Slashdot Mirror

Frums writes: "Today is the 50th birthday of the UNIVAC I (UNIversal Automatic Computer), the first commercial computer. It was quite a beast: 16,000 lbs, 5000 vacuum tubes measuring 9 inches by 2 inches, and an amazing 1000 instructions executed per second! The first UNIVAC was sold to the US Census bureau where it revolutionized data storage from them. No longer did they have to use punch cards, UNIVAC supported storage on metal tape! The US Census bureau still maintains a plaque commemorating the computer. It reads "Bureau of the Census dedicated the world's first electronic general purpose data processing computer, UNIVAC I, on June 14, 1951. Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation" Happy Birthday, UNIVAC I!" Wired has a brief story about it.

Chibi writes: "Wired has an article about Altavista creating a new application that allows corporations to search their own networks, e-mail systems, and computers. It allows for certain areas to be designated off-limits and companies can determine who has access to the application. They claim it is a tool to increase productivity, but what are the chances it will be used to monitor people instead?" As the article points out, if a business implements this kind of desktop snooping, though, they could face additional liability as well.

sil points to an article at Wired which says that Attorney General John Ashcroft told Congress (specifically, the House Judiciary Committee) this week that "Justice Department prosecutors would help state officials imprison sex-site operators that feature obscene images." "I wonder how one would be affected on the international level. So much for freedom of speech, and expression." says sil. Full article on Wired.

mtstump writes "Wired is running a story stating that Napster has signed deals with three of the five major recording companies in an effort to make Napster legit." It's the perfect model: the users pay you *and* for the bandwidth to share the songs they already bought. Course I still don't see the benefit for us. No doubt we'll see more of these deals as napster becomes less relevant and decentralized networks grow in popularity.

mtstump writes "Wired is running a story stating that Napster has signed deals with three of the five major recording companies in an effort to make Napster legit." It's the perfect model: the users pay you *and* for the bandwidth to share the songs they already bought. Course I still don't see the benefit for us. No doubt we'll see more of these deals as napster becomes less relevant and decentralized networks grow in popularity.

mod you later writes: "Wired is reporting that PGP is ten years old - and is giving a summary of the growth and political issues that PGP has gone through." Congratulations to Phil Zimmerman for the courage to release it despite opposition from various Official People, too. Has PGP changed your life?

mod you later writes: "Wired is reporting that PGP is ten years old - and is giving a summary of the growth and political issues that PGP has gone through." Congratulations to Phil Zimmerman for the courage to release it despite opposition from various Official People, too. Has PGP changed your life?

tulare writes: "According to this story at Wired, a research team is developing a way to replace the steel core inside high-capacity electrical power transmission lines with a fiberoptic core, which apparantly could provide a dual benefit: a 200% increase in emergency transmission capacity along with the ability to "carry several gigabits of data per second." (Per line?) There are a few kinks to work out - like how to splice the data in and out of the lines, but the story talks about an initial rollout date in 2003. Not soon enough to bail Californians out of the current crunch, but considering the benefits (less line sag, greater capacity without building new towers/routes), the effort certainly seems worthwhile." There's some more info from the researchers at this site as well.

howardjp writes: "Scott McNealy's editorial, The Case Against Absolute Privacy", appeared in this morning's edition of the Washington Post. He seems to think keeping records on the public is a good idea..." McNealy is famous for his "You have zero privacy anyway, get over it" quote.

dattaway writes: "Hormel has given up complaining about 'spam' referring to junk e-mail and makes a good point about our trademark system." Hormel has actually seemed pretty quiet, even good natured, on this front for a long time -- unlike certain companies, they haven't attempted to throttle everyone using those fateful four letters in sequence. (And that would have made them look bad, anyhow. Language evolves.) Now if only they would send infinite supplies of can-cooked spiced pink meat to the nasty kind of spammers ...

Lukenary writes: "For years, Cisco and Juniper have been stuck in the "smart fringes, dumb core" view of routers and the Internet. If Larry Roberts and his new company, Caspian Networks, have their way, all those promises you've heard about the Web being the new entertainment medium may play out. "Smart" routers will be able to pick out different types of packets (text, voice, media, etc.) and intelligently sequence them to their destination more efficiently. Broadband that can really stream high-quality multimedia. Worldwide, high-quality IP-based long-distance telephone. Even faster dialup connections." While the Wired reporter doesn't question the greatness of these new routers, what it means is that the backbone companies gain greater control over what traffic they will and won't permit, what they'll speed up and slow down, etc. This is likely to increase their profits at the expense of the health and dynamicism of the overall network. ("You're a residential customer, you can't serve data, only consume it!") These are the issues we've looked at before here and here.

Logic Bomb writes: "Wired has a story about Aaron, a computer program under development since 1973 that is supposed to creatively make art. Some people have probably heard about Aaron and its creator Harold Cohen before, since this has been in progress for so long. Aaron is nowhere near finished (will it ever be?), but it's far enough along that Ray Kurzweil thinks everyone should get a look. He has sponsored the creation of an Aaron screensaver for Windows that will continuously create 'original paintings' on your idle PC. You can download a trial version for free." Aaron is also programmed in LISP; as I recall it's also one of the many cool things talked about in the truly strange The Secret Guide To Computers (ISBN: 0939151278).

An unnamed reader writes: "I thought this was kind of interesting. AOL has implemented a new form of parental controls, using neural net AI instead of hand-picked "lists". They seem to be willing to accept that no automated solution is infallible, and offer end-users the ability to vote to block or unblock sites. If there is an acceptible solution to parental filtering (not mandatory filtering, mind you. This scenario leaves it up to the parents), the seeming efficiency of neural net ai (at least, as efficient as the input) coupled with end-user's ability to influence the filter state seems to be it. The company that developed the AI in partnership with AOL (RuleSpace) doesn't appear to have much to say on the internals. Anybody know any AOL users who have tried it yet? If the market is pushing towards optional filtering, what would make for a better solution?"

Ant writes: "Celera Genomics said Friday that it has completed the assembly of the mouse genome. The genetics research company, which began the sequencing process a year ago, said its map now ensures greater than 99 percent representation of the genome." From rice to mice to humans, the mapping continues.

A reader writes: "Apparently the Napster Judge has thrown her hands up on the case. Napster has argued, successfully, that they cannot keep up with all the file name variations (and there's an interesting argument for the "Fab Four")."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "IBM is looking to build self-policing networks with project eLiza, as reported in Wired. Sounds pretty cool, but I don't see it being all that effective. And if it is, security teams will get pretty lax, and not be able to handle an attack that breaks eLiza." Also a USA Today article. It's a insightful idea, and one that I'm sure will *eventually* become part of many major networks, but somehow I suspect that this is one of those things that appears difficult on the surface, and turns out to be ten times as difficult when you get into it.

ParticleGirl writes "This morning, congress called for a federal ban on human cloning. The associated press has an article. This follows the International Cloning Ban which took effect last month. This is research into human cloning for any reason, this is "importing a clone" ...a kid born of cloning overseas can't come into the U.S.? And other weird stuff." If god is all powerful, then can't this just be another way he works? Personally I don't care if there's a god or not: I want clones. I wanna grow spare hearts in a vat. I wanna have a brainless clone in a tube in case I blow out my liver drinking whiskey. And as soon as we get really good with the genetic engineering, I want my own half height clone to mow my lawn.

Matt Watson writes "Here is a link over to a story on wired that talks about the upcoming chess match in Spain between the world's top 4 computer chess programs. The winner will go on to play Vladimir Kramnik for the second round of human vs computer chess. I think that "deep fritz" sounds the coolest and my money is on that one. Read the article from Wired"

seldolivaw writes: "You might be interested in this Wired article, a fairly good summary of why monolithic media is a bad idea, and exactly how close the US already is. Funny quote: "There are six or seven media conglomerates that rule the world... [b]ut how many companies do you need to provide programming to mass audiences? Six companies should be enough. At least it's not two." America, head for the hills -- I'm safe in the UK, not!"

call -151 writes: "Interesting article at wired about how since 1997, 205 laptops have disappeared from the British Defense Ministry most with classified info. Oops, left my laptop on the bus... So now the plan is to have ``a built-in electronic self-destruct mechanism that erases a laptop's hard drive if the case is opened by force'' when the code is forgotten, as well as ''a tracking feature that allows a computer gone astray to call home." Maybe we'll see some of this tech trickle down to other interesting uses ..." Maybe vigilante justice in the future will consist of LoJacked laptops allowed to be stolen, with the Semtex inside blown up via 802.11. Hey -- business method patent ...

Sarcasmo writes: "The FCC has taken a break from it's normal routine of censorship and, uhhhh.......censorship, to remind everyone what it wants to protect us from. The full 28 page report will tell you what words are acceptable, and what words are naughty." A quick guide: Howard Stern - BAD, Monty Python - BAD, Schindler's List - GOOD.

We've gotten several submissions of this Wired story about life on space station Alpha. The story was written from these logs (which we linked to a few days ago) kept by the commander of the most recent ISS mission. So, let me recommend the logs once again - like the Wired reporter, I found them fascinating reading. For instance, the commander describes losing a washer because everyone's hands were full and they couldn't grab it - obviously letting go of dozens of washers to grab one, in zero-gravity, would not be a good idea - and they can't just "put them down" somewhere.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to a Wired story, a company called Pedagog USA wants to have its cameras be as ubiquitious as cell phones and computers, except that the cameras would be spying on the public. These cameras are pretty cheap and easy to install. Scott Fry, of Pedagog USA, appears to think that if they like it in England, it must be loved here!" The story mentions the slow slide in Great Britain when the public became convinced that surveillance would prevent crimes...

An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to a Wired story, a company called Pedagog USA wants to have its cameras be as ubiquitious as cell phones and computers, except that the cameras would be spying on the public. These cameras are pretty cheap and easy to install. Scott Fry, of Pedagog USA, appears to think that if they like it in England, it must be loved here!" The story mentions the slow slide in Great Britain when the public became convinced that surveillance would prevent crimes...

nilstar writes: "Cnet has a story here about how Microsoft will revamp its "draconian" privacy policy. Better yet.... how about we get a warning on the bottom of the IE6 window saying that this site's privacy policy is unnacceptable every time someone logs on to a passport site." Looks like it has already been changed. Update 10AM EST by J : Make sure to check out the Wired story too. Jason Catlett of Junkbusters nails it: "if Microsoft doesn't know what's in its own terms of service regarding personal information, then what hope do its customers have for the privacy of their own information?"

andyNola writes "It was exactly 33 years ago this week that 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in theaters. Beings with ten digits don't normally get excited about 33rd anniversaries, cept in this case it's... well, you know... actually 2001. According to this timeline, the world premiere was in Washington, DC on the 2nd, followed by New York (April 3) and Los Angeles (April 4). LIFE Magazine got the first crack at it (March 29)... Here's Q&A with Arthur C. Clarke on the 25th anniversary." Yeah, we shoulda posted this yesterday, but this is definitely noteworthy. Methinks I should dig up my DVD and watch it again soon.

Wired reports that eBay is changing its privacy policy. Previously they had promised that, if the company gets sold, your personal data will not be sold. Well, now it will be. Don't like it? Don't use eBay. Or any other site which, as "part of an industry-wide shift in privacy policy," decides to do this too. The funny thing is, eBay has spammed me a couple of times in the last six months with useless notices, after I specifically asked them not to. One was even to say basically, "you said you didn't want to receive spam, but we've expired that preference, so you'll have to tell us again, and meanwhile, have some spam!" But a change in their privacy policy -- they must not think that's very important, because I haven't heard a word.

mansoft was one of several to send us a followup to last week's story about the massive MSIE/Outlook security hole. He points us to this Wired news article: "Your computer may not be protected against a recently discovered and dangerous security hole -- despite all claims to the contrary from Microsoft." Ack! If you tried the patch and got the message, "This update does not need to be installed on this system," you may need to upgrade your IE and re-patch. I'm amazed at how poorly this has been handled. I'll be even more amazed if there is no fallout. If Melissa or ILOVEYOU had been able to install backdoors as they spread, that would have really, really sucked. Update: 04/03 04:24 PM GMT by J : According to this Wired story, Microsoft was given six weeks of silence to prepare and issue the patch.

mansoft was one of several to send us a followup to last week's story about the massive MSIE/Outlook security hole. He points us to this Wired news article: "Your computer may not be protected against a recently discovered and dangerous security hole -- despite all claims to the contrary from Microsoft." Ack! If you tried the patch and got the message, "This update does not need to be installed on this system," you may need to upgrade your IE and re-patch. I'm amazed at how poorly this has been handled. I'll be even more amazed if there is no fallout. If Melissa or ILOVEYOU had been able to install backdoors as they spread, that would have really, really sucked. Update: 04/03 04:24 PM GMT by J : According to this Wired story, Microsoft was given six weeks of silence to prepare and issue the patch.

Wired has a story about the Secret Service raiding one of the several firms that promise to exchange your old-fashioned greenbacks for even more old-fashioned gold - the idea being that E-gold is a better medium of exchange than those boring currencies backed by national governments. Unfortunately it seems that the primary use of e-gold seems to be turning stolen credit cards into cold, hard, ca.... errr, gold. (Update: 03/30 5:19 PM by michael : The headline has been changed to make it clear that the raided company is a company distinct from E-gold. The business relationship between the two companies is not entirely clear.)

spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "It's only based on one reported sighting (i.e. it could be bulls**t), but anti-virus software hacks Central Command say they have found the first Windows/Linux cross-platform virus. It appears only to be a proof of concept with no malicious payload, and targets Windows PE files or Linux ELF files once it recognises the infected OS." There are stories at CNET and at Wired as well, not to mention at NewsForge. Despite the Wired story causually saying so, though, this is anything but an "equal opportunity" virus, except in that it seems to infect multiple media sources without discrimination. When was the last time you ran unknown programs (as root) on your machine, then manually copied them (and ran as root) on another machine as well?

More on privacy as seen by legislators; a hopefully luckfilled update on graphics software you may be waiting for; and a denial from Germany on the "getting rid of Microsoft software" claims touted not long ago. All below in tonight's episode of Slashback.

Buried in the fine print is where you will find Jimmy Hoffa and mitigation. Sarcasmo writes "I'm hoping you'll post this story, since it's partly a correction/update of a previous story on Slashdot. While Senator Edwards' bill, S. 197, does come down on spyware in a very good way, it doesn't as the previous article suggested, "require commercial web sites to ask permission from the user before a cookie can be set or personal information collected." To quote the bill itself:

"(B) The term does not include a text file, or cookie, placed on a person's computer system by an Internet service provider, interactive computer service, or commercial Internet website to return information to the Internet service provider, interactive computer service, commercial Internet website, or third party if the person subsequently uses the Internet service provider or interactive computer service, or accesses the commercial Internet website."

Though I did come across this bill introduced to the house by Representative Green of Texas -- and it seems to come down just as hard on cookie use specifically."

Oh, baby, I love your photo-realism -- it's so ... real-seeming. After wryly noting that the last few times it's been featured in this forum it's been while he was on a plane, or in the middle of bug-fixing, or while being boiled alive by cannibals, etc, Paul Nolan says of his Photogenics graphics software:

"Well, it was a long hard slog, but it's finally out, the press release is here.

There's a pretty good chance there will be a local power outage today, on the off chance that would increase my chances ;)"

Nicht wahr, nicht wahr. sconeu writes "According to Wired, a German Defense Ministry official has denied the original report in Der Speigel about the Microsoft ban ... Oh well..."

Judg3 writes: "Salon.Com announced Tuesday that their readers will have a choice: Continue to read for free, dodging new, bigger CNET-style ads, or they pay $30 a year to read Salon's daily news and views, plus bonus content, in a blissfully ad-free environment." Is it worth doing something like that here? I don't read Salon enough to care, but I'd love it if a few bucks removed the ads from CNN. Slashdot's ads aren't really all that obtrusive, most of the time anyway :( If it's something people want, we could certainly consider it.

baptiste writes "I came across a story in Wired News that on first glance had to be a joke. The scary part is, its not. The RIAA is looking to start their own MP3 streaming services, but they are also trying to stiff the song writers who hold copyrights on the lyrics. The RIAA doesn't want to pay the songwriters royalties on streamed copies of songs and has petitioned the U.S. Copyright Office to settle the matter. I highly recommend you read the petition - if you didn't know better, you'd think it was from Napster or MP3.com. The irony is almost too much."

baptiste writes "I came across a story in Wired News that on first glance had to be a joke. The scary part is, its not. The RIAA is looking to start their own MP3 streaming services, but they are also trying to stiff the song writers who hold copyrights on the lyrics. The RIAA doesn't want to pay the songwriters royalties on streamed copies of songs and has petitioned the U.S. Copyright Office to settle the matter. I highly recommend you read the petition - if you didn't know better, you'd think it was from Napster or MP3.com. The irony is almost too much."

rev420 writes "Wired is reporting that Napster traffic has fallen by 60% since it instituted it's (er, the labels') name-blocking scheme. Despite their best efforts, few people seem to be finding name-scramblers like Catnap to be useful and the Aimster's Pig-Latin encoder is no longer available because Napster requested that it be disabled." No big shocker here.

Chris Soghoian writes: "According to a Wired News story, IBM is going to feature Tux as part of it's 'Peace, Love & Linux' ad campaign. Apparently, the campaign is going to kick off with a 6-story Tux billboard in Times Square next week." I'm looking forward to seeing the CG Tux TV ads.

An anonymous reader writes: "Wired is running this article about Idealab creating new TLDs. They propose to do it with a browser plug-in. Many people are upset with ICANN, but is having an incubator distribute new code any better?" If it makes ICANN nervous, I think I'm all for it. If it won't work with browsers besides the Top Two, though, then I guess I'll miss out on dot-duh ...

jij writes "Have you seen this? File-trading network Aimster is using an unusual shield to protect its users from snooping: copyright law sponsored by the recording industry. Wired has the story." This is a cute hack, but I really wonder how well it will stand up in court. One of the basic concepts in law is the idea of "unclean hands", where a party may not get relief when they too are breaking the law. In theory, this should prevent the music industry from being able to successfully sue Aimster. But in practice, judges are going to want to rule for the noble music industry against the evil music pirates.

zephc writes "Wired is reporting that a group of researchers are working with an artificial language of whistles in an attempt to communicate with dolphins."

xpccx writes "There's an article on Wired about a team of Anglo-French scientists that have "...sequenced the genetic map of the leprosy bacterium which could point to new ways to diagnose and treat the disfiguring disease that strikes 700,000 people every year." It's interesting to note that the scientists discovered that "...the bacterium that causes leprosy seems to have lost nearly half of its nonessential genes, more than any other organisms studied so far." This research was published in Nature."

xpccx writes "There's an article on Wired about a team of Anglo-French scientists that have "...sequenced the genetic map of the leprosy bacterium which could point to new ways to diagnose and treat the disfiguring disease that strikes 700,000 people every year." It's interesting to note that the scientists discovered that "...the bacterium that causes leprosy seems to have lost nearly half of its nonessential genes, more than any other organisms studied so far." This research was published in Nature."

blkros writes: "Over on Wired there's an article about Deja News and the plans to try to get Google to open source the Usenet archives it got when it bought Deja News. Part of the plan is to have the Library of Congress oversee it and put it on university mainframes. Google has taken the archives off the web for now Aaagh!"

Two nuggets from the FBI today - this: "Freedom of speech apparently doesn't apply to some topics. Take cute animals, for example. If it had been BonsaiSloth.com, we probably wouldn't seeing this." And this: "It seems that the FBI is changing Carnivore's name to "DCS1000" apparently because it 'made the system sound like a predatory device made to invade people's privacy'. I'm sure a snide remark about "truth in advertising" fits here."

xmutex writes "Wired has a story about a documentary concerning the history of Linux and the open-source movement." I've heard bits and pieces from people at LWCE about the movie, but won't know for myself until I get a chance to see it. I guess its airing tonight in NY, and if you're at the show, you can get tickets from the OSDN booth.

villoks writes "Doug Miller, Microsoft's group product manager for competitive strategies is trying desperately to find arguments against Linux." Many really good points, and many other equally bad ones.

kastaverious writes: "I found this on Scientific American. It talks about developments in all optical switching and the growth in capacity of optical fiber. The article has some interesting graphs of bandwidth demand and the growth in bandwidth availabilty. There is also a good explanation of some of the technical issues involved in increasing switching capacity, and efforts underway to overcome these problems." The article also has lots of good SciAm-style graphics. This short article at Janes also sheds some light on the world on undersea cable laying, which also recalls the article Neal Stephenson wrote for Wired a few years ago.

msuzio writes "Wired is reporting on British ISPs who are mad as hell about RIP. The report talks about the ISPs dealing with unreasonable requests (archive all traffic for seven years), stupid cops ("What is a Hotmail account?"), and the threat that ISPs will move offshore. There is also a great teaser at the end about Moot, a product to enable commonly available data encryption to UK users to combat RIP."

msuzio writes "Wired is reporting on British ISPs who are mad as hell about RIP. The report talks about the ISPs dealing with unreasonable requests (archive all traffic for seven years), stupid cops ("What is a Hotmail account?"), and the threat that ISPs will move offshore. There is also a great teaser at the end about Moot, a product to enable commonly available data encryption to UK users to combat RIP."

Talespinner writes: "Wired has this article on THX certification being ready for the PC. Lucasfilm, in combination with Dell, created the new THX-certification standard for the PC. The new systems for Dell start around $2000 and come ready with "multimedia speakers, Dolby Digital surround sound and integrated audio and video systems." "