Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Computing
This link came my way a few days ago; it is titled simply Final Exam. And I warn readers that visiting it could easily suck up the next half hour of your life in unproductive thought, and quite possibly more. It was written by a science fiction writer, and the point of reading it isn't the answers, but the questions and the predicates they are founded upon. Will we see this world? Why or why not?
I'm sort of upset I never got questions like that in college.
I particularly like 5, 6 and 7...
Really though... how do you make people realize it isn't you?
This space for sale
... The title says it all!
Thank you Slashdot - I'll be making sure everyone on my mailing list gets to see this.
And personally, I will be taking some time out to think some of those points through more deeply.
What a great link.
A little planning goes a long way...
yes i know it's off topic, but hey, this is a big deal. no more green!
I've actually met Marc Steigler, and had dinner with him, and worked on his computers.. He's a smart guy, with a lot of great ideas.. He also writes some decent sci-fi, and I've seen his latest book, earthweb, I think it's called, at all the bookstores.. check it out..
There's an unusually high amount of brown here now.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I don't know about everyone else, but I thought this was pretty lame. I thought the questions totally uninteresting and not thought provoking in the slightest. IMHO, this didn't need to be posted. But that's just me. Feel free to moderate me down now!
Taco, you broke slashdot again!
Tough questions that innovators of the web will have to answer and quickly. It seems ironically enough the thing which makes the web what it is, and that is no goverment restrictions, is also the thing which threatens to destroy it(with warez manufactures, spammers, virus writers hiding behind polictical boundries ie. china and russia) What is to be done?
"There is a holy mistaken zeal in politics and religion, by convincing others we convince ourselves" -Junius
It really puts a few things into perspective.
-Adam
This sig goes live 11-NOV-99. Stay Tuned!
A different color for different themed sections
Aren't you dead?
So who decided that feces was a good shade to imitate?
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Frankly, I have to say I'm tired of hearing things like this. Yes, there is hunger, war, and other problems in the world, and yes, we should try to do something about it. However, don't be insinuating that I'm an evil person because I'm not devoting my life to helping that starving peasant in Korea and instead I'm helping to move technology forward. It's a logical fallacy to be saying that because there are bigger problems in the world we shouldn't be trying to fix the smaller ones. Like the animal rights activist who is accused of not caring about people because she's trying to prevent cruelty to animals.
/because/ we use technology.
I'm sorry, I guess this test doesn't seem as "deep" to me.. it's main purpose is to try to make those of us who use technology feel guilty
Collect as many of the little boxen a possible, then Hock 'em on eBay Dutch style... you can even use a couple to self bid and bump up the price...
Hmmm... If you write answers supporting my political agenda, you pass the course.
Geez, I would have gone berzerk if one of my professors tried to force his views down my throat in this manner.
Not that I don't agree that new laws aren't the answer...
My point is this: Both question 11 on the Final Exam and the Berners-Lee story point to the capacity for the Web/Internet/Computers to be more than just tools to shop online, download porn, or even really cool things like collaborate on amazing Open Source projects like Linux itself. I say more important because, in conjuction with the (sometimes disparate) philosophies of Open Source / Free Software, we as a community have the chance to really make a difference by applying these philosophies outside not only the domain of software, but also outside the world of business itself. As both a Linux geek and a scholar of things Chinese (BA in Chinese, extensive study of PRC politics, modern and ancient history, and ancient philosophy), it is exciting to think that we just barely might be able to influence on a wide scale an authoritarian regieme through the application of thoughts and ideals that we use to write our software. Gives the phrase "World Domination" a whole new meaning, doesn't it?
So does this make any sense, or am I just rambling?
I read over this and didn't find anything that was particullary interesting. The majority of those questions are non-issues. Trying to figure out which technology was most usefull for one task or the other? Maybe its just me, but that seems rather trite. I guess you can score me as flamebait now.
Write a contentless post, challenge downwards moderation, then wait for the moderators to fall over each other in their attempt to prove their willingness to support individual (if uninteresting and unsubstantiated) opinion?
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
the brown is nice, but the split pea/squash/puke green has got to go...
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
"It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
Normal Slashdot: Green
Ask Slashdot: Grey
Radio: Black
BSD: Red
Your Rights Online: Brown
Apache: Purple
Kinda weird if you ask me, but CmdrTaco ain't askin' me
Aren't you dead?
contrary to a fellow who just posted, I thought the questions modeled good case studies for how secure communications should be done (iow if the newer protocols being created now, IMPP, FTP-ext, HTTPs next version, etc do not solve these case, they should be reworked until they do)
Honestly, most of the answers I came up with involve things I do not think get listed in the new "enhanced" web, but it could just be a definitions issue, what the hellis a bonding agent? arbitrage in this context I am also not clear on... agents to _prevent_ arbitrage maybe?
(arbitrage from www.m-w.com : the nearly simultaneous purchase and sale of securities or foreign exchange in different markets in order to profit from price discrepancies)
nonetheless, the examples were good, what was the "answer" to #11 "... The time has come to solve your problem in the most fundamental sense, and save the life of your daughter."?
are they talking about the web being an agent for political change (every publishing medium at some point has toppled ruthless dictators)?
Anyway, this exam gives me new respect for those liberal-arts-in-the-CS-dept classes...
-RS
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde
Grrr. my nick is "Forward the Light Brigade"...
The correct answer for #11 is that you would need safe unforgeable identities with strong encryption. Once others with similar boxes found out you were doing well (because you can follow instrustions on basic survival and medical care, and they are lazy and want to eat to fruits of your labor) you will need to have digital protection. DUH!
-Adam
J. Willard Marriott Good timber does not grow with ease; the stronger the wind, the stronger the trees.
Lawmakers are looking at the Internet as "This technology is going to encourage people to commit crimes" (or sins, depending on which party you belong to.) This is the wrong way to view it, though. Good people are still good people when they have Internet access. Bad people simply have a more technologically advanced way to commit crimes.
- -----------------
How is this different from any other tech advancement? The automobile made it easier for bank robbers to flee the scene at a more rapid rate. But we did not make legislation specifically to prevent bank robbers from having cars.
Just as there are new avenues with which you may commit a crime (or a company can commit a crime against you) there are many ways in which those interested in "making a difference" can use the Internet to reach a wider audience to elicit help or support for cause x, y, and z. The concerns that one has while using the Internet should not differ from the concerns you have in the 3-d space that surrounds you. You're concerned about giving your personal information out on the web. But aren't you concerned about giving your personal information out in real life as well? Most of you are, and there's no reason why any of those concerns are different when you're on the web. The only difference is that information distributed on the internet is at risk of propagating much more rapidly. But information offline will still propagate. Junk mailers got addresses from publishers long before the proliferation of the www.
There will always be someone trying to rip you off or invade your privacy. And no technological advance will ever take away your need to protect yourself from those people.
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BORING
about a couple things.
1) Thought provoking posts don't get moderated down. (that's a compliment, by the way)
2) I think you've missed the point of that last question.
To expand a bit on 2, I'd say you're reading the author wrong. I think question 11 was SPECIFICALLY MEANT to make people think about "deep" issues, not to make them feel bad about having food (when others do not).
I firmly believe that its possible to feed everyone, and that distribution and politics are the only hinderances. Heh. "Only".
Farmers in the US get subsidies to NOT grow crops to avoid lowering the sales cost to a point where farmers couldn't make a decent living selling their goods. It doesn't always work, but that's not the point. The point is, WE CAN FEED PEOPLE. Not just our people, or their people, but EVERYONE.
Now imagine that hypothetical, food-stealing soldiers actions if he KNEW there was a web-cam or four pointed at him. Consequences are a bitch.
--Mark
Apparently, there's just not enough lithium in the world.
Use the box to figure out when these well wishing people would forget about the thousands of little boxes and start dropping food.
It seems to me that the answer to question 11 is that you can use the device to have Free Speech among your fellow countrymen for the first time in your entire life. You also get to tell the outside world about the soldiers who keep robbing you. You can also arrange for drop shipments of arms without the thugs being able to intercept it.
The internet can be used to aid a real world physical revolution.
Your grade for thinking that the question is supposed to make you feel guilty: F.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Just had a flashback to my essay-ridden college days.. yikes! But it is still rather thought-provoking...
11) You live in North Korea. Three days ago the soldiers came to your tiny patch of farmland and took the few scraps of food they hadn't taken the week before. You have just boiled the last of your shoes and fed the softened leather to your 3-year-old child. She coughs, a sickly sound that cannot last much longer. Overhead you hear the drone of massive engines. You look into the sky, and thousands of tiny packages float down. You pick one up. It is made of plastic; you cannot feed it to your daughter. But the device talks to you, is solar powered, and teaches you how to use it to link to the Web. You have all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips; you can talk to thousands of others who share your desperate fate. The time has come to solve your problem in the most fundamental sense, and save the life of your daughter.
Well, in light of some of the recent stories on Slashdot, here is my answer: :P
Using the ibm patent database as an aid, think of a common sense technology (ie one click shopping, yahoo's dynamic page generation) that hasn't been patented and grab it. Make millions.
Anyway, anyone else find it funny how this "final exam" is about the future of computing but most of the questions (1-4,8-10) were about, well, mostly money and the commercialization (sp?) of the internet? Is that all the internet is good for these days? *sigh* Granted there were some privacy questions in there, but 8/11 about money?
This sig is false.
This is an interesting essay, however atleast half the questions posed aren't relevant to today's 'net. Number 11 simply cannot occur. Provided it did occur, there would be precious little time to spend making pleas on usenet or elsewhere. Computers are used by those who have spare time, or a job that requires it. It is not a tool like a hammer, or a pole and some fishing line. In the unlikely event you could arouse sympathy on usenet, or even across the 'net, the most you would likely accomplish is a condemnation of your country. Your daughter would still starve to death.. because any food shipments would be denied by a government that tyrannical.
That's my 30-second-or-less essay answer. It probably won't get an 'A', but atleast it'll get moderated up a point, maybe even two.
--
Hmm. This is a nifty idea. Combine the global cellphone concept with a palm 7? And then just give them away any place where theyre illegal to sell. This I might kick in some cash towards, just cause it would be fun to mess with the system.
If he were, as you say, claiming that you're an evil person for moving technology forward, then what would his motivation be for giving this course? Why would he spend a semester teaching some college students about escrow agents and strong encryption? Clearly, he finds these technologies interesting -- but he knows that most don't consider the practical applications of that technology outside of their own lifestyles.
You shouldn't feel guilty because you use technology. But it's important to think about how your technology can be used to help people who don't lead a lifestyle identical to your own, even just as an intellectual exercise. I think that Mr. Stiegler's exam intended just the opposite -- that you should feel proud that you're helping advance a technology that some day might help that Korean woman feed her starving daughter, and that (Goddess forbid!) you might actually think about that image once or twice while coding your next GPL project.
"But always she's the spectre of uncertainty I first endured, then faded, then embraced..."
That was pretty deep...lots of "blurry boundaries in cyberspace" sounds like cnn or something but it's true...#5,6,7 could keep a team of lawyers happy for months. Question #11 blew my mind...it's kind of interesting to consider what would happen in such a situation. One of the major problems with the internet (in my opinion) is that there are very clearly defined lines drawn based upon wealth. The fact that the entirety of internet users represent less than 10% of the upper income bracket in the world suddenly puts things in perspective; i gripe about not having a computer when some don't have food. i won't get into discussing the irony of airlifting computers to starving peasants but in a situation such as north korea's it would do very little. all the knowledge in the world can't solve problems by itself....
...you're really close to the mark.
"However, don't be insinuating that I'm an evil person because I'm not devoting my life to helping that starving peasant in Korea and instead I'm helping to move technology forward."
Who's to say that you aren't doing both? Granted, technology and the net won't fix all of the world's problems. It does, however, have the potential to fix many of the world's problems. See where I'm going with this?
An analogy: If I work in the Chevy plant in Michigan and my specialty is building diesel vans, shold I feel guilty because I'm not helping out my local hospital in my free time? No, because the hospital uses the trucks that I build. The trucks are used as ambulances, delivery trucks, blood donation vehicles, breast cancer screening vehicles, etc. I am helping the hospital, though indirectly.
Your work to advance technology as a whole can pay dividends in indirect and unforseen ways. Hell, you might be the one who figures out a low-cost, low-power sattelite modem that is used in the machine that's dropped to that little girl's family.
Anyway, to get back on topic, these are excellent questions. I can also see two seperate ways of interpreting them: one is with the thought of `Is the internet really all it's cracked up to be', the other is `how can I think outside of the box to make the internet/technology/my toaster accomplish these tasks'. Keep these precepts in mind as you answer the questions, and I bet you will come to vastly seperate conclusions.
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
The POINT is that the same technologies that allow us to become incrementally more free will also allow those who are fundamentally enslaved to become free one day. It is pro-technology, not anti-technology. Expect it to be reprinted in Wired soon.
Paul Precod
did my blue and green phosphors burn out, or is this page all in brown and red for some reason?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I think you've completely missed the point of this test.
The only question that even remotely links to your criticism is the last question (number 11), and the question prompts you only to devise a way to best solve your inherent problem with the power of the internet. I can see absolutely no way you could interpret this to be an attack on people who use technology.
The point of the test is that the internet, as it grows in scope, will envelop more and more of our lives. How will this change things? How can we preserve neccesary elements of accountability, authenticity, and decency while not sacrificing freedom? That is the point, and you've completely missed it.
I can't understand how anyone could see these essay collections as advocating any kind of political agenda. Please try reading them before you post again. It's like if I ask you to explain what you would do if I asked you to write an essay question. That obviously is pushing my technocratic views on you. I'm glad that none of my teachers have ever tried forcing their crazy views on me by way of asking what I would do in a particular situation.
The test asks good questions in the sense of "they need to be asked", but not so good in the sense of "they don't have answers". Several of these problems have solutions printed in the first edition (1994?) of Applied Cryptography. (for instance, see the anonymous and secure poker protocol)
As for question 11, I don't know what the point of this is. If his point is "no amount of information in the world will feed a starving child", though, I have two responses:
1) Wanna bet? The first thing I'd look for information on edible plants, catching fish, trapping birds, etc. North Korea (even in the middle of a war) is not a wasteland.
2) Even if it were a wasteland, the problem is not that information won't feed a child. The problem is that the information wasn't applied early enough. Information on how to keep the soldiers out, how to prevent the child from getting sick (or even conceived), etc is all available.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
It is entirely possible that is can't, and that it's hubris to think that technology can really improve the human condition; but in some instances (like the last question in the test) circumstances are so bad it would be really hard for us to make them worse. So with your indulgence, I will speculate...
What could a solar-powered, wireless, tap-proof web terminal do for that oppressed peasant in North Korea? Perhaps the first and most important thing is to help him understand that there is another way of life. People who have been beaten down all their lives come to accept it; the first step towards radical change is to understand that change is possible.
Now, while one person may be a leader and inspire change, it takes many people to make that change happen. That web terminal would let our peasant organize and coordinate not only with others in his own country, but with action groups all over the world. It would be a lot harder for the U.S. Congress to ignore the problems of the third world poor if they were talking to us, one-to-one, over the net.
Our peasant needs to make the most of his meager resources. How can I build a warmer, drier hut? How can I dig a better well? How can I irrigate my fields? How can I take care of my sick kids when there's no doctor in a hundred miles? There might not be a lot of web pages dedicated to these topics now, but if the "third world" gets online you can bet they'll be tops.
Finally, what happens when the time comes for direct action? Whether you need the writings of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, or plans for building bombs and blowing up government facilities, the web has it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
... by the color blind!
FINAL EXAM
Name: _Coward, Anonymous_
Question #11 - Answer:
Step One - Do a Google search for Beowulf-HOWTO.
Step Two - Make a big freakin' Beowulf cluster out of the air-dropped computers!
Step Three - Now you're such a d00d that the army will bring food to you!
(Actually, the questions are interesting. #11 challenges us to define how universal communication can catalize mass cultural change. Hmmmm.)
All I want to do is setup my Samba print server so the workstations can use it - can I transfer out of this class!?! :))
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
1. complain that you're going to get moderated down
But I'll probably get moderated down for saying that.
The enhanced capabilites list brings up some questions for me. Perhaps if I had actually taken this "Future of Computing" class, they would be less ambiguous.
Unforgeable pseudonymous identities
Yes, but it will require a global standard in public/private key systems. This standard must be as stable and as universally and unquestioningly accepted as TCP/IP. It must also be backed by laws specifying the nature of the standard and describing the legal rights and responsibilities of using encrypted keys.
In a decade, maybe. The 'Net moves fast, but people don't. There's nothing technologically unfeasable about it, but it will require some changes in public attitudes.
Bidirectional, typed, filterable links
Bidirectional - yes. Should have done it years ago.
Typed - sometimes, and not very reliably. Who does the typing?
Filtered - probably not. Who gets to act as censor?
Arbitrage agents
Technologically, it can probably be made to work. Like key systems, it will take some time to do. A standard for publishing commercial information so that agents can read it is necessary. All agents must use it, and it must become so important to vendors that agents be able to read their information that they would never refuse to use the standard. This can happen - but not yet. Ten years, maybe. As much as 20 if interest in the 'Net drops off.
It's not in any vendor's best interests to help customers comparison shop. This will make it hard to implement.
Bonding agents
Escrow agents
I'm not sure what these mean. Bond has several definitions, and I don't know which one applies. I know what escrow means, but I don't know what it means in this context.
Digital cash
We have it now. With all the time and money pouring into it, it'll be pretty standard soon enough.
Capability Based Security with Strong Encryption
I know what this means, but I'm not sure how it applies either.
I would be interested to see some of the answers students have given to these questions. I'm something of a net skeptic.
I'm not sure there's any obvious solution to #1.
The answer to #2 should be to call the police.
There are a number of answers to #3 - politcal science describes several methods of evaluating the reputation of an unknown agent, but most of the practical ones have been in use since before the web.
#4 is unlikely to ever have an effective technological solution, but may become cause for calling the police someday.
#5 - so what?
#6 - Your government probably isn't reading your e-mail. If it is, your inability to share dirty jokes is the least of your problems.
#7 - public/private key encryption with a protocol for challenging an identity could work for this one.
#8 - There are technological solutions, but I will bet none of them will ever be implemented.
#9 - Call a lawyer. That's what they're there for.
#10 - Sue until dead. No new technology necessary. The ability to unimpeachably establish identites using encryption might help. But speak softly and retain expensive lawyers.
#11 - I'm not sure how much he 'Net has to offer to politics - even in totalitarian states - that TV, phones and faxes don't. The 'Net does makes it a little easier to distribute samizdat, but it also makes it easier to spread propaganda. Furthermore, modern media can make it awfully hard to distinguish the two. The government of every state with free media is sooner or later compelled to lie to it - closed countries can at least keep silent. In North Korea, most people know they are being lied to, even if they don't know the truth. In America, many people suspect they are being lied to, but go on and believe what they hear anyway. The 'Net changes little in that respect.
Assuming the tech in the little boxen is advanced enough for wireless web hookup from the rice paddies outside of Pyong Yang(sic)
:)
1. Establish your security and encription
2. amass great amounts of digital cash and using the UPI, stash the cash with the escrow agent.
3. Arrange for groceries to be air-dropped from netgrocers.com - payment via the escrow agent.
4. Ditto homedepot.com
5. ditto gunzrus.com - just in case the soldiers come back
6. work with the arbitrage agent to invest your cyber cash
7. Maybe get some drugs and meds from RX.com?
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
I don't have the several hours of time available right now to work through a complete analysis, but I suspect that you could make a pretty good argument that all the problems cannot be solved simultaneously .
For example, how can you be accountable for your lies about a product, but at the same time anonymous enough to speak out against a totalitarian regime? One requires untraceability, one requires traceability.
I suspect you could answer each question pretty well, but that your answers would be mutually exclusive. How interesting.
Bill Kilgallon
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
1. Look at the list of enhanced capabilities that were listed.
Unforgeable pseudonymous identities
Bidirectional, typed, filterable links
Arbitrage agents
Bonding agents
Escrow agents
Digital Cash
Capability Based Security w/ S. Encryption
Looking at thie list, you should realize that all of these capabilities, save the last, depand on the first. Without unforgeable identities you can't really perform any kind of commerce. Even more important is the realization that an unforgeable identity is itself dependent on encryption.
Let me repeat that - all higher level models of information exchange are fundamentally based on only _two_ cryptographic primitives, encryption and hashing. In the "Ask Slashdot" interview with Bruce Schneier, Bruce said,
This is why encryption is important and it's what encryption is really all about. As a community we should support strong crypto not because it will let us send privete naughty email, but because it is the foundation out of which is constructed digital cash, digital signatures, trusted arbitrage, and a host of other useful goodies.
2. Despite it's Katz-esque nature, question #11 is really rather profound. For the sake of argument let's remove the specificity and replace North Korea with "Oppressive Bastards", or OB for short.
My initial reaction to the question was "Why drop net appliances on these poor people? Send some food instead for the love of (insert deity here)." But then I thought hey, if you dropped them food they would eat, become hungry again, and you are right back where they started. Hmm, maybe air-dropping massive amounts of information is the right way to go. After all, to defeat the Oppressive Bastards you don't really need food or weapons, you need a collective will and the ability to organize. Both of these things can be done with the net, and you need _none_ of the advanced features listed at the start of the exam.
Profound, eh?
-Shane
Oh yeah, it probably wouldn't hurt to also send along Bobby Shaftoe to display some adaptability.
I don't think we read that question the same way at all. The exam seemed to me to be worded in a way that indicated the prof. thought these devices would help.
Consider:
Sure, it's an open question if any of these things will actually help, but there is certainly the possibility that they might. Is there an underground you can communicate with? Is there a sympathetic doctor in the area? Is the army interested in looking like an ass in front of the world? If thousands of communication devices are being dropped, it's possible that a food drop will follow. Now you can at leat find out about it.
Consider the importance the fax machine has had in anti-government actions (think China, latter-day Soviet Union).
Can you immediately feed your daughter a bunch of silicon chips? No. It's a tool that gives you an advantage you didn't have. It may not solve your problem and save your daughter's life, but if it was me, I wouldn't chuck the thing.
I don't think this was about the uselessness of communications technology at all.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
I think most people are missing the point with question #11. Giving poor, oppressed people access to the Internet isn't going to help them much.
What is going to help them is the ability to communicate securely and anonymously. The point isn't to contact the outside world for help, it's to organize a revolution.
Second, Q11 is unfair and ungrounded. What many people fail to realize is that technology is not our overall saviour, and it will not fix every problem. Sooner or later, we're going to have to use some good ol' human compassion to help those around us. I didn't think Q11 made me feel guilty, it made me realize that now, even more, I have to work harder to bridge the gap between myself and those less fortunate.
How the quiz at all relates to educating those who would make new laws is beyond me, unless your goal is to make them technically savvy.
--------------------
You're not evil. The exam's not trying to say you are.
Question eleven illustrates that, no matter what fine-tuning is done to the web, it's still useless out in the physical human day-to-dayness of the majority of the world. It's easy to become so involved in net culture and technology (see JonKatz's latest effort) that you forget what actual life is like. And this question is a reminder that computers, the internet, and the hype around them, are just part of the icing, not the whole cake.
The course was called the Future of Computing. The point is to consider the effects of 'what is' now, on 'what may eventually be'.
I don't think the point of any of the questions was practical applications. I think they were supposed to be theoretical... the questions were intended to make the students THINK. I got the impression that the course was intended to teach the students to think about causes and effects. They were supposed to learn about thinking, not learn about how to do a specific task. The point is that in the future, and now, they will be prepared to think about how to address problems and create solutions. That will be the practical skill... knowing how to think.
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I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
Besides, Brunner is one of those authors, like Stephenson, who appeals greatly to the hacker in me. Brunner was predicting the internet in the mid Sixties. And a nomadic American populace, moving from job to job amazingly frequently. (The Shockwave Rider). Brunner was, in my opinion, more visionary than any other science fiction author, especially in the wisdom of his predictions.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
1) Searching for a decision analysis tool on the Web, you find a review in which the reviewer raves about a particular product. You buy the product and discover it just doesn't work. You desire to prevent this person's ravings from harming anyone else--and you desire to prevent the product from disappointing anyone else.
You can't. This is basically a reputation issue. Why should the web belive you and not the reviewer? How do people know *you* are honest? Of course you can set up a site www.thisproductsucks.com, post your experience to Usenet, etc. etc. but all this is possible with the existing Web.
2) A product you buy based on a rave review opens your email address book, grabs your entire list of friends, sends itself to them, and sends your password files to a mysterious IP address. It's too late now, but which features would you install before ever touching your computer again?
You bought it, right? So there is an electronic/paper trail to the guys who made it, right? Viruses are illegal in the US, so you can complain to cops.
Other than that, there is nothing you can install on your machine that will prevent this from happening ever again (none of what this trojan did required root/admin privileges). Unless you want to set up a separate untrusted environment and try all unknown code there, there isn't much you can do.
3) A product is advertised on the Web. It sounds good, but the offerer has no Web reputation. What arrangement would you consider adequate to go ahead and procure the product (Note: there are several possible answers; give 2 entirely separate solutions, and that is considered answering 2 questions).
Simple escrow, in whatever form available.
4) You start receiving thousands of emails from organizations you don't know, all hawking their wares. You want it to stop, just stop!
Welcome to the club. Change your e-mail address and spam-proof what you expose in places like Usenet and Slashdot. And browser does not give out your email address to every site that asks, does it?
5) You wish to play poker with your friends. They live in Tampa Florida, you live in Kingman. This is illegal in the nation where you happen to be a citizen. You want to do it anyway.
Encryption.
6) You hear a joke that someone, somewhere, would probably find offensive. You wish to tell your precocious 17-year-old daughter, who is a student at Yale. The Common Decency Act Version 2 has just passed; it is a $100,000 offense to send such material electronically to a minor. You want to send it anyway--it is a very funny joke.
Exactly the same problem and the same answer: encryption.
7) Someone claiming to be you starts roaming the Web making wild claims. You want to make sure people know it isn't really you.
Unless you have a public key and registered it somewhere, you have a problem. Even if you had and did, you still have a problem. The degree of the problem depends on whether the guy just posts on the Usenet under your handle, or he messes with your bank account using your passwords/certs.
8) You have brought out a remarkable new product. There is a competing product making claims you know are false. You want to make sure anyone going to their site finds out your product is better.
You can't. To do this means that you have to be able to see everybody who goes to a competitor's site, and then spam them. This is technically hard, an invasion of privacy and may be even illegal.
9) Your elderly aunt sees a drug advertised on the Web that promises relief from arthritis. She dies shortly after starting to take the drug. You think the drug, and he company that made it, is at fault. Meanwhile the company is sure they didn't have anything to do with it. You want justice.
And what does the web have to do with this? That's a case from tort law (maybe criminal, as well). It makes no difference whether your aunt seen the ad on the web or read it in a newspaper. Of course the www.theykilledmyaunt.com site is always an option.
10) You are the CEO of Bloomberg News, one of the most prestigious (and expensive) stock information services in the world. An article circulates on the Web, based on a mock-up of the Bloomberg News information page, claiming that PairGain Corp. will be acquired by ECI Telecom. PairGain stock rises 32% in 8 hours. Investigators later find that the false report was created by a PairGain employee about to cash in his options. You want to ensure that your brand is never used
like this again.
You can't. Authentication would help somewhat, but will not solve the problem completely.
11) You live in North Korea. Three days ago the soldiers came to your tiny patch of farmland and took the few scraps of food they hadn't taken the week before. You have just boiled the last of your shoes and fed the softened leather to your 3-year-old child. She coughs, a sickly sound that cannot last much longer. Overhead you hear the drone of massive engines. You look into the sky, and thousands of tiny packages float down. You pick one up. It is made of plastic; you
cannot feed it to your daughter. But the device talks to you, is solar powered, and teaches you how to use it to link to the Web. You have all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips; you can talk to thousands of others who share your desperate fate. The time has come to solve your problem in the most fundamental sense, and save the life of your daughter.
The device is useless to you. All information in the world means nothing, if you cannot do anything. The situation is set up so that you are completely powerless in the real world and have access to a virtual world. Sorry, the virtual world cannot not help you. You and your daugher die. This does solve your problem in the most fundamental sense.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Dude, you are so totally off-base.
;-). The instructions direct you to some clear land close by; a refugee center with food, water, doctors, shelter, etc. By this time, you are too amazed by the help you have received to not go. Your daughter is actually up and moving around. The severity of the coughing has lessened and you feel ready to make this trip.
"however atleast half the questions posed aren't relevant to today's 'net."
Ummm, one of the postulates of the exam is the 'net of the future.
"Provided it did occur, there would be precious little time to spend making pleas on usenet or elsewhere."
Ok. Let's think about this for a minute. Anyone dropping shiny boxes that talk and allow you to connect to the internet would (logically) be dropped by someone sympathetic to your plight. How hard would it be to make your home site the default homepage of the box? How tough would it be to build a GPS into the box? How about 512 bit encryption?
Here's my take on the scenario:
"The time has come to solve your problem in the most fundamental sense, and save the life of your daughter." So, you read the instructions (in Korean) and fire up the box. You are immediately connected via ssl to the homepage for Free Korea(tm). They ask for your first name and if you are in any danger. You reply (speaking, of course, since you are illiterate) that your daughter is sick and that your family is starving. This is translated via voice recognition software into plain text (Uniocode), encrypted, and sent along with your exact coordinates (remember the GPS?) to Free Korea's site. The data is correlated, flight plans are made, and the next day another aircraft flys over. This time, it drops c-rats (icky, but they will get you by), medicine for your daughter, and instructions to call back in ASAP. So you eat the first real food you've had in days and your daughter's coughing lessens enough for her to sleep. When you call back in, you are told that you will have to move someplace and to start packing.
Meanwhile, back at Free Korea, your plight has been posted to the homepage in several languages along with stories from hundreds or thousands of other people. Free Korea, working with the G7 nations, have been putting pressure on North Korea to improve it's human rights practices; now they have hard evidence.
So you wake up the next morning to the sound of the aircraft again and eagerly check the package left in it's wake. This time, it's maps of the area (topo and symbol), water purification tablets, more food, more medicine, instructions, and something even more important: hope. You learn that millions of people are aware of your situation and that the superpowers are working to help you (gee, I didn't know they cared
I'll stop now, but that's the point of the excercize. I believe you failed for failing to read the directions...
" It probably won't get an 'A', but atleast it'll get moderated up a point, maybe even two."
That's not very funny.
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
The question placed you in the person of a poor, endangered person in a poor, embattled country, suddenly empowered with a networked device allowing you access to the minds of your fellow endangered persons. What do you do with it?
It wasn't a judgement on you, it was asking you to demonstrate, perhaps, which aspects of the 'new web' could be used to coordinate efforts, acquire food & supplies, and generally solve the problems.
I don't see where you get that its a guilt trip. It's actually showing HOW technology could help the poor and hungry and embattled.
..."Identify which advanced features listed above are needed to solve each problem, and explain how those features would work together." implies to you that the answer should include why you would do the thing in the question.
If he asked about the ethics of the actions, or how the use of these "advanced features" could affect society it might have been an interesting exam.
BTW, don't be so hopelessly naive. People go to university to get a piece of paper that makes corporations believe they know something. It is a required first step onto the corporate ladder, and few people would go to university if degrees were not required (in many cases by law!) for most decent jobs. Learning to think critically and to learn are things you do on your own; IMHO, most technical people picked these things up before high school and take them for granted, while people who choose to take these flakey courses have no grasp of such things and only come to think they have them when they've learned to regurgitate the products of more fertile minds.
This "final exam" are questions that are answered indirectly in the SciFi book "EarthWeb", by Marc Steigler. Get it at amazon... it is a short and easy read.
I have to assume that the author of the exam meant the book to be referenced, since it is linked from the main page of that site
http://www.skyhunter.com/
-Mitch
Btw, I'm a communication scholar who took a course over 20 years ago (a computer science/sociology combination special!) on the "universal information utility." From my perspective, remarkably few persons realize how this medium alone (just the Web, I mean) changes society. It is a far more basic change than telegraph, radio, and television combined. It may even be more revolutionary than print. Its basic effect will be to enable us to return to non-hierarchical organizational structures! Many sociologists make a rough analogy between society and a human body; this used to be a poor analogy. I like to say that the Internet (or connected machines generally) is the first central nervous system of society, making the analogy somewhat valid for the first time!
Although it still suggests you didn't read the exam. The exam was not about solving problems through technology necessarily; but about the possible problems brought about by things like anonymity, and challenging the students to resolve them.
At any rate, you didn't even give "technology creates as many problems as it solves therefore this essay sucks" as a reason in your first post...
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
First rule of the net. Never trust the word of any single unknown person. Do place some trust in the majority of several dozen opinions under the (usually correct) assumption that most people are not (a) loons or (b) marketroids for the product you're asking about.
2) A product you buy based on a rave review opens your email address book, grabs your entire list of friends, sends itself to them, and sends your password files to a mysterious IP address. It's too late now, but which features would you install before ever touching your computer again?
If you followed the answer to (1), you probably would not have been bitten. Also, never be the first to install any software (or version X.0 of anything). Plenty of others will happily volunteer themselves as guinea pigs and scream loudly if things run amok.
3) A product is advertised on the Web. It sounds good, but the offerer has no Web reputation. What arrangement would you consider adequate to go ahead and procure the product (Note: there are several possible answers; give 2 entirely separate solutions, and that is considered answering 2 questions).
It's the same question massaged over a bit. See (1) and (2) above.
4) You start receiving thousands of emails from organizations you don't know, all hawking their wares. You want it to stop, just stop!
Just have procmail route it to /dev/null or bounce it back to the sender. If you have no control over incoming mail, you're using the wrong ISP. Even better, set up your own domain on your own box on a DSL/cablemodem and stuff like this becomes ever so easy to deal with. Never tell spammers to stop spamming you. That just tells them your address is valid and read by a person which results in more spam.
5) You wish to play poker with your friends. They live in Tampa Florida, you live in Kingman. This is illegal in the nation where you happen to be a citizen. You want to do it anyway.
Look at the intent of the law. Gov't is worried about internet casinos and big $$$. Not you and a couple of buddies. You're not worth the effort, manpower, and $$$ to prosecute. Have a blast.
6) You hear a joke that someone, somewhere, would probably find offensive. You wish to tell your precocious 17-year-old daughter, who is a student at Yale. The Common Decency Act Version 2 has just passed; it is a $100,000 offense to send such material electronically to a minor. You want to send it anyway--it is a very funny joke.
Again, look at intent. CDA was built as a tool to stop the XXX hardcore pr0n sites and to catch the pedo-kiddie trollers on the 'net. Who's going to be upset and complain? Sender or recipient? Neither, right? Send the mail.
7) Someone claiming to be you starts roaming the Web making wild claims. You want to make sure people know it isn't really you.
This one is a bit harder to solve without some cooperation by others. (A) Complain to their abuse dept at the forger's site. Failing that (maybe he is his own domain), go one ISP level up. Repeat until solved or you get to the point where they say "we don't care". (B) Ignore him. He probably gets off upsetting you and laughs as you frantically chase his every newspost or whatever to discredit him. Ignore him and he'll get bored and move on to his next inane diversion. besides, who are you worrying about him confusing? Smart net people can easily recognize forgeries. They'll know it's not you.
8) You have brought out a remarkable new product. There is a competing product making claims you know are false. You want to make sure anyone going to their site finds out your product is better.
Others will solve your problem for you as in my answers to (1) and (2) above. Since you would be speaking from a position of self-bias, you cannot meaningfully join them in getting the truth out.
9) Your elderly aunt sees a drug advertised on the Web that promises relief from arthritis. She dies shortly after starting to take the drug. You think the drug, and the company that made it, is at fault. Meanwhile the company is sure they didn't have anything to do with it. You want justice.
Never buy version X.0 of software applies to drugs too. You should've made your aunt more suspicious of words from the net as in my answers to (1) and (2) above. Since it's now too late, you're stuck with your own doctor's autopsy findings and the legal system which may or may not help depending on where the 'net drug company is located. Good luck.
10) You are the CEO of Bloomberg News, one of the most prestigious (and expensive) stock information services in the world. An article circulates on the Web, based on a mock-up of the Bloomberg News information page, claiming that PairGain Corp. will be acquired by ECI Telecom. PairGain stock rises 32% in 8 hours. Investigators later find that the false report was created by a PairGain employee about to cash in his options. You want to ensure that your brand is never used like this again.
Put the facts up on your own home page right at the top. Reputable news media will check any circulating rumor with the source as will sane investors with their hard earned dollars. Loons buying based on rumor will weed themselves out of society soon enough.
11) You live in North Korea. Three days ago the soldiers came to your tiny patch of farmland and took the few scraps of food they hadn't taken the week before. You have just boiled the last of your shoes and fed the softened leather to your 3-year-old child. She coughs, a sickly sound that cannot last much longer. Overhead you hear the drone of massive engines. You look into the sky, and thousands of tiny packages float down. You pick one up. It is made of plastic; you cannot feed it to your daughter. But the device talks to you, is solar powered, and teaches you how to use it to link to the Web. You have all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips; you can talk to thousands of others who share your desperate fate. The time has come to solve your problem in the most fundamental sense, and save the life of your daughter.
This is not a question. But assuming you meant to ask, "What should you, as the North Korean person Do?", the answer is simple. Toss the gizmo aside and focus on what's important: taking care of your daughter. She comes first. Tell stories of your plight (this is what what the question implies the device should be used for, right?) only when there's time.
--
OK, maybe that wasn't so quick.
The consideration, here, is to see how perfectly implemented encryption technology can help better a society. This is clearly the point. I have to say I always took a dislike to exams which tried to coerce you to the teacher's side. I think it's obvious from the nature of the test that this man believes technology will defend human rights in the future.
But...
What this theoretical approach ignores is that technology's impact is always moderated by its inherent failures. A technology is never perfect, and you have to examine its potential failures as well to fully understand its impact in the future.
A much better final exam would be:
"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."
OK, I understand pretty much everything on the exam except that. How would an agent to make arbitrage transactions (a buy followed immediately by a sell, or a sell followed immediately by a buy, used to play with rounding errors in currency exchanges) do anything for any of these questions?
Is the professor using some definition of the term I'm not aware of (and apparently few outside the class are too)?
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Hmmm... If you write answers supporting my political agenda, you pass the course.
Imbecile. Cretin. Fool.
Libertarianism is not a "political agenda". It's is objectively verified TRUTH.
EIGHTY MILLION DEAD.
I'll say it again:
EIGHTY MILLION DEAD.
That is what comes of government regulation. Eighty million dead, killed by communism, in this century alone. Libertarianism is not an "opinion"; it is FACT. A student who fails to grasp FACT should fail. A student who considers EIGHTY MILLION DEAD to be an acceptable price to pay for the Clinton Media Show is fundamentally incapable of learning or thinking, and should fail.
Use your happy little plastic Web-box to find out where the other people are who have Internet access (probably via one of the other Web-boxes). Send them a msg explaining that you can better survive if you work together, so you propose a spot to meet. Once you are together, kill the weakest of them with your Web-box and feed your daughter. I don't recall the essay "rules" saying anything about cultural taboos. =]
_______________________
Mello like the Yello, but without the fizz.
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
This one is simple - the woman grabs all the web browser chips she has, sets them all to porn sites, and leaves them where the soldiers can find them.
While the soldiers are engrossed with the free porn, she then grabs some of their food and as many weapons as she can carry.
Even when technology can't make our lives better, it can at least make them different...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
- When the boxes start falling, carefully observe everyone that picks one up.
- Go to the authorities with this information. Take the reward they give you.
- Once the authorities have executed everyone with a box, seize the belongings that have been left behind.
- Revel in your new position as Administrator of Pyongyang Prefecture. Use your authority to acquire the necessary medicines for your daughter.
Welcome to the real world.You missed the point of Question 11 entirely. And I do mean, entirely.
As I said, all the world's knowledge is at your fingertips. Not only that, but it's at the fingertips of everyone else in your situation, and you can communicate with all of them. The free exchange if information is the key to a popular uprising which would finally throw off the oppression mentioned earlier in the question.
That test wasn't about helping others with technology. It was about showing that in the end, the key to justice is knowledge and the free exchange thereof. In the end, if you carry the question further, those devices would make a revolution possible, but the people would be the ones to carry it out. No foreign troops necessary.
You don't get it. The question wasn't meant to make people feel guilty because they had technology. It's about showing them the greatest possible use of that technology: justice.
What I wanna know is - why do most of my answers for questions #1-10 generally point back to my answer to #1, with or without the added technologies mentioned in the exam? That, for me, (aside from the fact that most of the technologies mentioned already exist, but just aren't widely-deployed due to the clue barrier required) is the interesting thing about the quiz.
1) Post your warning to things that get archived. State your claim. Invite debate on the issue. The truth will come out in either the debate or in the bogus reviewer's lack of willingness to debate.
Canonical historical example: Co$ vs. The Net and similar memetic wars.
2) I'd deinstall my network connection :) Seriously - a packet-sniffer and a logger, so that when I got reamed by the next piece of Real^H^H^H^HTrojanNetworkSoftware, I'd have the proof and could fight back with the mechanism outlined in #1).
3a) Search publicly-available archives to see what other people thought about the offerer. Gauge relative clue of proponents vs. opponents on quality of their writing and argument, and watch out for astroturf campaigns. See #1.
3b) If I really want it, go with a trustworthy (see 3a for defintion of "trustworthy") bonding or escrow agent. Interestingly, this is the only answer of mine so far that "requires" any of the new technologies described in the premises to the Final Exam.
4) Story of my life. The unforgeable pseudonymous identities aren't needed, but simply make killing the spammers easier. MAPS, RBL, woo-hoo! Though I would like a law banning all unsolicited commercial email and allowing a private right of action in a dollar amount that would allow me to make a tidy sum off the spam campaign described in the exam.
5) Play anyway over a secure link if I trust and have verified that the people with whom I'm playing are who they say they are and aren't working in an entrapment scheme. The odds of them working in an entrapment scheme for a game of poker are pretty slim, so I'd likely play.
6) Wouldn't send it. If it appears on a screen, and someone's looking at the screen with my daughter, I'm out $100K. CDA-like acts chill free speech, and just like video and audio, the decrypted joke has to be displayed in a form viewable by humans at some point or another. (Unlike my poker game, the odds of there being someone politically-correct and uptight enough to charge me are pretty high at a university.)
7) Second answer where unforgeable pseudonymous identities would make life easier. Nail 'em to the wall credibility-wise using the answer to question #1. Note that it's still pretty hard for an opponent to pull this off on today's 'net, even in the absence of unforgeable pseudonymous identities. Your NNTP-Posting-Host or other IP-related info, if you're coming from a dialup port or cable modem, are pretty hard to credibly forge unless your enemy happens to live in the same geographical area as you do.
8) You can't. Deal with it and employ the techniques of #1 so that users using the techniques of #3 can get to the truth.
9) You can't, unless you have the money to buy a landshark. The techniques of #1 may help with a little payback in PR losses for the company, but if you wanna blow 'em outa the water, you still need a lawyer to sue 'em for negligence.
10) You can't. And #1 won't work either. Lusers will be stupid and not check URLs. Why do you think AOL password-phishers continue to con lusers into thinking that "AOL's billing department" needs their passwords and uses a hotmail.com address? You can, however, as CEO of Bloomberg, afford sufficient lawyermass to dust off and nuke the offenders from orbit. Do so, and mount their heads on pikes, pour encourager les autres.
11a) Collect as many of the subversive devices as possible, smash them, and haul the carcasses in to your local political officer in exchange for food bounties. Feed daughter with proceeds.
11b) Wait a few more years for your government to collapse. Unlike East Germany's government, which collapsed due to the close proximity of "people who had enough food that they envied the people with Levi's Jeans and Sony Walkmans", North Korea's government is collapsing without any help from the West.
If there's not enough food for you and your family, eventually enough of your countrymen will die that the population will drop to the point where the survivors can eat. IF the North Korean leadership survives the depopulation phase, it'll take another 5-10 years between the end of the famine and the time when the people can keep an unsmashed device or two well-hidden and start envying the Walkman-wielding folks elsewhere, leading to an East-German-style final collapse of the government.
Unfortunately, unless you also did 11a) to keep you fed in the interim, your daughter will still be dead. And perhaps you too.
Until you can FTP food or learn to code, write, or play music while starving to death, you won't be able to trade anything in exchange for food drops, and even if you could, the food drops will be detectable and you'll likely be shot for receiving them.
There will always be problems that cannot be solved solely in cyberspace, a fact which is, IMNSHO, profoundly worth knowing.
(My only beef is, as I suspect many slashdotters would agree, that most of us already know this. I'd love to see a followup showing how the students of this class answered these questions, particularly #11. Did they "get it" over the duration of the course, or not?)
SDREN ROF SWEN TON SI SIHT
And to drown everyone in blood? Pretty good solution, isn't it?
Heh heh, you sound like a Heinlein character. Remember the way the teacher spoke in Starship Troopers? I love it, you can't get deeper indoctrination than convincing people that you've derived "should" from "is." (logical notation my left buttock!)
...it still just really points out that technology can be used to change the nature of a problem, possibly (though not necessarily) to a solvable one, but does not in itself solve problems that are not technilogical to start with. the false advertisng questions could just as well be asked of newspaper ads (patent medicine & suchlike of yore).
The varied replies to #11 point this out - the "obvious" (to me) one is 'organize the revolution' but the better one (as in more immediately solving the problem at hand) is the one about searching for edible & medicinal plants and such.
Question 11 is a great thought experiement...right now. By the time it is practical, the problem will not be one of 'which answer' but of how to deal the *set* of differing answers that will be chosen.
And the question has been brought up - if the plane (or cruise missile, whatever) can drop these gadgets, could it not also drop food, medicine, weapons? Or would those be considered and rejected, figuring freely available information and communication to be the most powerful long term weapon?
"The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the sword speaks louder at any given moment." -- Leonard Wibberly
"Just barely" is correct. Thinking like this is fuzzy and probably less than helpful. How is a starving NK peasant even going to understand what this box can do (or what it is...) without the fundamental education that the Western people absorb almost by osmosis.
A more likely scenario is that (a) The peasant will not understand what it is and either throw it away or try to sell it. (b) The peasant will somehow learn how to operate this device, and understand what the opportunities may be. Shortly before being summarily (sp ?) executed for crimes against the state. Anyone ever see any successful revolutions helped by telecommunications ?
Whilst I agree the net is a communications revolution, remember that all power fundamentally comes from the barrel of a gun (Mao). Even your rights to hold this discussion are protected and projected by the most pwerful forces ever seen on this planet.
IMO a slow evolutionary change for these countries is far more likely.
Life is just a bowl of All Bran - Small Faces
That's nonsense. You're not talking to people making millions of dollars in extra income by forcing third-world people to accept lower wages. You're talking to people who have modestly better than average salaries after investing *far* more of their free time than average in studies and unpaid work, and trying to guilt us into giving up the meager benefits of our decision.
If you win and I write someone a check for my "excess" salary, call it a few tens of thousands of dollars, will you send over the hot college girls I didn't get to fuck because I selfishly spent my free time studying instead of chasing tail like my peers?
It's not that I don't care about the horrible conditions people have to suffer in the third world. I do, but I also know enough about how the world is put together to realize that you can't simply go in there and hand out checks without making the situation far worse. Ditto trying to change the rules of the game in the middle. Even if you win, you lose because the next generation will see that the jackboot of compassion will grind everyone down to the same level so you might as well party, party, party since there's no benefit to looking beyond the end of your dick.
To paraphrase the Bible, give a man a fish and he'll eat today... and starve tomorrow. Teach him to fish for himself and he'll eat everyday.
You can offer him a hand up ("here's a fishing pole and how you use it"), but it's ultimately disasterous for you to offer him a hand out ("here's a fish").
These are not technological issues. These are all addressed by our current judge/jury system. The state and federal governments never passed laws about manslaughter or theft. That's the realm of common law. Sure technology will have repercussions in/with all of these issues but there not new issues. Technology will not solve any of them.
1. I believe the English word is liar, this is not a new computing issue.
2. The notion of a Trojan Horse is very old, of course this is a new twist on the old story, yet still something like a 3000 year old trick.
3. Yet another ancients practice, kings used marry off their children to the children of enemy kings to help insure the alliances they forged worked as expected.
4. Yes, advertising is quite new, but is this phenomenon different than junk mail? Or a newspaper boy standing on a corner selling papers in 1900? It's all still advertising.
5. Gambling is illegal. Take appropriate precautions. Various religions were illegal; they went underground. This is one of the oldest issues people contend with. Think 'pagan'
6. See # 5
7. Imposter. There's even a word for it in English. Old issue.
8. Free market competition. Let's see this issue is about as old as the marketplace.
9. Snake oil salesmen? 1800's. Soothsayer? 1500BC I believe. Yet another old issue.
10. Again as old as the marketplace itself.
11. Prime time for religious or political infiltration. The best example I can think of is the rise of fascists in Germany after WW1.
I respect the notion of considering these problems in a more advanced technological sense, but they're very old. These have nothing to do with the future of computing, these are exclusively the future of culture. Should junk mail be regarded any differently than spam? Is a liar something other than a liar online?
I feel the only real answer is to consider motives and intent, via the jury system. With the exception of #11, which I consider a failing of my species in general. We all fail to feed the poor, and house the homeless, but I feel we are doing far better now than say around Y1K.
Ick, Jesus Christ, it's disgusting! I mean, it's like my grandparents' new bathroom was these colors in 1978! EARTH TONES! Yeeeaaarrrggghhh!
Blech, ugh, igghhghh.
Horrible.
I recall, some time ago now, a professor telling me of how he wound up in a "camp" for his anti-government activities. He did not march. He did not protest. He did not assault anyone. He made no guns. He fired no bullets. He made no bombs. He thre no grenades. What heinous act did he commit? He built shortwave radios - ones that worked.
Information machines are powerful tools. Whether they be web-devices, cellphones, facsimilie machine, shortwave sets, printing presses... all are feared by tyrants.
Turk 182
If I was a moderator I'd mark every single post that said "Mark this as flamebait" as "flamebait" simply because I don't think I've seen a moderator do this. Just because a person can anticipate the moderation doesn't mean he doesn' deserve the moderation.
I'm not commenting on this post in particular. Just posts that use this strategy in general.
I bet the moderators will mark this offtopic.
I thought Woody Gutherie's guitar had "This Machine kills grasshopers" I know Pete Seegar's bango says "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces it to Surrender"
Or maybe I'm wrong.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
Dear lamer/troll/etc. - Change your last line to a 'waste of our time' then apply to your comments. I may be wrong, or not a 'technologist' but I believe by bonding agent it is refering to just what that would be in the regular world - someone who bonds a particular activity - the same as many security companies, delivery companies, and others do. Now make the same pitifully small leap in logic regarding escrow agent and attempt to learn.
funniest thing I've read in weeks.
To add insult to injury, "athletic programs" in the same paragraph should have been singular.
. . . I always goof like that when I'm most busy being cocky about how literate I am. I believe that it's a sort of divine punishment for the sin of pride.
7) Someone claiming to be you starts roaming the Web making wild claims. You want to make sure people know it isn't really you.
By now, most of you have probably seen the incredibly virulent 'I kiss you' page. The interesting thing is that the page was an unauthorized copy of one from Turkey, and it ended up getting over a million hits in 3 days. Mahir's strange story is here .
More than being about rising up and crushing your oppesors I think numnber 11 is about education and knowing how to think. The internet for all it's good and all it's bad can provide and education, and an education is the one thing nobody can take away from you - no matter what. And with an education a person can do great things and bring oneselves out of whatever situation he/she might be in.
Oh, I flunk this test! Forget the controversial Q11, I flunk the rest. From what I know of the listed technologies, they are at best a partial solution to the listed problems.
It's naive beyond words to believe that technology, particularly information/communications, will stop human avarice, disagreement, meddlesomeness and other unpleasantries. More likely the technology will be used to further unpleasantness, witness the flamewars, trolls and flamebaiting that hardly existed on paper correspondance.
Sure, some of the listed measures are partial remedies. Some ("pseudonymous") are aggravators when the opposite would work better for some listed problems.
-- Robert
The exam had the following preconditions:
*Unforgeable pseudonymous identities*
Bidirectional, typed, filterable links
Arbitrage agents
Bonding agents
Escrow agents
Digital Cash
Capability Based Security with Strong Encryption
7) Someone claiming to be you starts roaming the Web making wild claims. You want to make sure people know it isn't really
you.
Wouldn't unforgeable psuedonymous identities make this impossible?
It looks like he's part of a group of OSS folks working on technologies to enable just the things he lists at the start of the exam. The language/environment they're using (developing?) is called "E" and tied in with Java.
Is anyone familiar with this development effort? Can anyone point to a serious critique of the crypto and protocols involved?
--- When life gives you lemons, make coffee ---
Which is one of the reasons I'm damned proud to live in America and have the 2nd Ammendment on our side. When the government comes knocking on our door looking for guns, they'll get a faceful of lead from my shotgun.
There are answers to all of his questions without having to resort to his "wish list". He seems to be advocating a position that his New Net offers solutions that weren't available before. Sure you can construct new solutions to existing problems with the technologies provided but a more interesting question (that he doesn't ask) is why would a person use them?
If a competitor makes false claims you can sue them for false advertising and take out ads of your own. Why would bidirectional, typed filterable links be preferable to that? Your elderly aunts dies; you file a product liability suit. Why would someone want a web version? Someone dilutes your trademark; you sue them to discourage others from doing the same. Why would digital fingerprinting be preferable? People are starving in North Korea. Why is sending them a computer better than sending them necessary farm implements?
It's not just why one may or may not be better but why would he think that anyone would pick his high-tech ways?
Those are far more interesting questions, in my mind.
First off, his questions clearly show his Pollyanaish side. Instead of asking "I want to play poker with my friends but poker is illegal here" why not ask "I want to exchange child porn but it is illegal here"? Or perhaps, "My grandmother died and happened to be taking medicine at the same time. I don't think they had anything to do with one another but I want to cash in on it and get some quick money from the manufacturer." Or how about, "I want to lie about my product's capabilities and I want anyone who goes to my competitor's web site to know that my product is so much better and cheaper than theirs." The same technology can and will be used for both so why not admit it and move out of the Star Trek fantasy that it will only be used by the Good Guys for Good Reasons (tm)? The interaction between the possible uses would also be a more interesting question, IMHO.
The questions he asks are kinda stupid because they invite either
a) rote replies of "good answers" or
b) amateurish "bad answers"
Look at the net poker thing. How many people are going to just happen to know how to implement a crypto-system that not only guarantees your anonymity but the validity of the deal, lack of cheating, and enforcement of bets and debts?
All you are doing is making people think that these are easily answered questions -- something you can answer five of in an hour. And then we wonder why so many crypto-systems are designed by amateurs and are so easy to break. It invites answers like, "oh you just have the agents sort it out" hiding non-trivial implementation problems.
We already have lots of great thinkers in the world. The problem is that very few of them can actually practically implement their grand schemes.
I don't want a three paragraph answer that isn't telling me how to avoid laws I don't agree with. I want solutions in the real world and the people who can solve them. Not a bunch of sound bite buzz word compliant "great thinkers".
if( above == sarcasm )
coutisInebriated() == true )
cout"That's some crazy moonshine buddy";
else
***Confused by earlier errors, bailing out***
Please someone tell me this was sarcasm.....
Your point b) is way off base. Why do you think that someone is evil, simple because they choose not to be "devoting their life towards the goal" of helping people that they have never met?
I think you fail to assign a proper priority to the things that should really be important to you. Instead of trying to help 6 billion people equally, I devote my life to helping the people that are important to me. On my priority list, I happen to be tied for #1 (with a very small number of equally important people), so I have no guilt at all about seeing a movie or having a night on the town. Neither should you.
The real evil would be a strict adherence to your doctrine, taking every spare penny over and above the world's average income level, devoting your time and resources to trying to feed the world, and... having the people who are really important to you suffer as a result.
If your daughter was sick, and you needed $100,000 to pay for the cure, and your were just an ordinary Joe without that kind of money to spare, would you a) do everything you could to make her better or b) send $100,000 to the World Health Organization, and possibly immunize thousands of children you don't know. According to your philosophy, the answer is b) - and that, to me, is wrong.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
If the famine is caused by market failures -- as recent Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argues -- then "educating" starving people isn't going to do anything.
It's the old saw about give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime
The problem with this is that if it takes him a week to learn how to fish and then another six weeks to actually catch anything you haven't done him the slightest good. He's just a dead fisherman instead of a dead farmer.
Besides, there is much more to it than just knowing how to fish. You might be interested in checking out some of Amartya Sen's writings, including On Poverty and Famine (I think that's the title).
Marc Stiegler, the author of this page, also wrote a science-fiction book called "Earthweb" which is an excellent introduction to many of these ideas and an exciting speculative story about the world we might live in one day.
If you're curious about the future of computing or interested in hypertext and collaboration, at all, definitely check it out (ISBN 067157809X).
Imagine how quickly a digital democracy could pop up in such a situation.
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Two words, man. 'Fax Machine'.
I wish I could find a reference to it somewhere, but 5 minutes searching in Google failed. I do recall that it was one of a small number of things that firmly established Minitel in the minds of the French whilst it was still taking off.
Wade.
if we can assume the web box has a GPS
in it (seems reasonable) and given that it
talks he sohuld be able to just yell into
it "my daughter is starving and has no more than a
day to live". Maybe the box dropping fairies
can drop a pack of rice. Then we can get on with
the fishing lesson.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Yeah, right, as if it's just our species. Everything from bacteria to whales woould do (and have done) the same thing. I bet aliens from another planet would do it too. The answer isn't in biology, psychology, sociology, or religeon. It's just math -- game theory and optimization. When resources are finite, it is basically "good" strategy to advance your selfish interests at the expense of others -- unless they retaliate.
What you ought to ask is not why we do it, but what we can do to stop it (assuming we want to).
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Repressive governments don't like communications technologies because they allow people to self-organize. Assuming the villagers figured out how to talk to one another, the army would be in big trouble, even if no one dropped them any weapons. When people are starving, they've nothing to lose. One brave, hungry man with a molotov cocktail can take out a tank (it's true!) A thousand can overrun a garrison and plunder its food and weapons. History has shown us that if the folks in such a situation can organize, their government won't be around much longer. Remember the Czar? How about the French royals? The printing press was the invention that facilitated the revolution in both cases. The internet is the printing press of the late 20th century.
If he gets the handy dandy web doodad, he can call a village meeting, get the other farmers together and organize them based on information and tips he gets on the web. Then they go to local bank or farming cooperative and borrow enough money to get a credit card ($100 is fine). Once they have this it's on to E*trade to buy some Redhat shares....
U know the rest....
Bad Command Or File Name
where are those moderator points....
oops! Here comes the Spanish inquisition with
some "hard, common-sense objective reality"
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Um... why have you replied to my post ??
Your comment quotes someone else and clearly pertains to a completey different view point than mine... so much for threads!
---
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
> Man I am knee deep in technology and I have no f*cking clue what a "bonding agent" is. WTF is he
:}
> talking about.
Um, superglue perhaps?
Let me adapt question 11 to something that I know is occurring today in the USA, and which is of grave concern to me.
12) You live in Black Mesa, Arizona. For the last 25 years or so the US government and agents thereof, as well as the Hopi Tribal Council and its agents, have been destroying your way of life. You live in an arid land, and recently they capped your well. Then they came and took away all your livestock. The strip mine next to your home is filling the air with poisons, and the pristine aquifer under the sacred mountain is drained to carry coal to massive power plants. On February 1st 2000 they will permanently expel you from your sacred home. They want to move you to land polluted with uranium tailings. A person learns of your plight via the Internet. How does this person help?
For more information see:
http://www.magiccookie.com/activism/ black-mesal
http://www.theofficenet.com/~redorman/welcome.htm
http://www.solcommunications.com/
http://www.migrations.com
I can provide more information to assist in answering this question to those interested. (My home page is at http://www.magiccookie.com.)
In response, you wrote: "I majored in English Lit. in college. I'm now a software engineer, and a good one, too. The other senior s/w engineer here majored in Chinese or something at Williams. He's a damn good programmer. Incidentally, both of us consciously chose to get an education rather than memorize our way through a glorified trade school."
Since you were able to successfully become a software engineer without the formal training, I think you just helped him prove his point. The critical thinking skills you use in your job are most likely innate and/or acquired in high school or earlier. Some people choose to apply those skills to the analysis of literature, other people apply them to the analysis of mathematical algorithms.
From your perspective, computer science programs are "glorified trade schools". If that's what you think, then I don't think you know what computer science is (hint: it's not about learning to program).
I personally know several English majors who graduated without having expanded their thinking ability at all. Such people are capable of regurgitating other people's points of view as gleaned from the literature they studied. However, they are not very adept at independent thinking. Of course, I also know engineers who are quite capable of regurgitating the theories, techniques, algorithms, etc. developed by others but are not capable of thinking beyond what they are taught. I don't think that you can say that certain fields of study breed better critical thinking skills.
The primary traits that separate most students of the liberal arts from students of technical fields are the former's propensity for creative thought and the latter's propensity for logical thought. But well developed thought processes and critical thinking skills are valuable in all fields of study.
If we ever meet, I expect that you will be able to educate me on various perspectives that make up the human experience. I also expect that I will be able to educate you on physical interpretations of the universe we live in. We may be differently educated, but we are both educated, and we both have critical thinking skills that are independent of our education.
Wouldn't it be great if all those jobs got realistic and required only the education that's actually needed to do the jobs.
Actually, no I don't think it would be great. When I was in college, I took courses and completed projects in various fields of mathematics, physics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, cognitive science, chemistry, literature, culture studies, diplomacy and foreign policy, and economics. Also, through my membership in a few campus organizations plus a fraternity and ROTC, I learned to understand and deal with people, appreciate other people's points of view, and developed leadership & management skills. In my current job, I may only use 5% of the academic material presented to me in college. However, college was the most valuable experience in my life.
I know that many people didn't have as many positive experiences in college as I did. However, I strongly think that turning traditional 4 year colleges into 1-2 year technical trade schools will deny students many experiences that will prove to be more valuable to them in the long term.
Don't believe me? When was the last time you thought about the genocide in Kosovo? If the answer is six months ago, then we're not talking about the same thing. And why? The information is out there, it's in the news, it's all over the place if you look for it, and still, nobody knows or cares.
Build the internet as much as you want, the world just ain't changing. And if you have an idea of why the culture that transformed an entire continent into one vile, big mall will not do the same to any newly conquered domains, let me know.
AC
you can't help everyone, its called natural selection. Those who are stronger and have advantages will survive. The animal kingdom works that way, and it used to work that way with human. Technically 10,000 years ago if you had poor eyesight you would be dead, same thing if you had a disease like asthma.
This question is pretty impractical.
Obviously if someone needed to communicate to get help the internet provides the means to doso, but
If the peasent has no food but has interent access, perhaps they should try renting there net access to there buddies, or SELLING THERE COMPUTER !
Or if they have access to the internet they have access to a phone, and probably other people as well, they could try VOICE communications.
Go here. Hit `Parent', or this. It's Signal 11's comment. He replied to your comment here.
:-)
To reiterate: Signal 11 made a comment. You replied to it. He replied to your reply. I replied to his. You became confused, replied to my reply thinking it was a reply to your original reply, when, in fact, it was a reply to a reply to your reply. Got it?
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
1. Post comprehensive review to /. and get root on their servers and make the front page redirect to the /. article, install backdoor so you can keep it up for a week or so.
4. Smurf the companies servers, crude but effective.
6. Havent you heard of Hotmail or Yahoo mail?? DUH!
7. Find them, get on ICQ etc, trace them, stalk them, and then scare the living hell out of them
9. Semtex the CEOs car as a negotiating strategy, then settle for 10% of yearly turnover
10. Have the man shanked in jail as an example to all that cross your company
11. Look at all the anarchy FAQs, learn how to kill a man easily with your bare hands, and take out the soldiers, then roast them, tastes like chicken you know, fava beans and Chianti are optional.
Why is it that moderators never get this kind of sarcasm?
You are a would-be communist/fascist dictator living in a relatively free, relatively prosperous country. You want to institute a reign of terror that will reduce the population to abject poverty and submission. However, the citizens of this country have had internet access for a generation. They take for granted the ability to access, publish and communicate any information in the world, instantly, anonymously and securely. What do you do?
Marc Stiegler is asking you to imagine a world of stronger cryptographic mechanisms. Digital certificates, secure communication, secure electronic cash and digital contracts. All things that anyone reading Bruce Schneider would want.
Marc also tries to imagine how lots of mass-produced, small, cheap, computing devices would alter the nature of freedom.
Instead, we get of "answers" that simply ignore the whole spirit of the question, which is imagine a world that has a more secure network infrastructure.
Why even bother with "Ask Slashdot" when the aggregate intelligence level of the readership here has been demonstrated to be slightly above 14 year old teens with a hyperactivity disorder, and a profoundly warped view of their importance in the world?
I would ask Marc Stielger to imagine a world where the Zetetic Institution of David's Sling really exists, and where people are cured of irrationality and knee-jerk opinions.
Unforgeable pseudonymous identities
Identitities for what ? For people ? For machines ? Do we all get one of these or only some of us ?
Bidirectional, typed, filterable links
What kind of links ? Links as in hypertext links ? Links as in data links ? Fileterable by whom ?
Arbitrage agents
A very vague term as far as I can see, unless it has some specific meaning that I've not heard of. Could mean pretty much anything.
Bonding agents
Don't know what this means, perhaps somebody would be kind enough to explain it.
Escrow agents
OK, I know what escrow is, I think. But is this a computational algorithm or an FBI member !?
Digital Cash
Seems clear enough, but what form of digital cash ? One that can be exchanged for coins and notes or a totally virtual system. Is it accepted universally or by only a smaller subsection of the net population ?
Capability Based Security w/ S. Encryption
How strong is strong ? Strong enough that nobody can crack it, ever, or just strong enough to be mostly secure most of the time ?
I think you could write a whole essay just on the capabilities themselves !
Something screwy seems to have happened with my comment format. I don't have hard thresholds set, but that's still how it comes out... I no longer see "X replies below current threshold". It's confused me, sorry.
---
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
And I do wish that the petty bashing of other people's choice of whether or not to attend college and/or for how long and/or choice of major would just STOP. One of the best professors I had was my radio production prof, who was an adjunct with two years of undergrad work under his belt. I don't think I ever worked harder in a class in my life, or ever loved it as much. Sometimes it's better to learn from a guy who's been out in the field for 30 years than someone with the fancy pieces of paper on the wall.
And of course: social science isn't just for people who "can't hack the hard stuff," science/math/comp-sci majors aren't all heartless and arrogant, an English or other classical liberal-arts type major isn't useless (my dad's got some interesting stats on that one that I don't recall right now), business majors aren't all there just to make a quick buck when they get out, etc.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
The way things are right now, you can choose whether you want to have an anonymous identity or an unforgeable one.
Want others to be sure it's you? Sign your message with your private PGP key, which is in turn signed by a mutually trusted party. To pretend to be you, someone would need to get your private key.
Want to be completely anonymous? Send an email through a nice long mixmaster chain. Then only the first remailer in the chain has any way of possibly knowing where the message came from, and only the last has any way of knowing where the message is headed. And if you encrypt the original with the recipent's public key, only they can know what it says. And if you want a response, you can use a nym.
The point is that both these things are possible already, but they are not in wide use, and a person has to go to some trouble to accomplish an unforgeable or anonymous identity.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
The way things are right now, you can choose whether you want to have an anonymous identity or an unforgeable one.
Want others to be sure it's you? Sign your message with your private PGP key, which is in turn signed by a mutually trusted party. To pretend to be you, someone would need to get your private key.
Want to be completely anonymous? Send an email through a nice long mixmaster chain. Then only the first remailer in the chain has any way of possibly knowing where the message came from, and only the last has any way of knowing where the message is headed. And if you encrypt the original with the recipent's public key, only they can know what it says. And if you want a response, you can use a nym.
The point is that both these things are possible already, but they are not in wide use, and a person has to go to some trouble to accomplish an unforgeable or anonymous identity.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Hardly a revolt....surely ?
Life is just a bowl of All Bran - Small Faces
From his home page, Stiegler describes the link to the exam as follows:
After reading this, the exam makes a whole lot more sense. He is saying that with the web technologies listed at the top of the exam, it's possible to solve many human problems without needing to create and enforce laws.
This makes #11 all the more interesting. It may well be a reminder that not all problems can be solved by technology, or merely that the technology isn't mature enough for everything. I can see how a reliable communication and information device described would be very useful for the inhabitants of a really oppressed place, but it couldn't solve the immediate needs very quickly.
True enough. However, as anyone living in the West today can attest, changes in technology lead to strong changes in culture. This course sounds like it was all about examining this set of coming technological advances to determine their impact. Even more than that, to find ways of channeling this technology into being a strong tool for freedom, and not for oppression.
I have a pretty good idea it wouldn't be highly complimentary to the original poster... all I am really going to say is that I agree with Buaku for more. something that makes you good only by bringing yourself to the lowest common denominator is not likely to help, in the long run. there are things one has to do for oneself, as well as others. right now, I'm working on my project for a compilers class, instead of working at McDonald's and sending the $$ off somewhere. your "virtue" does not seem to come from the act of giving, but from the act of not taking. those are sometimes compatable, but not often. becasue I will make more money, I consume more (I pay tuition, I pay for internet access, and a computer, not to mention those expensive books). later, I will give more away than Joe at MickeyD's, but I consume more, making me more evil.
so which is king, eh? comsuption or donation?
Lea
Out of the questions only #11 seems to be interesting and somewhat realted to one possible future. Fairly many in their answers thought this scenario cannot happen, but when thinking how well people in rich western countries know the situation of people living in 3rd world countries I don't think it's too far that we start thinking that what they actually need is Internet connection.
BTW, what if the box itself is communicating with couple servers emulating web at some place in North Korea and they've just dropped them to find out which citizens are not loyal to the government?
Go into an exam.
Answer the questions you would have liked to see.
Ignore the actual questions.
Do you pass?
The original Doctor Dark.
Yeah, trash the puke green. Besides, I went and bought a slashdot hat, and now it no longer matches the site. Viva la slashdot green. Please put it back.
The 'evil ones'[tm] could use these boxes to entrap those who might be 'thinking' about resistance. It asks you for you name and if you are pissed off with the sitch. You say yup and they come and pick you up.
Trust takes more than a secure socket methinks.
ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/etext/gutenberg/e text98/anthm10.txt
Communications is essential. Both for staying in power, and taking over power, whether it's peaceful or not. Take your average banana republic, and wait for the next coup. What are the 2 things they go for first? The presidential palace, and the broadcasting stations.
remember that all power fundamentally comes from the barrel of a gun (Mao)
Real control isn't the barrel of a gun; real control is control over communications. Who's more powerful in the US: Bill Clinton, or Oprah Winfrey?
Not all revolutions were based on violence. Witness what happened 10 years ago in the countries in Eastern Europe. Revolutions, but not fought with guns. Helped by telecommunications? You bet. Why do you think the people in those countries thought they would be better off without their government, and why didn't it happen 20 years before? Because 20 years earlier, their government could control the communications much more than it did 10 years ago.
-- Abigail
>it could easily suck up the next half hour of your life in unproductive thought, and quite possibly more
Yes, it has done for many of you! What a load
of crap. I detest up-their-own-arse idiots like
this!
I don't even know what the terms mean! I'm sure
I could understand the concepts once they pull the
Wankers Dictionary out of their arse and use plain
English.
What a waste of brainpower.
I'm glad I left school at 16 and got a real job
instead of pissing about with pointless wank like
this!
Why do I have to be in brown? It's too near looking at shit. Brad
Style sheets based on several different color schemes that the users can pick through their preferences. The HTML gets thrown out at us with one little line changed based on our prefs and then we can look at /. in whatever colors we want!
"He's a farmer, In a low-tech society." The reason societies remain low-tech is the absence of information. If the farmer had had the information sooner (albeit generations sooner), he wouldn't have been low-tech.
Sure, the information of today may not feed (all) the children of today. But the information of today WILL feed the children of tomorrow.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I will attempt to answer the question according to my perception, please let me know your thoughts.
First of all, we need to analyze the problems our theoretical person has in front of him, in order of importance:
Within the framework of his "new Web" and using comon sense, he could attempt to solve the problems in the following way:
For his daughter he could contact one of the many humanitarian groups that have a presence on the internet, inform them of his daughter's condition, and plea for help from them. He could also research different medical sites that may detail symptoms that his daughter may have, as well as remedies for what ails her.
For his/his daughter's nutrirional needs he could read articles on more efficient planting techniques, or even learn another skill that he could use in order to gain income to purchase food.
Using the "enhanced capabilities" we were given at the biginning of the exam he could create a unforgeable pseudonymous identity for himself as well as use capability-based security with strong encryption (to prevent his obviously oppressive government from spyig on his communications, theoretically) and, again, spread the word of his (and presumably his people's) plight and maybe even get a digital cash fund with which he could travel to a big city and trade for real goods.
To deal with the soldiers as many pointed out, he could start a information-based revolution. Gettting the word of the oppression out may help garner allies or get support from humanitarian efforts. Here again the aforementioned "enhanced capabilities" com into play.
Lastly, and unfortunately more realistically, he could travel to a big city and sell the device which would probably get him enough money to feed himself and daughter for a little while, and to perhaps get his daughter medical care.
Well...those are my thoughts on the subject. Let me know what you think.
Carlos Noguera
Web Development
Millersville University
While clearly the prof was trying to show that free speech via technology can combat oppression, the question has a few more folds. Note that: 1) It is by no means certain that this gift from above will save the child, and 2) There is no doubt that this gift from above could not have come about any other way -- the peasants would not only have not had the technology, they would not have had the freedom necessary to refine it to that point. The lesson? If we do not understand, embrace, and protect our freedoms, and demand that our technologies be used to enhance freedom rather than quash it (remember, the reason that no one's dropping food or arms in that farmer's field is that the government is developing nuclear weapons), we could find ourselves in the same situation as that farmer, and with no means of escape.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Unforgeable pseudonymous identities
Bidirectional, typed, filterable links
Arbitrage agents
Bonding agents
Escrow agents
Digital Cash
Capability Based Security with Strong Encryption
--
Thanks.
Bzzzt!
"a starving mother and daughter"
s/mother/parent/
The parent's gender was never mentioned.
World Domination was a fscking JOKE! It was never intended to be taken seriously! That's MS-think!