Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Encumbrance, Silence, Internalization
Different folks, different contributions Dr. Sheueling Chang-Shantz writes:
"Hello, I am the lead researcher/developer of the ECC project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. I appreciate very much the news you posted on Slashdot regarding 'OpenSSL Gets Cryptography Gift From Sun.'However, your wordings "Sun Microsystems has donated ... developed by Whitfield Diffie ..." seems to be causing some confusion on Slashdot forum. It gave the wrong interpretation that Whit has invented ECC. Sun is definitely making no attempt to claim that Whitfield Diffie has invented the Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem. Technically, neither has Whitfield Diffie developed the ECC technology that Sun has donated to the OpenSSL project recently.
I would appreciate it if you could correct the news before too late.
For clarification, Elliptic curve cryptography was independently invented by Neal Koblitz, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington and Victor Miller who was then at IBM.
Whitfield Diffie is Sun's chief security officer who co-invented Diffie-Helman public-key cryptography."
We now go north of the border ...
And further on the topic of that donation by Sun, friscolr writes "In a recent post on misc@, OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt states...
OpenSSL is becoming a non-free software project, because the code from Sun contains licenses which invoke patent litigation; the licence on the new code basically builds a contract that says "if you use this code, you cannot sue Sun".
He goes on to say, 'once again, i think it is time to fork OpenSSL.' Thank you, Theo, for always making sure we will have 100% free software at our disposal and for standing by your stated goals."
[Headline redacted] Dotnaught writes "The question of whether British composer Mike Batt's "A Minute's Silence" on the "Classical Graffiti" CD (by The Planets) violated the copyright of John Cage's silent composition " 4'33" " has been resolved in an out-of-court settlement. Batt reportedly paid the John Cage Trust an "adequate sum" (whatever that is). On his site, Batt writes, 'We have now settled the matter of my artless plagiarism of John Cage's silence, by his publishers caving in and us winning! Why didn't I think of that before! We could have saved a lot of time and buggering about, although I must say, the struggle was one of the most amusing disputes I've ever , er, disputed.' Batt may yet have the last laugh. According to the New Yorker, Batt has been busy copyrighting chunks of silence of various lengths other than the four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence owned by Cage."
Hey, does this guy really work for the government? In response to broadly worded news that the U.S. Department of the Interior was switching to an all-Microsoft computing infrastructure, security architect (and oftc.net honcho) D. Clyde Williamson fired off a well-phrased mail to Hord Tipton, Acting Chief Information Officer for the Department of the Interior. asking for clarification, and urging that the DOI consider advantages of not tying themselves completely to proprietary systems. Tipton's response (posted with his permission) is informative:
"Thanks for your views on the DOI's attempts to standardize operating systems. Whereas it is true we are moving towards enterprise approaches to desktops and operating systems, there will be as you suggest a heterogenous mix at the server level. We have not decided at this point to be 100% Microsoft although that discussion has been entertained. There are certain risks and efficiencies that must be considered regardless of the path taken.Our major concern is interoperability and our current situation is all over the map. Thus standardization is an important step forward for us.
Thanks again for your views.
Hord Tipton
Department of the Interior"
Why relying on a single vendor for such an important aspect of the modern workplace is still considered an "enterprise approach" I'm not sure, but it is certainly true at many companies.
It makes a lot of sense to have everyone using the same operating system at the user level. Standardize the OS, disallow unapproved app, device, driver installation, and use an OS that doesn't require extensive training.
Heh, you'd think they'd go with Mac.
FYI, according to the OpenBSD site it's "Theo de Raadt", not "Theo DeRaadt".
Don't believe me? Check this user's posting history, Theo's personal homepage, interviews, or mailing list posts.
In the cryptography mailing list, it appears that Theo may not need to declare jihad on licenses he doesn't like.
According to Ulf Möller there will be a patch made before the next release to isolate the ECC code in case of patent concerns. The ECC code can be included or excluded based on a configure flag like the present RC5 and IDEA algorithms which are still patented in various parts of the world.
Apparently the patent claim is an additional optional provision that companies can use the Sun code under a truce against lawsuits if they agree to not sue about ECC patent infrigement either.
My father works for the Department of Interior, and it is pretty obvious in my frequent vists to his office and in conversations with him that the IT Department over there is very competent, thus them moving to an all Microsoft environment is something that is quite likely. When I am talking all Microsoft environment, I mean Windows 95, because that is what he is running on a P3 machine down there, and it came with windows 2000 on it. The reason why I think it is very likely for them to move to an all Microsoft environment is because they don't know what they are doing, thus they would not see the problems with moving to an all Microsoft infrastructure and it would also be easier for them because they really aren't very good with Unix. Earlier in the year, there was a contraversy of sorts involving fiscal fraud in the Native American relations office and there was a court order to shut down all systems that are linked to the server which kept track of all fiscal transactions in the native american relations department. One system that was affected was email, and it took them about 6 months to get the system back up. When Mr. Tipton said "our current situation is all over the map", he wasn't joking.
This page was generated by a Barrel of Circus Midgets, and that is the way I like it!!!
He paid them a six figure sum.
http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery
Not only does every possible finite sequence of bits occur in the bits of pi, it occurs an infinite number of times. It's all there: directions to Jimmy Hoffa's grave, the human genome, the lost works of Shakespeare, MPEG's of Gallmer and Bates doing the unspeakable, a bug-free release of Windows 2010, JPEG's of those court and military records Bush won't release, MS-DOS 1.0 with Gary Kildall's Easter Egg still in it, everything! An infinite number of times! Find it. Post it here.
Ah, grasshopper, you've just labeled yourself a novice. The reason you're not sure why that's considered an enterprise approach is that you have no experience with enterprise-class operations. You can get a vendor to agree to all kinds of massive price reductions on hardware and, more-importantly, the margin-laden services contracts, by agreeing to standardize your entire operation around their products.