Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: SmoothWall, Gopher, Be
But can you backtrack through a google cache? pointym5 writes "Checked out the ZeoSync web site lately? Remember all those PhDs on the scientific staff? Well, like I'm sure others did, I sent e-mail to a few of them expressing interest in more technical details. All that I contacted responded with absolute disclaimers of any relationship whatsoever with ZeoSync. This morning I note that most names are gone from the 'org chart' and the scientific team list. There are only five left, including Dr. Piotr Blass, 'developer of one of the world's first web sites.' Wow!"
How smooth is smooth? juct writes: "I appreciate it, that Slashdot gave the SmoothWall Team an opportunity to answer to the concerns in my review of their firewall. But it is full of errors and might leave a wrong feeling of security. So I invite everybody to my Tour on SmoothWall where you can judge for yourself."
Whispered words of wisdom, 'Let it be.' Sander van Dragt writes: "Many BeOS news lately. Not all so good for the BeOS community though. BeUnited, the organization which tried to license BeOS from Palm, has received today a final answer from Palm: '...we have made a firm decision NOT to license any part of this technology other than that which we incorporate into the Palm OS.' It is already known that the new 32-bit PalmOS will feature some elements of the Be technology, but that OS is built for PDAs, not for the desktop."
You can read that letter and the rest of the article on OS news.
And take this as you will -- An Anonymous Coward writes: "osnews.com is reporting that there is a new version of BeOS on the way... A German company called 'yellowTab' is said to be ready to ship a new version of BeOS (Just when everyone thought it was dead, and the final shovel full of dirt laid on top), get the full article here ... Hrm, I sure liked BeOS, I hope this one works out."
Dig, my brethren -- the Gopher Palace is almost complete! SuperguyA1 writes "Lwn is reporting that the gopher team has done it again with a 3.0 release marking Gopher's 10th anniversary. Happy birthday gopher. Thanks for helping me find all the muds I wasted so much time in college on:)"
"Bad connection, say again, you invented WHAT?" mi writes: "Yahoo! reports a potential problem, the Segway Scooter may have in Japan -- a Japanese robotics professor seems to have a patent on something very very similar since 1996. On the other hand, the USPTO knew about, when granting the patent to Segway's Dean Kamen, but still found Mr. Kamen's invention worthy of a patent in 1999. My favorite is the Kazuo Yamafuji's words: 'I would hand over my patent for one dollar if Mr. Kamen admitted that we were first.' Indeed, he just sat on the invention for 15 years."
Let us dump this web silliness and return to the age of ftp and telnet.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
The others didn't leave, they were simply compressed down to only 5 people using their revolutionary compression algorithm.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Can whoever contacted the ZeoSync "scientific advisory board" give more details about the responses? I don't know why I'm so interested, I guess I just find fraud really fascinating.
- Have a picture
BeOS makes quite a capable OS for embedded systems. It seems completely logical that a portable computing company would want an interest in them. It's one of the most efficient OSes (on a operation/cycle) level and it's compatible with many different boards (x86, PPC, 68k, etc). It's really a waste that Palm's letting it go... in some ways, it's the wave of the future, but I guess (to Palm) it's also a relic of the past.
back before I had SLIP (or PPP), the choice was Gopher or WWW via Lynx. Of the two, I found Gopher much easier to use.
If asked, I would have said that WWW was going to be a flash in the pan, and that Gopher was the future.
Oh well...
The Yahoo article says that the Segway patent mentions Yamafuji's patent. It does not make clear whether the note was made by the USPTO or Kamen. i.e., did Kamen come up with the same idea independently or based on advances over Yamafuji's work? There's also an aside in the article that casts further aspersions on Kamen's stair-climbing wheelchair. That too is patented in the US.
Since I think Kamen actually cited Yamafuji's invention in his patent application, that rather implies that he does acknowledge that Yamafuji was first. I don't get what Yamafuji is upset about.
Anyway, check out gopher://gopher.quux.org:70/h0/3.0.0.html for the news properly gophered.
Now I want a good TurboGopher 3D client rereleased :)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Its really amazing how quickly gopher dried up as http took off. The gopher clients for windows are all written for Windows 3.1 or NT 3.1 and the major browser vendors seemed to have left the code in a state of neglect.
I was also amazed to find CGI like scripts for handling gopher+ (or something like that, my memory is hazy and in true /. fashion I'm too lazy to recheck facts) forms. If everyone wasn't so busy re-inventing the wheel gopher might have made a good base for all the low bandwidth wireless devices running around today instead of WAP. A few modifications and it might have worked. Problem is, 'gopher' just isn't as sexy on the resume as all those modern TLA's...
Bleh!
Not trying to be a karma whore here (well, not REALLY trying), but this site really is worth a look if you're thinking about using Smoothwall. IMO, the REAL security concern with it is not the package itself, but the developers in charge of it. I, for one, refuse to support a product led by a group of developers with their heads that far up their ass when it comes to dealing with potential customers. Especially when they beg as loudly as they do for donations...
-Corvidae
- Kamen has been working on the Segway for a lot longer than 15
years. Most people don't realize how old Dean Kamen is; Yamafuji probably
was just a young tot when Kamen introduced his "cripple cart."
- The Segway employs a sophisticated transmission system that adjusts
gear ratios depending on how difficult the terrain is (uphill, flat, or
downhill) and the desired speed. This improves battery life and
performance. Kazou's project had no such feature.
- As was clearly stated in the patent, Kamen used a gyroscope while
Yamafiji used a clumsy set of concentric rings and Hall effect sensors.
It's like the difference between using GNOME 1.0 and KDE 2.0 - there's just
no comparison.
- Kamen's software was considerably more streamlined because it was
written as a true embedded system, in pure ASM. Yamafiji's model used C++
because, well, it was just a model and it would have been useless if it
were not hooked up to the portable computer he used to build it.
Kamen deserves every penny he can make frmo Segway, both here and in Japan. For once, the USPTO did the right thing - and the media owes it to DK to stop complaining.Mr. Uptime
Free Open Source Naked Ladies!
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
I dont guess they ever made any money of gopher at UMinn, but perhaps we shouldn't have been so hard on them for trying. Bygones.
the Be auction the day after tomorrow for those who are lucky enough to be near menlo park.
Who knows, maybe some of that stuff will become collectible.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I have recently become quite interested in Gopher and I got to reading "The Whole Internet" which was basically the first internet book. When I got to the chapter on Gopher, it also mentioned the "Web" and said that:
"Admittedly, Web servers and hypertext editors are scarce; but the potential here makes the World-Wide Web one of the most interesting new tools on the Internet."
Oh how the tables have turned.
Just downloaded smoothwall 0.9.9se and had a search on google.
/usr/sbin/pppoe
/usr/sbin/pppoe
/usr/sbin/pppoe -D /etc/test
/etc/test
/etc/test
bash$ id
uid=99(nobody) gid=99(nobody) groups=99(nobody),14(smoothwa)
bash$ ls -l
-rwsr-x--- 1 root nobody 23888 Aug 6 12:36
bash$
bash$ ls -l
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root nobody 367 Jan 10 03:11
Though it's not surprising it's full of holes with code that the smoothwall people write:
...
if (setgid(0)) { fprintf(stderr, "Couldn't set GID to 0\n"); return 0; }
if (setuid(0)) { fprintf(stderr, "Couldn't set UID to 0\n"); return 0; }
...
snprintf(command, STRING_SIZE - 1, "/var/patches/%s/setup", argv[1]);
if (!(p = popen(command, "r")))
return -1;
etc. etc.
It's full of setgid(0);setuid(0);system(command);
absolutely unbelievable.
"segue" is a verb [imparitive, intransitive] or a noun.
"Segway" is a proper noun as of a few weeks ago. Don't worry timothy, i suck at grammar too.
Speaking of backtracking, allow me to segue (teehee) into this offtopic question: Does anyone have any good techniques for backtracking, through google or otherwise, your old slashdot posts? it seems you can search by everything else but you're own name.
So it's free, but only if you pay for it. Why don't they just use a pay model?
That being said, it's in Menlo Park, Ca. Don't buy your plane tickets tonight. Some of these auctions end up WAY overbid...
So yes it's really over. well that goes only for the Palm deal, since there are already some projects to make an OpenSource BeOs:
:-(
http://www.openbeos.org/
http://blueos.free.fr/
And those surely won't stop their efforts !
That's yet another example of the dangers of closed source systems...
RIP BEOS.
ZeoSync really should look up the pigeonhole principle. You can't fit n pieces of data into n-1 slots with one piece of data in each slot.
Basically, if you can reduce 1 million bits to 10,000, then you can only represent 2^10000 different outcomes. But, they need to represent all 2^1000000 outcomes! There are only so many outcomes in there that can be compressed, and that means that the other outcomes take up more space.
In other words, their data is not random.
If a 12th grade high school student can figure this out, surely people with PHD's can see how this idea is flawed. I am surprised that such an absurd idea is even being taken seriously in the news.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
So it looks like BeOS is going to be lost forever -- the modern day equivalent of being bulldozed into a pit, burned, and buried under concrete.
... and in the end you have no one but yourself for getting fucked over and spit out.
Think of this as another example of the failure of modern-day copyright law. The purpose of copyright law is to place fine examples of the arts into the public domain -- if instead of computer software, BeOS consisted of a series of patents, then 20 years from now we would all have complete, free, access to BeOS, because the patents would have:
(1) been disclosed when the monopoly was granted
(2) expired
However, in the case of copyrighted computer object code, in exchange for granting a government monopoly of 95 years, the public gets nothing. Zilch. Nada. Copyright law hasn't just "tilted" to the side of copyright holders, it has no other master. The public interest is completely removed from consideration. Modern copyright law is NOTHING more then corporate welfare. It no longer benefits the public, and like all laws that work directly against the public interest, no longer deserves respect. Want to get rid of ancient, outdated, overreaching copyright law? Disobey it. Sit in the front of the bus -- in the seat labeled "for corporations only."
Take this as a warning. No matter how "cool" a piece of software is, if it is proprietary software, it is absolutely worthless. It can disappear at any moment, and it contributes nothing to the progress of computer science. nothing. Sure, you can pretend that you're part of the future by playing with a "cool" proprietary OS, but you're just wasting your time and energy on someone else's game.
Score: -1: Troll
This wasn't one of the mentioned Slashbacks, but it probably could have been. The NY Times is running a story on Time Canada's (free reg...) apparent faux pas on the new iMac announcement. The article is a bit more about the content of the article than the error which was oh so recently immortalized here on slashdot, but its still a good read.
forma3
Think of how many people invented the car in the various countries around the world.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
And if you actually took an "Engineering Law Class" and you were taught that people deserve patent protection because they implement their controller software in "ASM" as opposed to C++, you should ask for your tuition back. But perhaps you just made that up.
God damn do they have an annoying site! has anyone visited it?
I always cringe when, in movies, they show someone at a computer. inenvitably, the computer beeps, whines, or makes some sort audible response at the slightest keystroke or button press. I sometimes explain to the geek friends that i'm watching with how f*cking annoying it would be if computers actually did this, i'm sure it's something everyone here as thought about at least once. (as an aside, a friend of mine once went so far as to create a new term for those operating systems; MOS, or Movie Operating system) anyway, their site is like a web based version of mos.
I Just put my mouse over the damn menu, and I know i did that because you're wasting my cpu with this crappy flash animations, I DON'T MY COMPUTER TO BEEP AS WELL!
*beep* *beep* *beep*
The part I can't figure out is why anyone would bother with a Linux software firewall running on a PC if you can get good firewall appliances with web-based configuration for little more than $100.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
mosaic required a direct TCP/IP connection (SLIP, if you were on dialup). Gopher would work as text mode on a terminal.
lynx would do www on text mode terminals too, but was harder to use in text mode than gopher was.
Even on SLIP, mosaic was slow because it would load the entire page, including all images, before you could see anything. On a slow dialup line (14.4) that could take a while.
of course then Netscape came out and the rest is history... the main feature of Netscape that made everyone use it was that partial pages were displayed while the images downloaded.
Its really amazing how quickly gopher dried up as http took off. The gopher clients for windows are all written for Windows 3.1 or NT 3.1 and the major browser vendors seemed to have left the code in a state of neglect.
Mozilla and all versions of Internet explorer support gopher. Just type in gopher:// and then the rest of the URL the way you normally would. You don't need to go digging up ancient software to browse.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There is no Dr. John Post on the math faculty here, and as far as I am aware, not in the CS or CE departments either.
Sad to think they had to make up names. They're sinking fast.
Regards
James
No one is threating lawsuits here. Just because the guy flamed you dosn't mean you have to get all bitchy about it. So he's a dick? So what? Does it make any real diffrence in your life?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Penis birds don't really count as pr0n ... well, maybe for some people.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Ease of use: obviously, you've never used a bike in a city. Bikes are incredibly awkward as soon as you go indoors with them. Try riding a bike in an elevator, or down a hallway.
Q: Why isn't the horse moving or whinnying or anything?
A: BECAUSE IT'S DEAD.
Does yellowTab really think anyone wants to pay some tens of dollars U.S. for an O/S that has far less application support than damn near everything else?
Or that they'd want it for free for use as anything other than a toy, like AtheOS?
Hmm. Maybe we could use it to power an Internet applia-- oh, wait, Be already went there. Buying into BeOS is like learning Latin: it's cool and all, but unless there is some killer app (which is doubtful), it's just cool, pretty perhaps, but not the optimal choice.
Well, I didn't read through the whole thing, just the first few messages. But what I don't get is why you kept replying with these long emails when it was mostly obvious that the guy didn't really want to do anything other then piss you off.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The most interesting thing I read is in their Technical Description, where they state that they "will have for all intents and purposes successfully encoded lossy universal compression". No where in their description can I find anything that explicitly states that their algorithm is lossless.
They also talk about mapping binary strings into higher dimensional spaces, but that these spaces cannot become super saturated or their "multi dimensional circumvention of the pigeonhole principle breaks down". In other words they do claim to be able to compress all strings of equal size down to smaller strings.
This makes me look at them in a different light. I'm still skeptical because they have offered no proof of their algorithms, but at least in their "technical description" they do not seem to make claims that have already been proven impossible. I also find their talk about multi dimensional representations intriguing, because lots of typical information does become more compressible in higher dimensions. Look at how much better video compression works when encoding just the changes between frames rather than encoding frames individually. An ideal compression algorithm would find such representations in any kind of data (maybe that's where the marketspeak about "random" data came in) and be able to compress it, since all meaningful data is full of patterns.
Think of music, specifically 74 minutes of 16 bit, 44.1 kHz audio. Uncompressed = 650 MB, or about 5e9 bits. That means 2^(5e9) possible 74 minute sound samples. Now think about how many of those are likely to match anyone's idea of music. I don't know if ZeoSync has actually found a way to extract that kind of pattern from arbitrary data, but it seems like the way to go for a universal lossy compression algorithm.
The ultimate plays for Madden 2006
Can you imagine what would happen if everyone overreacted like this every time there was a slight?
We'd have lots of publicity, pop stars arguing about the boils on each other's arses... (Oh wait, they're like that now...)
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
of course then Netscape came out and the rest is history... the main feature of Netscape that made everyone use it was that partial pages were displayed while the images downloaded.
Both IE and Netscape had problems displaying partial pages that contained tables. (IE still does.) The fact that Mozilla can display a partial page (right-click anywhere to force a reflow) makes browsers based on Mozilla code (skipstone, k-meleon, netscape 6.x, etc) feel faster than browsers based on MSHTML (winamp, neoplanet, msie, etc), especially when displaying tall tables such as the one Slashdot's standard mode uses to draw its page.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
[Reinventing the wheel] Like a Web based message board where NNTP would do?
NNTP doesn't support mass moderation or metamoderation. NNTP doesn't readily support banner advertisements that keep the server free. NNTP servers often don't have very long retention of old discussion. NNTP doesn't have server-side search. Slash supports all of the above.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Now that Be has gone chapter 11, can I finally get a free copy _FULL_ of Be?
Yes. In ninety-five years.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Come to think of it, I still don't get why the hell they don't just use gopher. The protocol is there, it's lightweight, and it's perfect for providing text-based menus to access text content.
Oh, wait. These are phone companies...
You're talking about someone's private property. Its theirs to sell or destroy as they see fit. You're talking like you were swindled out of something you had rights against.
Please explain further.
According to Google's USENET timeline, Gopher is actually younger than the World Wide Web. That was news to me.
I was just thinking about Gopher last night: when I installed my first home UN*X system a couple of years back, I was anxious to try out every kind of server on it: NNTP, HTTP (plug), NFS, NIS, SMTP, DNS, and just about anything I knew about. It wasn't until last night, though, that the thought of running a Gopher server ever occurred to me.
My first CSE textbook contained the statement, "It is possible to spend many exciting hours in Gopherspace." I never found that to be the case; I started my degree in 1996.
Another interesting subject in that same textbook caught my eye, though: USENET via tin. I owe a gigantic chunk of my education to USENET. It sure saddened me when my University shut down our news server. I was a little jealous that the gopher server was (and still is) left in operation.
Congrats to the Gopher team; I had no idea you guys were still going. Best of luck.
Hmmmm. The next event in the Google timeline is the announcement of Linux. Maybe early Linux development was spurred on by Linus' secret desire to run his own Gopher server. :)
Hmm. After reading the Gopher Manifesto, I now have an appreciation for what Gopher could give us. This seems promising.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
The scariest thing about this is that some poor sod is giving them money to develop that site -- and I think that they're expecting to make a profit on this.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
[Slashdot's M1 and M2] are completely broken and cause more problems than they solve.
At least it keeps the gay porn out 95% of the time.
[retention] isn't a problem if you run your own.
And restrict your audience (although this may not be entirely a bad thing). Many users don't know how to switch their NNTP server. Others use newsreaders that support only one NNTP server per installation. Some users can't switch it at all (such as users of America Online).
[Usenet] has working client-side searching, rather than broken/incomplete server-side searching.
Client-side searching requires the user to have downloaded multigigabytes of Slashdot's previous stories. Not all users who want to search Slashdot have the T1 to download the whole site.
i've been meaning to bitch about this... thanks for the chance to let me do it on-topic.
Another place for complaining about Slashcode bugs: Slashcode Bug Tracker
Will I retire or break 10K?
They now have a new patch released for it. Interestingly enough, it seems to fix a few things mentioned on here that should be fixed. From the patch release:
Apparently the exploit c't found involved the admin of smoothwall visiting a page on the Interent, directly after establishing a connection with the admin interface of the smoothwall (all on the green or internal, safe network). It did have a few caveats to it, like needing to know the name of the smoothwall box (often default set to 'smoothwall'), but apparently was severe enough to warrent a fix. Details on the proof of concept attack can be found in this article on the smoothwall site.
However, the team leader, Richard Morrell still seems to mock the individual at c't as evidenced in this article. Odd that he berates the individual for shoddy reporting, and yet they still release a patch.
Regardless of the pissing match between various individuals and the smoothwall team, I'd suggest all the users of said program head over and update their machines.
-A non-productive mind is with absolutely zero balance.
- AC
I think the title of this was supposed to be "SmoothWall, Gopher Be"--yoda.
Doesn't he tell Anakin this in the second prequel?
Liberty uber alles.
Just a (dumb) question: You can browse the web with Winamp? I've never looked into that
Winamp 2.x embeds MSHTML, the browser engine at the core of IE. Press Alt+t to open the minibrowser, then press Ctrl+o http://slashdot.org to open Slashdot. It looks much better if you set Slashdot to Simple HTML first. To change text size in any MSHTML app, use Ctrl+mousewheel.
Will I retire or break 10K?
My recommendation is the D-Link DI-704, as I've used 3 of these devices in different locations already and have had nothing but great success with them. This company I'm linking to has them available for $73.50 right now, but there is a $20 rebate to make them only $53.50.
http://www.comready.com/broadband.html
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
it doesn't keep it out - it keeps it hidden, for the people who choose to hide it. kinda like how filters & blacklists work for usenet readers.
Filters and blacklists don't catch users who change their e-mail address regularly to avoid the filters. The analogous action in Slash is to create several new accounts, but moderators quickly moderate down the individual comments that a new account posts. The difference lies in moderating the user vs. moderating the posts.
news://nntp.slashdot.org/msft.general.bitching would work on 99% of the browsers out there
It works on IE=>Outlook Express and Netscape=>Netscape, but the last version of Forte Agent that I tried (1.7) has a bug such that any news: URL that includes a hostname requires the user to re-enter the registration code.
how many nerds out there do you know who use aol, or don't know how to configure a newsreader?
Not all nerds have been nerds for years; some are still learning, and some aren't 18 yet. Elitism will get you nowhere.
unless, of course, they search through the headers.
Only if the subject of a message adequately describes the content. Often, this is not the case because Usenet users tend to put the same subject on replies that the parent article had because many common newsreaders do a poor job of parenting followups. Even then, with nearly three million comments in Slashdot's database, you'd still have to download gigabytes of headers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
How about the ASCII goatsex picture? When I had a stint of moderating, I did the 'proper thing' and browsed at -1, *shudder* - I thought I had seen practically everything on the internet until I saw that!
But. They still haven't fixed the bug I found so irritating when I first started using the web. Web clients just don't grok the fact that Gopher keeps the page title in the directory, not in the page file itself. So all Gopher pages display with a URL in place of a title. This would be a scandle -- if anybody gave a shit.