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Iranian Coup Plotters Exposed By PDF File
Renfield writes: "Security Focus has the details on how the New York Times released a SECRET CIA report on the Agency-sponsored 1953 Iranian coup on their Web site as a PDF file, with the names of foreign agents covered up with black lines and boxes. It turns out the Times didn't merge layers, and John Young of Cryptome discovered that by freezing the rendering at the right time, he could view the edited text before the black boxes covered them. He's putting up the full, unedited document on his site now. The Times says he's endangering lives, but why, oh why, didn't they use eraser tool, and how many other PDF files, Word documents, etc., contain more than meets the eye?" I wonder if there are any "aggressive" pdf viewers built to scan for just such information, too.
The fight against .doc can be accomplished without mentioning Unix, Linux, proprietary vs. open formats, etc. at all. When someone sends me a Word document, I simply reply "Please re-send this in text/HTML/RTF, I don't have or use Microsoft Word."
Word (and most other Office apps) have a "Send as mail" option hanging off the File menu. If Microsoft were not evil greedy bastards, that option would pop up a warning telling the user that the receiver of the message might not be able to read it, and then give the user a choice of 'Convert to HTML' or 'Attach in Word format'.
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Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Besides, what am I *supposed* to do? Ignore the document?
Depends. If you're in business, what you are supposed to do is get Office for Windows or the Mac. The business world has standardized on Word format. Resent it all you want, but welcome to the real world.
At least until the competing office suites get a clue and realize that Office compatibility is the ONLY feature that matters. That should be the number 1 priority. It is absolute idiocy that import/export of Office is so brain-damaged in all these suites, after all this time (in WP's case). They should not put in one more feature until that is rock solid.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Yeah, I'll say. What the fuck was the US thinking, sending hundreds of thousands of troops to liberate France?
All those white crosses at Normandy, that's a monument to American selfishness, right?
On the other hand, US foreign policy in the Pacific before the war was selfish, not to mention incredibly short-sighted. We wanted to rape China just like the Europeans.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
It's been a while since I worked with PDF, but doesn't writing one "optimized" removed the edit stuff (i.e., writes it all from scratch...?
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Imagine a software engineer in Belarus Republic in 1993, graduated from university (6 years), working at governmental organization that among other things monitors post-Chernobyl radioactive contamination, as a programmer, sysadmin, admin of a "WAN" based on inadequate phone lines and the worst modems that they could find and local Novell-based LAN, getting for that a salary, not significantly above the poverty level. Add dealing with broken custom software, written in foxpro and sold to that organization by some lame company, owned by a bunch of local crooks. Add the fact that all promising jobs for a programmer are in communication, and infrastructure happens to be so underdeveloped, all positions are already filled. Add fluctuation of government that brought nationalists to power and army draft in the same year, and the fact that the engineer is jewish-ukrainian by origin. What the above mentioned engineer is supposed to do? Remaining in the country promises at least major suckage of life until economy improves and at most death in the army, as conditions there were closer to a jail than to anything else even before nationalists came to power. Moving to other country can be realistic, however only two choices are present -- US and Israel.
In Israel he can expect large number of people with exactly the same education that he got, not much of a software industry, language that he doesn't know and doesn't want to know, ideology that he doesn't share, war with Palestinians that engineer wants no part of and Judaism that engineer wants no part of either, being agnostic or atheist, depending on how you define it.
In US he can expect major humiliation, frightening corporate power, a position of non-citizen for many years, stupid politicians, yet almost guaranteed decent job for anyone who got his CS education in non-american school, and has some resemblance of programming talent.
What would the engineer choose?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The whole Open Source/Open Information movement is far different than the issue of Privacy and what not. You seem to be saying that we can't have both, but you're being far too broad with your definition of "information".
Exposing a potential security flaw in software is fine, but doing it with a specific file that may infact endanger people's lives, in the name of technology and security is kind of irresponsible.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
> Soviet Union never used military force against its own people
so how about all those millions ppl that were sent to gulags in siberia... how about whole chechen population being sent to siberia by stalin in 1940-ies ?
> I however talk about messing with other countries -- something that USSR did rarely...
lets see, ussr was about to invade yugoslavia in 1948 after yugoslavian communists refused to join warsaw pact and allow soviet troops on yugoslavian ground.
it invaded hungary in 1956, chechoslowakia in 1967(?), finland was invaded in the begining of 1900 century, baltic states were occupied by the russians at the end of ww2.
soviet forces also helped establish n. korea as a state, its known fact that soviet fighters/bombers fought on n. korean side...
then we have all those communist states in europe who only became communist states because they had bunch of soviet troops in their country and were more or less occupied by russians and forced to become communist countries.
try to get your facts straight before you start trolling around....
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
Just so you know, the "security" in PDF docs is pretty weak. It's only 40-bit.. There's a version of the reader you can find that bypasses any protected features (no open, no print, etc...)
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Name one useful feature that Word has that can't be done on Unix.
.doc files.
Word reads
Yeah, I'll say. What the fuck was the US thinking, sending hundreds of thousands of troops to liberate France? All those white crosses at Normandy, that's a monument to American selfishness, right?
Invasion in Normandy happened at the time when Germany was if not dead but lethally wounded -- there was no possible turn of event could end with Nazi surviving (except, of course, an unlikely one in which US, the only country that was not weakened by a war, would switch sides and start supporting them). Until that point US didn't touch Europe, and the idea of "liberation" of France was a complete farce. At that point US was afraid of Soviet influence over Europe, not anything else.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The US bribed^H^H^Hpayed IRA and Ulster Union leaders to stop fighting in Northern Ireland (knock on wood).
It's still a question if the haste was worth the result -- both sides in Northern Ireland are in unstable position toward the political results -- fighting (actually random acts of terrorism) stopped at the price of bringing up all the political tension, and sides don't seem to be ready to come to the agreement, so it has all chances to resume.
They bribed^H^H^H^Hpayed Israel to find the peace process attractive.
Pressure on Israel government seem to have little effect on large (and vocal!) percentage of population that got kicked out of their homes, got their religious feeling insulted, or both. Again, fixing one problem, creating another. If Arabs didn't see Israel as being so dependent on US in everything they probably would be more willing to negotiate (plus see what I said in other message about Iran and religious bigotry).
They brought fragile but existing peace to Bosnia, and started the same in Kosovo. If you take the preservation of human lives as a universal standard, then there were less people killed in Kosovo this year than in a month (you pick the month) two years ago.
Maybe per month compared to situation in the middle of civil war, but not the total amount -- if left alone, fighting would cease earlier, without the amount of political complications that were caused by US/NATO bombing what they were supposed to protect and supporting every accusation against Serbs, valid or invalid one, thus fueling the hatred between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. If US wouldn't interfere, Serbs would defeat KLA (killing some but mostly frightening the rest, causing them to disband), keep the control over Kosovo, and would be forced to give some semi-autonomy to Kosovo, letting some Albanians into local governmental structures. US didn't like that, and needed a cause for military presence in Europe.
If there is a huge rock falling down towards 100 people and you have the option to push a button that redirects the rock to another group of 10 people, what would you do? Save 90 lives and become a killer (of those 10 people who would not have died otherwise), or let 100 people die but stay morally clean? If you have the power to actually *do something*, these are the questions you face every day.
US motivation never was to preserve anyone's lives -- it either was political, up to "those people are oppressed by their insufficiently democratic government -- let's kill or starve them all to death, so their evil government will be destroyed with them", or economical, up to "we need some cheap labor here and oil there".
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
so how about all those millions ppl that were sent to gulags in siberia...
The word "GULAG" has no plural. I refuse to discuss Russian history with a person that doesn't know why.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
While Young's points are very valid, I think the threat to survivors is real; not as revenge on the families of those involved, but more as an effort to intimidate (other) people who might be presently contemplating such actions. Like so many other decisions, every alternative comes with a cost.
Are we talking about Chechnya here? Or Russia?
I'm sure whatever "uncivilized" aspects of Chechen society have been cleansed by bombing the shit out of Grozny.
Don't forget to leave some of those brightly-colored, little plastic land mines before you leave. The children love to play with them.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
There are some other dimensions to this case that no one has
mentioned, and they concern journalistic ethics.
In the first place, NYT reporter James Risen is essentially
taking this position when he claimes to John Young that the
families of those named may be at risk:
"You say that we have no clothes on. But unnamed, independent
Iran experts we consulted say that we do indeed have clothes on.
Therefore, if you assume that we are naked, you are responsible
for endangering the lives of others."
A complaint I lodged with Mr. Risen in the past suggests to me
that he is fully capable of spinning when he says that he
consulted independent Iran experts who told him that the
families of those named would be at risk. Indications are that
these so-called "independent" sources could well be connected to
the U.S. intelligence community -- the same people who use
classification and secrecy to cover up incompetence and/or avoid
accountability.
Therefore, I conclude that these families are not at risk, and
Mr. Risen is protecting his sources, or his career, for entirely
separate reasons. I asked him to put his experts on the record,
but he didn't respond so I have no idea who they are.
I consulted an Iran expert who says that Iran hardly needs to
read the New York Times to figure out what happened in 1953, and
that the report would probably strike them as boring.
A newspaper has no business playing redaction games for what may
be ulterior motives. I'd prefer that they skip the report
entirely rather than establish a redaction precedent for
journalism professionals. We'll eventually get the information
another way -- from Iran, if we have to.
>I refuse to discuss Russian history with a person that doesn't know why
... anyway gulag are nothing else than work camps for soviet ppl that didnt share same opinion as stalin did
so you wont discuss with me because i prooved to you that ussr did indeed harm its own citizens...
>The word "GULAG" has no plural i am not native english speaker so thats why my english may be fucked up (bosnian/croatian/serbian is my native language)
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
Newspapers don't wantonly publish things in blatant violation of local and federal laws. They are among the most careful and cautious of entities, for obvious reasons. If they publish something inaccurate, they can get sued for libel. Even worse, they can lose credibility and future sales. If they break the laws, they ARE liable for it, which is why they take care not to.
There's another very disturbing aspect to your attitude. Govts. have often used impressionable ideas such as yours to prevent citizens from finding out the truth. For instance, before the Vietnam war, it was often unthinkable for the press to question military wrongdoing. ("What??? Our young men are risking their lives for the country, and you are saying they might have done something wrong? How can you be so unpatriotic?").
In fact, the whole idea of self-criticism has been a very slow process in US foreign and military policy, and the media deserves enormous credit for it. The media is the only reason we know of operations such as subjecting black people to syphillis for medical research, massacring civilians in Vietnam, and spying on civil rights activists.
It's always scary when people demand a crackdown on the press, on the grounds that it might reveal too much.
Between 1950 and 1995 most such ventures were part of the not quite war between the US and USSR.
Actually that was used as a cause, but rarely was the reason. USSR avoided doing anything outside its borders unless was seriously threatened, and even US didn't actually threaten it to justify anything of the kind.
Perhaps you would rather the US and USSR had fought a pitched battle in Western Europe?
All european countries including USSR, avoided military conflicts after WWII -- and last time I checked, US is not located in Europe, so if a potential war between US and USSR would have any effect on Europe, it would only affect US missile bases there. However considering MAD, it wouldn't be possible, so it didn't happen.
Or maybe you would have liked eating lots of black bread and sending your tax returns to Moscow?
As a matter of fact, I like black bread (one made in Russia, not something I see in local stores that looks like clay with hay mixed in, and tastes like one, too). However the political situation at the time of Cold War reliably prevented direct military confrontation.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
If you knew anything about MS Office formats, you would of course know that it is pretty unlikely that any non-Windows native software will ever be able to read them, because they rely heavily on OLE for data storage. So your points are really pretty invalid. They would of course be perfectly sensible if Word et. al. saved to a plain text file.
Someone needed an explanation, why American citizens are hated as much as their government. I hope, the above message gives a good example of something that can piss off even the most civilized and non-judgmental foreigner.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
So why are we surprised that 50 year old information is leaking>?
Um, didnt we drop *TWO* nuclear bombs on cities full of (not military installations but) civilians? Has any other country ever done anything like that? no? thank you.
When we are in a war, we as citizens rest well at night knowing it wont affect us physically, by that I mean we pretty much know there wont be an H-bomb landing on our bedroom roof.
We are the only country to ever bomb civilians with nuclear weapons, and we still have them. If it had been any OTHER country that had done that we would have STRIPPED them of nuclear capability.
The fact that other countries dont "mind" hosting American military bases is mostly economical. (and the fact that they ARE weaker than us)
Fear the government that fears your guns. Fear the government that fears your computers. Remove them from my email.
Are we talking about Chechnya here? Or Russia? I'm sure whatever "uncivilized" aspects of Chechen society have been cleansed by bombing the shit out of Grozny.
We are talking about early 19'th century, the last time when Chechnya was independent.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Have you ever considered that, in a nation where 'We the People' are sovereign, it is a blight upon that sovereignty that so many ideas and data are kept from their knowledge?
You raise a very interesting and important point, and yes I have considered this in some detail. However it is somewhat tangential to my original post. Like you, I neither condone the activities of the U.S. or U.K. governments, nor do I believe that information like this should be kept from the people who make decisions, if even the decision on whom to vote for. I am merely pointing out that for whatever reason this information was classified Secret, which means that only a restricted body of individuals may access the information, and the information may not be shared among those who lack sufficient clearance. If this material still holds a Secret classification, then it is illegal to allow individuals to access this information. While we may debate whether the material was classified correctly, whether the public had a right to know this information, or even whether any organization should have the right to hide such information from the public, while it holds a Secret classification it needs to be protected in accordance with this classification level. Individuals who violate these laws go to jail, and I don't see why those who wear press badges are necessarily exempt.
The point of my post was the following apparent inconsistency: When one body misplaces Secret information we raise a huge ruckus, whereas when another body mishandles information with the same level of classification, then it's ok since "It is in the interests of the people." I would argue that for classification to have any meaning whatsoever, then leaks of classified information to the press must be prosecuted with the same intensity as what the New Mexico lab is experiencing.
Secrecy has few places in a true democracy or republic.
(A most curious stance on a site that champions privacy and the right to encrypt). Secrecy has its places, however it is dangerous to a democracy or republic to cede to secrecy too much power. I agree that the immoral acts of the U.S. and U.K. governments are disgusting and the public is better off knowing than not knowing about such things, however I also acknowledge that we have many secrets (e.g. biological weapons secrets) that are much better off being out of the public domain. As a consequence, I would argue that we should vigorously protect our national secrets as a point of principle, and we should call for reform to the classification system so that it cannot be abused.
And while you're at it, don't forget to run rough shod over the first amendment and freedom of the press.
I never called for anything of the sort; all I am advocating is that we hold journalists to the same laws as the rest of us.
And there is no oil nor anything worth in Kosovo. No administration could have pulled a war like this off, and even this way the Clinton administration has the Republicans^H^H^H^Hwolves hanging off their throats for 'waste of taxpayer money'. Just look at the position of the GOP to see the selfish american politics that has dominated this land for such a long time. By the way, there is no oil nor anything worth mentioning in Kosovo, and there is much cheaper (and much more isolated and less militant and less organized) mass-labor force in Asia. Your suggestion is not credible, think for a moment. Dont you think that there is a tiny chance, just by the rule of big numbers, that the US sometimes does something good - just by accident? I mean, even assuming that the US was the evil, the US could make mistakes as well and do something good, occasionally, right?
--Coke
Oh come on, this is a valid form of protection, right?
Ok, so this guy may be endangering lives by doing this, but a better question is if that is true, why did the CIA give the "secret" report to the New York Times???? Isn't that the whole point of keeping it classified in the first place? "Government intelligence" at its best...
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
PDF's alow you to chang the file just by adding to the end of it. so to get the orignal file just open it up with emacs find the end of the orginal file then delete the rest and re open it in your favirot pdf viwer. the full spec for pdf is on adobes web site.
To my knowledge, the US has never started a war by invading another country. Can you give an example?
Vietnam, Grenada, Panama to name a few most blatant ones that immediately come to mind.
America comes in to defend freedom.
Invading a sovereign country has nothing to do with "freedom", no matter what the invader thinks of himslef.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
First Post is here.
I do not suppose their actions will cause
these people, their graves or their
families any trouble. However, the mere fact
of association with America will.
This isn't data destruction; these are people's lives.
This is the blackest-hat action I've ever seen.
Give me a break, "endangering lives?" The people involved are probably all dead by now....
"Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius; please pay it and don't let it pass."~Socrates, on his deathbed.
Bosnia was indeed 'left alone' as you say, and 200 thousand people died. 'Doing nothing' ('letting the rock fall') caused the death of tenthousand muslims in Sebrenica. Is that the kind of peace and sovereignty of nations you envision?
Actually yes. Conflicts like that, no matter how much third parties will try to suppress them, will claim their number of victims. There is no "good" way out for people involved, and suppressing conflict earlier will cause more deaths later -- perpetuating the hatred and making the end result worse.
And there is no oil nor anything worth in Kosovo.
There was however US influence in Europe that decreased because of the formation of EU. US needed to reaffirm its dominant position in NATO, establish presence in the Eastern Europe, and create a country (Kosovo is de-facto a colonized country now) dependent on US military force -- something that Europe never had before.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Actually, the standard in the legal fields is usually Plain Old ASCII Text, WordPerfect, and PDF in that order. I have /never/ seen a legal brief written in DOC format during my stint of sysadmin'ing for the courts.
Maybe the lawyers know something we don't?
Weapons of Mass Analysis
This method of hiding the names in the PDF was about as secure as releasing the document in paper form with black tape stuck over the names. If someone had peeled the tape off and discovered "hidden" information, the blame would most likely fall on the releaser of the document for using such an ineffective method. It seems that the fact that technology is involved in this is what's making Young look like a bad, evil hacker.
I love people like this. The world is either black, or it is white. Gray does not exist.
Following Ed's logic, it is perfectly fine if I break into your house, rape your wife, kill your kids, and cut your legs off, so long as I justify it by giving you a stern warning (after the fact, no less) that your home security system is woefully inadequate. "No need to thank me, sir, just performing a public service."
Bah.
You could argue (and I would join you) that breaching computer security is different than endangering a human life -- unless, of course, that breaching computer security results in the endangerment of human lives. There are gray areas to almost everything, but the sanctity of human life should be an overarching consideration in anything you do.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
. People here don't find it immoral to expose CyberPatrol blacklists... they find it immoral to blacklist at all.
"Information wants to be free," they chime.
Given this strange behavior to this story, I have to ask. Is it "information wants to be free, except when lives are at stake"?
If you don't see the difference between exposing a list of blocked sites and exposing a list of names which may endanger the lives of people, then you've a very warped sense of morality.
"Information wants to be free". What does that mean? An evocative phrase devoid of rational content... Freedom of information and the need for privacy have to be balanced.
There is nothing particulalry insightful about a "this is the real world, deal with it" argument. His top level post probably doesn't deseve to be marked "troll", but his others certainly demonstrate that is the basis of his opinion.
Besides, what is so bad about politely informing people that you won't accept non-standard document formats? The truly obnoxious people are the ones too stupid or too stubborn to learn the "save as text" feature.
I, too, was outraged by our young hacker's actions, until I sat down and thought about it. Let's take each one of these things in sequence:
/least/ guilty is our hacker. His crime? Announcing that it is possible to remove those little pieces of tape to see the words beneath. The other two parties are responsible for /anything/ that happens beyond that; the gov't for letting such information fall into unscrupulous hands (Are you reading, Los Alamos?) and the Times, for handling such a dangerous secret with such disrespect.
1) The Times acquires a document outlining the dirty particulars of a covert US operation. Parts of this document include name, places, and even possibly addresses, all of which could be harmful, to say the least.
2) The Times throws the digital equivalent of little bits of electrical tape over enough of the details to protect the individuals, leaving just enough to scandalize the reader and condemn the gov't for being bad, bad men. (Insert Fox Mulder and Whistling Theme Music.)
3) Our friend, the hacker, removes the pieces of tape, and posts it on his website, detailing how the act was done, and why the Times needs to be more careful when handling sensitive gov't documents.
First of all, the party
Posting the complete document on his website, was just nudging the last sheep out the door. Any foreign intelligence agency worth its dark sunglasses is likely capable of having done this, for themselves, if they really wanted the info. More than likely, they already have it. 1953 was a long time ago, in Intelligence years.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
The edited words don't just contain names
but also other info, like which newspaper
behaved in which way. It is unlikely that
the Times editor himself would know which
names and passages to edit out. It follows
that higher up people with access to other
classified info were involved. Thus it
appears to be a deliberate leak, so I'd say
blame the source of the leak, not just its
publishers.
File formats, other specs, or whatever, won't get anyone killed by it's release.
I won't bet on it -- people do a lot of awful things out of disgust.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Exposing the story was one thing, and certainly merits CIA internal investigation. Putting individuals lives at stake to satisfy ego is another. There was no legitimate purpose in doing so. The hole in PDF could have been demonstrated in any other number of ways. The story itself was also already exposed. The only thing gained by the person who did this was a feeling of playing God with other peoples lives. It is not their place to have made that decision.
Funny because the CIA and/or the New York Times thinks that drawing black boxes on top of the images in a PDF is "security" and sad because this does endanger the lives of the families of the people who collaborated with the CIA. When a few small business owners are killed or their houses are burned down in Los Angeles and Long Island in coming months, it will be because of this episode.
PDF is completely, utterly unprotectable. If you can read it, you can dissect it.
Have a "locked" PDF? Run it through Ghostscript, convert it back to Postscript, and do whatever you want with it.
Have a PDF encrypted for use with one of those "secure" book readers, as was done with the recent Stephen King novella? Then just run the reader alongside a debugger and intercept the Postscript parsing code to reconstruct the original file. Oh! But that's in violation of the licensiung terms of the "secure" reader!
The only way to make a PDF or Postscript file like this "safe" is a simple one. You need to replace the critical text or images with those black boxes, not simply cover it up using PDF or drawing tools. The original snippet of text needs to be utterly absent from the resulting file. Period. And then don't kid yourself if you think you can restrict or trace redistribution. Lock it all you want; the source Postscript can be recovered with a copy of Ghostscript and twenty minutes with the documentation, or failing that, by a C programmer armed with a debugger.
If you look at the article, you see that this document refers to the coup against Prime Minister Mossadeq, a nationalistic politician in Iran that Washington was afraid would play to the Communists, since Russia had had a lot of influence in Iran ever since the days of the Cossak Brigade, and those long, romantic evenings when British and Russian officials would stay up late, carving up the national resources and self-determination of what is now modern Iran. Mossadeq had made moves that seemed to suggest that he wanted to nationalize the oil industry in Iran, removing the monopoly held by the British, who had bought the rights to all of Iran's oil reserves for a handful of glass beads some years before. Amusingly, this oil monopoly was the precursor to the modern petrolium company named BP. Think about that the next time you stop at their pumps. Basically, the CIA paid people in the streets of Tehran to protest against Mossadeq, in order to give the Shah good cover for having him dismissed. Mossadeq had a lot of popular appeal, and the Shah was afraid of what might happen if he removed him from office.
But to the point; I agree that this action was irresponsable. I think the correct move would have been to notify the Times, as he did, make sure the oversite got corrected, and then drop it. Maybe write an article. But there is no need to personally reveal these names, once the nature of the security problem had been made public. If this had been some other document, there might be hell to pay here. If it had been some other document. But Mossadeq had absolutely nothing to do with the regime instituted by revolutionaries in 1978-79 under the influence of Ayatollah Khomeini. Therefore, it is kind of questionable who these people's lives would be in danger from. Mossadeq was part of the dynasty that was swept away by Khomeini and his ilk; he was a secularist of sorts, who advocated Iran taking control of its own affairs, but was not interested in the establishment of an Islamic republic. I am not sure what the view of Mossadeq inside the Iran of today is, but I doubt that there are many strong supporters of him around to make any moves against those who plotted against him. Also, keep in mind that the names of those on the CIA side involved in the operation have been available for years, people like Kermit Rosevelt, who was out in the streets of Tehran handing people 20 dollar bills to go protest against Mossadeq.
So I doubt that this document is going to make any revelations that will inspire action on the part of the Iranian people. For them, it will just be one more document proving that the United States can't be trusted. Like they neeed more proof.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Although what he found he could do with the pdf files was intresting. He shouldnt Publish this material. The iranian Ayatolahs are crazier than anyone thinks, and they still have all the power in iran despite what anyone thinks.
People think the iranian government is crazy, this isnt true. The iranian government has no power. The ayatolahs do and they are the crazy ones.
Well.. I believe that most if not all line-soldiers in the intelligence war believe this to some degree.. Even their middle managers. But do not underestimate the lunatic fanatacism that occupies our government to the highest levels. Modern American government sees regulation of the world as its /new/ Manifest Destiny, a way to unify and pacify its own people by saying 'See? See what good we're doing?'
It's not that I think any /one/ man in the US Government, or many other governments, is evil.. I think, when you put them all in a room together, and with them all competing for public accolades and corporate sponsorship, the output is evil.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
While it is possible that nobody at the NYTimes is at fault, an investigation should still be made to find out who leaked the document to the press. The last time I checked it was illegal to share classified information with those who lack the clearance to view such information and the need to know. I find it hard to believe that everyone on the editorial staff at the NYTimes would fall into that category.
This case is fundamentally different from the one you cite in that in this case a classified document was passed to a news agency by someone; in United States vs. The Progressive the information was obtained from the public domain and from deduction based on known physical laws, and not on compromised documents. I'm suggesting an investigation should be made on how the documents were compromised in the first place.
--
Here's my mirror
Does it benefit the user to be able to share documents with co-workers? Yes. Does msword offer this feature? Yes. Do other formats offer this feature? Yes. Can they be used in the place of .doc? Yes.
Does anyone use any formats other than .doc universally? No. Any argument you can muster doesn't matter to the fact that 95% of business uses Word. That makes it a de-facto standard, and yes, to the benefit of users. This is not a Microsoft-centric fact, it's an industry-centric fact. Business has picked a format.
Now I know where you get your viewpoints from and I know that you're an avid reader of ms rags (reads msBob power Dev monthly) and like a trained seal barking for food, you've been trained to spout the ms line whenever you can.
Translation: If someone disagrees with me, it can't be that I'm wrong, it has to be that he is a mind-controlled robot. Nice logic.
What I'm asking you to review is who benifits from the continued use of .doc benifits and why.
Who benefits? Microsoft, obviously. So what? I'm interested in getting work done. You are interested in religious arguments.
And the industry benefits. There is no question that there is a benefit to a universal document exchange format that everyone understands. Would there be more benefit to a simpler format? Of course. But life is seldom perfect. You only have to look at Linux to see how imperfect life can be.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
defacto industry standard? This is just bunk.
Who does this compatibility feature benefit? Think about that for a moment. Does it benefit the user to be able to share documents with co-workers? Yes. Does msword offer this feature? Yes. Do other formats offer this feature? Yes. Can they be used in the place of .doc? Yes.
So, continued use of .doc format only benifits micros~1 to the detriment of the user base.
Now I know where you get your viewpoints from and I know that you're an avid reader of ms rags (reads msBob power Dev monthly) and like a trained seal barking for food, you've been trained to spout the ms line whenever you can. What I'm asking you to review is who benifits from the continued use of .doc benifits and why.
___
being a unix user I of course send back the usual note about proprietory formats etc etc..
This attitude is one of the main reasons that Linux will have extreme trouble making it onto the mainstream desktop. Rather than recognize that Word is the defacto industry standard document interchange format, you preach to people about "proprietary formats".
Guess what? People don't care. They are interested in getting work done, and you are preventing them from getting work done. This attitude of yours just tells people "Unix is useless, it can't even read standard documents. Boy, I'm sure going to stay away from *that*!"
It's just frustrating to those of us who would like to see alternatives. Unfortunately, it takes 10 reasonable people to undo the damage caused by 1 fanatic such as yourself. Even if/when the office suites under Unix catch up with MS/Office and offer full compatibility, people will still remember that "arrogant Unix asshole" who told them that Unix couldn't read their Word docs.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Two years of planning went into Normandy: the Dieppe raid in August, 1942 was a dress rehearsal. There was also the Torch landings in North Africa in '42, and the invasions of Sicily and Italy in '43 and '44. Oh, and the 8th, 9th, and 15th Air Forces in the skies over Europe.
Even before that, billions of dollars of aid (Lend-Lease) was shipped to the UK and the USSR, in US-flagged merchant ships, escorted by USN destroyers, as early as 1940. Our violations of our own Neutrality Act were flagrant, intentional, and meant to goad Hitler into attacking a generally isolationist USA.
As for the fear of a Soviet influence, that took a distant second to fear of Nazi domination. Before WWII, the USSR was seen by the US much in the same way China is viewed today: a closed society more concerned with consolidating the gains of its own revolution and restructuring its society and industrial base than with external conquest.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
it's been mentioned in comp.risks numerous times - ms word files by default are saved by revisions.
Tracking revision is not activated by default, although there may be an option to make it the default. A standard Word installation will have it off, however.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
My wife applied for a position. The offer came through email in the form of a Word document that had been created using somebody else's offer as a template. The only thing she was concerned about was the bottom-line, so she viewed the attachment using strings(1), piping it to less(1), and visually grepping for the yearly figure...what she saw was absurdely low, and she wanted to tell them to 'get bent'. A cool head prevailed...she opened it in Word later and the offer was good -- but went back to examine the innards: there was somebody else's offer complete with their name and address, buried within the saved 'undo' stack. Knowing this, I don't understand how businesses could be so careless about sending Word documents outside the company.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
When dealing with a large document, with multiple authors, and three dozen text styles, all that hidden sophistication becomes a nightmare of sloppy organization that is hard to fix because it's hard to see. Doing something like changing a heading can break the rest of the document. God how I pray that I could dump Word files to text and clean them up like I clean up the crap generated by WYSIWYG HTML editors.
Fix the styles, and you've fixed the document. It's not as if they're hidden. Where's the need for Reveal Codes?
It will be a beautiful world when all documents are XML, especially Word documents, because it will become relatively trivial to convert the content into a meaningful form using XSLT.
I agree that an XML format would be way better than the complex Word document (not that the complexity will go away...). However, people think .doc files are big now, way until they are XML-ized. At least they'll compress nicely.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
What this comes down to is:
But, clearly, in some circles, there is some belief that the NYT is some impartial, competent institution that is in a privileged position to receive confidential information. For the reasons given above, I think this attitude is wrong. However, even if we admit the premise of a special status for the NYT, I think this blunder suggests that the NYT simply isn't competent to work responsibly in the on-line media.
As for me, I stopped reading the NYT for its informational content a few years ago. In the areas I know about, I found their articles to be too often poorly researched, factually inaccurate, and logically inconsistent, and I had to conclude that this was likely to be true for their articles in areas that I didn't know about.
But the NYT is clearly still of enormous influence in US society because of its readership, the access it is given in some circles, and the beliefs many people seem to have about the quality and integrity of their reporting. So, from that point of view, it is useful to have a rough idea of what they are writing. For accurate information and insightful analysis, however, I'd recommend going elsewhere.
(For some history of the media, including the NYT, I found the book "Life the Movie" by Neil Gabler very interesting.)
If "sane by a human points of view" means humane, then no, US foreign policy has not been humane since (or before) the Gulf War. There are numerous such examples (launching cruise missiles at medicine plants in Sudan, selling napalm to Turkey so it can kill Kurds, killing about a half a million children in Iraq according to UNICEF, etc...) but I'll stick with the stories you think pass for evidence as to the good intentions of the US government.
First off, I do grant you that the US government would like to see a long term ceasefire and some sort of peace in Northern Ireland. This is in the foreign policy interest of the US, so it's no surprise. As far as paying Israel for the "peace process" (which is really just setting up and formalizing an apartheid type system in Israel) that is totally incorrect. Israel was still the biggest receiptient of US aid when it was occupying South Lebanon (against the UN resolution for it to withdraw) from 1982 until just a few weeks ago. They weren't paid to get out, the war had no popular support in Israel and no strategic value anymore for Israel. Domestic pressure was probably the biggest factor, not US government money.
Furthmore the idea that the US went to war to save Kosovars is ridiculous. The US government and its allies could care less about them, look how few of them they were willing to take in significant numbers as refugees. Bombing exaceberated the situation in Kosovo (as admitted by the US general Clarke) resulting in more casualties and undermining all the efforts of domestic opposition groups inside Yugoslavia to get rid of Milosevic. The bombing certainly wasn't support by them, and they couldn't even begin to organize rallies against Milosevic until after the war was over. Bombing a country isn't the best way to affect social change, as should be obvious from dealing with Iraq.
All governments make up fairy tales as to why they are attacking another country, they must do for the war to be accepted by the public. It doesn't mean it is true. If you want to see some of the real motivations for US foreign policy, go to www.stratfor.com (private intellgience agency) or if you want to read a more radical critique try reading the Noam Chomsky archive at www.zmag.org/chomsky/index.cfm.
Besides, what is so bad about politely informing people that you won't accept non-standard document formats?
There is a difference between "politely" lecturing someone about non-standard document formats, and simply saying that you don't have access to Word. One is being a religous snob, and the other is simple practicality. I was taking issue with the former, which is what the original poster said.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
'"Unix" has no word processing features. Oh, you mean some of the office apps available for Unix?'
No, I mean tools like ispell, TeX/LaTeX, grep, sed, etc. Put these (especially *TeX) together right and you can do anything Word can do. Plus, you can do it more modularly AND deterministicly than Word will ever be.
And you can't credit Word with good printing while denying it to Unix. That's comparing apps to os's. Word itself doesn't do ANY printing. Yes, Windows printing system is, in general, easier to use. But again, using *TeX (or even just PostScript) good quality output is possible, even easy, under *nix.
"Finally, the most important feature that Word has is -- Word compatibility. Face it; Word is the defacto industry standard document interchange format."
I'll leave it to others to counter the ridiculous claim that I should follow Word just because other people do.
I'll just turn this argument against itself: "Finally, the most important feature that Unix has is -- universal compatibility. Face it; Unix is the defacto industry standard data processing system." Sounds stupid? Because it is. So is your argument.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Strings -a reads .doc files too.
Say no to software patents.
What the hell are you talking about??? PDF *IS* open. You want the specs? Go to their site and GET them! You want to make your own viewer? you CAN! its open! You want to make your own PDF maker? you CAN! its open!
As for the text being ugly, duh, it was JPEG compressed. Dont compress it. As for the size being large, its usually smaller than a word doc, its TEXT for crying out loud. No editing tools? ANY file can be saved as a PDF from ANY EDITOR moron.
Why use PDF? because its open, cross-platform, powerfull, secure (you can digitally sign it, or even encrypt it with a verisign digital ID), small, and universally supported. It also can house multiple media types.
did I mention FREE? I use html2pdf ps2pdf and sgml2pdf to create PDF's all the time. How would these FREE utilities exist if it was not open as you claim?
What the hell do you mean by its interface sucking? PDF is a file format. not an Aplication, and as such has no interface, its a file. The Adobe free viewer isnt much, but there are other viewers.
My impression from your post is that your PDF expierence sucks because you dont use any PDF tools, or have any PDF software, which leads me to wonder why you would comment on PDF, which you dont use, in the first place.
Several years ago, an employee in the US HR department of a large, international company HQ in the UK send out a large mailing announcing the new engineering hires. The mail format was cc:mail, the attachment was an excel document.
Columns in the excel file containing starting salary and moving expenses, etc where supposedly *hidden*. Well, when the excel file was opened by the recipient, the columns were no longer hidden.
Lots of existing staffers suddenly got raises.
This kind of thing happens.
.
So - going back a bit in history just to show the obvious flaw in your argument - Nazi Germany should have been left alone - they would clearly have stopped after some natural amount of time, after killing/gasing everybody not of arjan descent (including most of Russia). At that time this ment something on the order of a few 100 million people, and a vast array of unique cultural heritage would have been destroyed in an irreparable way by the nazis. So your opinion is that this should have happened, instead of Britain/USSR/US getting involved in a 'naturally unfolding' conflict?
--Coke
The Word feature to turn off is Fast Saves - this means that when you save a new version on top of the file (e.g. having deleted agents' names), Word simply adds the changed data to the end, to speed things up, rather than rewriting the whole file. So if you ever send a Fast Saved file to someone else electronically, you can be fairly sure to leak some information.
The Risks forum should be read by:
- Anyone who uses or depends on computers in their daily lives
- Anyone who programs computers
- Anyone who makes policy decisions involving computers or software
- Anyone who ever depends on the correct functioning of computers for their lives or safety (flown on a modern airplane lately?)
- Anyone who operates computers that affect safety (piloted one?)
I think that includes most readers of Slashdot.You might think such spy stuff as this article is about is out of your realm, but consider this example which likely could have affected most of us:
Peter G. Neumann, moderator of the Risks forum, wrote a book called Computer Related Risks that draws on material from the forum and discusses it in more depth. It has ISBN 020155805X and you can purchase it from:- http://www.fatbrain.com
- http://www.barnesandnoble.com
- http://www.amazon.com
- http://www.chapters.ca - in Canada
If you teach a course on programming, I suggest adding this to the recommended reading, and if you teach a course on fault tolerant or embedded computing, I urge you to include it in the required reading.-- Could you use my software consulting serv
There's nothing Hollywood about throwing Jim Risen to the DOJ in an attempt to find his source. No cover needs to be blown. It would be worth testing to see if freedom of the press extends to leaking secret CIA documents and endangering lives in an attempt to promote your web site / newspaper.
As for getting his disk, I doubt getting a job as a janitor in his office building represents a serious risk, then again his system is probably on the network and that wouldn't exactly represent a risk of exposure if hacked from Tehran.
Now if I can think of it in the time it takes to write a post how long do you think it would take counter intelligence to think of it? Ofcourse those Iranians live in caves and don't have computers, silly me.
Your trouble is you are too busy being cynical about CIA doctrine to expect anything useful to be done about this. So who's given up on the USA, you or me?
You seem to think that the NY Times is both legally liable and under an obligation to the government to report information on what their sources are. Neither is true.
Perhaps another basic civic lesson is needed. Do you know who Deep Throat was? He brought down the Nixon government. He changed the face of US politics. Nobody knows who he was.
The press has an obligation for full disclosure to the public and privacy for their sources. Beyond the need to reveal enough to let people check what they have to say, they have zero obligation to indicate who gave them the tip.
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
"Even if/when the office suites under Unix catch up with MS/Office and offer full compatibility, people will still remember that "arrogant Unix asshole" who told them that Unix couldn't read their Word docs."
.doc he said he could read even the stuff they had deleted.
.doc attachments to email. the established standard for email is text not .doc.
.doc attachments then it's just a matter of user feedback to tell them that something else is better. customers can get away with that.
He never said he couldn't read the
and anyways it really is obnoctous to send
if it's a company sending you
Female Prison Rape in NY
I first read it with the "strings" command and if I care I ask for it in text because I don't like to open Word documents due to viruses.
You would be amazed at how well people react to being told that you are concerned about viruses...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
What the Times did is perfectly legal. Doesn't matter how much the government doesn't like it.
If you think that this is bad, read the thoughts 20 years later of the man who published the design of an H-bomb.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
/************************************************/
/************************************************/
/ CIA/Iran Conspiracy Generator v0.1
/
/ This Conspiracy was released under the GNU
/ Public License, feel free to modify and
/ redistribute it as necessary, just keep this
/ License intact (unless responding in a reply
/ post to the original message).
Here's an off the wall one for you:
1) Someone in the CIA threatens to go public with info about current espianoge schemes that are very dark, sinister, what-have-you.
2) Person has connections with other govt officials, so having him killed outright (or in an "accident" won't suffice.
3) Conveniently, a story is "leaked" to the press, with full name disclosures. The story is leaked to a designated contact person in the press who will cooperate with their full wishes.
4) PDF is published with names poorly marked out, it's only a matter of days before someone, be it tech whiz or Iranian Intel (such a thing?) finds the information.
Now here's where it kinda falls apart:
- Iranians could kill the "real" informant, if he has secrets that were to be released upon his death, they will still get out -or-
- most likely scenario: Public will get ahold on information and names and will immediately discredit the "real" informant, whose name is listed, if he ever comes forward with the real CIA information. CIA could then kill him at will and have it blamed on Iranian retaliation. Any documents that get released post-mortem would most likely get glossed over since people will still be focusing on the earlier CIA scandal.
Hammer of Truth
TeX is assume, most thesises and scientific papers are written in TeX, if you don't believe me look at xxx.lanl.gov, and these comminities are very grateful to Donald Knuth. But I'm afraid its just to hard for the pointy hair briggade let alone office administrators.
Press: Oh please Terrorists, don't watch this, by watching it you are endangering the lives of the 12 swat team men slowly climbing stairwell 4b to aprehend you and rescue the hostages!
The press can be so arrogant.
NightHawk
Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.
Following Ed's logic, it is perfectly fine if I break into your house, rape your wife, kill your kids, and cut your legs off, so long as I justify it by giving you a stern warning (after the fact, no less) that your home security system is woefully inadequate. "No need to thank me, sir, just performing a public service."
No, that isn't perfectly fine. But following your analogy, all Young did was point out the inadequecies of the security system.
You could argue (and I would join you) that breaching computer security is different than endangering a human life -- unless, of course, that breaching computer security results in the endangerment of human lives.
Throughout this discussion, the common arguement is that he comprimised computer security. Young did no such thing, he discovered publicly published data. Would you be crying foul if he found this information buried in some library?
There are gray areas to almost everything, but the sanctity of human life should be an overarching consideration in anything you do.
How far do you want to take this? People have killed themselves over what was published about them, should the publishers go to jail for that?
... and so should the CIA operatives engaged in the overthrow of an elected foreign government. Some of them may even now hold high government positions, or have influence with current or future administrations. The New York Times is overdue opening the books on dark ops like these, shameful episodes in American history.
... unless they elect a government we don't like.
It's actions like this that make me question the deepest principles of our nation. In The Falcon and the Snowman spy case, a loyal American from a military family became disenchanted when his security clearance allowed him to see that the CIA was conspiring to overthrow a liberal government in a foreign country, including fake demonstrations and planted violence in the trade unions. The country in question was Australia. Yes, this is true. A loyal ally
I have nothing but disgust for an operation supported by the United States that stole democracy from Iran for the next thirty years and handed it to, of all things, a king. How antithetical to American values is that?
Did you ever stop to think why the Iranians hated us so much they'd hold our people hostage for 444 days?
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
What lives are endangered by releasing a report from a covert operation which happened *47 years ago*?
The guys who were spying for us then are almost certainly dead by now: we're only protecting their tombs.
(The federal government has a serious problem with overclassifying documents; hell, there are still classified documents from *the spanish american war*. The whining by the CIA over the dangers of releasing this information is like the whining of the little boy who cried wolf).
"Instead give them a pragmatic reason why they shouldn't send you word files."
Not having Office or Word available under Linux is a pretty pragmatic reason.
Adam
I'm not arguing that Word is inferior to Wordperfect, only that the whole lump of thick GUI wordprocessors are deceptively intuative -- Word moreso than Wordperfect. It is purely subjective as to whether or not that is an advantage.
I would rather that we had ultra-simple wordprocessors, stripped throughly, people could then send their docs off to the local Word or Wordperfect expert in their group.
When I mentioned bloat it was in reference to data bloat from OLE. The problem I encounter in the field is end-users who cut and paste, only to have objects inserted in their documents... All they really want is CGMs. Most are happy after I explain to them what has happened to their document, and the difference between embedded objects and pasted graphics.
IMHO you are absolutely correct that you cannot pick particular features to remove from a wordprocessor in order to simplify things. But not everybody needs to have a wordprocessor.
I suppose my ideal would be a complex viewer alongside a simple wordprocessor. People could collaborate by sending people gently formatted rich text and in-line graphics (without layout information). For the mostpart simple rich text environments such as Lotus Notes are perfect for this sort of thing. People don't have to worry about page formatting, or even files.
The end result would hopefully be a workforce which respects that Word and Wordperfect are complicated programs and should not be used for hundred-page customer proposals by people who just "figure it out as they go". To stay on topic, they might even respect that erasing super-confidential information from a document might not be as intuative as it seems.
3 months early. So if there were no nuclear wapons the war would have ended months ealier. Dropping nukes on Japan saved no allied lives, what so ever. It actually cost allied lives as the allies rejected the Nips peace offerring & extended the war by 3 months, plus there were allied prisoners of wars in both those cities, that died because of those nukes. Let me explain Arround August '95, the British Home Office & Foreign office, released many 1000s' of documents (classified under the official secrets act),pertaining to the war, as their 50 year status had expired - There maybe many other secrets about the war, we have yet to find out about, as apparently there are many other documents that were classified for 100 years. Basically it was all Poland's fault that Hiroshima & Nagasaki were nuked...... What happened was that when the Germans invaded Poland, the Russians moved in & took the Eastern half - Mad Adulf & Uncle Joe had got Ribbentrop & Molotov to work this senario out, when they were together signing their little non-agression pact, earlier on. After the invasion the Poles formed a 'Goverment in Exile' in France, which later moved to the UK. The Western allies recognised them as the official Polish goverment. Meanwhile the Russians had made their own Polish Communist cronies form their own Polish Goverment in Eastern Poland, which they had intergrated into USSR as another Soviet Republic (well what was left of Eastern Poland after they gave a bit to the Belarus SSR, & another bit to the Ukrainian SSR). Well after Operation Barbarossa (the German invasion of Russia), these Polish communists were forced to run back to Uncle Joe in Moscow, & form their own Polish 'Goverment in Exile' in Russia proper. So now we had 2 Polish Goverments in exile. Well any way, during their many pow-wows together, FDR, Winnie & Uncle Joe finally agreed that the post war Polish Goverment should include representitives from both Polish pretenders, in London & Lublin. By arround the Summer of '44 Hitler's panzers were in full retreat & there were already Soviet T34s' rolling into the suburbs of Warsaw, across the Vistula from Warsaw proper. The Russian radio stations were beaming across the frontier telling the Poles to revolt, to speed up their liberation from the Nasis'. The Polish exiles in London saw their chance & ordered the Home Army in Poland to revolt against the German occupiers. A funny thing then happen, the Red Army all of a sudden ground to a halt at the Vistula, thereby giving the Germans a free hand to crush the Warsaw Uprising. Once the Uprising was over the Russian T34 tanks then moved forward again & 'liberated' Warsaw. Stalin then 'forgot' about his agreament, & had his Lublin exiles form a goverment on their own. When some of the London exiles flew over to join them, having no Home Army to protect them, they promptly dissappeared. Winnie & FDR (& later Truman) were enraged. Meanwhile in the Pacific, things weren't going well for the Japanese, & by the early Summer of '45 & the German defeat, they knew there time was up. So the Imperial Goverment started to send out surrender feelers to the allies, via the Russian & Swiss Embassies (Russian did not enter the war with Japan till August) - this was 3 months before Hiroshima. They included only one condition amongst their surrender terms - that they be aloud to keep their Emporer. These were rejected, even though (as the secret war ministry documents show) the US had already decided that the Japanese could keep their Emporer after the war; as it would then be less likely for a communist Goverment to form there. Seeing as Stalin had agreed years earlier, that he would enter the war against Japan, 3 months after Germany surrended, you can see why Truman & Churchill were so concern. Especially when you considered what happened with Poland. Well any way beacause of what Stalin did to Poland, Churchill & Truman decided to show that they had 'Mojo' to equal Stalins red Army 'Mojo' (you got to remember that the Western Armies were nothing compared to the Red Army then - to every German Soldier fighting the Western allies, there were another 10 fighting on the Eastern front - there was no way even D-Day would have been successful if the Russians werent tying down so many German men. Plus the allies had nothing to compare with the 1000s' of Russian T34, KV & JS tanks, other than almost obsolete Shermans, & much smaller numbers too.). So Churchill obliterated Dresden with his 'Mojo' - RAF's Bomber Command, & Truman was advised by Stimson or paterson (I forget which) to reject Japans surrender feelers, so he could demenstrate his 'Mojo', through nuking Hiroshima & Nagasaki. The War Ministry papers also show that the nukes, were not even the main reason for their unconditional surrender to the US, but just a face saving way out, as the Russians had by now entered the war against Japan & Marshal Zukhov's Red armies had just Blitzkreiged the whole of Manchuria & Korea, & also crossed over & taken Sakhalin & the Kuril Islands, so were now within sight of Japan itself. After taking 2 million Japanese prisoners, including over 150 generals & 'liberating' more land from Japanese occupation than the Americans, Australians & British had in the previous 4 years of war. There was one thing the Japanese top brass feared more than unconditional surrender to the Americans, & that was an invasion by the Red Army. Another swaying facter in the droping of the bomb was that it cost 2 billion to develop, & Truman was worried what the publics reaction would be if the secret of the bomb (& its cost) ever came out, without him actually using it. Afterall news of the Baatam death march, etc, had just filtered through to the American public in the preceeding months. War is war, & the reality is there's no rules in war but the rules of the victors. Afterall Dresden, Hiroshima & Nagasaki was just as bad as any of the 'war crimes' of the Nasis or the Nips - mind you, revenge is sweet. Thats why I dont beleive Japan should have to pay compensation for war crimes (such as what the British veterans & the Korean woman want), otherwise the US should have to pay compensation for the nukes, & the Brits for Dresden etc. Also it was up to the goverments of the day to set reparation claims when Japans signed formal peace traeties with the 48 allied nations in '52. In other words the Korean Women & the British veterans etc should really be now sueing their own goverments now & not Japan.
Presentation should be separate from content.
But in Word they are combined. You are thinking of things such as LaTeX in which presentation is separated from content. You can take the same LaTeX document and present it in any number of ways, simply by changing the style files you use it with. Most people who use Word do not use styles, and even if they did they view their documents with those styles applied; AFAIK there is no `view as plain text' option. One should not be concerned with the look of a document; mark it up properly and use a well-written set of styles; this guarantees excellent output.
Why do we need autoformatting? We convert plain text to...plain text.
Embedding? Why should a document need anything but pictures in it? Like it or not, the vast majority of documents will be printed, not viewed on-screen. If they are to be viewed on-screen, then use a computer-specific tool, not something which was designed to output printed text. Use the right tool for the right job.
Spell checker? This is the greatest nuisance in Word. I happen to use the (correct) British spellings for most words, and since the versions of Word at work do not have the International English dictionaries I am stuck. I turn it off. Spelling is not something which everyone agrees on; that's fine and IMHO as it should be. The idea that spellings should be standardised is very modern, dating as recently as the introduction of the printing press.
Master document? Most every text layout program I know of allows one to include other files within the main one.
Your problem is that you are looking for personal computer, WYSIWYG-type software when Unix has something far, far better, and has had for quite some time now.
I used LaTeX for all my papers my final year of college, and I noted that my grades were rather significantly better. People appreciate well-laid out text, not the ugly stuff spat out by Word.
So - going back a bit in history just to show the obvious flaw in your argument - Nazi Germany should have been left alone - they would clearly have stopped after some natural amount of time, after killing/gasing everybody not of arjan descent (including most of Russia).
First, US was an ally with Britain, France and Russia -- as opposed to KLA that was no one's ally -- formally was and remains a terrorist organization.
Second, Nazi Germany was left alone even though it invaded US allies, so actually US extremely poorly performed its own obligations as an ally. US participated in insignificant fighting in Africa, and other things that didn't significantly affect the events in Europe until it became absolutely clear that Russia will not be destroyed (all USSR territory was back in Soviets' hands), and Germany will be defeated, this way or another. Not until that happened, US started pulling its shit together to actually attack Germany in any meaningful way.
As I have said it many times, US behavior in WWII in Europe was extremely selfish, bordering on being a traitor to other allies.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
This is the fault of the Times, plain and simple.
Way back when, the pentagon papers engendered an enormous amount of debate and discussion at the highest levels of editorial control before being published by the Washinton Post. Not to say Post good/Times bad, they share the top of my list of great papers, and get high marks for jourmalism generally, especially compared with other media.
But they should have taken care here. We aren't talking about something that happened 50 years ago in a western country where the worst likely outcome for descendants of said conspirators would be bookings on the talk-show circuit and their 15 minutes of fame. Iran may be moderating, but it's a long slow process, and I think you'll be able to mail most of these people's remains to the Times in a small manila envelope.
I am also appalled at the contention that all these people are really old, so who cares if the government kills them? They may still be alive themselves. Old or not, their secret deserves protection, as do their lives.
But that's not behind the refusal of many people to read Microsoft Word documents they receive. The reason is much simpler: it's a nuisance and it's expensive.
At work, we have a site license for Word, but maintaining a separate computer just to read mail containing Word files is a lot of work and money. For private correspondence, I would have to buy my own copy of Word, which is more expensive than my whole computer. In addition to all that, I would have to spend time learning how to use Word, and I would have to live with the risk of computer viruses.
I consider sending Word documents around a sign of bad manners or ignorance on the part of the sender. It's roughly the equivalent of giving me a set of Porsche hub cabs for my birthday and expecting me to buy the Porsche to go with it.
I respond to such messages politely that I am sorry, but I cannot read them. Nothing more needs to be said; it's none of the sender's business why I can't read them, nor do I lecture them on Microsoft, Linux, or open source. I suggest plain text, HTML, or uncompressed PDF as alternatives that I can read. It's then up to the sender to decide whether they want to resend the message or not. If they don't, it can't have been that important.
"Your whining does nothing to change reality."
I am not whining. Not now, nor to people who send me proprietary data files.
However, my complaints and explanations ARE changing reality. Trivially: People resend me the files in a non-Word format. Non-trivially: My workplace has stopped using proprietary encryption and authentication on their VPN.
"But in the meantime, I see no reason to make everyone else's life miserable. The emergence of a standard format is clearly a big plus."
Just how do you think this emergence is going to take place? A magic wand waved near Bill Gates and suddenly he decides to play nice with others? No, it takes a lot of people deciding they aren't going to "conform" to get a critical mass going.
Of course, I'm sure in 5 years you'll be telling everyone how your "cooperative attitude" allowed you to overturn the MS Office dominance "from the inside"--when it was really people who just refused to take it anymore.
--
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http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
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What is the New York Times being blamed for? Not being effective enough in their self-censorship? The New York Times is a newspaper; they publish the news. So they get some news, and they are going to publish it. But the CIA says, "wait! we didn't intend to give you that information." So the NYT graciously agrees to censor the information, but they screw it up. BFD. The New York Times is not in the business of censoring information. The New York Times is in the business of publishing information. You don't give documents to a newspaper without checking that you can safely release them first. It was the CIA that screwed up. The moment the information left the CIA's control, it should be assumed that "the enemy" (whoever they might be) has the information. If the New York Times knows how to keep secrets, why doesn't the military hand over all the records from Area 51, and ask them to only publish the parts that should be printed?
If Jim Young hadn't published the information without the redactions, the information would still be there. Determined parties would still have that information. The only difference is that people would have (incorrectly) believed that the information was secure.
The argument is identical to disclosure of security holes. Someone (Jim Young) finds a vulnerability. He notifies the vendor (NYT) so that they can take action. When it becomes apparent that the hole is being exploited (others are publishing the names), secrecy becomes irrelevant, and the only issue is making sure everyone is aware of the hole ASAP, so Young published the names.
Does anyone think that if Jim Young hadn't published the names, Iranian intelligence wouldn't be able to get them out of the file?
Does anyone think that if it hadn't been widely publicized, Iranian intelligence wouldn't have eventually found out about the problem?
Blaming the NYT or Jim Young is like blaming Cult of the Dead Cow for the lack of security in Microsoft products.
The Hatfield and McCoy clans. They're so legendary that they've become virtually synonymous with "blood feud". And they were 100% American.
;)
The story is somewhat apocryphal. Most of their conflict originated because of Civil War disputes (one family fighting for the North, one for the South). I recently heard a radio report about a friendly softball match between the two families.
I'm sure that there are many Americans who have held onto multi-generational vendettas, but it's not really part of our culture. We have too short of an attention span to hate people for long
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
tracking revisions are a different thing. word essentially saves diffs of files. using the standard unix utility called strings to read word documents you'll see that word files are frequently saved as diffs.
how to turn off that "feature"? turn off "quick save."
kevin
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
This is not a flame.
It's amazing how many people are rushing to condemn the man who published the un-redacted file, and how many people are screaming to investigate the New York Times because they published the redacted file without understanding the file format, and how many people are crying foul because the CIA leaked the document in the first place.
Isn't this SLASHDOT?!
People here don't holler if Microsoft leaks proprietary technical specs... they laugh. People here don't whine if DeCSS circumvents runtime-redaction, they propagate the utility. People here don't find it immoral to expose CyberPatrol blacklists... they find it immoral to blacklist at all.
"Information wants to be free," they chime.
Given this strange behavior to this story, I have to ask. Is it "information wants to be free, except when lives are at stake"? Is it "information wants to be free, especially since beer isn't free"? Is it "information wants to be free, because I can't afford to pay programmers"? Or is it "information wants to be free, because Courtney Love teaches us how we gotta stick it to the man"?
Principles are principles.
If you don't believe "information wants to be free", then get off the pot and stop crusading. If you do believe it, then why are we worried here? The guy who finally published this unredacted form basically said he had two reasons,
force the hand of the State Department, letting these families know they may be in danger
force the review of critical information management within our own intelligence community
Both of these reasons focus on exposing more information than just this document. His tactics also demonstrate that information wants to be free. He also showed that releasing information was a powerful proactive strategy, not a secret reactive strategy. Releasing information doesn't mean giving up all your control. He took control when he showed his hand.
He was doing you a favor.
[
Maybe you can testify at their trial, they have religious courts you know. No need for judges when you have a cleric to run the proceeding you see. All the CIA et.al. needed to do was NOT release the names. There was a zero activity required to keep those few lives safe.
If US wouldn't interfere, Serbs would defeat KLA (killing some but mostly frightening the rest, causing them to disband), keep the control over Kosovo, and would be forced to give some semi-autonomy to Kosovo, letting some Albanians into local governmental structures.
... there's *no* evidence at all that I can detect that the Milosevic government would have done *anything at all* to bring the Kosovars back into the government or give them back the autonomy which they had had until his government came to power.
Do you have any evidence for this, or is it just blather? Since the Serbs had essentially forced all Albanians out of government structures *ten years before the war*, and had denied the peopel living there *the right to teach in their own language*, and had gone to great extents to drive non-Serbs out of the parts of Croatia and Bosnia under their control, I think the outcome you paint is unlikely.
More likely --- and what we were afraid of --- was the Serbs driving the Albanians out, causing a massive refugee crisis in Albania (a country which is *awash* in guns because of a brief civil war a couple of years ago which followed on the heels of the collapse of a popular pyramid scheme) and Macedonia, and destablizing both countries.
Yes, this is a modern-day domino effect. And it's reasonable to question if it would have happened that way --- certainly the refugee crisis which *did* happen failed to destabilize either country. But
"They are interested in getting work done, and you are preventing them from getting work done."
I am also interested in getting work done. Having to reboot into Windows to read something that turns out to be a macro-virus prevents me from working, too.
"Even if/when the office suites under Unix catch up with MS/Office..."
Name one useful feature that Word has that can't be done on Unix.
"...people will still remember that "arrogant Unix asshole" who told them that Unix couldn't read their Word docs."
Ah, the old straw-man argument. Who said anything about "arrogant" and "asshole"? When I get Word documents (or requests for Word documents) and say "I'm sorry, I don't have access to Microsoft Word." Depending on the situation, I give a list of alternatives (plain text, html, etc). I am polite but firm. If asked why I can't read (or supply) a Word file, I use the (completely applicable) word "proprietary".
Besides, what am I *supposed* to do? Ignore the document?
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
From reading John Young's dialog with the NYT, it seems his reasoning was twofold:
1) Since other people were unmasking the names, the information was no longer known to only him and the NYT, and was therefore in the public domain.
2) In the interest of security, he decided that by publishing the names, everyone would be on an even playing field, and any people involved in the operation would know that they had been exposed. (Rather than not knowing if they were named and if so, who had uncovered the names already.)
He had a hard decision to make, and I think he did the right thing. The moral questions of full disclosure get a lot hairier when it's potentially peoples' lives on the line, not just RealServer remote DoS attacks.
That's what it takes. Keep up the good work.
During the Gulf war, while Israel was being bombed, a CNN reporter in Tel Aviv broadcasted missile hit locations based upon street names, etc. The Israeli military ordered that he stop, and he did not. He was deported.
That example is irrelevant to this discussion. In that case it was war, and in war certain freedoms are suspended in the name of helping to preserve those freedoms further down the road. No such declaration of war exists here.
should the publishers go to jail for that?
If people die, yes. It's called manslaugter. Something to do with reckless endangerment to other peoples lives.
Does anyone use any formats other than .doc universally? No.
Bzzzt. Thanks for playing. Dan, show our contestant the consolation prize...
There is one format which is universally used, which everyone connected to the Internet can read. That format is text. Over the last thirty years the text format has grown to encompass conventions for the enclosure of every form of content imaginable. Most users have multiple text readers on their machines: cat, less, more, Notepad, SimpleText, Eudora, MailSmith, Emailer, Netscape, IE, Opera, slrn, strn, NewsWatcher &c. ad infinitum.
There is no question that there is a benefit to a universal document exchange format that everyone understands.
You're right. We had one: text. It was used to exchange information--you know: data, useful stuff, what is needed. Now we have .doc, which is used for the interchange of data covered in dressing, gravy and all the fixins. Why? What is added by allowing every second-rate secretary to use seven fonts in a purchase order?
to the tune of Oh Give Me a Home... Oh give me the days
Of the ASCII term haze
Where seldom was heard
A proprietary word
And the data flew swiftly all day!
It may be worse -- it may indicate that New York Times journalists actually had clearance for things like that. But for what purpose simple journalists would have it?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
> It's all very well and good to show off one's
> expertise but peoples' lives are not something
> to be played with
But sponsoring a coup is ok of course...as long as its a coup against a "bad governtment" full of "Bad people" (Bad being defined as "anyone we don't like")
> that's NOTHING compared to what could happen to
> these agents
Something they knew before they got involved I would assume. Should have known better than to get in bed with the CIA.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Did any of you really look at that? I'm glad we can have this rousing debate on wether it is better to use MS Word or PDF etc. Who cares, use vi.
The thing that bothers me is that the person who "revealed" this information basically only seems to reveal people's names, and that's pretty screwed up. Even if you don't agree with someone's reasoning, when a major news source covers up peices of a document, and when it comes out, they ask for information to be taken off the web post-haste, due to a threat on the lives of the people who were revealed, it seems that is what we should be interested in and upset about. -Nick
-- Don't overthrow the government, just think about it.
Depends. If you're in business, what you are supposed to do is get Office for Windows or the Mac. The business world has standardized on Word format. Resent it all you want, but welcome to the real world.
Everything that happend in the real world changes what the "real world" is. Even this message where I call you a Microsoft sheep and one of major causes of the bullshit "proprietary standards" dominance, changes the "real world" toward more widespread understanding of it.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
From a user perspective, printer independent printing can't be done on Unix in any practical sense.
That's odd, since for years the computer world exchanged, on Unix systems (and others), documents in a true printer-independent format: PostScript. Remember the days when we cursed our personal computers because we could just cat doc.ps > /dev/lpr? And for those of us with non-PS printers, there were all sorts of transparent filters. We were able to transfer documents, with layout and everything, exactly as written, if we needed to. Which was precious seldom...
That must be why the Times incompetently attempted to cover the names, and why even Jim Risen, the great sleuth who couldn't sleuth out how to write pdf files properly now thinks lives are being endangered. It isn't just about the spies, it's their extended families. In anycase you don't know who is left alive.
It's like the example of one's root password. That is information which must remain privileged. Same with spies, military plans &c.
Maybe it's time ethics are considered by all the engineers, programmers, hacker-types, etc that drive this new world forward. Since its existence, for example, the medical community has had to evaluate and intro/retro-spect their behavior(Nazi medical expiriments, AIDS in Africa, steroid abuse in East Germany...). And look at the way gamers and geeks responded to charges that FPS's increase youth violence(not that I believe so). If the greatest evil out there is Microsoft, some reprioritizing needs to be done. Ok, maybe I'm going to far, but just because something can be done or be discovered by some technical snafu or quantum-physical law, doesn't mean it should be done for technical sake.
But isn't the purpose of the Doomsday machine lost if you keep it a secret!
Dude, even emacs can do this... Everyone has this capability. Last I checked, however, Word was the only word processor that fucking autocorrects, so that I have to jump through hoops to type in things like people names that aren't in the dictionary without them being changed to obsenities...
Also, you should try to create a large (50-60 page) document with embedded graphics.. Then try to revise the document once a week... Don't forget to make a backup :)
Just how do you think this emergence is going to take place? A magic wand waved near Bill Gates and suddenly he decides to play nice with others?
Not that I'm necessarily saying that Microsoft is a nice company for the most part, but what's your theory on why MS is converting to XML? Not that they've done it yet, but I think the reason is that the .doc format has grown too unwieldly even for Microsoft.
Of course, I'm sure in 5 years you'll be telling everyone how your "cooperative attitude" allowed you to overturn the MS Office dominance "from the inside"--when it was really people who just refused to take it anymore.
Oh, I guarantee you that people like you are irrelevent to how the industry is going to evolve on this matter. I don't think you realize how little the general population cares about this issue. Got news for you: business likes Microsoft Office. Hell, I like Microsoft office. It is far superior to any other office suite.
Now, would I like to be able to parse the .doc format easily? Sure, but it's still going to be complex even if it goes to XML. Word does a lot. Given that it's not going to be that easy even ASCII-ized, I can't get too excited about it.
The industry will clearly evolve. But what's going to move the evolution is what business uses. That's how Microsoft won. They catered to business to an unbelievable degree by listening to them and giving high priority to their feature requests (which is how it should be done, by the way, but I'm sure you'll criticize listening to users). If a better solution comes along that gives a company a business advantage, then the industry will change.
Frankly, I don't know what that better solution will be. What I do know is that business is extremely happy with the MS/Office solution. The better solution is going to have to be a lot better to make a dent. Maybe it will be Java-based browser word processors that store the docs on a central Internet server, and the advantage of being able to access docs anywhere in the world will be the big killer advantage. I doubt it, simply because that doesn't sound like enough of an advantage.
But "anything but Microsoft" is not an advantage, as much as you would like it to be.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
No, I mean tools like ispell, TeX/LaTeX, grep, sed, etc. Put these (especially *TeX) together right and you can do anything Word can do. Plus, you can do it more modularly AND deterministicly than Word will ever be.
That's like saying that with 'vi' and a good Postscript book, you can do anything Word can do. Or with a good manual typewriter, you can do anything Word can. Technically true, but very, very painful.
TeX/LaTeX has its uses, particularly for technical documents, but is not a good solution for the average business user. Maybe if someone wrapped a good WYSIWYG interface around it, but you would still be lacking things like revision histories, app embedding (spreadsheets in particular), and other modern business necessities (yes, necessities).
And you can't credit Word with good printing while denying it to Unix. That's comparing apps to os's. Word itself doesn't do ANY printing.
Technically, you're right, but the average user doesn't see the distinction, so I think it's fair if you are comparing "user experiences". Your original statement was "Name one useful feature that Word has that can't be done on Unix". From a user perspective, printer independent printing can't be done on Unix in any practical sense.
I'll leave it to others to counter the ridiculous claim that I should follow Word just because other people do.
Well, let's say I'm an architect. I use L33tCAD, which has a fabulous open CAD format. However, for some odd reason my customers keep sending me stuff in AutoCAD format, which as you know is closed. Unfortunately, L33tCAD doesn't have all the features of AutoCAD, and doesn't really import properply, but heck, I am going to take a stand and tell my customers to shove it even though AutoCAD owns the CAD market.
Yes, I would look like an unprofessional fool.
That is the situation. If 95% of the business world like Word, then if you are in business, you need to be able to exchange Word documents. Hey, the legal professional standardized on WP. You think they're happy that they had to retrain to use Word? But lawyers are pragmatic, and realize that it was in everyone's best interest to have a common document format.
That format has been picked. Your whining does nothing to change reality. Would it be better to have a simpler format? Clearly, yes, and maybe if MS goes to XML, it will be. But in the meantime, I see no reason to make everyone else's life miserable. The emergence of a standard format is clearly a big plus.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If people die, yes. It's called manslaugter. Something to do with reckless endangerment to other peoples lives.
The courts don't agree with you, but lets consider this. Lets say its a crime to publish something that causes someone to kill themselves. One can argue that it should be a lesser crime to publish something that causes someone much heartache. While we're at it, lets make it a crime to make fun of some poor kid on the playground.
As much as I'd personally like to see mean school bullies get punished, it doesn't work with reality. Carrying this tangent to its logical conclusion basically means you can't say anything bad about anyone, ever. So much for the first ammendment, hell everyone on slashdot thats saying bad things about John Young would be in trouble.
During the Gulf war, while Israel was being bombed, a CNN reporter in Tel Aviv broadcasted missile hit locations based upon street names, etc. The Israeli military ordered that he stop, and he did not. He was deported.
For the press to be free it has to be sensible. There are some things that, sadly, should not be free as in speech. Governmental SNAFUs are a minor problem, but our contemporary "aggressive" reporting style is far too much; reporters complained about being unable to know the locations of US troops and US strategy in Panama, the Gulf, and Bosnia. The truth is, however, that they have no "right" to governmental information. They can say (almost) anything, but that doesn't mean they have free reign.
Mike Greenberg
http://www.yourmothernaked.com
Excuse me, but could you re-send that? I can't read plain text.
Thanks
PS Word format is fine.
The info was covered up by a "Black Box"? Sounds like a new movie!
Oh, BTW, Stop the MPAA while you're at it.
http://siokaos.org/
Do you have any evidence for this, or is it just blather? Since the Serbs had essentially forced all Albanians out of government structures *ten years before the war*, and had denied the peopel living there *the right to teach in their own language*, and had gone to great extents to drive non-Serbs out of the parts of Croatia and Bosnia under their control, I think the outcome you paint is unlikely.
That was going on-and-off over decades after WWII -- never reaching the extent of open war before Milosevic/KLA.
More likely --- and what we were afraid of --- was the Serbs driving the Albanians out, causing a massive refugee crisis in Albania (a country which is *awash* in guns because of a brief civil war a couple of years ago which followed on the heels of the collapse of a popular pyramid scheme) and Macedonia, and destablizing both countries.
That mostly started after US interfered. BTW, Albania was the worst place in Europe even in the time of peace.
Yes, this is a modern-day domino effect. And it's reasonable to question if it would have happened that way --- certainly the refugee crisis which *did* happen failed to destabilize either country. But ... there's *no* evidence at all that I can detect that the Milosevic government would have done *anything at all* to bring the Kosovars back into the government or give them back the autonomy which they had had until his government came to power.
US interfered at the time in the middle of civil war. Definitely Yugoslavian government was not in a position to do anything meaningful in Kosovo at the time. Common sense indicates that no country ever benefits from foreign involvement in its civil war.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Of course, Word had done a partial save. And since my lecturer had made the mock exam by taking the real exam and modifying it, he had a heart attack when the student showed him his printout of the mock exam and said "this is different to another copy someone else printed."
The absolutely laughable thing is, my lecturer then experimented with the 'Fast Save' feature in his version of Word and discovered it did fast saves even when he told it not to.
As a result, nobody on campus spreads stuff around in Word documents anymore. Especially when they're sending their (judiciously censored) letter to the Vice-Chancellor...
All the while Word uses a cryptic, closed and proprietary document format. That is a huge negative. In the real world, I've seen hundred-page documents crash and burn because somebody tried to embed an object. Funny, Word was able to save the document, it's a shame it wasn't able to load it again.
Other things to consider is that the vast majority of end users only use a minority of features. Most of the people in the real world whom I deal with barely know a tab from an indent from a clump of spaces. They're confused when they change printers and their documents reformat on them.
I would so very much rather give them something like Abiword or even Wordpad and let them write their docs and prepare their graphics, then have somebody who knows what they're doing sit down with the person for an hour and slam everything together.
I've seen sooo much wasted time from lousy features which are half-implemented.
Although Windows and Office have been getting better, I still have to tell people "The reason your document is 34MB, is because you were using cut and paste... that embeds objects by default. this is unreliable, unintuative, unstable and bloated. It's been that way since the feature was first implemented."
So what can Word and all other ridiculous wordprocessors do better than a feature stripped rich text editor?
For the computer literate, they let you mailmerge, save time with styles, create labels, import complex charts while producing professional looking results...
The computer illiterate however, can waste hours on unfriendly though deceptively intuative interfaces. It can also get people killed as critical information is leaked when people think something is deleted. Microsoft and the rest of the industry's philosophy towards user friendliness is inherently flawed. Precision first, user friendliness second... let people read the manual or be fired for their incompetance.
WordPerfect was great... people just had to pick up a manual. And please, don't compare Word 2000 to WordPerfect which hasn't significantly improved since version 6.0 Only recently has Word advanced to the point that I feel a little comfortable that I can trust the software to format my documents without relying upon reveal codes.
Don't kid yourself, the only reason Word is so successful is because of marketing and proprietary formats.
Open letter to Mr. Risen:
End letter. I'm no fan of Big Brother, but frankly, I hope CIA nails the reporter's ass - and his source's ass - to the wall. Stupid fscks.Back on topic - I've learned lots of things about idjits and their companies from M$Turd docs. The "Quick-save" feature is great, in that it keeps all the things the writer says about security-ignorant assholes like Mr. Ri^W^W^W^W^W^W^Wpeople with less awareness of security issues and makes them visible to anyone with a hex editor.
Finding out company-confidential things notwithstanding, I also had a blast nailing an MMFool to the wall by digging the name under which he registered his copy of Turd (which matched one of the mailing addresses in the spam) after he sent me a spam with a Turd .doc in it and forwarding it to a local USPS inspector.
Us UNIX guys aren't immune from attacks on covert channels. An attacker can learn a lot from "vi"'s temporary files, though he's usually gotta 0wn r00t to get to them first. Ditto clever usage of "ps" on a system full of un-clever users specifying passwords on command lines.
But in general, many binary file formats make great covert channels for digging up leaked information. "od" is your friend, as is the hex mode of Vern Beurg's LIST.COM in a WinDOS environment. (I'd say Beurg's LIST utility is the single most useful DOS utility I own. Text-based "file browser" with the ability to view in ASCII or hex anything you hit ENTER on. Damn sweet!)
I'll bet the security agencies, including Iran's, have already figured out how to break PDF without Cryptome's help. :) This document was compromised when it was published, if not long before.
Let's spell it out: the only thing anyone learned by this "egregious endangering of lives" was a bunch of people learned that What You See Is NOT What You Get. That is a correct function of the press.
Of course, defeating the PDF "black box" protection mechanism is probably a DMCA violation.
I can't really say I agree with the people who say that we are 'endangering lives' I think that we need more of this. This sends out, to my mind at least, a message to those in charge that there isn't going to be able to be secrecy forever. They need to learn. If a harsh lesson is all they will listen to, so be it. It's not like there's a huge surprise here. Even for the family members, they have to understand what they are getting into when they decide to deal with a CIA agent in their midst.
-Dusty Hodges
"Word is the defacto industry standard document interchange format."
Please substantiate that with facts...
Since *all* computers and computer users can read text files, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that text is the defacto industry interchange format?
Adam
I would think that they endangered there own lives, it shouldn't be put on SOMEONE ELSE!! this is a case of personal responcibility. They made there mistake a long time ago, and so far have had someone hold there hand to protect them. There hand is no longer being held......
Home, home and deranged...
Hmmm... It seems to me the guy finding out the info was there used quite a diffucult way of getting the 'cencored' data.
Of the info is there he could just have opened it in some vector graphics app that can import PDF (Like Illustrator) and remove the boxes...
Ah well. Maybe he didn't have one around.
I personally can well imagine the US being more afraid of Josif Stalin than of Hitler, at least until 1942. Stalin has already proven that he is capable of killing millions of people. It was not at all clear until last 1943 / early 1944 that Nazi Germany started the extermination of jews.
I can well imagine the US letting the USSR alone against Nazi Germany - that would have been a shame. Nevertheless the US did send supply to the USSR, which probably tipped the balance in favor of USSR troops in the Stalingrad battle. After Stalingrad all the production facilities in western Siberia (and probably even worse, the oil in the Kaukasus) would have been exposed to the germans. Nevertheless I agree with you that the hesitation of the US to enter the war did cost millions of lives in the USSR, and that cannot be forgiven.
France's participation in WWII was mostly symbolic, given that they were occupied during the decisive stage of the war, the real participants were USSR, US and Britain, against Germany, Italy and Japan. (sure there were other countries present as well, most of which participated in heroic and important battles.)
--Coke
How did this obvious troll get modded up?
.DOC as an alternative crossplatform format; it is an example of being able to view and edit documents).
If you really think their specs are on the website, provide a link to the page with the spec.
They're open? Hah! Why was there all the fuss (in fact, I believe it was on Slashdot) when someone reverse-engineered the PDF format, so that the pdf2text convertor could be written?
Adobe's original plan (a hideous one) was to make documents which were viewable but not able to be modified or manipulated with anything except Adobe's viewer.
Storing text as JPEG compressed? Gee, how clever is that.
So you often save PDF files from vi/emacs?
To use your own style of argument, any document type can be encrypted with a digital signature or security certificate.
Gee, I see a FREE utility DeCSS. I guess this means that DVD encryption formats are open-spec too.
PDFs can contain tables and images as well as text.
Show me a Windows viewer that displays a document as clearly and usefully as Microsoft Word, and I might change my mind.
(PS: This is not a suggestion to use
Bullshit. I use a PC at work and do the same damn thing. I don't have Word installed on my NT server and my boss always sends me crap that I can't open because he is too lazy to send plain text emails. I have Acrobat installed outta necessity but thats about it. All others, I end up having to go to another room or pull out my powerbook to read the attachments.
Am I keeping NT Server users down by saying this? NT Servers are useless because you can't run Word and WebServers and File Servers and thing else on the same box (errr...BillG would hae ya think ya can though...probably the reason most geeks can't run a stable NT Box is that they can't realize the limitations of the OS and install crap as they do their linux boxes...I can't kill my Linux boxes no matter how much I install, though it sure does slow things down).
Anyways, not trying to be too offensive about this, but ya got to realize it happens on the same platform as the sender is sending.
blah
clif
Okay then, let's see you draw a line or make a set of rules 'with regard to the circumstances,' and then justify them.
That example is irrelevant to this discussion. In that case it was war, and in war certain freedoms are suspended in the name of helping to preserve those freedoms further down the road. No such declaration of war exists here.
War isn't necessary to create a national security issue. Even without a declaration of war, the leakage of this information was, and still possibly is, dangerous to national security by the virtue that it endangers citizens (i.e., members of the original agents' families, etc.)
Of note, in Israel you're rarely allowed to talk about the military. Only recently did the Israeli government admit to having the Shin Bet, which is a mixture of the CIA and Secret Service. Israel is perhaps not a prime example because they don't have a free press. National security is prime there, but they're perhaps more locally hated than America is.
Mike Greenberg
http://www.yourmothernaked.com
There are gray areas to almost everything, but the sanctity of human life should be an overarching consideration in anything you do.
Your views. Some of us don't give a shit about our own lives, and don't tend to value the lives of others much either. In the end, the statement 'Human life is valuable, and should be valued' is just as much an opinion as 'Natalie Portman is the hottest girl ever.' and carries about as much weight without further proof and justification.
What will happen when some of these people are actually found dead because of the actions of the NYT and the guy who opened the docs. Just imagine that for a second. People might actually fucking die. And the more interesting question, is who'll have to be the one to answer for it?
I frequently get sent word documents by various people, being a unix user I of course send back the usual note about proprietory formats etc etc..
.pdf for sending out messages.
But I've found is more effective to also go int othe file with a text editor and extract bits of text which they've deleted, along iwth other information the user may no t want me to see.
Recently I received such a message from someone which handled PR for my particular section of the NI govt. There was some really dodgy info in there, and afdter returning it to the sender, the govt department got sent aplaintext policy document about not using MS Word or anything more complicated that
People should go looking at these files - there's a lot of info out there to be had
The claim that information "wants" to be free is a charaterization of its nature. It doesn't necessarily mean that you or I should want a specific piece of information to be free. What I want may be different from what the information "wants". Consider this analogy: matter doesn't seem to "want" to be permanently formed into useful configurations. That doesn't mean we should bow down to what matter "wants". Quite the opposite: you need to make entropy your enemy if you want to make matter useful. Back to information: it's very difficult to contain, by virtue of the fact that replication has near-zero cost. That shouldn't imply that one ought never attempt to contain it.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Which just shows the terribly pernicious effect US domestic and international espionage has on communities. In their vile efforts to keep down people who are dedicated to social justice, they corrupt the comunity with offers of money for trivial pieces of information like what do the spied upon talk about with their neighbors, how they raise their children, who visits them, and stuff.
I'm happy about this blunder. I'm sure one can learn a lot more about the evil machinations of US intelligence agencies from this.
Are you adequate?
Not true. There is 2000, 97, 95, etc. MS Word has too many releases to be seriously considered even a lame defacto standard. Even businesses infected with Microsoft software have no guarantee of being able to read a MS Word document, because the document may have been written by a newer version.
MS Word's file format works for local storage, but it is useless for interchange, and will never be a serious defacto standard the way that, say, .DBF tables and .WKS spreadsheets are. If you want to send someone a document that is currently stored in MS-Word format, and you want a reasonably good chance that they can read it, then you have to either convert to something more standard (e.g. RTF, or maybe WordPerfect 5, or better yet, plain text), or print it onto paper.
Something cannot be a defacto standard if it's only a year old. A year is a long time in "Internet time" but its a blurry flash in "business time".
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You're right. We had one: text. It was used to exchange information--you know: data, useful stuff, what is needed. Now we have .doc, which is used for the interchange of data covered in dressing, gravy and all the fixins. Why? What is added by allowing every second-rate secretary to use seven fonts in a purchase order?
You know, I have another idea. Who needs houses with colors, windows, landscaping, etc. What's wrong with caves? You know, shelter, useful stuff, what is needed. Now we have all this useless "dressing and gravy". Why? What is added by allowing every second-rate homeowner to see outside, have landscaping that you know they won't maintain, and other useless amenities.
Give me gray, featureless stone caves any day.
By the way, kind of hard to have charts and diagrams in text-only files. Yeah, yeah, I know, ASCII art should be good enough for anyone.
Oh give me a cave
no longer a slave
to the grass that needs to be mowed
a nice gray slate
is all that I rate
and a nice, soft pillow of stone!
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
What I'm trying to accomplish is to get Slashdot readers to read the risks forum.
I feel that's very important.
I think the future of society is at stake if we programmers don't take heed to what's regularly discussed in risks.
If you look at the rest of my posts, you see I have no problem getting karma. It's just a matter of posting relevant, interesting, on-topic posts.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
BTW, I for one agree with him posting the report on a 47-year-old event, because information wants to be free. So there.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Invasion in Normandy happened at the time when Germany was if not dead but lethally wounded -- there was no possible turn of events could end with Nazi surviving
... in 1945, the Nazis had developed:
Someone else has pointed out that there were years of planning for the invasion. But
* bombers capable of reaching New York and flying back to Germany
* guided air-to-air missiles
* short-launch helicopter planes
* stealth technology
Sure, their economy was wrecked and their infantry was lagging. But their *technology* was good enough that if the war had gone on six months longer they would have started to push back --- and if they'd been able to concentrate *all* of their military on Russia instead of dividing it on two sides, they would have been able to hold off the invasion. (Similarly, if Russia had sued for peace the way it did in 1917, and Germany had been free to concentrate all of its military on Normandy, the allies would have been pushed back into the water).
I'm aware that this contradicts what you learned in school. I've got a Russian friend (ethnic Russian, grew up in Moldova) who was *shocked* when I pointed out that Poland at one point had stretched as far east as Smolensk --- he wasn't taught *that*, either.
I'm in boston. It's now 5am. Which means 2am in California. Not sure if it's 3 or 4 where the slashdot guys are. The story says it was posted at 3:39am. Dosen't seem to me that they're "just waking up". Get over it.
The Word feature to turn off is Fast Saves
So why was it on by default?
What other security leaks do they have in there?
We know they're squirreling away in word files lots of identifying information about the people who create and those who edit the file. The whold WORLD found out after the the FBI used it to track down the author of a Word macro virus.
So obviously, if you're:
- a government functionary charged with keeping things secret,
- a businessman or office worker handling the trade secrets that give your company a competitive edge,
- a professional responsible for keeping your clients' business data, medical histories, or similar data confidential,
- a whistle-blower,
- a revolutionary writing a manefesto, or
- darn near anyone who has information to keep sectet
you should NOT be using Microsoft's tools.
I wonder how many more people will be harmed before the general public has this figured out?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This was going on-and-off over decades after WWII -- never reaching the extent of open war before Milosevic/KLA
Exactly. Most *Americans* who have paid any attention to the issue at all blame the situation on Milosevic, whose attempts to suppress the minority in Kosovo --- like most attempts at repression --- created a backlash which *increased* the support of the KLA.
That mostly started after US interfered
True --- but we don't have any way of knowing if it would have happened *anyway*. Certainly similar things happened in Slavonia, Krajina, and eastern Bosnia, without the US interfering.
Albania was the worst place in Europe even in the time of peace
Granted --- it's one of the few places in the world i'm legitimately *afraid* to go.
On the one hand, you complain that users don't know how to use the features that are in Word, and then later you say that they should be fired if they can't learn to use a less user-friendly tool. Either way, incompetent people are going to screw things up. What else is new?
Pasting of images has to work that way, because otherwise the average user wouldn't understand that they had to send all the various linked files along with the original document. You know that will never happen. Better to have a big, but complete, document than a small one with zillions of broken links. Advanced users can still do linking, but it's far more intuitive to have a single monolithic document.
I have to admit, I've never understood this "bloated" argument. Which features do you want to delete? I guarantee for every one you name, there are a lot of people that use and depend on that feature. In fact, that's how features generally got added -- someone asking for them.
I used WordPerfect up until version 6. 6.0 was so screwed up and buggy compared to 5.2 that I decided to give Word a try. Guess what? It was far superior. I hated it at first because they took away my beloved "reveal codes" function until I realized that "reveal codes" was window dressing for an inelegent interface. If you use styles properly with inheritence, etc, they are extremely powerful.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Wait just a minute.
.PDF file crossed "the line" because it could threaten the lives of certain individuals? Bear with me through a ridiculously-worst-case-scenario:
The information wants to be free crowd isn't a bunch of absolutists - we recognize that there must be limits
And with one fell swoop, the logic of your entire argument is blown to itty bitty bits.
By saying "there must be limits", you're saying "We have to draw a line SOMEwhere." But are Mp3's and this PDF document truly different? The answer is 'no'. What is an Mp3-compressed version of a RIAA artist's song? It's a piece of information which you're not supposed to have. What is the non-redacted PDF file in question? A piece of information that you're not supposed to have.
"But QuarterSauce, a line has to be drawn. Mp3's are just music - this affect people's lives."
So do Mp3's. By partaking in Mp3's, you affect the quality of recording artists' lives (okay, okay, it's a drop in the bucket, but still a distinct point of principle). You possibly affect the quality of life for the people who are supplying you with the files; what if they get caught because they were transmitting this data to others (including you?)
So who gets to decide where the line is drawn? Who gets to say, "Well, this situation isn't dangerous enough to someone's life to be wrong, but this other situation is."
Has this non-redacted
Some kid gets busted for running an Mp3 site (or a warez site, or whatever). He gets fined, let's even say he has to do some jail time. His family really can't support the burden of the legal fees and penalty fine that well, and are forced to really cut back to make ends meet. In the meantime, Junior is having trouble finding a job because he's a convicted criminal. Mom and Dad have to continue supporting the family, and have to take second jobs. Due to the strain and general tone of things, let's say Mom suffers a heart attack, and passes away.
Downloading Mp3's just killed Mom. Heck, we could even go a morbid step further and say that Dad suffers a similar fate, and maybe just for variety Junior is so messed up by all of this that he gets hooked on drugs ond OD's.
The point of that insane fictional story is this: THERE IS REALLY NO SUCH THING AS A CLEAR LINE. You can't draw one, because for every line that's drawn, an example can be made of an exception, no matter how far-fetched.
Should this Cryptome guy have posted that document? I don't know. Should people be downloading Mp3's? Probably not. But please don't argue that "Information Wants To Be Free" doesn't apply to both situations. From a logical, principle standpoint, you can't argue that one's justified and the other's not.
"I am Worf, son of Mogh. I have come to challenge the lies that have been spoken of my father!"
-sigs of the world unite
"...what's your theory on why MS is converting to XML?"
No theory is needed. XML is not a format, it is a language (that's what the "L" stands for). There's no reason in the world that an XML file can't also be proprietary.
"Oh, I guarantee you that people like you are irrelevent to how the industry is going to evolve on this matter."
And you call yourself Reality Master? Have you seen anything that's happened since around 1995? "People like me" are starting to take the tech industry away from Microsoft. Why do you think Linux is getting big? Not because we follow "de facto standards"--it's because we like quality software AND the freedom to do what we want. And we aren't ashamed to say it.
'But "anything but Microsoft" is not an advantage, as much as you would like it to be.'
Please provide a quote, with context, where I've indicated this desire.
It's pretty clear from this series of posts and others that you like to think of yourself as a "counter-revolutionary": "The sheep like MS, the slightly less-sheeplike hate MS, but *I* (in my level-transcending wisdom) like MS--for the 'right' reasons." But guess what? Just because you condescending to "the masses" AND "non-conformist" among the "elite" doesn't make you right.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
1.) Reality Master 101's comment was in no way "flamebait."
2.) One way to commit *nix advocacy is to send a reply email to the person who sent you the two megabyte Word file as follows:
"Please resend your letter of the 23rd in text format. Our mail system detected a macro virus attached to the email you sent and the antivirus program automaticallly deleted the attachment, so I got your email but the document was gone. FYI, our network manager told me that it was the particularly destructive W97M.Stand.c virus which silently installs itself in Microsoft Office and exactly two weeks later wipes out all data on infected systems all across the user's office network."
OK, so (someone will complain) that's dishonest. But it's funny too, and that's important. Anyway, in the long view, if you can help him break his habit, your little white lie could be doing a poor cruelly longsuffering MSOffice addict a big future favor. Because after all things like W97M.Stand do exist.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
If this dude publishes those names, and someone dies, he's a murderer, and I hope he gets thrown in prison.
As far as the times criticising anyone who scans their documents for security flaws, they should be whipped. the times should be heavily criticised for this failure to adequately insure the names were removed from the document. they should be thankful someone wrote in.
but for anyone to continue publishing the names...once the problem has been exposed...if that's not a crime, it should be.
incidentally, i did not see the list published, only that the times reporter was "angry" that someone exposed their failure to safeguard the names and emailed them (?!).
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Performer Guy writes:
The CIA and the Times have already done the endangering. It seems like the Times has a lot to answer for in this. How the heck did they get the source of a 'secret' CIA document in the first place? Ultimately it has to be someone in the CIA who is responsible for this foul up.
It isn't a foul-up unless you believe that nothing the CIA has ever done is deserving of public scrutiny.
In fact, the CIA has been attempting to erase the record of its coup-related activities for several years. FOIA requests in 1997 revealed a number of "missing" documents.
[snip] This is simply amazing. I think the Times accusations have more to do with covering their own ass than concern for their unfortunate victims.
Well, it was a mistake, and clearly one they didn't intend to make. But I don't know that I consider the names in this list "victims".
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Well, what else is new ?? first we are selling, and letting the Chinese steal and buy our plans to nukes, and then, hard-drives listed as secret have been missing for around 6 months, and no one knows who had it, and now CIA .pdf files are being accessed ?? whats next ?? All of the goverment secrets on a zip file, or better yet, how about military secrets ?? who know... Just goes to show how many people actually care about stuff that is classified, and how un-guarded it can be =/
Actually, StarOffice does have revision tracking (not sure about abiword). Both SO, ABIword and WP have underlined misspelled words. Many of the other features you mention are most likley present in the major productivity suites (I don't have a regular need for them).
GS can print postscript to almost any printer. I've used gs to print out documents on everything from a ImageWriter II to a Minolta Pageworks 20 (I didn't spend the $300 for the PS option for the PW20) without any problems.
Anyway, why would you use software from a company that doesn't trust it's own software? (Hotmail relies on FreeBSD (NT has never been able to handle the load), Solaris is used to create distribution disks (From their document on how they keep distrbution media virus-free))
BTW, how is the weather in Redmond today?
However, the State Department did assert that, prior to acceptance of the plan, assurance must be forthcoming from the British that they would be flexible in their approach to the govern ment that succeeded Mossadeq as far as the oil question was concerned.
Is anybody fairly sure of what this is talking about? I presume they are talking about keeping oil prices down? or...?
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Wouldn't pdf2txt rip out all the relevant text ignoring the black boxes? --da m0nki
Looking through http://cryptome.org/cia-iran.htm, the email address of a John Markoff appears various times. Its interesting to note that this was the journalist who was supposedly very skillful in catching "uberhacker" kevin mitnick.
Doesn't look like he was very skillful this time.... (if he was actually involved in the stuff up).
http://access.adobe.com/ is a tool ostensibly to assist the visually impaired get information from PDF files - but which can also be used to get all the text at once.
I believe a similar tool (or maybe just the unix command "strings") was used to parse through the George W. web bublished PDF of his financial backers.
-- Joe Crawford, web journeyman: San Diego California USA
And you call yourself Reality Master? Have you seen anything that's happened since around 1995? "People like me" are starting to take the tech industry away from Microsoft. Why do you think Linux is getting big? Not because we follow "de facto standards"--it's because we like quality software AND the freedom to do what we want. And we aren't ashamed to say it.
Let's check the Linux scorecard:
Servers: Good success. Clearly this is the area where Linux has succeeded the most, with apps such as Apache.
Desktop: Moderate success. Clearly they have come a long way, but still are not up to the quality of Windows or even the Mac. Difficult to say whether they ever will for the average user, simply because the "average user" is not a priority to the people who work on them. In fact, there is a noted hostility toward making things easier for the non-tech-elite.
Applications: Poor success. Yes, there are some that are moderately useful, but there is no end user app that is better than the equivalent on Windows or the Mac. Many apps are held back by the lack of tech infrastructure on Linux (such as a print rendering subsystem, multimedia, etc). It's actually remarkable that there is NO end-user app that one can point to as an application success story, other than server apps such as Apache.
Desktop Penetration: Abject failure. Given that people use applications to get work done, not operating systems, it's difficult to say whether Linux will ever succeed in this space. There are so many things that have to come together, including desktop usability, applications, hardware support, corporate penetration (most important), etc.
There is no question that you can point to the server space as a successful space for Linux (which is where I use it), but the subject is Office Suites. I think you make the mistake of assuming that server success means success in all areas, and that is simply false. Otherwise secretaries would all have Sun workstations on their desktops.
It's pretty clear from this series of posts and others that you like to think of yourself as a "counter-revolutionary": "The sheep like MS, the slightly less-sheeplike hate MS, but *I* (in my level-transcending wisdom) like MS--for the 'right' reasons." But guess what? Just because you condescending to "the masses" AND "non-conformist" among the "elite" doesn't make you right.
Hmmm; you're right, but for the wrong reasons. You think I take the stands that I do out of some political sense, like I stick my finger in the wind and figure out where the extremes are, and go in the perpendicular direction. Sorry to disappoint your attempt to pigeonhole me, but I take the stands I do because it's what I believe. I believe in taking rational stands, irrespective of what is "conventional wisdom". Sometimes I even believe in the conventional wisdom, and sometimes I don't. I usually only post when I have something reasonably unique to add to a discussion, so it probably seems like I'm always against the grain. Frankly, it's boring to post an "I Agree" post, unless someone says something particularly well and I feel an urge to congratulate it.
But I do agree with you in this way: I do tend to look down on extremists on both sides, primarily because they usually don't know why they believe what they do. Microsoft is a perfect example. Most of the hatred on Slashdot is totally irrational, and done just to "fit in" with the culture. On the other hand, RMS is an extremist whom I rarely agree with, but I respect him because he can tell you exactly why he believes what he does (misguided as it is).
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Actually there is another format which most word processors understand: .RTF. Rich Text Format.
.DOC ueber alles, I am instituting a policy here at Catseye Labs. Send me stuff in either of three formats, take your pick: .TXT, .HTML, or .RTF if you absolutely, positively need fonts and formatting.
Now that I am no longer working at a company that insists on
Is RTF an open standard? I'm curious.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Invading a sovereign country has nothing to do with 'freedom', no matter what the invader thinks of himself
Never?
I would argue that the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia (which expelled the Khmer Rouge) was a great leap forward for freedom.
With this kind of slipup and now a public demonstration that these propietary word formats are highly likely to be exploited, how will the bureaucrats respond? I don't see them releasing more sensitive documents to the public. The response is going to be a very protective one.
While it is possible that because of this blunder these secretive government operations will now procure additional resources to serve public requests, I think my University would first grant me $250 million to work on a VR-MUD chamber.
The result of this news? People who want to access private government documents are going to have to travel to their respective agency and stand in line for a photocopied, protectively marked documents. So much for our digital revolution's freedom to access information.
Now we wait for fifty-something plus years before additional, secretive documents will be released and all because someone thought it would be slick to post a few names.
SoulStriker
SoulStriker
Am I wrong? Prove it.
Well, how many of those journalists may actually be government agents? The US military has proven links to the US media: look here for a story on Army propaganda personnel working at CNN. Surely there are CIA people working in all major media outlets.
But for what purpose simple journalists would have it?
Maybe to report on it? Gee, I though that was what journalists in a country that prides itself on its "free press" (but really has a handful of megaconglomerates pushing their interests with their media possessions) were supposed to do.
Are you adequate?
But did they have the manpower to run the technology? Was it of high enough quality to be usable? What about raw materials?
Anyway, somewhere around that point we developed a nuclear weapon. Since Germany wasn't going to develop one for a long time, the US could nuke them into submission.
How can you possibly draw a parallel between downloading mp3's and releasing secret information by the CIA on the names of their agents? How the f*ck are the two related? They're not! The information wants to be free crowd isn't a bunch of absolutists - we recognize that there must be limits. Some information shouldn't be free - you'll note I don't publish my root password.
By and far, this mandra is related to a subconscious counter-culture and anti-authoritarian attitude which has grown on us as a result of circumstances. Circumstances like watching our rights as "consumers" and citizens be systematically stripped away while calling it a "win in the battle for personal choice". We were taunted by our peers, ejected from our school system, for wanting to know how the system worked.
Yeah, there is some history here fella, and it would do you some good to talk to people on the other side of the fence before going off and trying to label everyone - something you'll find is usually met with freezing contempt amongst geeks.
Given this strange behavior to this story, I have to ask. Is it "information wants to be free, except when lives are at stake"? Is it "information wants to be free, especially since beer isn't free"? Is it "information wants to be free, because I can't afford to pay programmers"? Or is it "information wants to be free, because Courtney Love teaches us how we gotta stick it to the man"?
I stuck a camera in your bedroom when you weren't suspecting it, and I vidcap'ed your masturbation technique. Yeah, I know--I shouldn't have tresspassed. And I'll own up to that part. But now I've digitized all this information--your hand movements, the naughty pictures you look at, the beastiality...
Digitized video images is also information. And information should be free, regardless of what that information is, right? Expect my anonymous posts to be put up on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.masturbation for all to see.
Don't worry--there was no camera. And there was no digitized video. But the above is ment to illustrate a point, which is that there is a balance point where information should and should not be free. Sometimes one's privacy is more important than the free flow of information about a person--or are you selectively reading only the articles on Linux and skipping the ones on Doubleclick?
What we're dealing with here is an example of the latter: the desire to preserve one's privacy for something they did 30 years ago (and which could get them killed) is greater than the need for the free flow of abstract, impersonal scientific or historical information. While the consequences are greater (they're getting killed is probably worse than the imbarasment you would feel if vidcaps of your masturbation made it on the alt.sex groups), the principle is the same: the need for privacy must outweigh the need for the free flow of information.
Voyeurism is not scientific inquiry.
The US bribed^H^H^Hpayed IRA and Ulster Union leaders to stop fighting in Northern Ireland (knock on wood). Eh? You what? The US didn't pay the paramilitaries in NI anything - not cash, concessions, anything. Their sole role was to supply someone neutral to mediate between the various sides. As this could have been done by anyone, I think this was a concession to Clinton by Blair so he could associate himself with the peace process to help his international standing. As you're (presumably) an American, I'll let you off. I only live about 30 miles from Ireland (Wales), and despite it being in the news constantly I haven't a clue how it all works. Neither do most of its population, I suspect.
You seem to think that the NY Times is both legally liable and under an obligation to the government to report information on what their sources are. Neither is true.
I fail to see how this follows from my most recent post. I have asserted that an investigation should be made of this matter since clearly classified documents were compromised:
1) Secret documents were leaked to the press. Either someone in the press with authorization to access the documents leaked the information to those without access, or else someone outside the NYTimes organization leaked the information to journalists who have no authorization to access the information.
2) At some point information that was classified was leaked to individuals who lack the authorization to peruse the documents. In other words, at some point someone broke the law in giving the documents to those without authorization.
3) When someone breaks the law in this fashion, the FBI is often called in to investigate the matter.
4) 1) through 3) imply that it is consistent for the FBI to investigate this leak of information, and an obvious first place to investigate, besides the organization responsible for drafting the document in question, is the news agency who distributed the information.
Thank you for your very kind civics lesson; I hope you permit me to return the favor: While the NYTimes staff may indeed be innocent of all wrongdoing, this is neither for you nor me to determine. This is for the judicial system to determine if, after an investigation is made, enough evidence surfaces to warrant a case being brought up before the courts. Please note that I am only suggesting an investigation of an obvious compromise of classified information be done, and not that jack-booted fiends break into the NYTimes offices to start breaking the fingers of those who don't "volunteer" information on their sources.
The company was pissed off with me, but the group that was contracting them was so impressed by my analysis that we landed an extension of our review contract.
The middle mind speaks!
I'm not saying that communism is a superior economic system to capitalism. I am simply saying, what makes you think that you can't have a democratic communist republic?
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Maybe to report on it? Gee, I though that was what journalists in a country that prides itself on its "free press" (but really has a handful of megaconglomerates pushing their interests with their media possessions) were supposed to do.
Last time I checked, press is supposed to represent the public, not the government. Of course, adding corporations to "the public" already turns the whole idea into a farce, but having government agencies' interests secretly influencing it crosses the line.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
There are two types of information transfers: official and personal. Personal transfers are the business of the concerned parties, and hence not our concern. But official--business, gov't, educational &c.--transfers are. The purpose of these transfers is to exchange data in a usable form. It is not to be pretty or attractive. One does not dress up 30GB of atmospheric data with pictures of clouds.
The problem is that these transfers have not been computerised. Open, well-thought out formats should be proposed and used so that this information might be transferred in a comprehensible and portable fashion. Comprehensible, because if one cannot understand information, then it is garbage. Portable, because oen never knows what tomorrow may bring and what the requirements then will be.
It just so happens that we have the perfect format for data exchange of text: text. A purchase order should either be sent over a special Purchase Order Protocol ('cept POP's already taken), or sent as text. A paper--which needs formatting--should be encoded in such a way that presentation is seperated from content. A discussion among colleagues concerning the purchase of a new web server should be conducted over email, in text. Why add the useless overhead of Word? It slows things down, fills up disk space and is in many other ways sub-optimal.
Text can be made attractive as well as expressive: I can set my mail reader to use any font I desire; I can attach images in the appropriate places; I can use the ASCII notations for emphasis and the rest. But, unfortunately, that requires that my brain be engaged.
I handle the whole MS Word problem by silently throwing away Word documents I receive in my personal mail. When I send documents, they are either plain text or marked-up text; either is perfectly legible to the casual reader. Sometimes I use image files (PostScript, PDF, JPEG or PNG), if that is nec.
BTW, charts and diagrams should be images, in formats readable by anyone, or if important, they should be in the form of data, which can be easily interpreted by the user as he wishes. One of the things I hate is just getting a chart. I want the data, so I can look at it, analyse it and generate my own charts. You'd be surprised at how easy it can be to make a chart lie...
I don't know whether that statistic is true or not -- it sounds possible. Of course you should remember that on June 5, 1944 (The day before D-Day) "All was quiet on the Western Front". So it would seem foolish to NOT put 90% of the military on the other front where there was actual combat taking place.
Well, let's say I'm an architect. I use L33tCAD, which has a fabulous open CAD format. However, for some odd reason my customers keep sending me stuff in AutoCAD format, which as you know is closed. Unfortunately, L33tCAD doesn't have all the features of AutoCAD, and doesn't really import properply, but heck, I am going to take a stand and tell my customers to shove it even though AutoCAD owns the CAD market.
.doc format cannot be extended by anyone outside Microsoft, nor can Word documents be processed by any software (reliably) except Microsoft Word.
Yes, I would look like an unprofessional fool.
In fact, in the world of engineering, DXF is more of a "defacto" standard than the closed DWG (AutoCAD drawing) format. AutoCAD can import/export DXF, as can virtually all other CAD software. If you demanded that things be sent in DWG format, you'd look like more of an unprofessional fool.
While there are certainly are benefits to there being a standard document format, that are huge disadvantages to that standard being one that is proprietary and closed. The Word
Suppose someone wanted a tool that would ensure that their documents didn't contain any deleted information? Or a tool that performed some other useful transformation/validation of their documents? All of these tools essentially have to either come from Microsoft, or be written as Word macros. With an open format, there would be far more innovation in the field of document processing.
And you fail to realize that many of us don't us Microsoft operating systems not for religious reasons, but for practical reasons. 99% of the work I do can't be done as efficiently under Windows as it can under UNIX. Why should I need to have a second computer just to handle that 1% of the time when someone sends me a document in Word format? With an open format, I could view the document on the OS I use for everything else.
To sum it up, yes, there are advantages to having a standard document format. It would be far better if that was an open and portable "de jure" standard, rather than a non-portable, closed, proprietary "de facto" standard. Unfortunately, once a standard has become entrenched, it often becomes very difficult for people to switch to something else even if it's measurably superior.
It still forces you to have to use that lame "Reveal Codes" nonsense (yes, I know a lot you think that's a feature not a bug, but you're wrong. Presentation should be separate from content).
.NET thread. It will be a beautiful world when all documents are XML, especially Word documents, because it will become relatively trivial to convert the content into a meaningful form using XSLT. Then one only has to pick their favorite stylesheet and presentation vocabulary to render it, or convert the file to the storage vocabulary of their favorite word processor. With conversion so easy, I bet it won't be long before a simplified version of DocBook becomes the real industry document standard.
You don't understand what that means. Both the codes and the WYSIWYG display are part of the presentation. One is simply the processed from of the other. The text is the content. (And for one who calls the Word format a standard, it seems a bit strange to hear you harp about the distinction between presentation and content).
And as it is, the reveal codes option is increadibly useful, and I wish that Word's support for it was as good as I remember Word Perfect. Because Word, in all it's WYSIWYG sophistication, is pretty freaking stupid when it comes to manipulating the formatting. When dealing with a large document, with multiple authors, and three dozen text styles, all that hidden sophistication becomes a nightmare of sloppy organization that is hard to fix because it's hard to see. Doing something like changing a heading can break the rest of the document. God how I pray that I could dump Word files to text and clean them up like I clean up the crap generated by WYSIWYG HTML editors.
I was thinking about this the other day when people were ranting about XML in that Microsoft
The difference in this is that it puts people at risk, whereas MS and DeCSS are simply novelties with no real consquence either way,
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
I pointed out to John that the same feat could be accomplished using a plugin for Acrobat called Pitstop.
All rental IBMs at Kinkos have this plugin, so basically the Times PDF was vulnerable from the word Go. I'm sure that uber-intelligence agenices has already figured out how to remove the redaction long before Mr. Young posted his revelations.
Just open the file in Acrobat, click, click, delete... full disclosure.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Germans developed a lot of technology (I doubt about stealth though, as it would be extremely impractical at the moment), however it was nowhere close to being ready for production, given the state of German industry by then. Also the war was in the condition when no improvement to anything that files (bombers, missiles, helicopters, spaceships, bows and arrows, slingshots -- anything) will give any advantage to them unless it massively outnumbered anything that Russian had in the air or on the ground. Tanks could help, but there was no progress there, and there was a shortage of copper to make advanced things like electric transmission practical. So they were doomed in any case.
I'm aware that this contradicts what you learned in school. I've got a Russian friend (ethnic Russian, grew up in Moldova) who was *shocked* when I pointed out that Poland at one point had stretched as far east as Smolensk --- he wasn't taught *that*, either.
I don't know where he studied -- definitely not at the place where I did. The definition of "Poland" however is rather foggy over the all time when various stuff existed at its place.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I think, everyone who has to deal with pdf files on a regular basis should know that you can see how parts of graphics are built up and then overwritten again.. So this should hardly be new info for those web-publishers...
.pdf appeared. It probably went thru many hands long before the article appeared on the nytimes website, so people interested in these names (even the ones who would not know a computer if it fell on their head) problably knew them long before.
.pdf most likely is just postscript in disguise, one could make these black rectangles transparent anyways by simple search/and/replace (if one knew the encoding used... but just see the ghostscript-source for details..) anyway.
And arguing, that telling people how amateurish this ducument was "redacted" would be endangering lives is just wrong.
The secrecy of the names in this document has not been compromised when cryptome published the unredacted version, and it has not been compromised when the "redacted"
And because
The writer of the article thinks, that overclassification of issues often intends to cover up governmental wrongdoing, and so the criminalization of reporting classified information is a threat to the free press.
This bill is not necessary and controversial, because already law exist, which prosecutes reporting of information which actually harms national security and is not just classified.
Maybe this intentional (no journalist is that stupid?) endangering of lives will ease the passage of this bill.
First of all there is simply no comparison between handing out names of a few people involved in a case of past dirty pool on behalf of the CIA and handing away the technical secret behind how to get from damaging a medium city to levelling a large one. The Progressive has forever raised the stakes in controlling nuclear material. Any enemy government that could previously put together a nuclear bomb can now put together a far more powerful H-bomb. If a terrorist organization managed to deliver a nuclear bomb to New York City previously they could cause serious damage to lower Manhattan. Now they would destroy the whole thing.
That is how serious the question was yet the government could do nothing about it.
Conversely the state secrets revealed by Deep Throat were of tremendous current interest. Did Deep Throat violate national security? No question! Yet the government simply does not have the right to investigate Woodward to find out his sources.
Let me throw another item in the mix. The Pentagon Papers. The government knew that The Times had classified material. They even knew who it was from, and the approximate contents of said material. Yet they were not allowed to prevent the publication of said material, and they were not allowed to investigate which specific documents the press had.
That decision ultimately got the US out of Vietnam. Had it been done earlier tens of thousands of American lives (and many more Vietnamese ones) would have been saved. Conversely had it been done later, more lives would have been lost.
No, in this relatively minor case the FBI has no grounds to investigate any newspaper unless they have direct evidence that the Times was engaged in directly illegal activities such as breaking and entering. Sure, lives are at stake. Well lives were at stake when the US put a puppet regime in power, and lives were at stake when his brutal little dictatorship led to an extremist theocracy. Personally I think that the US should be turning over various people who set up other puppet regimes for war crimes. That will not happen, but don't expect me to shed tears if a few names escape the censors.
Freedom and human rights matters more than their petty dictatorships. If I felt otherwise then I would rather that the Soviet Union had won the cold war.
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Well, then they must not be doing what they're supposed to.
Of course, adding corporations to "the public" already turns the whole idea into a farce, but having government agencies' interests secretly influencing it crosses the line.
Well, corporations exist only because the state licenses them to exist, so there's one first point of influence; also, the US government has this huge military apparatus that the megacorps can depend on to enforce their interests worldwide, so they can enter in exploitative deals all over the planet. Of course the media megacorps will be intertwined with the government; they use it to expand their power and influence.
Are you adequate?
To every I German fighting the western allies, another 10 were fighting the Russians. Really D-day, Italy & Africa were mere side shows & made no effect on the course of the war what so ever.
The NY Times believes that publishing this information will endanger the lives of people.
I don't believe that the NY Times has the capability to keep such information from falling into the wrong hands. That's just arrogance. Since when have newspapers been able to keep things secret? In my experience, news rooms are just about the worst place for a secret. If nothing else, with all the gossip, secret info will get out anyway....
-- I don't have a cool sig.
When you copy a range of cells from a Ecxel spreadsheet document to, for example, send in an email, you don't just copy the range of cells, you copy the whole document with the range of cells highlighted. When you look in the mail, it looks fine, but when you double click the spreadsheet object to edit it, you can scroll through the spreadsheet, move from sheet to sheet using CTRL-PAGEDOWN/PAGEUP, and etc.
We found this out in our organisation recently when accounts copied pieces out of a salaries spreadsheet to give to managers, thinking they were only sending out the details of each managers department, but in fact sending the whole spreadsheet with details of company wide salaries ! Fortunately nothing bad came of this, but yet another example of Microsoft not planning their products for privacy and security. One can easily imagine this having much more serious consequences.
My thoughts are if you have anything you want to send where leaked data may be an issue, save your Word Document or Spreadsheet as text, and then import it back in and reformat. This of course may not always be practical for 100 page documents or whatever, but you know you're safe.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
Even without a declaration of war, the leakage of this information was, and still possibly is, dangerous to national security by the virtue that it endangers citizens (i.e., members of the original agents' families, etc.)
Correct, which is why the parties responsible for keeping that classified information safe should be reprimanded. John Young had no such obligation.
Which US allies did Germany invade? When France and Russia were invaded, and Britain attacked, they weren't US allies, and only became so after Pearl Harbour. The US had no allies at this time, with the possible exception of various satellite states. So it had no "obligations" to defend anyone.
Otherwise, your contention that the US held back from attacking Germany frontally until it became clear that Russia would survive is certainly arguable at best. I would blame Churchill's insistence on attacking the "soft underbelly of Europe" (ie Italy, 1943) which meant that there were no resources for a landing in France until 1944 ... which is when they did land. 1942 would have been *way* too early for a landing in France - the landing ships, troops, air forces just were not available then. But I would say that it was pretty clear that Russia was going to survive after Stalingrad in 1942/43. As I've explained, D-Day wasn't really an option in 1942, so where's your evidence?
(Please don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that the US "won the war" in Europe or anything like that. In fact, I think it is pretty clear that the USSR did by far the most to defeat Germany, and paid the highest price for doing so. I just don't buy your theories. If anyone was thinking along those lines, it was Churchill - the Americans were quite clueless as to the Soviet threat until very late in the war.)
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
The old men start the wars, the young men fight them.
it's been mentioned in comp.risks numerous times - ms word files by default are saved by revisions. i got a job offer two years ago that contained the offer letters of five other people. i did quite well i found. :)
the only time i've been a fan of ms products actually.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
What I'm missing is the explanation why they changed their mind. It looks like they wanted to publish before someone else does.
I would like to know if they considered the timing of all this. For someone named in this report, a couple of hours to leave the country might make a big difference.
Don't you find this all rather comforting? I mean, isn't it rather nice to find out that rather than employing a bunch of perfect heartless humanoid clones, that the CIA actually employ regular blokes like you and me, who make mistakes?
The CIA/NSA/GCHQ aren't perfect. They're human. They are little people who have desk jobs just like you and me. They go home at the end of the day and they play bad music too loud and they go to crap parties and they go to the movies and they spill popcorn all down their t-shirt just like you and me.
While you're at it, you might want to go to:
www.open.gov.uk/search/search.htm
My pal from GCHQ (I live near Cheltenham, it's difficult to live around Cheltenham without having friends in GCHQ) laughed and laughed when he tried this. Then he searched for some other phrase that he wouldn't tell me, then he stopped laughing, then he went kind of quiet, and then he said "I think I need to have a few words with some people on Monday"...
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Sad fact is that until people won't die because some secretary doesn't know to use their tools, nobody will care neither for educating personal, nor for making tools do things right, not do things as easy as possible. And even after that not many would care too. Until all "Time"s won't realize they are playing with people's lives, these things will be more and more common.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
I mean, I would start worrying if the only nations that defend you are China and Cuba, both well-known flagships of democracy ;-)
--Coke
Alex, replying to a troll in such a way should really not be your style - I'm sure you can do better. Please answer the previous well-made non-AC points you choose to ignore.
--Coke
"Universal" means that it's widespread and popular everywhere, not that it's supported by absolutely everyone. For example, the knowledge of the Newton's laws is universal, yet I know a lot of people who don't have it.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
inally, the most important feature that Word has is -- Word compatibility. Face it; Word is the defacto industry standard document interchange format. The other suites are pathetic when it comes to compatibility.
Firstly, it's not so much a defacto standard as it is the unthinking choice. Sort of like calling someone in Sweden and just expecting that they speak english.
Second, Word is fairly pathetic when it comes to compatibility. It can't even interoperate fully with older versions of itself. It's easy to win a beauty contest if you convince the judges that beauty is defined by how much the contestant looks like you.
Finally, I'll bet other software would read word documents just fine if MS didn't go out of it's way to make that a problem.
If you tell someone in a company you are working with jointly, "hey, we need your specs for this product" and they send you a Word doc and you come back with "I don't have word, please send plain text," they're gonna say "these guys can't even read a word .doc, why are we working with them"?
Conversely, I could say "these guys haven't even got half a clue about interoperability, what makes me think we won't end up doing all the adapting while they play solitare? Maybe working with them isn't such a good idea."
The systematic reduction of albanian's rights within Kosovo, and the growing violence (which increased the voilence done by the KLA as well) was a clear sign. Imagine a gunman who has killed 10 people in the room and you are the last one, aiming at you and shouting 'you will die', what are you going to do? Wait until he shoots wether there would have been one more killing? How likely is it that the gunman instead apologizes to you and lets you go?
--Coke
I've read through most of the comments here, and it strikes me that there is a lot of discussion about how bad file formats are. Yeah file formats are bad, remember this when you design your next one. Yeah, it's useful to know how to extract hidden info from these various file formats.
Now address the point that releasing this info may lead to some peoples deaths. Which I feel is much more important at this point than the file formats. Have the people who may be at risk been warned? If you know someone who may know someone who may be at risk, perhaps now is the time to ask around and try to pass the info on. Let's try to make sure no-one gets hurt because of the dumb-ass actions of all actors in this sorry episode.
Jeff Veit
As anyone who's had to do lot of actual wordprocessing will tell you, WP is so much of a better *word processor* than Word that it's just not funny.
It has more sane style handling. It has better number handling. It has better table handling.
In short, it does better wordprocessing.
It doesn't have sparkly text.
It doesn't have a pinball game.
It doesn't have a paperclip.
It does have totally broken sections.
It does have smashed page numbering (How many pages your document is depends on your version of Word. That's broke.)
It has lame TOCing.
It has crap indexing.
But it has a paper clip.
And wizards to help you write a letter to granny.
And sparkly text.
But for real, 700 page tech documents like the ones we deal with, it sucks.
It's slow.
It's unstable (Word 97 SR-2b) on boxes with 128MB of RAM and 600MHz PIII processors, running NT4 SP6.
The bullets/numbering system is so baroque and non-deterministic that people here only use it when forced to.
Compared to something like LaTeX or Interleaf it blows donkeys for REAL work.
It's a toy, suitable for parish newsletters and recipe cards.
--
Peter
Up to version 7, that is.
It's gone in 8.
--
Peter
But it isn't, and people fsck up their documents and hand them to me for fixing.
"Fix the styles, and you've fixed the document. It's not as if they're hidden. Where's the need for Reveal Codes?"
Yeh. Right. That kinda assumes that there isn't half a dozen styles depending on the style you fix, and that there isn't any local formatting buggering things up, and that it's not a subdocument (my god, how craply is this implemented in Word?) which has its own styles...
--
Peter
I wonder if the New York Times will own up to the rather blatant fact that they fudged up. Seriously, if Mr. Young had come up with this method, it doesn't seem too terribly surprising that interested parties wouldn't have done so themselves. Hell, how many fast computers are there in Iran, anyway?
Moo
BTW: why did you mention my website? Do you want it to be slashdotted? :-) Nah, I think my 128 Kb upstream cable connection can handle it pretty much.
-- Rogier
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
When I talk about all the stupid things the government over here do, I say "they" (I didn't vote for them, and I only voted for the people I did vote for as the best of a bad bunch)...
What your government does, and what I think of it doesn't reflect on you as a person - I don't care what nationality you are.
Anyway, my point is that just because I happen to agree that the US government deserves a fair amount of international animosity, none of you americans need to feel offended...
There are many countries "south of the border" that would gladly let you know that your statements are full of shit...
Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
The purported danger was to their children and families. Family is very strong in a lot of cultures, and "Your father was a traitor" can carry a lot of 'weight'...
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Endangering lives my lilly-white (REDACTED)!
We're talking 47 YEARS here! Even if someone was 21 at the time, they'd be closing in on that septugenarian mark! They're more in danger of losing BLADDER CONTROL than they are of being hunted down by an equally aged remnant of a four-decades-dead government!
In intelligence circles, this is pre-dirt ANCIENT HISTORY.
I can see it now.
Needless to say, it must be a slow news day if this guy needs to claim "violations of national security" to grab some page space.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
They were absolutely sure that people in Iran can't type. Now they think that same people can't run od(1). And they call themselves Intelligence agency. How cool.
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
One program was called "Dirty Laundry." Each week, WRAB broadcast blueprints unearthed from some secret military-industrial cache or another. You could either try to figure it out (and win by building a working model) or be lazy and wait for the answer the following week. Previous week's answer: RAND Corporation Anti-Gravity Device Mark IV.
We've had something like this for years, of course, though the floating base is new, but Havenco could hold forbidden data that would get The Smoking Gun struck offline in a minute. Will Havenco (or rather their customers) be as successful as their fictional counterpart?
Dirtylaundry.com is owned by Unilever, the soap products company that also owns Ben & Jerry's.
When will people realise that PDF sucks? It has sucked since it ever came out. Its format is not open, the Adobe viewer is ugly (both its user interface, and the appearance of the text), there are hardly any editing tools for it, and it has large file sizes for small amounts of information. What a mess!
See Cliffs thread on Linux Development.
This does raise the question of how far to go in exposing secrets. We've lately had more and more confirmation that our guardians are often incompetent, arrogant fools. Most governments do a crap job of guarding our secrets and quickly abuse the privilege. We need more exposure of official nonsense, especially the dangerous kind. The question is: who draws the line and where?
The CIA and the Times have already done the endangering. It seems like the Times has a lot to answer for in this. How the heck did they get the source of a 'secret' CIA document in the first place? Ultimately it has to be someone in the CIA who is responsible for this foul up. It looks like at the very least they should review their procedures on controlling & releasing electronic versions of their documents. This isn't exactly a novel phenomenon. It also seems unlikely that it's the only pdf file out there from the master spies with this problem. I guess there will be some overtime getting worked in Langley right about now.
This is simply amazing. I think the Times accusations have more to do with covering their own ass than concern for their unfortunate victims.
Another good solution might be for Slashdot to open a branch in Europe.
when he found out others already were attempting to gain the names. Publishing highlights the situation that the exposed individuals and their families are in. If he kept quiet about the whole matter, then someone could have extracted names and went quietly on a revenge spree without the targets knowing at all...
-select black box with "Touchup Object Tool"
-press delete key
done!
Do you agree that in the last 10 years (eg. starting _after_ the Gulf War) the US foreign policy was pretty sane from a human point of view?
The US bribed^H^H^Hpayed IRA and Ulster Union leaders to stop fighting in Northern Ireland (knock on wood).
They bribed^H^H^H^Hpayed Israel to find the peace process attractive.
They brought fragile but existing peace to Bosnia, and started the same in Kosovo. If you take the preservation of human lives as a universal standard, then there were less people killed in Kosovo this year than in a month (you pick the month) two years ago.
Yes, IMO this peace was worth those innocent ~400 lives caused by the air-raids (as counted by Yugoslav propaganda - not the tens of thousands they claimed initially), if you balance this against those many kosovoans *not* being killed now. The bosnian war took an estimated 200 thousands lives, so that was the prospective. If you are forced to pick between hundreds of lives and get your hands bloody, and thousands of lives but stay clean, which one would you pick?
If there is a huge rock falling down towards 100 people and you have the option to push a button that redirects the rock to another group of 10 people, what would you do? Save 90 lives and become a killer (of those 10 people who would not have died otherwise), or let 100 people die but stay morally clean? If you have the power to actually *do something*, these are the questions you face every day.
--Coke
Why should anybody be considerate of these people's lives? If they had any respect for other people's lives they wouldn't be going around setting up coups!
I don't think the NYT is at fault for this; however, the CIA operative that let a PDF file out with soft redactions, he ought to be drawn and quartered. Since the redactions are merely annotations added to a file as an afterthought, they can be removed so long as the file has a public file format. Worse, you rely on the imaging software to do the right thing under all conditions- the whole mess is really unsuitable for anything confidential, let alone Eyes Only level Top Secret.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Good point. I had just read your comments on /.. And respect your disagreement and that of others. Still, once the insecure doc had been made public, it seemed to me that those who might be harmed by it should be aware of the threat, and that the blunder should not hidden to avoid embarrassment of the Times and CIA leaker. That coverup would be worse than openly publicizing the threat. This is comparable to trying to hide weakness in crypto, or that a security system has been cracked. Far too often the producers of those systems try to hide the weakness using accusations like the Times and others have, which only serve to conceal their self-interest at the victims' expense. Nobody who has followed the intelligence agencies' hoary "lives will be at risk" chant over the years to hide their screw-ups should believe its use this time. I'm amazed that the Times' reporters ape the disinformation con-artists. Probably due to fear of embarrassment, the nightmare of vainglorists -- who has not felt that, too. A horrifying number of lives were sacrificed by the coup, as the CIA report shows. The sideshow of the names appears to be a deliberate attempt to divert attention from the real issue of US and British abuse of power -- which the Times should distance itself from by not parroting the CIA excuse. Usually it does not, and a pity that it is now. The Times is commended for publishing the report, and it should be widely read for the truth it tells about covert war crimes by many nations, as now being revealed out around the globe. The Internet is a great tool for behaving truly responsibly to release hidden information rather than being a "responsible publisher" who does what the master leakers order. FWIW, all my personal data is on jya.com and cryptome.org, and has been there since day one of setting up a web site. Try to find that kind of info about the Times personnel much less those of the CIA and other global intel sneakers and killers. Regards, John At 07:44 AM 6/25/00 -0400, you wrote: >http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/06/25/0320 201threshold=1commentsort=0&mode=threadp id=6#97 > >Free speech works both ways... pity. > >
Damn it the more I read the worse this gets.
Jim Risen is the guy who's caused this problem now he's accusing the people who exposed his treachery of endangering the very lives his incompetence has thrown to the wolves.
I say arrest him and show him the sharp end of a 10 year stretch unless he comes up with the name of his CIA mole. Even if he hadn't screwed up like this, he'd still have advertised to all & sundry that he had the original file somewhere on his systems. How difficult would it be for a half competent agent to wander in and take his whole file system?
Oh no.. Not in the least. The press are supposed to represent their own interests. The hope is that -- supposedle being closer to the people -- they'll reprepresent the people's interests as a side-effect. That having been said, if the people who own the newspapers are the same people who own the politicians, (cf. DECSS), all bets are off.
I still remember back in the Iran hostage-taking. Being a Canadian, I had access to both US and foreign news reporting. I was brutally shocked by the US media's blatent twisting and even misrepresentation of events in Iran. No stone was unturned in the crusade to portray Iranians as hating the American people, anti-democratic and bombastic.The end result of that crusase was that just about every moderate in or near the Iranian government was either executed, exiled (sometimes both) or (in the case of Ayatolla Khomeni -- yes, he was a moderate) isolated and neutralized.
Now, if President Carter had recieved accurate intelligence WRT Iran from the CIA, he might have been able to respond sanely, in spite of what was going through the press, but the head of the CIA (George Bush) was to busy getting ready to run for Vice President.
Sorry for the rant, but putting the CIA, Iran and the press in the same sentence gives me flashbacks
--
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I'd support that post getting moderated up. Sure, it sounds like a typical anti-govt rant, but it puts the finger on the usually invisible (yet rampant) problem of the massive over-use of classification for things that have nothing to do with national security and everything to do with keeping gross incompetence and dirty deeds away from public scrutiney. "risk to lives" is perpetuated by the over-classification, but it's usually others (often innocents), not those who can cover their ass with "National Security" abuses of power, who suffer.
It's all very well and good to show off one's expertise but peoples' lives are not something to be played with. These exposed persons earlier risked tremendous torture and death for themselves and their familes in order to help the world which benefits from having the freedom to print stuff like this. How ironic that our own freedoms should translate to such a lack of personal responsibility and gratitude to these persons.
To John Young and the offending employees of the NYT: you deserve to have every last detail of your lives published to the world. Including credit card numbers. Shoot... that's NOTHING compared to what could happen to these agents. Why not advertise you as great targets for recently released sodomizers? Let YOU see what it's like to be hung out to dry, placed in peril by the fully premeditated yet incompassionate actions of others!
Should any retribution be taken against these agents, no amount of finger-pointing or personal denials will be able to wash the blood from your hands. I hope your little game was worth it.
-Noctavis
Well. Although many of like to see a arrogant and monopolistic corp like M$ get more open. And generally likes when the computer world get more open for that matter. It does not mean we are all fanatically Cyberpunks. (you know that 'info wants to be free' subculture that William Gibson named in 1984 - quite by chance I'm sure).
;).
It's something diffrent when a number of people's life get's endangered when they are fighting one of the western worlds enemies. These people are HERO's dammit
Anyway. I think we can all agree that we want an open world where we all live in peace and share the info for the quicker and better develeopment of the human race. But this does not exactly help with that...
Have you ever considered that, in a nation where 'We the People' are sovereign, it is a blight upon that sovereignty that so many ideas and data are kept from their knowledge? If The People are supposed to determine their own destiny by making informed decisions about whom to elect and whose policies to enforce, then how are they to do so if the most critical information to those ends is kept from them? Secrecy has few places in a true democracy or republic.
And while you're at it, don't forget to run rough shod over the first amendment and freedom of the press. Yeah, that's the ticket.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Many of the arguments on here have followed the lines of "The information is very old. Therefore it cannot be of any importance anymore, and no harm can result from releasing it to the public." These arguments miss the point, however, that the U.S. press is, perhaps unintentionally, one of the single most pervasive and irresponsible agents for foreign intelligence. They routinely violate people's civil rights by interfering with their right to a fair trial, they endanger national security by releasing classified information to the public, they interfere with ongoing investigations, and they place U.S. and U.N. soldiers and their missions in jeopardy by their aggressive reporting of active military operations. This is another in a long string of security mishaps perpetrated by the press, yet the only reason it constitutes news here on /. is because of their technical naivete.
The fact remains that the document in question was classified Secret and had no business being published in the first place. (I would argue that if it indeed endangers the lives of agents or their families, as argued by the CIA, then the document should have had a higher classification). What business do they have releasing such a document without ensuring that the sanitized version is indeed sanitized? Does the NYTimes take all appropriate security measures when they deal with such classified information? Do they have a secure perimeter within their confines where classified information is kept away from those without a compelling "need to know?" And just what constitutes a compelling "need to know" among the press--the need to sell a 4x4 ad for Cambell's Chunky Soup or the latest "Big Sale" at Macy's? Am I the only one who is disturbed by how many of our national secrets could be compromised in this manner?
Where is the investigation of the leak? Is the FBI pursuing criminal charges against the NYTimes and its staff as they are with the NEST team at Los Alamos? Why does the Los Alamos National Laboratory suffer daily in the press because some hard drives were misplaced within a secure area, yet when the NYTimes mishandles classified documents (documents with the same level of classification, mind you), then so little is made of the affair?
Has lab-bashing become so fashionable that we don blinders whenever larger security issues surface in the vaunted press? Enquiring minds want to know.
I haven't seen it happen yet, but I know that someone is going to wave the freedom of speech flag on this one and say that's OK to release this kind of information because of freedom of speech. Well it's not! The New York Times tried to do the right thing and made a mistake. That does not make it acceptable for someone to exploit that error in this manner. Aside from the real danger to the families of these people who are in Iran, what about those who just want to retain some privacy? What about those who would rather not have their names thrown out into what is turning into a public spectacle for the purpose of criticizing their past and the past of the US government? With the right to freedom of speech comes the responsibility to use it wisely. It's people releasing information like this simply because they can that is going to result in us all having our rights eroded. This is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE! And they know it.
-- If it's stupid but works, it isn't stupid.
Name one useful feature that Word has that can't be done on Unix.
"Unix" has no word processing features. Oh, you mean some of the office apps available for Unix?
Let's see... I believe StarOffice does not have revision capability. Not sure about WP.
WP does not have Styles as advanced as Word. It still forces you to have to use that lame "Reveal Codes" nonsense (yes, I know a lot you think that's a feature not a bug, but you're wrong. Presentation should be separate from content).
Other features: Autoformat (great for converting plain text docs), advanced embedding (All the suites are way behind on this, although KOffice is trying), underlining of misspelled words (why others don't copy this feature is beyond my understanding), Master Document capability (splitting of docs into multiple files), etc, etc. This is just off the top of my head. Anyone who doesn't think Word is light years ahead of any other office suite has not really explored everything it can do. A hint -- it does way more than you think, but most of it stays out of your way until you need it.
However, the biggest thing Word can do is print reliably to just about any cheap printer. Unix is way, way, way WAY WAY behind on having a comprehensive print rendering subsystem. I think the Gnome guys are working on something, but that's the part of Unix that has biggest piece of brain damage.
Finally, the most important feature that Word has is -- Word compatibility. Face it; Word is the defacto industry standard document interchange format. The other suites are pathetic when it comes to compatibility.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
....This might be a canary trap ;)
:)\n"
if ($user =~ m/shaldannon/i) {
print "\n-- $user
}
What is your Slash Rating?
for being involved in a CIA sponsored coupsponsored coup. Just as those responsable for the CIA coup in Guatamala (just because the United Fruit Company didnt like the compensation for the small part of its massive holdings that was being given over for land reform, & that Dulles, the US Secretary of State was a major share holder of the UFC, so he wanted to keep the share price up) are directly responsable for 50000 deaths. Those involved in the CIA coup that brought the Shah to power are also responsable for many thousands of death. So if any of them are in danger, because they were named, well its just karma.