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

slurpd replication daemon

[wiredog]

I don't know why, but "Slurped replication demon" just sounds funny as all hell. Try to visualize slurping a replicating demon.

Another S1G bug

[stox]

cvsup, a utility used to synchronize CVS repository's, was hit by the S1G event. Version 16.1d is available to fix the bug.

genetic engineering the brain

[perdida]

There is not one genetic engineering.

There are many kinds of GE.

One kind splices genes from other species into a species. This has problems with inaccurate gene-snips and potential allergies to foreign genetic matter.

Another kind of GE is simply eugenics, which many farmers have used for centuries; selecting the best representatives of a species to breed together, or hybridization. Eugenics presents political problems in humans.

Another kind of GE is the turning on of inoperative genes through hormonal treatments or other chemicals. Cancer genes (oncogenes) are turned on through sun damage and other carcinogenic interactions, for instance. This type of GE may be dangerous but it is noninvasive and can be done through conventional current gene therapy methods. I support this kind of work.

Now onto the spurious ethical questions.

There is no a-priori model of the human. Humans have been evolving for thousands of years, and our lifestyles and diets have a big part to play in that. The conscious manipulation of this process has the opportunity, actually, to be more ethical than the unconscious genetic engineering we have done.

The americans imported people from Africa in the slave trade and created "hybrid races" of humans, for instance. This has led to changes in frequency of various positive and negative genetic traits in the US population. Although slavery itself is reprehensible, I don't think anybody would consider treatments for sickle-cell anemia (which occurs primarily in Africans and African-Americans) immoral genetic engineering, for instance.

Conscious manipulation of human intelligence is a scientific technology question and is morally neutral. Methods and political superstructures surrounding the issue are not.

Wow, 2 things to ba happy about!

[Enigma2175]

1) I think it is fantastic that the judge in the Scarfo case isn't dazzled by the FBI's "National Security" defense. This case has absolutely nothing to do with national security, the FBI is trying to establish precedent above the law. This time it is the keylogging technique, next time it is Carnivore v.2.0 that they try to hide behind the "national security" shield.

2) Being a subscriber, I am extremely happy that AT&T has lifted the ban in HTTP servers (I know I may assume too much given the anecdotal source). Most of the servers that run on the @home network are small, low traffic servers that don't cause much of a problem(unless they are infected). They must be worried about losing even the small percentage of customers that run web servers. Economic hard times are hitting everywhere...

national security...

[nettdata]

I could see how divulging how the keylogger works could be a national security issue... once it's been released how it works, people could start looking for the tell-tales, and then once word gets out about how many people are actually being logged, all hell breaks loose... both in and outside the US.

Re:national security...

[WhiteWolf666]

This is insane. How do we know that its just a keylogger? How do we know that its not a virus? How do we know that the government is only using it on people it has obtained a warrant for? How do we know that the government does not install it first, and then gets the warrant if necessary?

National security can go to hell. Worst case scenario (and this is unlikely)---the FBI looses its ability to log keys, and has to go back to doing real detective work. Big Deal. The U.S. will go on, and we will know that our rights are not being infringed.

If the FBI thinks that said documents really contain information pertaining to the case, subpeona the password.

I think if the government has the probably cause(is that the standard? whatever it is) necessary to get a warrant, the person targeted should know about it, and be able to challenge it, in the interets of privacy.

You have a right to know if you have been charged, so why don't you have a right to know if you privacy has been violated? Similarly, don't you have a right to not incriminate yourself? If the fifth amendment prevents the government from using a subpeona to get a password, than it is at least idealogical consistant that is should protect you from unknowingly giving the government your password.
And if it doesn't, and they say no, its a crime in and of itself, and the government than has every right to put the wiretap on whatever computers said person uses. This still provides a reasonable chance to catch the crook, or stop his illegal behavior, and still protects privacy rights. Yeah, this may reduce the probablity of catching them, but hey, it is better for 1000 guilty men to go free, than for 1 innocent man to be punished.

And, of course, I need to say this.

They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.

Port 80 blocking

[sting3r]

Folks -

Everyone who keeps complaining about the port 80 blocking needs to put the situation in perspective. (Yes I am one of them.) http is one of those "nice" Internet services that will easily run on any port, without changes to the client software. Try to do that with Windows SMB networking - you can't (easily) because the port range is hard-coded into the OS and can't be changed without much hacking. At least we have the option of simply changing our URLs to end with ":81" to solve the problem. And if you happen to be serving a domain off your cable modem and the :81 makes your URL look ugly... well, cable modems just weren't designed for serving domains anyway, so look for another provider.

If @home *really* wanted to be jerks, they could block incoming connections to your PC (except as required by ftp/irc clients). We agreed not to run servers so that's well within their rights. But they're not doing that and it's trivial to work around the port 80 block, so let's just be happy for what we have (and enjoy the newfound lack of Code Red sponsored congestion).

-sting3r
See what billg has up his sleeve

People have a limited idea of their own brains.

[Futurepower(tm)]

I study the programming of the human brain. I have an opinion that is quite different than yours.

Most people in the U.S., and most people in the other cultures I've studied, believe that they are less intelligent and less mentally capable than they potentially are. Since they have a limited idea of their own brains, they make a mistake when they try to guess how easy it would be for a computer to duplicate human mental ability.