Slashdot Mirror

Roland Piquepaille writes "The Tree of Life is an expression first used by Charles Darwin to describe the diversity of organisms on Earth and their evolutionary history. There are only two life forms, — eukaryotes, which gather their genetic material in a nucleus, and prokaryotes, such as bacteria, which have their genetic material floating freely in the cell. Until recently, eukaryotes, which include humans, were divided into five groups. But now, based on work by European researchers, the Tree of Life has lost a branch. After doing the largest ever genetic comparison of life forms they concluded that there are only four groups of eukaryotes."

Masq666 writes "A Norwegian team has made the first piece of hardware that uses evolution to change its design at runtime to solve the problem at hand in the most effective way. By turning on and off its 'genes' it can change the way it works, and it can go through 20,000 - 30,000 generations in just a few seconds. That same number of generations took humans 800,000 - 900,000 years." The University of Oslo press release linked from the article came out a few days ago; the researchers published a paper (PDF) that seems to be on this same technology at a conference last summer.

equex256 writes "Early Wednesday morning, a meteorite streaked across the sky in northern Norway, near Finland and Russia. A witness (Article in Norwegian) went up the mountain to where it hit and reported seeing large boulders that had fallen out of the mountainside, along with many broken trees. Norwegian astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told Aftenposten, Norway's largest newspaper, that he would compare the explosive force of the impact with the Hiroshima bomb. This meteorite is suspected to be much larger than the 90-kilo (198-pound) meteorite which hit Alta in 1904, previously recognized as the largest to hit Norway. From the article: 'Røed Ødegaard said the meteorite was visible to an area of several hundred kilometers despite the brightness of the midnight sunlit summer sky. The meteorite hit a mountainside in Reisadalen in North Troms.'"

vinlud writes "Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA's ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these 'rogue' waves and are now being used to study their origins. ESA writes about it in a story. More information about this phenomena at the website of Karsten Trulsen, Associate Professor at the University of Oslo."

KjetilK writes "Venus is just about to cross the solar disc. Direct from the control room in the Frogner Park in Oslo, I'm pleased to inform you that we have a great webcast, and as far as we know, it is the only webcast that still stands upright... Slashdotters, do your worst! ;-) A Venus transit is one of the most unique astronomical events in our time, in fact, no living person has witnessed it before today. And today, more people have seen it from the park where I'm sitting that in the rest of human history. Also, it had tremendous importance for the development of science, as it gave the first absolute measurements of distances in the solar system. Especially in 1769, a transit made science take huge leaps forward. And BTW, New Zealand and Australia were 'discovered' in the process" Some nice photos from the UK, photos from vt-2004.org, and if you missed it, it'll be eight short years till you can try again.

KjetilK writes "During the past couple of days, the World Wide Web Consortium, have advanced several core XML-specifications to Recommendations. You have the Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 and Namespaces in XML 1.1 as well as XML 1.0 Third Edition. In addition, XML Infoset Second Edition is now a Recommendation and VoiceXML 2.0 is now Proposed Recommendation."

johanneswilm writes "Michael Fallwell has figured out a way to overcome many of the problems of traditional telescope construction - making it way more compact and economical. And the whole thing is completely portable and achieves accuracy down to one or two millionths of an inch across an 18 inch surface!"

An anonymous reader writes "Brian Vincent of Wine Weekly News fame has started a new series of interviews with the Wine developers, over at the newly redesigned WineHQ site. The first interview features Über-hacker Ove Kåven, while the second one (hot off the press) features long-time Wine hacker Dimitrie O. Paun. Cheese anyone?"

Alex_Ionescu writes "The Doom 3 E3 Demo Alpha has leaked to the public. It looks promising, altough I'm only getting 12FPS on a Radeon 7500. Did anyone else have the chance to play it and could post their FPS? Here are some sites with more information and screenshots: here , here, here, and finally here. "

Slashback tonight brings you several updates and amplifications on everything from Java in phones and a GPS system in Europe, to the future of Internet audio streaming and (related) near-unbelievable proposed tariffs on nearly anything that will hold data (in Canada). Read on below for the details.

The man is not often wrong. Doc Searls writes: "I wrote a piece piece at the Linux Journal site that you might want to check out. The very first comment is 'This needs to be Slashdotted.' I agree. And not because I'm looking for attention. I want to *call* attention to the CARP Report, which will kill Webcasting with fees. It's a big deal, and I don't see anybody else talking about it. Yet. And we need to."

Would you say that these are more 'puppies," "babies," or "mommas"? Vladimir Vuksan writes: "There are already hundreds of so called Java midlets that will presumably execute on these Nokia puppies or any other Java enabled browser. Check out http://midlet.org/jsp/index.jsp"

Too bad I can't get the entire Economist free just by reading the ads. FortKnox writes: "ZDNet is running a story about generic "Ad-Free Subscription Services" being used on the internet today. The review of these services is from the 'Ad Space Buyer' and how marketing execs are not keen on the idea. Something interesting to read, seeing Slashdot is testing the services."

How about a countersuit for strong-arm tactics? iosphere writes "According to an article on Wired, the judge in BT's case issued a ruling that questions whether or not the technology that was patented is really analogous to todays definition of a hyperlink. She questions how the patent, which was written with only a single computer terminal in mind, can apply to the internet as we know it now."

Update: 03/15 00:31 GMT by T : arget writes with a few more data points: "An article at News.com suggests that Prodigy has won a TKO in the first round. Another story at ZDNet is more neutral, but quotes an expert saying that prior art will 'come back to haunt BT's efforts.' Both articles agree that motions for summary judgement and probably a ruling will come soon."

Portable Monopoly kylus writes "Roughly a month after it was last mentioned here, the Gameboy Advance light project over at Portable Monopoly takes another step closer to fruition. While the official release date is in May, the group will begin accepting preorders on Friday, March 15th for the $35 light kit, which has been officially named 'Afterburner.' In addition to this news, they've provided some video captures of the product in action."

Remember, as reader Vito puts it, that's Portable Monopoly's warranty-voiding, solder-requiring, tech-support-suiciding Gameboy Advance internal lighting kit. :) Your own risk, et cetera.

This goes beyond disputes about how to spell "meter." meehawl writes with an update on the European Union's plans for a GPS workalike system, which we had previously reported had been scrapped.

"So after the Pentagon removed GPS's Selective Availability, the maximum GPS accuracy is typically within 10 to 20 meters. Differential GPS can reduce this to minute levels, very useful for calling in airstrikes and pinpointing installations, and so on.

So it's probably no surprise that the the European Union's plans to build their own GPS system, the Galileo Project, met such stern resistance from the U.S., with Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz asking EU defence ministers not to go ahead, saying it could complicate US satellite-assisted warfare and furthermore could be more easily used by anti-US military forces.

The EU has has now rejected the latest message from the U.S., a State Department exhortation to forgo development. Interestingly, the latest rebuff was framed as an anti-monopoly stance, that competition in satellite navigation would be good for business.

Apparently, Osama is responsible for this latest rebirth of the European space industry.

Perhaps more worryingly, in a related development a UK company was awarded the "Skynet 5" military communications system contract. Don't these people watch movies at all?"

The principle of the thing. Boone^ writes "It's been well covered, but The Tech Report has written a nice little article going through the finer points of the proposed levy and why there should be more people than just Canadians lobbying against it."

Perhaps some more apprentices will emerge from the woodwork? pynchin writes "Kyle Sallee, creator of Sorcerer GNU Linux has just announced on #sorcerer that he will no longer be involved with SGL. Some disgruntled SGL users forked the distro a few days ago -- see www.lunar-penguin.com for details."

Rolf Marvin Bøe Lindgren writes: "For most human endeavors that involve some sort of risk, there are powerful, recognized public interest groups or even government-appointed organizations that investigate and analyze dangers, prescribe guidelines, determine criteria for acceptable risk, etc. This does not seem to be the case for software! I work for a ship classification company. The purpose of such companies are, very simply put, to determine how safe seagoing vessels are, for instance in order that insurance companies can decide insurance premiums. There are, needless to say, numerous conventions and special interest groups to determine safety at sea. That is, as far as I know (and I would very much like to be proven wrong), except the computer systems that the ships use. there are restrictions, laws and regulations involved in just about any object that goes into a ship except the computer system. Everybody seems to know, for instance, that UNIX is safer that Windows, but there are no safety, reliability or security criteria established by any recognized authority that can be used to defend one computer system over another."

"Now, I could ask Slashdot how to go about to form a recognized body, but I have access to competence in that particular matter. What I would rather like to know, is this:

• What might a set of safety criteria be like (I am just now most interested in criteria for computer systems that would address such issues as vulnerability to worms, viruses and crackers)?
• How should one go about to find competent and interested people who would like to be part of a body like I describe, or consultants to one?

Jens_AAMC wrote in to point out that the 2001 Turing Award has been announced, going to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard for their work in object-oriented programming.

Jens_AAMC wrote in to point out that the 2001 Turing Award has been announced, going to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard for their work in object-oriented programming.

Jens_AAMC wrote in to point out that the 2001 Turing Award has been announced, going to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard for their work in object-oriented programming.

KjetilK writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has posted a response to public comments it received. Part of the response is that the review period is extended to 11 October 2001. Continue to submit elaborate comments to the proposed policy, and make sure that the points made by the W3C are specifically addressed. Also, read the Patent Policy Framework proposal, the original announcement and background and the Patent Policy FAQ."

Zortoaster wrote a review of a book that might be of interest to folks around here:" In lieu of the Norwegian police's crackdown on 16-year-old hacker Jon Johansen, who broke the DVD copying protection, Paul A. Taylor's book Hackers raises a series of interesting questions about crackers and cracking. The book scores high on content but lacks somewhat in presentation. He manages to spell out issues that are often only implicit in the computer security debate, and is able to paint a multi-faceted picture of the hacker, represented by the cracker, community setting it apart from the very black and white, good or bad, presentation of hackers in the mass media." Hackers author Paul A. Taylor pages 224 publisher Routledge, London: 09/1999 rating 7/10 reviewer Zortoaster ISBN 0415180724 summary In lieu of the Norwegian police's crackdown on 16 -year-old hacker Jon Johansen who broke the DVD copying protection, Paul A. Taylor's book Hackers raises a series of interesting questions about crackers and cracking. The book scores high on content but lacks somewhat in presentation. Hackers and hacking

Hackers starts out with a discussion on the hacker, what he (as is pointed out in the book, the hacker is almost always a 'he') does, and why he does what he does. Somewhat sadly, although fairly well-founded, is Taylor's choice of terminology. He chooses to consistently address the cracker as hacker. A hacker is not a cracker, but a cracker is always a hacker (put in more technical terms: the cracker is a subset of the hacker class -- think object orientation here), which is a point Taylor seems to willfully ignore. That he chooses to use the terminology in this manner is rather sad because it puts an ugly stain on the respectability of the hackers -- those of us who not meddling in computer break-ins or other dubious activities, but merely hack code to produce cool software. Throughout the rest of this review I will be using the term cracker to refer to Taylor's hackers, and hacker when referring to real hackers

However, since crackers are a subset of hackers, much of Taylor's discussion on the hack and hacking is applicable to the hacker community at large. This is one of the things that makes Hackers an interesting read. For a newcomer to the hacker community Taylor's discussion on the 'hack' is quite enlightening. Even for oldtimers his discussion may shed some new light on the hack. Contrary to existing material on the matter, like the Jargon File, Taylor is the first to spell out the criteria implicit in earlier treatises on the hack: 1) simplicity, 2) mastery, and 3) illicitness [as in 'against the rules', reviewers comment] (p.15). This latter criteria is in its use of the 'illicitness' term only applicable to the cracking activity. In a sense it is applicable to hacking as well. Then in the shape of 'against the rules'. We are not neccessarily talking against the rules of justice, but against what the system's rules say is possible. In that sense, calling the third criteria illicitness hints at somewhat dubious activities, but is in fact not. It is an important element in the regular hack (if such thing as a regular hack does exist), too.

Taylor manages to view the hacker community from a fresh angle. Being a sociology researcher his angle is quite different from that represented by for instance Eric S. Raymond or Gisle Hannemyr. One drawback is that Taylor draws on Steven Levy's overly romanticized hacker ethics as presented in Levy's book of 1984: Hackers. It is time someone tried looking somewhat deeper into the hacker psychology to realize that while Levy's five tenets may to a certain degree represent attitudes within the hacker community, it is not, contrary to what Levy proposes, an ethos by which hackers live and die (apart from this, though, Levy's book is highly enjoyable and recommended reading). I'm also having some problems accepting the psychosexual theories on hacking that Taylor proposes. They seem a bit far fetched to me. It's been a while since everybody agreed that Freud's psycho-therapy was kind of overly sex-fixated.

Taylor addresses a largely ignored issue in hacker literature, that of the gender question. Why are there next to no female hackers? He addresses the point through looking at societal factors, by explaining how the community is a masculine environemnt -- the new wild west, so to say -- and the fact that electronic communication creates misogynity through its anonymity. At the end of the chapter it is a bit hard to grasp what Taylor's point is, though (see Presentation for more).

Another issue thoroughly treated is the question of hacker motivation. What drives the hacker to hack? Taylor's background within sociology is again helpful, as he regards the issue from a fresh perspective. Hacker motivation has previously been treated by Eric Raymond in his essay Homesteading the Noosphere . Taylor's angle is to compare academic theories on hacker motivation with the the reasons the hackers' themselves give. From the discrepancy between these two angles he lists four reasons for hacking: obsession, curiosity, boredom, and the feeling of power. If not directly contradicting Raymond's view -- that hackers hack simply to gain peer esteem and status within the community -- Taylor gives Raymond's view a more multi-faceted hue. He goes beneath the drive for esteem, trying to address the reasons why anyone would need to gain esteem from their peers. As such, Taylor manages to add something new to a discussion that has been on the brink of going stale.

Issues on computer security and cracking

Taylor's main focus on crackers is how society at large is to deal with them. Are crackers to be treated as criminal masterminds plotting to bring the world to its knees, or simply misguided kids trying to do something exciting with their computer knowledge? Several views are drawn up, with Taylor quoting representatives of each view without really making any kind of judgment himself as to the better way of handling crackers. It is an exercise in how difficult the question truly is.

A number of other quite intriguing cracker/computer security issues are spelled out by Taylor, as well. Issues include who is to blame when a computer system has been cracked? The system administrator for not maintaining sufficient security or the cracker for breaking into a system to which he doesn't have legal access? Should anti-cracking laws be targeted at stopping all kinds of illegal computer use, or are there degrees to the crime being committed? Is printing your personal CV on the company's printers even though it is explicitly forbidden to use company equipment for personal use to be treated as a computer crime equal to that of breaking into a banking system and tampering with the data?

Taylor also questions the computer security companies' motivations (and rightly so, one might add). Are they simply running a protection racket like that of the mafia, using cracking and virus alerts to scare their customers into investing in expensive counter-measure software? Or are they avenging angels siding with the innocent, the not particularly compu-fluent masses? Using the dichotomy of the computer security industry vs. the crackers, Taylor raises the issue of whether good computer security can only be achieved through knowing the enemy, the crackers. Can crackers and computer security consultants work together in a symbiosis, or are they eternal enemies never to be reconciliated?

Another issue dealt with is how crackers are to be handled. Should their acts be punished in the harshest way, or should they be helped into redirecting their activities into more useful terms? The question is whether the cracker is to be treated as a nuisance or as an asset. Taylor treats this issue quite thoroughly referring from the parliamentary discussion in Britain. He also discusses in what ways legislation can prevent cracking. He shows how little the law enforcement agencies know about cracking and how they employed overkill (refer to the Norwegian police's recent raid on the hacker who broke the DVD encryption).

Presentation

However intriguing the book might be it is presented in a very unorderly and weird way. The pages are filled with rather long quotations from various e-mails, books, interviews, etc. I gather the intention is to present the reader with the direct opinions of the book's "main characters," giving us in a way a first person view of the matter. The idea is nice, but the effect is that it ruins the fluidity of the text, making the book somewhat hard to follow. Also: it is at times quite difficult to grasp what message Taylor is trying to convey when he is expressing himself through the extracts of other people's opinions. Quotes are OK, but when, without exaggeration, 50% of the average page is taken up by quotations it is a little bit too much of the good stuff.

Having said that, the book is very structured, each chapter building nicely on previous chapters. The conclusion at the end of almost all chapters helps clarify Taylor's opinions a bit, which is nice. Still, it does not weigh up for the confusion created by the excessive use of quotations.

Conclusion

Taylor succeeds with explaining the relationship between crackers and the computer security industry, presenting the matter in a more multifaceted way than that of the mass media. The book is a definite must for those wanting an introduction to the social sides of computer security. However, I find it rather amazing that a book written in 1999 seems to totally ignore the writings of Eric Raymond, as these are probably the best works on how hackers view their own culture. Despite this, I believe Hackers might prove an interesting read even for the hardcore hacker, if only as an alternative look at our own culture.

Purchase this book at fatbrain.

CousinBob asks: "I'm about to finish my European MSc degree and want to work abroad (US or Canada) for a while. Some of my friends in the same position would like to move together to the same location/company just to give social life a boost. I was invited to a company once (they payed for everyting), but turned their offer down as they wanted to put me in Dilbertland. So just how do skilled and creative people find jobs across the pond? I'm just not ready to fill in my CV on a company's web page and hope they'r not locking me up in a cubicle. "

proBETA asks: "Is there a GNU tool for making tutorials? With a rising demand for documentation, a common tool would be great. So I just wonder if there are any such projects going on. How about recording and playback of X-windows (with mouse movement, typing, and graphics) along with explaining text boxes."

Laura Colban writes "Eben Moglen's article "Anarchism Triumphant" covers everything from Raymond's gift culture theory (which Moglen rejects) to IP rights in digital technology and numbers. In addition to being a former IBM programmer and a quite distinquished legal scholar (Columbia law professor), Moglen is also general counsel for the Free Software Foundation. He is probably the most important legal mind supportive of the open source community." Its a long piece, but from what I've read it looks like its worth it.

Alf Dagfinn Lynegard writes "On The University of Oslos (Norway) campus some Apple ppl put one iMac balloon over our math auditorium and last night some unknown linux-fans made up a Tux poster over the screen of the iMac balloon last night or this morning. (1998-09-04)." The shots are here and here. All I can say is hahahaha. We are definitley going to need mirrors for these shots.

Alf Dagfinn Lynegard writes "On The University of Oslos (Norway) campus some Apple ppl put one iMac balloon over our math auditorium and last night some unknown linux-fans made up a Tux poster over the screen of the iMac balloon last night or this morning. (1998-09-04)." The shots are here and here. All I can say is hahahaha. We are definitley going to need mirrors for these shots.

Alf Dagfinn Lynegard writes "On The University of Oslos (Norway) campus some Apple ppl put one iMac balloon over our math auditorium and last night some unknown linux-fans made up a Tux poster over the screen of the iMac balloon last night or this morning. (1998-09-04)." The shots are here and here. All I can say is hahahaha. We are definitley going to need mirrors for these shots.