Slashdot Mirror
State of Speech Synthesis and Text-To-Speech?
Gnulix asks: "Are there any, preferably either open source products available that produce realistic speech from an arbitrary (English) text? Projects such as Festival doesn't sound all that much better than SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) did on a Commodore 64 back in 1979, nor does SoftVoice's or IBM's new products sound very good. I mean we all know that Stephen Hawking is a fun loving guy, but I bet you that he didn't choose his unrealistic, robotic voice just for the heck of it. With all the amazing advances we have seen in real-time graphics, shouldn't speech synthesis have come much, much further than what is, seemingly, available today?" Ask Slashdot last handled the Voice-To-Text issue in January of this year.
Lyrics to "All My Shootin's Be Drivebys"
Trash Talk
Ah yeah, that's right motherfuckers!
I'm back riding a funky track.
I got a story to tell you all,
So listen up!
Yo! Trip on this!
Verse 1
I'm rolling through the hood on a Saturday night,
got a 40 in my left hand, my dick in my right,
some chronic in my lap, a pager in my cap,
and a 9 millimeter in the small of my back.
I'm just chilling no place to be,
I take another pull off my 40 z.
I'm thinking 'bout spinning a fat ass tree,
a B to the L to the U-N-T.
Then I get a call on my dope cell phone,
check the caller ID, what up homes?
Yo, it's the Doom and his news ain't good:
"little Pookie got capped last night in the hood."
I feel like the world is fading away,
I saw Little Pookie just the other day.
Pookie was my boy we shared Kool-aid in the park,
now some punks took his life in the dark.
I ask Doomsday who the motherfuckers be,
"some punk ass bitches from MIT."
The fucking Institute, man I should've known,
I say meet me at my crib and hang up the phone.
Playtimes over I got a job to do,
and the world will be less crowded by the time I'm through,
and I'll keep rolling while bullets fly,
cause all my shootings be drivebys.
Verse 2
One minute to midnight we hit the street,
cold as a cadaver, hard as concrete.
Doomsday's packing a baby Mac,
got my AK-47 and the nine in my back.
The Alpine's glowing, P-E's flowing,
got my swerve on tight and my game face showing.
Them damn punks are gonna pay,
the Hawks on the case a bird of prey.
Then up ahead cold chilling in the street,
six motherfuckers from MIT.
I flick off the safety, check my grip,
and load a dum-dum clip.
I glance at the Doom to make sure he's packed,
his fingers on the trigger of his baby Mac.
Time to give a Newtonian demonstration,
of a bullet its mass and its acceleration.
Nine on my lap AK in my hand,
I roll up slow like a snake in the sand.
I wait till I'm sure they can see my face,
then I bust out slugs to the beat of the bass.
The streets sketched out in the full moon light,
MIT punks dying left and right.
There's nowhere to run don't even try,
cause all my shootings be drivebys.
...
The Federal Information Assurance Conference 2002 is taking place this Tuesday through Thursday at the University of Maryland. Some of the most prestigious government agencies and private businesses in the realm of Information Security are attending, including among others the National Security Agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Defense Information Systems Agency; and RSA Security, Symantec, and IBM, respectively. The speakers included professionals from the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, and the Office of Homeland Security.
Yesterday, the very first day, Microsoft announced that Windows 2000 has passed all required tests for certification under the Common Criteria (CC) at Evaluated Assurance Level 4 (EAL4) to demonstrate their "commitment to security." Unlike the Windows® NT 4.0 TCSEC (Trusted Computer Security Evaluation Criteria, a.k.a. "Orange Book") C2 certification which was on a non-networked machine without a floppy drive, the Windows 2000 CC EAL4 tests included among others the Active Directory Service, Virtual Private Networking (VPN), the Kerberos implementation, and the Encrypted File System. Where was Linux(TM) when Microsoft dropped this bombshell? Linux(TM) was nowhere to be found. There was no one from Red Hat, no one from Mandrakesoft (makers of Mandrake Linux), and no one from SuSE. Linus wasn't there. Not even the self-appointed patron saint of open source, Richard Stallman, bothered to show up.
Oh Linux(TM), oh Linux(TM). Where art thou, Linux(TM)? Why dist thou not showst up? The answer lies in a small, little excerpt from John Pescatore, Director of Internet Security for Gartner. He said, "Not all but some of versions of Linux could meet this level [CC EAL4] as well."
That's right. Not all versions of Linux could meet CC EAL4. In other words, not all versions of Linux could meet the same minimum security requirements as Microsoft Windows 2000.
"Well," you ask, "exactly which versions of Linux can and cannot meet CC EAL4 requirements?" It stands to reason that the core Linux(TM) kernel, the version distributed by Linus at http://www.kernel.org, cannot meet these minimum requirements, because if it did, all versions of Linux(TM) would meet these minimum requirements. After all, other Linux distributions are not going to be made less secure. I also know for a fact that this is true. The reason that only some of the Linux(TM) versions would pass CC EAL4 is that those versions patch the main Linux(TM) distribution. In other words, those more secure versions are forks, alternative versions of Linux(TM) that were not accepted into the main distribution.
This means that Linux(TM), as released by saint Linus, the same Linux(TM) that all these so-called "experts" have been touting as the more stable, more secure alternative to Windows, is actually less secure than Windows 2000. Now I don't want to get any email from you Linux(TM) naysayers asking me that if Microsoft Windows 2000 is so secure why does Microsoft® Windows 2000 have so many more security bugs, or security bulletins, than Linux(TM). Measuring the security of an operating system by the number of security bulletins is like measuring the security of a bank by the number of robberies. By that standard, my small town bank out here in the sticks with 2 tellers, 3 security cameras, and never more than US$1,000 cash on-hand is the most secure bank in the world.
The "theory of a thousand eyes" (the theory that open source is more secure because everybody can see the code and instantly discover a problem) doesn't make an operating system any more secure either. While the potential for more security exists, this doesn't ensure that the "thousand eyes" are actually looking. To the contrary, Red Hat has discovered bugs in the Linux kernel in sections that went unchanged for years. For example, not only did the Teardrop vulnerability in TCP/IP exist for decades, but the Teardrop vulnerability was ported to other operating systems, even though "thousands of eyes" had to be looking at the code in order to port it to another operating system. Peer review, an extension of this theory, doesn't provide any assurance either, because the reviewing peer may not be well versed in security and hence not fully understand or appreciate the implications of a given piece of code.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The only way to fully evaluate operating system security, and to compare one operating system's security to another operating system's security, is to have that operating system evaluated under TCSEC or CC. These are comprehensive methods of fully and exhaustively evaluating security, and the fact that they are common standards allows operating systems evaluated by the same criteria to be compared in terms of total security assurance. Until Linus and his open source goons get their act together, get their kernel up to snuff, and get their kernel certified, Linux(TM) will remain less secure than its arch-nemesis, Microsoft Windows 2000.