Slashback: Folding, Cursing, Exporting

Slashback tonight brings updates and clarifications on the odds of Apple Computer buying Universal Music, the Evil Bit RFC, and more, including Niels Provos' reasons for moving his cryptographic research tools off-shore.

The more numerous the laws ... friscolr writes "The Register has an article about security researcher Niels Provos's (creator/collaborator for systrace, honeyd, openssh, various steg tools, and more) struggle to continue his Ph.D. studies amidst an increasingly restrictive set of U.S. and Michigan laws. This isn't the first time a prominent security researcher in Michigan has voiced serious concerns over new laws."

You may remember several earlier stories mentioning Provos' research, such as this article on his honeynet creation tool honeyd.

Apple Records has a certain ring, though, doesn't it? egoff writes "The Apple/Universal Music deal is unlikely, according to the New York Times (reg req), nor would it be a sure hit with investors. However, if the deal did go through, it would be because of Steve Job's vision for the future of digital music. Said one former Apple exec: 'Apple always needs to pull a rabbit out of its hat. Universal is a pretty big rabbit.'"

Swearing in another language doesn't count. Chilliwilli writes with an update to the recent Anger As a Software Design Philosophy: "Anyone that took a look at the foul language feckfeck might be amazed to see that somebody has actually risen to one of the three challenges and written a quine in this more irritating of languages. Congratulations go to 'hoser'."

Upping their meds. Elyjah writes "Steve Bellovin has compiled a short list of emails he got regarding his most recent RFC (3514) which appeared this last April 1st. (I believe you may have seen something on Slashdot about it.) Some people just...don't...get it."

If you go beyond the Enterprise, doesn't that invalidate their theme song? Built enough floppy-disk Enterprises? GaryK writes "With Dell getting rid of 3.5" disk drives, I'm quite sure we'll have to come up with creative uses for the hundreds and hundreds of floppies we have around our offices. This guy should serve as an inspiration to us all.

Comments

Apple Trademark violation

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when Apple Computers(AC( was founded, Apple Records(AR) (who put out the Beatles records in America) sued AC for the name Apple. AC had to agree not to go into the music recording business in order to use the name Apple. If AC makes this move into music recording, would they not be violating that agreement?

Apple pulled a what out of its what?!

[no_opinion]

Said one former Apple exec: 'Apple always needs to pull a rabbit out of its hat. Universal is a pretty big rabbit.'

You don't save a drowning man by throwing him another drowning man.

Re:One easy answer

[inertia187]

Yes, that is truely scary. Especially the part where he or she says, "Or maybe a database with signatures of "bad" bits?" Man, that's gotta be a tiny database:

create table good_bad_bits (
bit boolean not null primary key,
evil boolean not null
) ;

insert into good_bad_bits ( bit, evil ) values ( true, true ) ;
insert into good_bad_bits ( bit, evil ) values ( false, true ) ; /* Ok, I guess I'm done. */

What's a Quine?

[_xeno_]

I hope I'm not the only one who didn't recognize what a "Quine" was, so here we go:

A quine is a program that, when run, exactly reproduces its source code. Nifty - although not particularly useful, it's still kinda neat.

Anyway, find quines in, uh, many languages at The Quine Page.

RFC

[genka]

It should be noted that if evil bit (RFC 3514) is used with TCP by Pigeon (RFC 1149), evil bit is dropped. In fact, a lot of evil bits are dropped

Floppy RAID is cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me for "hanging" this on your funny-post, but the FDD-RAID project is just soo funny and I'd like more people to see it.

It is really cool when you access the drives the way they flash each light and spin in no particular order that I can discern. It is of course faster than a standard single drive. I was able to transfer "DEVO Uncontrolable Urge.mp3" which is 3.6 MB in 32 seconds. Which is pretty good I think.

(Really, with people posting "what's vorbis?" with every Vorbis story, I'm sure there must be persons out there for which this is new)

Re:One easy answer

[Krondor]

... all data originating from a Microsoft system are, by definition, evil.

Nevermind that "Evil" is a relative term, but I was under the impression that in fact all FreeBSD packets should in fact be "Evil". I mean they have a daemon (albeit a cute one for a mascot). I think they are more then deserving for that fact alone, but hasn't the FreeBSD crowd been the one primarily pushing for this bit to begin with?

Build a hard drive wind chime...

[Jonah Hex]

Since the days of the death of MFM hard drives I've been stripping dead drives of their platters and using them for wind chimes. The platters resonate with crystal clear tones when struck against each other, and I've never had one I couldn't use from notebook drives to IDE/SCSI drives.

Besides the usual nylon line and a wooden dowel or two for the upper support, you do need a few different type of screwdriver bits, since most drives use odd shaped star/torx screwheads. If you have any trouble just grab a drill and destroy the screws, at this stage who cares about what the case ends up looking like. And a final tip, you may want to spray the platters with a thin clear coat if your putting them outside.

Jonah Hex