Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Regalia, Godseye, Undetection
How very magnanimous. Amazing Quantum Man writes "ZDNet reports that Timothy Koogle and Yahoo were acquitted of condoning war crimes by selling Nazi memorabilia. The article is rather sketchy, so that's all I have. Here are some background articles from Slashdot history."
He doesn't sign anything, just sprinkles on some invisible nanobots. shawn writes "The Penguin Group's site has a schedule of upcoming book signing events for Willam Gibson's Pattern Recognition . The new book was mentioned on Slashdot earlier."
And now Gisbon's new book has been reviewed, as well. Look out for a review of the No Maps For These Territories DVD (with extras) soon too.
Aren't you glad some people are realistic enough to be paranoid? For everyone worried about your ISP suddenly deciding to detect and crack down on everyone who's taken advantage of the currently ubiquitous, simple-to-use NAT hardware (here's the post we ran about the means to snoop behind your NAT box, which links to the Bellovin paper mentioned below), an anonymous reader writes with one way to foil detection efforts: "Good news coming from OpenBSD camp! Read CVS log message (mail archive): 'Add scrub option 'random-id', which replaces IP IDs with random values for outgoing packets that are not fragmented (after reassembly), to compensate for predictable IDs generated by some hosts, and defeat fingerprinting and NAT detection as described in the Bellovin paper.'"
Right place at the right time when the wrong thing happens. fonixmunkee writes "an 11-year-old Mac and a COTS (commercial-of-the-self) telescope may have captured a very helpful image in solving the shuttle Columbia tragedy. this article here at CNN tells the story of how some self-proclaimed 'geeks,' working on an Air Force project aimed at watching satellites & incoming missiles, whipped up a contraption with some simple parts that captured an image of the shuttle on descent that may offer some light on what happened. also interesting is how many news sources mistook the image as a capture from the high-tech cameras that the people *actually* worked on."
Just a scratch in the historical record. truthsearch writes "In response to a leaked Sun memo complaining of Sun's Java implementation on Solaris, News.com has Sun's response. Many posters doubted its authenticity (myself included due to missing dates), but 'Sun confirmed the memo's authenticity, but said that the document is two years old and that the problems it describes have been fixed.'"
GPS, free databases -- these are a few of my favorite things ... Tony Pryor writes: "In April 2001, while there at arsDigita University, I developed a web interface called the Godseye Project, designed to enable 'grassroots cartography,' allowing individuals with web access to add subjective knowledge details about their surroundings to closeup satellite images. Although I wrote Godseye over a year and a half ago, it isn't currently online- I'll spare you the gory details of the events between then and now.
I just wrote two new pieces which *are* live. The first is a script that dynamically adds geolocation pages using Movable Type, and automatically registers each of them with http://www.geourl.org. The second part is a geolocation-based search centered upon any one of these geopages. The search aggregates the results of consecutive google queries on each of the sites (or geopages) within a given radius."
Visit the still-growing Godseye Project to test out this cool geographic search capability; Tony promises that the functionality will improve with lots of visitors and suggestions.
Satellite tracking itself isn't too hard, it is tracking a object that is entering the atmosphere that is tough.
Sat Tracker allows you to track/image sats with a LX200 chipset telescope.
Since Penguin's homepage is several clicks away from the actual signing schedule page, try this: Gibson Rocks Come on, submitters, you can do better than that.
regalia != memorabilia
here is a direct link to William Gibson tour dates information.
When I was looking for broadband some providers made you pay extra for the privilege of connecting more than one computer, with fines if you used a NAT and got caught.
I think currently most providers take the sensible option of allowing it but not supporting it.
I am told that similarly, phone companies made you pay when you hooked up another telephone to your existing line, but this was challenged in court and declared illegal.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Here is the relevant quote from the earlier article: "[Lt. Col. Andy] Roake said that the Air Force will transmit classified images and data to Columbia accident investigators on the condition that they not be made public."
...more fodder for the anti-NASA conspiracists
You see, they can't release the photos from the Starfire Optical Range until NASA's examined them, because if they did that, the uninformed public would leap to conclusions. But that doesn't mean they were trying to misinform us about the origin of the picture. I think they just made an honest mistake.
I didn't know there was a conspiracy against NASA. Did you mean, anti-NASA conspiracy theorists?
WINE, VMware, Win4Lin etc. Not to mention that many give fake user agents anyway and there are other apps and protocols besides http browsers. What if I surf the net on my Linux box and play CS on my windows box. What HTTP User-Agent do most games use?? How much CPU power would it take to detect something like that even if you could?
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
I've seen passing references to Joshua Schacter's Geourl, and the Geocoder project Dave Egnor wrote (which won the Google programming contest)... but not much feedback here on Godseye.
Please take a moment *look* at the Godseye Project, look it over, try the search feature at the bottom of one of the geopages, and then yell at me if you would.
There's more to this project than you can see- the orthophoto polygonal clickthrough tool is already written, and I'm working on making this distributed.
You can add geosearch functionality to your own site fairly easily with the directions provided.
--
It may be the case that 1.3 is (too) prevalent, but you only need to spend a little time with 1.4 to see that it is far and away faster than 1.3 in a "default" setup.
Gas and electric is charged based on use because those are consumable resources and the cost to you is proportional to the cost to them. 1 kW or 1 "therm" requires X amount of gas, coal, hydro capacity, etc. They don't charge for use just to keep you from using more than your "fair share."
.isos at 3am, it isn't going to cost my ISP *anything* because there's not much other bandwidth use going on. Now if I download .isos at 8pm on a weekday, then that could lead them to needing more capacity.
ISP bandwidth costs are largely flat. They pay for an OC3 whether their customers happen to use most of the available bandwidth or not. They have to buy their bandwidth based on peak capacity. If they were to charge based on use it would *only* be to discourage use and therefore reduce the need to add capacity.
The most important part of a network connection is binary, either you have it or you don't. How many actual bits you can cram through it in a given day is far less important. The only use fees I would be cool with would be ones which specificlly charge for (and therefore discourage) the behavior which ends up costing the ISP money, disproportionate use at peak times. Monthly or daily GB limits are stupid because if I download a bunch of
Most ISPs aren't stupid enough to care about whether you're using a NAT within your home. You don't need multiple computers in your house to use a crazy amount of bandwidth. They *do* care about you using a NAT in your home to share your connection with your neighbors, that's robbing them of a potential customer. Your electric company would also care if you were doing the same thing with an extension cord instead of Cat5 because they also have flat fees. My utlity bill has a "Minimum Monthly Charge" of $17.50. If I just used my neighbor's electricity and split the bill, we would be robbing the utility of that monthly charge from me.
yeah, and here is a good site about it. You can even download it from here, i guess it is classed as abandonware.
I remember you could play "realistic" mode where the shuttle platform moves out in real time, which is about 3 days I think. now that's realism!
if you bought it, it came with a *huge* wall chart with all the switches. The two real life shuttle disasters look positivley pedestrian compared to some of my botched landings in that game.