Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

House and Senate Reject E-mail Surveillance

Posted by timothy on from the sweet-of-them dept.

vena writes "The Star Tribune reports the House and Senate today agreed not to allow email surveillance of American citizens proposed by the Total Information Awareness program. Additionally, negotiators agreed to halt all future funding on the program without extensive consultation with Congress."

7 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. guess what by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    first? Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!

  2. first by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    first post

  3. Yayhooray for vena! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    You asshole I hate you! QBN whore.

    love,
    fwis :P

  4. The Original Article from Last Night . . . by Tiro · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    This is funny, /. cites the Star-Tribune, some obscure Wisconsin paper.

    Perhaps they missed the article in the New York Times last night?

    I hate to be a pretentious citer of the Times, but come on. The guy who wrote the article found in the Star-Tribune is a writer for the New York Times! So just cite the original paper.

    So, here's the link to the original: http://nytimes.com/2003/02/12/politics/12PRIV.html

  5. All I have to say is... by lasmith05 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    YATTA!!

    --
    www.samuraidreams.com - My Blog
    www.samuraifiles.com - Get Some Videos Here
  6. Old news by spazoid12 · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    A funny thing happened on the way to the Bureau of Old News... I submitted the same story last month:

    2003-01-24 21:02:42 Senate Blocks Funding for Pentagon Database (yro,news) (rejected)

    Of course, now I'm apparently grousing...which is far worse than Slashdot's constant duping.

    ---
    Karma - am I supposed to care?

  7. in case of slashdotting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    Welcome to the new plex86 web site Administrator Administrator 1 1 2003-02-12T23:26:00Z 2003-02-12T23:27:00Z 1 547 3119 cadence 25 7 3659 10.3501 Clean MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";}

    Welcome to the new plex86 web site. I have rehashed/revitalized the previous plex86 architecture to offer a very lightweight Virtual Machine (VM) for x86. Rather than implement a full and heavyweight VM which can run all guest Operating Systems (OSes) as-is, the new approach only runs guest OSes and application code at user privilege in the VM.

    This new strategy yields two interesting uses of plex86:

    • Plex86 can be used on its own for running Linux as a guest. It has recently been demonstrated(1) that the Linux kernel can be executed inside the plex86 VM at user-privilege, with only minimal changes to the kernel source Makefiles. The aim is to allow multiple guest Linux VMs to run concurrently on the host machine, even of different kernel and distribution versions. Check out the boot verbage from my maiden voyage or the other successes like an X Windows application running on a Linux 2.4 guest displaying its window on my Linux host machine if you're so inclined.
    • Or plex86 can be used to accelerate bochs, by executing user code inside the plex86 VM, while letting bochs execute kernel code and IO functionality inside the emulator. This is useful for executing binary-only OSes, and ones without the simple mods noted above. This was also demonstrated recently(2).


    This new incarnation of plex86 is just getting kicked off. But for now, here's some points of interest and related goals:

    • Plex86 is Open Source (LGPL).
    • Because of the new lightweight VM strategy, plex86 is quite small in size, and thus there is big potential for auditability of the VM technology. This is important as the VM monitor runs as a device driver in the host kernel.
    • Plex86 uses the existing x86 port of the Linux kernel. It does not use a separate port. Thus, Linux as a guest enjoys all the global testing/development that Linux on x86 hosts receives.
    • The guest Linux will communicate to hardware such as the disk and network via a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). Vanilla guest drivers for Linux will be created to effect these guest to host communications. Thus, plex86 will offer a very clean Linux VM implementation, without all the heavy overhead and baggage necessary to virtualize/emulate IO hardware. The end-goal is a true completely virtualized Linux resource, with completely OSS componentry.
    • With the exception of a few necessary kernel Makefile mods noted below, the goal is to run Linux distributions as-is. Plex86 needs a kernel compiled to run in the VM. This is just as well, as it's beneficial to configure out all the unnecessary IO devices which are irrelevant inside a guest Linux VM. A goal of mine, is to have the main Linux distributions offer a configured Linux kernel for plex86, on the distribution CDs.
    • Performance potential is quite good. Because of the new strategy of pushing Linux kernel code down to user privilege, it along with user code can run at native speeds inside the VM (at least in between virtualization events such as IO). There are some logical phases for the development path to follow, with the current phase favoring rapid prototyping and bug finding, and later moving components of the virtualization into the VM monitor after they are flushed out.
    • I will fight very hard against requests for unnecessary complexities and features. There should be a series of usable and stable releases, rather than a never-ending flow of almost usable code. As well, plex86 should remain auditable.

    -Kevin