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Domain: third-bit.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to third-bit.com.
Comments · 11
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there is no client software
Beyond that, the vast majority of users in China do not own their own computers - they spend their time in internet cafes... which means they're even less likely to have the proxy program.
The user in China DOES NOT need to install any program. From the psiphon website http://www.third-bit.com/2004-fall/psiphon_ae.html /:She contacts John and asks if there is anyway he can help. A few days later she receives an email which contains a link and 2 pieces of information, a username, and a password.
It is a web application. You just go to a url, log in, and start browsing. Of course at an internet caffee they could have a key logger but that's another matter entirely.
Mary clicks the link and is asked for her username and password, she enters in the requested information and is taken to a default Psiphon web page. She notices that the top part of the web page has an address bar nearly identical to the address bar in her Internet Explorer. Mary types in "www.google.com", and notices that she is taken to Google's main page, and that the address bar is still at the top of Google's page. -
Re:P.S
OOpps.. here
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Re:Article full of holesHow is sending your IP address to a contact list not advertising?
It's to a selected group; not available to anyone (eg police) who's interested. Which is still advertising, but the writer was trying to simplify.
exactly what separate network is this
HTTPS.
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Re:Is it going to be mandatory?
Considering there are applications like Psiphon to circumlent their censorship. It is the only thing they can do just shy of blocking access to every industry that uses SSL.
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Tor: Not the answer.
Tor requires that you install software on your local machine. As such, it's inappropriate for many people to use. I'd imagine that possession of the software in a place like China or Iran is considered prima facie evidence of seditious behavior and would probably land you in the re-education center regardless of what you were doing with it.
As is explained in TFA, "Mr. Villeneuve built a system that won't leave dangerous footprints on computers." As you can read here, the client machine doesn't require anything besides a regular web browser in order to operate, and you only need a secure channel once in order to set it up (to distribute the IP address, username and password) which can be pretty easily disguised. Also, you can use it from a computer on which you're not allowed to install software -- e.g., a netcafe. This provides an additional level of physical security: with a number of proxies and by moving from one cafe to the next, a user could make it very difficult to be picked out due to traffic analysis or usage patterns.
What we really need though, is something which combines the automatic routing of Tor and the ease of use of Psiphon: really, Tor without the barrier to entry that is a required software download. -
Re:Marketing.Is there a good comparison of the various Python frameworks available?
There's the PyWebOff: http://pyre.third-bit.com/pyweb/index.html
"PyWebOff is a compare-and-contrast exercise to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of some of the major Python web application frameworks."
Not all of the frameworks have been assessed yet but it still seems pretty active.
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Re:Umm...
Refer to page 4. Programmers would not see/edit XML tags. RTFA.
The fool should study polymorphism, and a object orientated language like Java or C++. But I suspect that is all is to much for the child's brain.
Maybe you should read up on the author. He's probably written more code in his day than you could shake a stick at. -
A lot of knee-jerk reactions so far...
Yegg, more bloat. Stupid idea to let people code in XML.
Shows that the poster didn't bother to RTFA. Of course you're not supposed to code directly in XML. XML is not very human readable. It is, however, easy for a machine to parse. The programs are stored in XML, programming stays more or less the same.
What does this do that I can't allready do in C?
The point of the article is that programmers should stop thinking of their code as a stream of characters but treat it like a tree. For example, when I want to change all the name of a function, tools like grep and sed don't suffice because they can't tell if a string belongs to a function call, comment or literal. A refactoring tool needs to know the structure of the program. Of course there are allready tools that are capable of this (Eclipse?), but they are in fact a partial compiler. Why not get rid of this duplication? If a language gives you easy access to the abstract syntax tree everyone can write his own refactoring tools in a minute.
Another way to look at it is this. If you'd have to design a data format to store an abstract syntax tree that is flexible and can last a few decades, would you come up with the following?for (int i=0; i < 10000; i++) { if (i<100) printf("%d\n", i); else printf("%f\n", i) };
Yet, this is how most abstract syntax trees are stored. You and I would probably define a format that represents the tree structure of the program more directly. This could be easily realized in XML.
The best known example of an extended language is C++ which originated as a "C with classes". Stroustrup added a feature to an existing language instead of writing one from scratch because this would have meant existing code had to be ported and the new language would suffered from the same problems as any immature language. The disadvantage of this approach is that of legacy mistakes like the declaration syntax in C. This particular problem would be non-existing in a language that was designed to be extended.
Bah, lisp can do this since 1950. When will people see the light?
IMHO never. A similar article from the same author was on slashdot earlier, in which he acknowleges that lisp can allready do this but also that lisp is waiting for a breakthrough for four decades. XML may not be the most elegant solution but it has the momentum.
The above mentioned article adresses some other objection people might have: e.g. that desiging a language is a difficult process because of the effects language constructs have on each other, and that therefore we shouldn't give this power to every high school student. -
Re:Dreamed-of feature
You might want to read Extensible Programming for the 21st Century. It was discussed on slashdot here.
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Go Greg!
The document is mirrored here to help compensate for the bandwidth deluge.
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Re:Move along, nothing to see here
>Overall it sounds like this guy had a bad experiance with A single project and decided to generalize it with all Open Source.
>I'd be nice to know what ProjectX is, then we all can get on them over it.
Google is your friend!
Its GForge....
See here...