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.
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..., an anonymous reader writes with one way to foil detection efforts:
The problem with this paper is that it describes an overly complicated way to detect multiple IP's behind a NAT firewall when there is a much easier, simpler and already used method: transparent proxying of HTTP and checking the browser identifier.
Shocking, but true. Many ISP's already use this method to scan all of your outbound HTTP traffic. Figuring out if you have more than one computer (especially if their OS or browser's are different) is trivial.
The only way to defeat this is to implement your own proxy (like squid) and have it re-write HTTP headers. Or... run all machines with the exact same configuration.
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.
I wonder what will happen if ISPs were to limit their customers' ability to use NAT devices...
:)
Either they will lose customers in droves due to the fact that the users can no longer use their fancy-schmancy Linksys router to connect all their computers together, or the router manufacturers will cook up an option in thier firmware to use the NAT-hiding approach mentioned above...
Just my 192.168.1.1's worth
--RickTheWizKid
P.S.: FIRST INTELLIGENT POST
What, he pulled it out of his ass?
[snip] ...The people who work here are geeks. [/snip]
Finally, management who understands! Now when are they going to let me start dinking around with gadgets at work when I have a good idea, instead of telling me to file more paperwork.
-theGreater Geek.
regalia != memorabilia
I saw Gibson do a reading at the University of Washington about a week ago. The lecture hall was packed- I get the feeling he isn't quite mainstream but having comparative literature courses that feature Neuromancer and occasional media references to the 'inventor of cyberspace' probably help with that.
Gibson mentioned the book started coming together after he was sent by Wired to meet with a lot of music video directors at a festival a few years back- He even fictionalized the Bjork video with the sexy female robots into background material for one of the main characters.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
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?
France surrenders.
-(())