Slashdot Mirror
Domain: wm.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to wm.edu.
Comments · 60
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Re:SHIN
A University in Virginia has a Student Information Network (SIN). I tell you sin can be a powerful thing.
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Re:SHIN
A University in Virginia has a Student Information Network (SIN). I tell you sin can be a powerful thing.
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it sure is NSA approved (a Good Thing(tm))Why are you slashdotters so paranoid of the NSA? It stands for National Security Agency. NSA are not the bad guys; it's the big corporations and bureaucrats that we need to worry about.
Back in the 70's the NSA delayed the release of DES, for reasons which they could not disclose at the time.
NSA knew of a then-classified attack against DES known as differential cryptanalysis. NSA could not disclose why they delayed the release of DES, they could only say that they were still working on it. Lots of people speculated NSA was inserting a "secret backdoor", when actually they were ensuring the national standard for data encryption would be secure against even secret attacks than only NSA knew about at the time.
Of course, the complete design criteria for DES were not published at that time. Since not all of the steps in the algorithm seemed logical at the time, people got real suspicious. AES, on the other hand, is pretty straightforward.
For more background, check out this history of DES, or Eli Biham'sthese papers on differential cryptanalysys.
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Re:makes you wonder...I'm not posting anonymously, and am without doubt pro-life. What we fear is the discrimination that most people prefer to utilize when dealing with the pro-life movement. That is to write us off as lunatics, crazies, violent drooling christian hordes of which most of us could hardly be described as.
"the so-called "pro-life" [highly ironic since people have been killed in the "pro-life" battle] movement wants to impose their will on all others. pro-choice does not. "
FYI, Pro-Choicers Are not Innocent in the Violence Issue
Dr. Bruce Steir, Abortionist, Charged With Murder
before you continue basing your opinion in the misconception that the pro-choice side is any less violent to grown-up people (as they are already are encouraging the killing of the unborn from 2 weeks to 9 months).
We here at Anarchists for Life took a stand against violence when we adopted this as part of our faq that "We do not support violence inside or outside of abortion clinics. We do support peaceful protest." We are hardly alone on the issue
Pat Goltz's Pro-life and Feminist Writings
Leftout: A Haven for Progressive (Liberal) Pro-Lifers
Pro-Woman, Pro-Life: Stop Abortion
Check Your Stereotypes At the Door
Rennaissance Suffragettes (Pro-Life Feminism)
Atheist and Agnostic Pro-Life League
RightGrrl: Conservative Pro-Life Women
An American Patriot's Page of Thanks
Matt Wallace: A Pro-Life/Anti-Violence Secular Humanist Atheist
Rochester Area Right To Life Committee (Rochester, NY)
Indiana University Students for Life
David Horne's Gay Pro-life Christian Homepage
In Susan B. Anthony's Footsteps: Pro-Woman, Pro-Life! Webring
The New Abolitionists (or "Funny, I Don't Feel Like A Conservative!")
STAAR: Standing Together Against Abortion Rights (Canada)
Weird Politik: Because Politics Can be Very Strange Sometimes
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Re:From the admin of WEBVEIL.COMJust in case anyone's curious, of the 37 anonymous service providers listed a WebVeil, this week's unscientific popularity ranking (based on links to the service sites) is:
- COTSE Anonymizer (9.29%)
- TheWebSurfer (8.89%)
- HideIP (7.15%)
- Anon.XG.NU (6.98%)
- Anonymyth (6.58%)
- SilentSurf (6.25%)
- AnonyMouse (5.18%)
- IDMask (4.45%)
- SnoopBlock (4.39%)
- SilentBrowser (4.05%)
- i-SafetyNet (3.60%)
- Surfola (3.49%)
- i-Security (3.60%)
- the-Cloak (3.26%)
- WayHaven (EarthProxy) (3.24%)
- SpaceProxy (2.87%)
- OperatorPat (2.42%)
- Exonet Gateway (2.31% even though it's disabled...go figure)
- MagusNet (1.86%)
- AceSpySurfer (1.24% also disabled)
The position in the chart may have something to do with skewing click-through. Those listed in the Free table are more popular than the others, even if the pay services host a free/demo version (Anonymizer, Siegesoft, Rewebber, IDZAP and Freedom all fall in the last 17). We have no way of knowing if this is representative of marketshare. Probably not. Anonymizer.Com probably ranks number among all usage of anonymizing services.
Point being...well, I guess I have none other than to point out the breadth of easy options (and as an excuse to post a link to WebVeil. You might argue that these anonymizers are just the tools of pornography seekers, message board troublemakers, or the overly paranoid. I couldn't say, but I submit that anonymity is neither good nor bad. It just is. The act or expression itself is what should be characterized, not the mechanism that makes the act or expression non-attributable.
Here's A. Michael Froomkin's familiar essay on "Anonymity and It's Enmities".
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What about...Of course there have always been:
- The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology,
The Journal of Online Law,
The Virginia Journal of Law and Technology,
The Berkeley Journal of Law and Technology,
The Stanford Technology Law Review, and
The Berkman Center for Internet & Technology
-Alex
- The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology,
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A Success Story
This may sound like a shameless plug but at least it's on topic
I am one of the programmers for The College of William and Mary's student community, The Student Information Network. We've been providing essential student services for over two years (log in as 'guest' and check it out), and we're entirely student run.
Which means, of course, when the time came to run the student elections online, everyone was worried that apathy and ballot stuffing would come to the fore. On February 29, 2000, the entire student body had the chance to vote from any web browser. Needless to say, we had a lot of sleepless nights
The results were spectacular!
- So here were the results
- To those who said that voting online was more inconvenient than voting at a dining hall (we set up computer stations at dining halls, and public access computer labs could be used for voting as well) -- we had a 43% voter turnout.
- To those who feared ballot stuffing -- We monitored the logs at all times and maintained many many backups of our PGP encrypted database. It was a fair election.
It may be noted humorously that, as befits most college elections, a lot of people ran for positions unopposed -- why fear ballot stuffing thenIn conclusion, not only am I showing that online elections are doable, but that they are a pleasure to do. If I'm not mistaken, that makes us the first university to have full, binding student body elections entirely online in the nation. Can someone show a date of such an election earlier than Feb 29, 2000 in case we are wrong? I'm curious.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled grits.
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A Success Story
This may sound like a shameless plug but at least it's on topic
I am one of the programmers for The College of William and Mary's student community, The Student Information Network. We've been providing essential student services for over two years (log in as 'guest' and check it out), and we're entirely student run.
Which means, of course, when the time came to run the student elections online, everyone was worried that apathy and ballot stuffing would come to the fore. On February 29, 2000, the entire student body had the chance to vote from any web browser. Needless to say, we had a lot of sleepless nights
The results were spectacular!
- So here were the results
- To those who said that voting online was more inconvenient than voting at a dining hall (we set up computer stations at dining halls, and public access computer labs could be used for voting as well) -- we had a 43% voter turnout.
- To those who feared ballot stuffing -- We monitored the logs at all times and maintained many many backups of our PGP encrypted database. It was a fair election.
It may be noted humorously that, as befits most college elections, a lot of people ran for positions unopposed -- why fear ballot stuffing thenIn conclusion, not only am I showing that online elections are doable, but that they are a pleasure to do. If I'm not mistaken, that makes us the first university to have full, binding student body elections entirely online in the nation. Can someone show a date of such an election earlier than Feb 29, 2000 in case we are wrong? I'm curious.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled grits.
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XML and an interesting personal experience
I am the sysadmin of a college online community (www.sin.wm.edu) and we've run into interesting issues. We are considering paying for a weather service to give us weather information every 10 odd minutes for us to parse and put into a web page.
This is because our old plan, that is parsing the Weather Channel home page's weather information for our region, has become legally suspect. At least our lawyers tell us so!
This is funny for two reasons:
1. It can't be legally suspect because of content. Please don't tell me the Weather Channel online has copyright to the weather. Weather is by definition public domain and I don't see any copyright infringement from using the information therein. Would you get in trouble for telling someone else what the weather is by word of mouth, without accrediting TWC? Weather is weather!
2. It can't be legally suspect because of implementation. We're not using the Weather Channel's implementation *at all*. Their layout is theirs, and we're just using the (aforementioned, public domain) content. They have an entirely different HTML structure, we actually parse out all the HTML and formatting and use the bare, public do main weather content.
So if it's not the content, and not the implementation, what is it? Why are our lawyers jumpy? It almost sounds as if the Weather Channel would get angry because we dared to rebroadcast the weather data they rebroadcasted from the National Weather Advisory (or whatever the organizational body's name is)... At least in the eyes of our paranoid lawyers. The Weather Channel hasn't bothered.
This leads to another issue. I promised you XML in the title and XML you wil get. XML's entire raison d'etre (reason for existence) is to make parsing of information easier. Yet, if we are to deal with a generation of confused copyright lawyers who aren't sure if parsing is legal or not, what's the point? XML makes content implementation-free, that is to say if I parse, TAG FOR TAG, the information off of the Weather Channel 2000's XML Weather Page, then my implementation and their implementation can be drastically different, but we could have the same DTD's and therefore the same content.
And the content is, unless you are seeing something I'm not, public domain. Please tell me weather is public domain. If it's otherwise, I'm going to kill myself now.
Do DTD's count as content, or implementation, or is it an open standard that is to be used as all (read: "public domain") I'm not sure, but if more incidents occur such as ours, then we should look into:
1. Reconsidering XML
2. Reconsidering what constitutes public domain
3. Firing our lawyers and hiring a younger generation
That's my $0.02
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I might have an answer
If you live on the east coast, esp. if you live in Virginia, you might want to think about the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA. It is definitly a place where you learn more than just a set of tools. Did I mention almost all of the CS dept. machines run Linux?:) Visit the web page http://www.cs.wm.edu for more info.