Slashback: Errata, Futurity, Portality

Slashed back tonight: The (slight) return of the Y2K behemoth, good news for those locked out of port 80 by the recent unpleasantness, one interested party's response to Stephen Hawking's genetic-engineering ideas, and even an update on the Scarfo key-logging story.

Better than world-wide anarchy and privation. kejoki writes: "I came into work today and nobody had voicemail. We use an ancient AT&T system 25 (Merlin) with the Audix automated attendant/voice mail system ... not my bailiwick but the boss was going nuts trying to figure it out.

He finally called his System 25 guy and found out that quite a few people were having the same problem. Inspiration hit, and he set the system date back before 31 Dec 1999 ... whammo! The voice mail returneth.

AT&T->Lucent->Avaya, of course, no longer supports the system...as a matter of fact the boss seems to recall getting a letter from AT&T saying that they'd be taking care of the Y2K problems which might be in their equipment; but another soon after saying that support for the System 25 would be dropped as of 31 Dec 1999 ... hmmm.

Oddly enough, he's had a problem with the system giving a database I/O error for a while, but since he reset the date that has also vanished.

All very interesting. At any rate, if you have a System 25 and you can't get your voice mail, set back the date!"

And in related news, Che Fox writes :"The OpenLDAP project is one of the first to be hit by a major bug due to the S1G (one billion seconds) Unix time rollover. The slurpd replication daemon, which pushes changes from the master LDAP server to the slaves, no longer works now that time has rolled over to 1 billion seconds. This means that all LDAP-using networks in the world that use OpenLDAP and slave servers to replicate the data (very common) are now broken. There is a fix available against both the 1.2 and 2.x OpenLDAP releases in the OpenLDAP CVS repository."

You may assume your former activities for the moment. Agent Green writes: "I was checking out my firewall logs this morning and noticed an unusual amount of port 80 traffic and come to find out...it seems that AT&T Broadband has lifted their port 80 restrictions on its residential network. Let's see how long this lasts ..."

Probably until the next worm that takes over everyone's port 80, whatever OS it runs under.

So what did one giant say to the other? jshep writes: "Inventor Ray Kurzweil recently responded to physicist Stephen Hawking's concerns regarding the progression of AI (previous Slashdot story can be viewed here). Kurzweil takes aim at Hawking's suggestion that we use genetic engineering to augment the power of the human brain."

The man behind the curtain is ... uh, vital to national security! camusflage writes: "Reuters has a story (courtesy of Yahoo) that says the judge in the Nicodemo Scarfo believes the "national security" gambit about as much as the /. community does regarding the use of keyloggers. The most choice quote is "I don't know what it means. It's gobbledygook. More gobbledygook," referring to the argument put forth that the keylogger is a sensitive piece of national security. An assistant U.S. Attorney indicated he would provide "classified and unclassified summaries of the system's operation and more affidavits detailing the national security aspects at stake," next Friday."

Comments

Nobody but nobody...

[HoldmyCauls]

...is going to pay my thought on this subject much attention, but here goes:

It is time for us to stop. Just to stop and take a moment to reflect on the knowledge we have and what is possible with it in hand. We make bigger, better, faster computers, and put them into operation immediately, for use in labs, and hospitals, and all the places where we need accuracy, and checking, and double-checking. We start cloning and genetically engineering humans without regard to the psychological consequences -- what will it be like to grow up knowing you wouldn't have just "happened" the way normal kids have. When we finally reach deep down enough inside the atom and find the particle we're currently looking for, that's not good enough. We have to build a bigger accelerator, abandoning the last one.

We need to start taking some responsibility -- the genetic code is a programming language in which we're not yet versed enough. Mistakes made there won't send up a compiler warning, they will ruin someone's life. Who's making sure we know what we're doing -- not what, WHY -- when we (as a global society) develop something like artificial intelligence? Sure, popular media -- so-called sci-fi movies and books -- pretend to address the issue, and some writers actually focus, but good luck getting those involved to turn an eye outward long enough to convince them of the moral issues involved.

The surest way to be sure of what we are doing is to stop relying on an economical system that simply doesn't work. Capitalism sucks, and we all know it. Technological tools are wasted on popular culture and ignorant masses. So many resources are wasted, so much time is wasted, so many lives are wasted. And before anyone posts beneath me calling me a Communist or whatever, no, I'm not. I just have no faith in ANY system that doesn't work, that is run by greed, and I'm open to suggestion. I'm a human being first and foremost, and I don't see how the world as we know it is run by and for human beings.

Every time I think of it, I flash back to Gödel, Escher, Bach: no system can ever be complete which relies on itself to define itself. It's a good book, and thank you to those who recommended it a couple months ago. I got it out that day, and I've read the first part so far, and I got it out again to finish it as soon as I returned to school.

Then again, I could be a complete idiot. Maybe I don't understand science and industry as well as I think I do from my limited viewpoint. Please post rational thoughts below.

Of course, maybe I should just stick to writing poetry...

--Joshua