Slashdot Mirror

Nick wrote:

Anyway, here's what I've had to say about Windows lately. Two weeks ago, I called for Microsoft to open the source code to Windows so that we could be certain it didn't have any secret backdoors (see Resources for a link). Most of the people I've heard from on the topic agree. One person insisted that people could be embedding backdoors into Linux as well. I agree -- it is certainly possible. But here's the crucial difference between Windows and Linux: if someone puts a backdoor into Linux, someone will eventually find it. Once it is found, I can eliminate it, rebuild the kernel, and get back up and running safely within minutes.

In fairness, it must be pointed out that the Jargon File mentions a famous hack, where Ken Thompson put an undetectable backdoor into a version of *NIX. Does anyone know a reason to assume that they same hack couldn't be inserted into a binary distribution of Linux? I'm just trying to keep things fair.

From Biafra's Bio:

(I hope that slashdot doesn't munge the links this time)

1985

Infamous Senate anti-music hearings are staged by Senator Al Gore and his cohorts as a favor to his wife Tipper and her openly bigoted fundamentalist friends calling themselves the Parent's Music Resource Center (PMRC). Among the PMRC's demands were the censorship through a labeling system of warning stickers, the "Reassessment of contracts" of artists whose lyrics are, "sexually explicit", "anti-Christian" or mention suicide or homosexuality. "Expert witnesses" called by the Washington Wives blame rock music for gang violence, suicide, murder, devil worship and sexual perversion. Frank Zappa stands virtually alone in opposing the PMRC and sensing their significance. The music industry above and below ground keeps their head in the sand, preferring to sleep through the hearings.

April 15, 1986

Two weeks after Dead Kennedys are publicly targeted by Susan Baker of the PMRC, Biafra's house in San Francisco is raided and torn apart by a squad of Los Angeles and San Francisco police officers. Cops even ransack the cat-box hoping to find - well? ask them. "Frankenchrist" albums and Giger posters are taken from the house and the Alternative Tentacles/Mordam offices.

June, 1986

Biafra and four others are charged in Los Angeles with one count each of "Distribution of Harmful Matter to Minors". They are the first people in American history to face criminal charges over a record; three years before the attack on 2 Live Crew. Biafra and other supporters form No More Censorship Defense Fund to cover the money to fight the charges. Defendants face a possible one year in jail and a $2,000 fine. The law had never been used before. The L.A. City Attorney's office admits to L.A. Weekly reporter Don Bolles that they kept files on several other PMRC-targeted musicians, but chose Biafra because it was, "a cost effective way of sending a message". The prosecuting attorney later says one of his goals was to destroy Alternative Tentacles. Fund-raising and the ensuing media circus delay the completion of the follow-up album to Frankenchrist, the appropriately titled Bedtime for Democracy .

August, 1987

Charges against Biafra and the other defendants are dismissed after a three-week criminal trial in Los Angeles. Even though Frankenchrist was not found to be obscene; Biafra, Dead Kennedys and Alternative Tentacles records are subsequently banned from a multitude of chain stores nationwide. This is exactly the type of de-facto censorship Tipper Gore and the PMRC had in mind. By this time, controversy has vaulted Biafra's spoken word performances from coffeehouses to the college lecture circuit, where he is brought in to "lecture" on censorship. For the first time the media is more interested in Biafra's political views than music-industry shoptalk on his latest music album. His documentation of Tipper Gore and the PMRC's ties to fundamentalist Christian extremists is no longer dismissed as lunatic. He also appears as an FBI agent in the Tim Robbins-John Cusack film, Tape Heads, wearing the same blue pin-stripe suit he wore at the trial.

________________________________________

From Biafra's Bio:

1985

Infamous Senate anti-music hearings are staged by Senator Al Gore and his cohorts as a favor to his wife Tipper and her calling themselves the Parent's Music Resource Center (PMRC). Among the PMRC's demands were the censorship through a labeling system of warning stickers, the "Reassessment of contracts" of artists whose lyrics are, "sexually explicit", "anti-Christian" or mention suicide or homosexuality. "Expert witnesses" called by the Washington Wives blame rock music for gang violence, suicide, murder, devil worship and sexual perversion. Frank Zappa stands virtually alone in opposing the PMRC and sensing their significance. The music industry above and below ground keeps their head in the sand, preferring to sleep through the hearings.

April 15, 1986

Two weeks after Dead Kennedys are publicly targeted by Susan Baker of the PMRC, Biafra's house in San Francisco is raided and torn apart by a squad of Los Angeles and San Francisco police officers. Cops even ransack the cat-box hoping to find - well? ask them. "Frankenchrist" albums and Giger posters are taken from the house and the Alternative Tentacles/Mordam offices.

June, 1986

Biafra and four others are charged in Los Angeles with one count each of "Distribution of Harmful Matter to Minors". They are the first people in American history to face criminal charges over a record; three years before the attack on 2 Live Crew. Biafra and other supporters form No More Censorship Defense Fund to cover the money to fight the charges. Defendants face a possible one year in jail and a $2,000 fine. The law had never been used before. The L.A. City Attorney's office admits to L.A. Weekly reporter Don Bolles that they kept files on several other PMRC-targeted musicians, but chose Biafra because it was, "a cost effective way of sending a message". The prosecuting attorney later says one of his goals was to destroy Alternative Tentacles. Fund-raising and the ensuing media circus delay the completion of the follow-up album to Frankenchrist, the appropriately titled Bedtime for Democracy .

August, 1987

Charges against Biafra and the other defendants are dismissed after a three-week criminal trial in Los Angeles. Even though Frankenchrist was not found to be obscene; Biafra, Dead Kennedys and Alternative Tentacles records are subsequently banned from a multitude of chain stores nationwide. This is exactly the type of de-facto censorship Tipper Gore and the PMRC had in mind. By this time, controversy has vaulted Biafra's spoken word performances from coffeehouses to the college lecture circuit, where he is brought in to "lecture" on censorship. For the first time the media is more interested in Biafra's political views than music-industry shoptalk on his latest music album. His documentation of Tipper Gore and the PMRC's ties to fundamentalist Christian extremists is no longer dismissed as lunatic. He also appears as an FBI agent in the Tim Robbins-John Cusack film, Tape Heads, wearing the same blue pin-stripe suit he wore at the trial.

________________________________________

What concerns me is the increasing amounts of money funneled into the War on Drugs and the meagre results being shown. I am also getting sick of hearing how people's basic Constituional rights keep getting trammeled by drug police (DEA, FBI, and local law enforcement) whether or not they are using drugs.

Harvard Study: Survey Finds Increased Use of Marijuana and Other Illicit Drugs at U.S. Colleges in the 1990s

Scientific American: Marijuana Use among Teens Increased Consistently through the 1990s

Nader is for decriminalization of marijuana use (not sale) and treatment for offenders (not mandatory prison sentences). This is in sharp contrast to both Gore/Bush who want to continue with the failing War on Drugs and its accompanying problems.

--

...is using a concept called the 'killough platform' and more information can be found here. Someone already did it with Lego Technic and a Mindstorms here. --Dave.

Godwin's Law invoked. You lose.

It is probably floating around in a lot of zappa quote databases like this one.

Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.

Personally I feel that MRAM is a beautifully ioronic idea.

Anyone have a good place to send the kids to show them what CORE really was?

You might want to point people at http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/pdp-11/ core.html which has a nice, brief summary of the technology.

Other sites worth looking at are:

http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/core.html
http://www.computer-mus eum.org/collections/ferrite_mem.html
http://www.science.uva.n l/faculteit/museum/CoreMemory.html
http://www.fortunecity.com/ marina/reach/435/coremem.htm

The last of these is particularly interesting (if somewhat self contradictory, as it describes Univacs miniaturised planes which are only 4.5" square, and cost $6000 each for 1 kilobits of storage.

Mark..........

Actually, I thought the Blue Room he was referring to was the Big (Blue) Room. Allow me to quote:

Big Room: n. (Also `Big Blue Room') The extremely large room with the blue ceiling and intensely bright light (during the day) or black ceiling with lots of tiny night-lights (during the night) found outside all computer installations. "He can't come to the phone right now, he's somewhere out in the Big Room."

One might go so far as to call it a good hack rather than a hoax.

Sorry, guys, the "Fundamental" is the Lowest frequency, not the highest. And MP3 doesn't delete high frequencies; it's much more subtle. Try out Lame in variable bit-rate mode, and you'll find the quality is pretty good.

Of course CD is better - it loses no info and has a high Nyquist frequency. But a sensibly high MP3 is pretty good.

Maybe I'm showing my age here, but does anyone else remember "Packets from Mars"?

martian: n. A packet sent on a TCP/IP network with a source address of the test loopback interface [127.0.0.1]. This means that it will come back labeled with a source address that is clearly not of this earth. "The domain server is getting lots of packets from Mars. Does that gateway have a martian filter?" Compare Christmas tree packet, Godzillagram.

jargon/m/martian.html
From The Jargon file (4.2)

See this Solaris FAQ for a summary of SunOS/Solaris versions.

Looks like somebody with a network sniffer, a few free hours, and perl could hack up something that looks to them like a regular user, while the owner of said perl scripts has free dsl access without the advertisement horror.
Now, personally, I avoid free providers like this, their service tends to suck bowling balls through a garden hose, and I'm a firm believer of tanstaafl, but I always wonder...

-John

It's a lost cause, and perhaps an artificial distinction, especially since the "Caltech Football Hack" is really a crack as far as I can see. This is part of the "New Hacker's Dictionary" which is supposed to be informing non-hackers about hacker culture.

It's a lost cause, and perhaps an artificial distinction, especially since the "Caltech Football Hack" is really a crack as far as I can see. This is part of the "New Hacker's Dictionary" which is supposed to be informing non-hackers about hacker culture.

IANAL?
No offense, but I have NO CLUE what that expression means. I'm saying this anonymously and with much cowardice.

I Am Not A Laywer.

I wanted to suggest the The Computer Jargon file... but it's not in there!

Go figure.

I will one day release the source code for this, but I'll have to find the time first (and clean it up...).

But AFAIK, the absolute "pioneer" is Phillip Dykstra who also published a paper on the subject titled X11 in Virtual Environments: Combining Computer Interaction Methodologies. He once had a page on it at http://info.arl.army.mil/~phil/xvr/ but I see it's gone now.

Old IBM Mainframes did it. See the jargon file:

DEADBEEF /ded-beef/ /n./ The hexadecimal word-fill pattern for freshly allocated memory (decimal -21524111) under a number of IBM environments, including the RS/6000. Some modern debugging tools deliberately fill freed memory with this value as a way of converting heisenbugs into Bohr bugs. As in "Your program is DEADBEEF" (meaning gone, aborted, flushed from memory); if you start from an odd half-word boundary, of course, you have BEEFDEAD. See also the anecdote under fool.

Phrack is underground magazine that started in the days of phreaking. Using different methods to bypass phone charges.

See the jargon file. "phreaking /freek'ing/ /n./ [from `phone phreak'] 1. The art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to
make free long-distance calls). 2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on
communications networks) (see cracking). "

Now adays, and in the old days phrack exposes new security holes, gives ideas about new directions to look for security holes (as in the last issue when they mentioned client apps should be invesitigated - over servers). They also have informative pieces about new and complicated technologies sometimes exposing the underlying system.

Phrack is almost always a difficult read, but new releases always mean more tools for script kiddies to run around with for a month or two.

Joseph Elwell.

These holy wars ("holy wares" - Freudian typo?) have been around as long as, ooh, as long as the jargon dictionary can remember. It's unlikely that /. will ever be immune, in the same way that IRC/bulletin boards/USENET/any given mailing list/a meeting of bofhs will never be truly immune.

Oh, by the way: use emacs. Or joe if you have to.

This thread is over. You lose.

BASIC

BASIC /bay'-sic/ /n./ [acronym: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code] A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which has since become the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential wizards a year.

David Gould

Check out the Jargon file entry on double bucky complete with this song:

Double Bucky
Double bucky, you're the one!
You make my keyboard lots of fun.
Double bucky, an additional bit or two:
(Vo-vo-de-o!)
Control and meta, side by side,
Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide!
Double bucky! Half a thousand glyphs, plus a few!
Oh,
I sure wish that I
Had a couple of
Bits more!
Perhaps a
Set of pedals to
Make the number of
Bits four:
Double double bucky!
Double bucky, left and right
OR'd together, outta sight!
Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of
Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of
Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of you!
--- The Great Quux (with apologies to Jeffrey Moss)

I'd like to see some of these whiners who are so up in arms about Jon referring to his activities as "hacking" define the word. To me, hacking means tinkering with something just to see what you can do. This sounds like what Jon is doing; trying out different programs just to see what they are, tweaking settings to see the effects. Apparently, the narrow (and narrow-minded) definition involves designing a kernel from scratch or something like that. I know ESR is The Great Satan these days, but I like his Jargon File definition of hack.

This is "News for Nerds", not "News for Losers".
As I said before, look first at ESR's Jargon File:
cracking n. The act of breaking into a computer system; what a cracker does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre hackers
Therefore they should be called "cracking organizations", not "hacking organizations".
Other documentation of interest is: http://info.wins.uva.nl/~mes /jargon/l/Lamer-speak.html, and definitions of hacker, cracker, phreaking, samourai, hacker ethic, warez d00d

This is "News for Nerds", not "News for Losers".
As I said before, look first at ESR's Jargon File:
cracking n. The act of breaking into a computer system; what a cracker does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre hackers
Therefore they should be called "cracking organizations", not "hacking organizations".
Other documentation of interest is: http://info.wins.uva.nl/~mes /jargon/l/Lamer-speak.html, and definitions of hacker, cracker, phreaking, samourai, hacker ethic, warez d00d

This is "News for Nerds", not "News for Losers".
As I said before, look first at ESR's Jargon File:
cracking n. The act of breaking into a computer system; what a cracker does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre hackers
Therefore they should be called "cracking organizations", not "hacking organizations".
Other documentation of interest is: http://info.wins.uva.nl/~mes /jargon/l/Lamer-speak.html, and definitions of hacker, cracker, phreaking, samourai, hacker ethic, warez d00d

This is "News for Nerds", not "News for Losers".
As I said before, look first at ESR's Jargon File:
cracking n. The act of breaking into a computer system; what a cracker does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre hackers
Therefore they should be called "cracking organizations", not "hacking organizations".
Other documentation of interest is: http://info.wins.uva.nl/~mes /jargon/l/Lamer-speak.html, and definitions of hacker, cracker, phreaking, samourai, hacker ethic, warez d00d

This is "News for Nerds", not "News for Losers".
As I said before, look first at ESR's Jargon File:
cracking n. The act of breaking into a computer system; what a cracker does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre hackers
Therefore they should be called "cracking organizations", not "hacking organizations".
Other documentation of interest is: http://info.wins.uva.nl/~mes /jargon/l/Lamer-speak.html, and definitions of hacker, cracker, phreaking, samourai, hacker ethic, warez d00d

This is "News for Nerds", not "News for Losers".
As I said before, look first at ESR's Jargon File:
cracking n. The act of breaking into a computer system; what a cracker does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre hackers
Therefore they should be called "cracking organizations", not "hacking organizations".
Other documentation of interest is: http://info.wins.uva.nl/~mes /jargon/l/Lamer-speak.html, and definitions of hacker, cracker, phreaking, samourai, hacker ethic, warez d00d

This is "News for Nerds", not "News for Losers".
As I said before, look first at ESR's Jargon File:
cracking n. The act of breaking into a computer system; what a cracker does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre hackers
Therefore they should be called "cracking organizations", not "hacking organizations".
Other documentation of interest is: http://info.wins.uva.nl/~mes /jargon/l/Lamer-speak.html, and definitions of hacker, cracker, phreaking, samourai, hacker ethic, warez d00d