If the use of standards is to be effective in any way, it is because the standards themselves make sense in the real world (witness the growth in the use of the TCP/IP protocol set at the expense of the OSI standards).

Simon Brooke adds... Oh, and, by the way, keep up the good work!

We intend to.

Thanks for your interest. It has been educational for me.

-- Mick Morgan

-- end --

Next week: John Vranesevich of AntiOnline.

Our interview guest this week is Mick Morgan, the man responsible for choosing Linux to run The British Monarchy's Web Site, the huge open.gov.uk Web site, and more than 80 other official U.K. sites. (continued below)

I e-mailed Mick and requested the inteview, really on a whim, the day we ran this story. To my surprise, unlike U.S. government officials and politicians who typically dither for weeks or months before answering their e-mail if they bother to answer it at all, Mick replied almost immediately with a message that said, in part, "Happy to oblige, if only to put the record straight on a few points. I can see from today's edition that there is a great deal of misunderstanding out there."

We're always happy to set things straight. And getting "the word" directly from the man himself is always better than getting it second-hand from The Sunday Times. So here we are, happily welcoming Mick Morgan to Slashdot.

Mick is a genial fellow, but please don't forget that he is also a highly-placed, trusted government official. He has laid down several necessary interview ground rules. He says, "I will not be drawn on specifics of system security (generalities I will answer at my sole discretion). Nor will I comment on UK Government policies on web usage, architectures etc. But since the questions are likely to be technical rather than policy oriented there should not be a problem."

The usual Slashdot interview rules apply: one question per post; moderators choose the most intriguing ones; editors make the final "cut" Tuesday afternoon; Mick's answers appear Friday.

Our interview guest this week is Mick Morgan, the man responsible for choosing Linux to run The British Monarchy's Web Site, the huge open.gov.uk Web site, and more than 80 other official U.K. sites. (continued below)

I e-mailed Mick and requested the inteview, really on a whim, the day we ran this story. To my surprise, unlike U.S. government officials and politicians who typically dither for weeks or months before answering their e-mail if they bother to answer it at all, Mick replied almost immediately with a message that said, in part, "Happy to oblige, if only to put the record straight on a few points. I can see from today's edition that there is a great deal of misunderstanding out there."

We're always happy to set things straight. And getting "the word" directly from the man himself is always better than getting it second-hand from The Sunday Times. So here we are, happily welcoming Mick Morgan to Slashdot.

Mick is a genial fellow, but please don't forget that he is also a highly-placed, trusted government official. He has laid down several necessary interview ground rules. He says, "I will not be drawn on specifics of system security (generalities I will answer at my sole discretion). Nor will I comment on UK Government policies on web usage, architectures etc. But since the questions are likely to be technical rather than policy oriented there should not be a problem."

The usual Slashdot interview rules apply: one question per post; moderators choose the most intriguing ones; editors make the final "cut" Tuesday afternoon; Mick's answers appear Friday.

moonboy writes "I know Netcraft exposed this awhile back, but here is a new story. This quote says it all: "We'd been running Sun Solaris since 1994, it was coming to the end of the life cycle for early machines and direct replacements would have cost a lot of money. We'd been running Linux on Intel [computers with Intel processors] internally for testing and had been impressed with their reliability and you can't beat them in the bangs for your buck department. It blows Sun [computers] out of the water and, as a web server, Linux is great. So we did some load testing internally and managed to get some more than satisfactory results." 'Nuff said. Here is the Sunday Times (UK) story" The article also says the Queen is a "keen web surfer." Good for her! Do you suppose she reads Slashdot? ;)

wojo writes "According to this story, the Israeli Weizmann Institute has broken RSA 512 bit encryption in, get this, 12uS (microseconds). And if that was not enough, it's handheld using a mix of quantum and optical computing technology. I need proof, how about you?" Hey, if it's in theThe Sunday Time (UK) it must be true, right?

wojo writes "According to this story, the Israeli Weizmann Institute has broken RSA 512 bit encryption in, get this, 12uS (microseconds). And if that was not enough, it's handheld using a mix of quantum and optical computing technology. I need proof, how about you?" Hey, if it's in theThe Sunday Time (UK) it must be true, right?

Chasuk wrote to us with the word from the Sunday Times that apparently Steven Spielberg will be directing what would have been Kubrick's next project - AI. The story is "the tale of a young 'robot' boy that he likened to the story of Pinocchio." The two had talked extensively before the latter's death, and were good friends. The movie is based on the short stoy Supertoys Last All Summer Long, by Brian Aldiss.

Ry Jones writes "The Sunday Times is reporting that people like Bill Gates and Christopher Reed will soon be able to get head transplants. " Interesting idea, and as the article points out, it's been a goal for transplant science for the past couple decades. I'd like to have my head meet Arnold's body.

Sith Lord Jesus writes "According to an article in the London Sunday Times, a new nuclear accelerator designed to recreate the Big Bang might possibly--*possibly*--cause the earth to "disappear in the twinkling of an eye." Oops. " This reminds me of the some the fears that the folks in the Manhatten Project had-almost zero chance of anything occuring, but the notion of creating a black hole on the surface of the Earth is a strangely appealing one, from a sheer comedic value POV.

The Sunday Times reports that Israeli military sources revealed that Israel is developing an ethnic biological weapon that targets Arabs, in particular Iraqis. William Cohen, US defence secretary has confirmed the existence of such research, and an Israeli parlementarian has dennouced it. The British Medical Association and the UK biological defence establishment Porton Down have confirmed such weapons are feasible but very difficult to make. During Apartheid, South Africa had a similar program targeting black people. Wired has a summary if you do not want to register. update Topic changed to News because Einstein would not have condoned the development of such weapons. update (for Dec 2) Salon gives the US military view (not possible), and Scientific view (theoretically possible, practically would encounter many difficulties). update (Dec 21) Omri Schwarz believes he knows where this article came from. This is his explanation. I hope he is right.

1. A year and a half ago, the British Medical Association commissioned a report on the feasibility of genetically selective weapons. The only BMA official to talk of this is Dr. Vivienne Nathanson. In the press, she didn't even mention the Middle East. In fact, her concern involved Scottish clans. (Would the McAllisters do this to the McGregors?) The report is due in January (hopefully) and Dr. Nathanson promised to email me a copy.

2. Two years ago a science fiction story was published in the Hebrew press. Then Jane's wrote a report claiming Israel was making an ethnic bullet and the parallels behind the story and the sci-fi short were too strong to ignore. The Jerusalem Post then reported that Jane's reported on the "ethnic bullet", then the London Times reported that the Jerusalem Post reported that Jane's reported, and then news media all over began reporting this story, each time citing one of the first three as the source. The Jerusalem Post's story is too full of biology bogons to be believed, and since it is a reprint of Jane's story, translation from Hebrew to English cannot be the cause (the Jerusalem Post is an English paper and I can't find a copy of Jane's anywhere, nor can I afford an online copy.) Apart from a mention of Dr. Nathanson, not one paper even tried to gain verification of this story other than from the first three, even though of the three only Jane's was an original story.

David Murphy writes "The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is setting up a new campus in the Republic of Ireland - initially a multimedia lab, but planned to expand to the same size over 10 years. The Sunday Times has the story. "

David Murphy writes "The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is setting up a new campus in the Republic of Ireland - initially a multimedia lab, but planned to expand to the same size over 10 years. The Sunday Times has the story. "