It was supported for a while, but then trolls started to include left-to-right tags to mess up the layout of the site. And more of that kind of text flow tags exist in Unicode that can thoroughly mess up the site. Some examples exist, and are quite funny to see. Use google on the topic or so, shouldn't be that hard to find.
IIRC basically/. had a few options:
let the trolls have their way. Not a good idea.
blacklist: filter out all the offending unicode characters. Typically after the act.
whitelist: allow only "safe" unicode. Even more work than 2.
switch back to non-Unicode and mess up some non-English languages.
The last option of course was the easiest, and didn't mess up too much (after all English doesn't use those accented letters and so). I'd also like to see Unicode supported for the occasional odd character but I do understand/.'s decision to revert to the old way.
Install flashblock. That takes care of 90% of the annoying stuff. Animated GIFs are quite rare these days, all the flashing is done in flash. It also takes care of those very irritating floaters.
Web based can be easy to develop UI wise, and flexible client wise (no need to install client software, easy maintenance of the software server side only).
The big question to me would be: how can a hacker get access to flight control in the first place? There is no need for those computers to be exposed to the Internet - and definitely not for those web servers to talk to anyone outside their own subnet. I do assume at least we're not talking about hackers that have gained physical access as then there is much more to worry about than just some software vulnerabilities.
In case of TPB, shouldn't the actual culprits be convicted first? That at least would give solid, legal proof that copyright infringement has occurred with their help. Of course everyone knows that is the case but a public secret is not enough for a proper judge.
But their intent has clearly been to defraud/infringe copyright/etc.
Their intent was to help other people sharing files. The intent was probably not even copyright infringement, at most it could be argued that they intended to help other people commit copyright infringement.
IIRC one of the issues with this trial is that TPB has been convicted as accomplice to copyright infringement, while there is no culprit. Legal people wonder how one can be accomplice to a crime that has no culprit, and thus has not been proven in a court of law. No-one has been convicted of using TPB to distribute infringing files. Also before no-one has been convicted as accomplice to a crime without having a culprit convicted as well.
"...I hope that reign of ignorance is over."
don't count on it, you know about embrace/extend/extinguish?
Now I can see how they can do that with protocols (e.g. the IE extensions to HTML), business models get harder and open source... well you can embrace it, and extend it, and both are only making it stronger, that is the nature of the beast isn't it? The FOSS model can not be extinguished. It's in a way like a cancer. You can merely try to slow it down, but as long as there are people that are either idealistic or have no interest in keeping their sources secret, the FOSS model will survive.
Doing damage with a car may damage other cars, other people's property, and cause injury or death. The driving license is to help prevent those accidental damages, and the insurance is to cover you financially if it still goes wrong. An insurance will likely not cover damage done intentionally.
Computers are not so. There is no way that by normal use of a computer you can cause serious damage to other computers. Let alone hurt or kill people. Those matters almost have to be intentional, and thereby proving serious control over the computer and knowing what you are doing.
Your analogy is seriously flawed. Cars and computers are analogies when it comes to technical fields, not when it comes to liability as a result of using them.
It means a computer has become a commodity, an appliance, rather than a high-tech toy. And that in itself is a good thing. Joe Sixpack should not need to know how the internals of his computer work, just the basics. I do expect Joe Sixpack to know about Windows and preferably the existence of alternatives, about a hard disk and what it does and how big he should want it, what a processor speed roughly means and whether he would need 1GB or 2GB or 4GB of memory for his needs. I don't expect him to be able to install an operating system, hunt down drivers to make it all work, partition the hard disk in the process, care about whether it is NTFS or FAT or whatever, and be able to know what the information on a blue screen means. I don't know how the internals of my digital camera work, but I do know what the megapixel and zoom functions mean for example. But if there is a problem with it I go back to the shop.
To add the obligatory car analogy: I don't know how an internal combustion engine works, but I do know what it means to have say a 1.6 diesel engine in your car. When something about the car is broken I call my garage, I'm not trying to have it fixed. I know I have to add fuel, have to check oil now and then (though in modern cars that's also less and less), and how to add water for the windscreen sprinklers (dunno how you call those things in English). That's enough.
100 years ago you would have to be able to fix your own car: they were new technology, quite rare, and for a select audience only. Cars were technically simpler at the time which also helped a lot. The same for computers. 20 years ago we were working with DOS, people owning a computer and actually being able to use it could normally also install the OS, and do low-level operations. That is not necessary anymore.
When a computer breaks down and can not start up anymore it is often NOT trivial to figure out what is wrong. An error message is not always caused by the direct error: some minor corruption in your video driver, and then the image on your screen starts playing up. Or is it really the monitor that is not good? It's not that easy.
OK time to stop, I start rambling, I think the point is clear.
Try explaining that to Joe Sixpack. When Windows doesn't work for whatever reason, the computer is "broken" and needs to be taken to a shop for repair. They can not tell the difference between broken hardware or broken software (and software hick-ups may of course be caused by broken hardware that still mostly functions - it is not always that easy to tell, even by experts).
Self-destruct is imho a very apt description.
Maybe it should be used more. Then more people would feel the pain of being infected. Of those 100,000 computers I can not imagine they can actually use the data of more than a handful of people for serious crimes. All the rest of the people is not affected until the malware disables their computer.
They would still only go after hard disks that are known to have contained interesting information. Dragnet scanning like was done for TFA doesn't sound feasible at all with zeroed disks.
Assuming such a drive can be recovered in the first place, it will not be a trivial task to do. AFAIK there are currently no commercial offers to recover such a disk, so it may be so that the government/CIA/MI5 are be able to, it's then for sure really really tough.
And why should they in the first place? Enemies that want to keep their data secret will use encryption for a start, and then presumably destroy disks physically when disposing of them. It is easier to kidnap someone and get the information that way.
OK the US military has some mighty expensive wars to finance, but I doubt they are this short on cash that they would have to sell hard disks on e-bay of all places. Instead of simply tossing them in a shredder. It is not that they are worth much or so.
I would expect that this is a drive from some employee's personal computer who took home data (either on USB or copied it to his home computer over the VPN) to work on it, and later sold his hard disk on eBay.
Well, as the saying goes: in the land of blind, one-eye is king.
In other words you do not need to be very competent to do a job. Being able to do it, and being more competent (less incompetent) than the average Joe is enough.
I totally agree. Having a botnet on your government's computers is enough of trouble already I'd say. It's quite sad that even governments can not keep their computers safe.
If you are talking about legal requirements here then it should say something like "the device originally comes with a built-in imaging device". Not something ambiguous like "supports a camera".
Then pretty much all laptops fall under this. They all support cameras. If not built-in they will via the USB port. Even my seven-year-old SonyEricsson phone (T69i or so, I forgot the type number) supported a camera: an external click-on one, but designed specifically for this phone.
That point is totally moot as has been pointed out before in other comments: patching is not an option. At all. It is usually not allowed for a start. Any changes to the system, even as minor as a small patch, would require full re-certification of the whole system. And that will last many many patch-Tuesdays, and cost a lot of money.
The big corps that really need IE6 for their broken internal sites are maybe 30% of the total Internet users. And 10-15% of the consumer web sites such as ebay and youtube (assuming employees are doing most of their surfing from home - not sure if that's a safe assumption though). Thus IE6 may soon slip under 30% market share with such an aggressive update policy, and it becomes too small of a market share to specifically build sites for. IE7-8 and FF become the standard, more modern features will be used, and with a little luck IE6 users find themselves with a so much outdated browser that they can not access the sites anymore, or that a lot of the rich content doesn't work anymore which does work at home, and within those corps they start demanding upgrades. That can only be a good thing, even if it is to the more standards compliant IE8.
Even more interesting: I recall from other stories on/. (sorry, too lazy to look up links) that even in "compatible mode" it breaks many IE6-specific web sites. Which I'd say is a good thing.
And these regular updates of IE will break even more web sites that still check for specific versions of a browser, and require one to use IE5.5 or IE6, but refuse IE7. I'm quite sure there are still some of those around.
All in all more versions of web browsers is good. All may have different quirks, but I can understand a web developer check for two, maybe three browsers or subversions, but if there are three different IE versions with all their unique quirks, each having 40% market share, plus FF, plus Safari, plus the rest, then the only thing a developer can do is code to standards. They can not maintain subversions anymore. That is for sure a good thing: for the developers (less work) and for the users (it doesn't matter anymore which browser one uses).
The KillerNIC can not do this independently of the host like this device can. With Microsoft's prototype you can put your main computer to sleep (not off) and it continues to download.
The smart bit I see is the interaction: the take-over of the network state by the NIC from the main PC and vice versa, and the transfer of torrent files (this of course includes the downloaded bits and so), current connections, and whatnot. That is quite cool and afaik not done before.
So this one for a change appears to be a real innovation by Microsoft. Good to see that those thousands of smart guys can now and then pull off something that at least on the surface is innovative. They should do that more, seriously. Maybe Microsoft should, like e.g. Google and Philip's Natlab of old, give all their research employees a day a week full freedom to work on their own pet projects.
Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)
Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk.
That were, at the time, very serious computing resources, but nothing special for a university to have available. Nowadays this will be the same: just add a zero or two for to the specs. It is even something that a normal start-up with venture capital funding can afford, start up a little smaller and it becomes living room material. 1000/1000M Internet is readily available even for consumers, so even bandwidth is not a problem. For starting up there is no need to index "the Internet", just a large enough chunk of it. 5-10% will do for starters, really, almost all you want to know is there already, just the more obscure stuff not but that will come automatically in time. Even Google is indexing only a part of the Internet, and I wouldn't be surprised if it is only about 50-70% of all the pages available.
It may have become harder to enter the search market than it was, but certainly not undoable. Sergei and Larry started this at their university as research project, using stuff they had sitting around there. No reason why it can not be done again that way.
Google at the time had a.o. AltaVista to contend with, at the time the number-one search engine. It was set up by some college students in their dorm room, who had a better idea about searching/indexing web pages, and managed to implement that idea. Then it went live from a single computer for their friends. Who told their friends, and soon the whole campus used them, etc.
Google never advertised their service, it was pure word of mouth. They just got better results than the competition. And they got started of course in a geek environment, so the first word got out and spread quickly.
Good chance that the "next Google" starts up just like that. Hell, I bet The Pirate Bay started up that way. Craigslist did so at least - just a guy called Craig who started a local classifieds page for friends and friends of friends.
Yes the stakes are huge but just throwing money at the problem generally won't get you far, I would say good chance it gets you doomed even as big money often takes away the focus from the innovation that is needed.
Alpha, however, will probably be a worthy challenger for Wikipedia and many textbooks and reference works. Instead of looking up basic encyclopedic information there, users can just go to Alpha instead, where they will get a direct answer to their question, as well as a nicely presented set of graphs and other info.
So this means we just get the straight answer in the future. No more thinking for yourself, no more understanding where the answer comes from, no more critical thinking about the validity of the answer. E.g. TFA mentions that the answer to how many Internet users there are in Europe includes the factoid that there are only 93 in Vatican City. Is this true? Well it must be because Alpha gives it, right? Or maybe it is not true? But why would it be not true and what would be a more realistic number? How many people do really live/work in Vatican City, for example? How does this relate to the number of Internet users?
An encyclopedia search will give one heaps of background information that is highly relevant to the question, and gives a lot of understanding about the answer. It makes the answer more than just a number.
For example if one would look up the question "what is the national flag of the USA", the answer is of course "the stars and stripes", and may include an image. But now I happen to know there is a story behind it: why this number of stars, and that number of stripes, and those colours. I bet this will be in Wikipedia's answer but not in Alpha's answer.
Search engines like this sound really interesting to me, and can be very useful, though it will never replace textbooks and encyclopedias. There is just so much more to answer to a query than just a straight number. And there are so many questions that can not be answered that way, such as "why is polcarbonate so much more temperature resistant than polyethylene?" for example. The full answer to this question includes details about the chemical make-up of the two polymers, and how polymer chains work. That is what textbooks are for.
Slashdot Mirror
It was supported for a while, but then trolls started to include left-to-right tags to mess up the layout of the site. And more of that kind of text flow tags exist in Unicode that can thoroughly mess up the site. Some examples exist, and are quite funny to see. Use google on the topic or so, shouldn't be that hard to find.
IIRC basically /. had a few options:
The last option of course was the easiest, and didn't mess up too much (after all English doesn't use those accented letters and so). I'd also like to see Unicode supported for the occasional odd character but I do understand /.'s decision to revert to the old way.
Install flashblock. That takes care of 90% of the annoying stuff. Animated GIFs are quite rare these days, all the flashing is done in flash. It also takes care of those very irritating floaters.
Web based can be easy to develop UI wise, and flexible client wise (no need to install client software, easy maintenance of the software server side only).
The big question to me would be: how can a hacker get access to flight control in the first place? There is no need for those computers to be exposed to the Internet - and definitely not for those web servers to talk to anyone outside their own subnet. I do assume at least we're not talking about hackers that have gained physical access as then there is much more to worry about than just some software vulnerabilities.
In case of TPB, shouldn't the actual culprits be convicted first? That at least would give solid, legal proof that copyright infringement has occurred with their help. Of course everyone knows that is the case but a public secret is not enough for a proper judge.
But their intent has clearly been to defraud/infringe copyright/etc.
Their intent was to help other people sharing files. The intent was probably not even copyright infringement, at most it could be argued that they intended to help other people commit copyright infringement.
IIRC one of the issues with this trial is that TPB has been convicted as accomplice to copyright infringement, while there is no culprit. Legal people wonder how one can be accomplice to a crime that has no culprit, and thus has not been proven in a court of law. No-one has been convicted of using TPB to distribute infringing files. Also before no-one has been convicted as accomplice to a crime without having a culprit convicted as well.
"...I hope that reign of ignorance is over." don't count on it, you know about embrace/extend/extinguish?
Now I can see how they can do that with protocols (e.g. the IE extensions to HTML), business models get harder and open source... well you can embrace it, and extend it, and both are only making it stronger, that is the nature of the beast isn't it? The FOSS model can not be extinguished. It's in a way like a cancer. You can merely try to slow it down, but as long as there are people that are either idealistic or have no interest in keeping their sources secret, the FOSS model will survive.
Doing damage with a car may damage other cars, other people's property, and cause injury or death. The driving license is to help prevent those accidental damages, and the insurance is to cover you financially if it still goes wrong. An insurance will likely not cover damage done intentionally.
Computers are not so. There is no way that by normal use of a computer you can cause serious damage to other computers. Let alone hurt or kill people. Those matters almost have to be intentional, and thereby proving serious control over the computer and knowing what you are doing.
Your analogy is seriously flawed. Cars and computers are analogies when it comes to technical fields, not when it comes to liability as a result of using them.
It means a computer has become a commodity, an appliance, rather than a high-tech toy. And that in itself is a good thing. Joe Sixpack should not need to know how the internals of his computer work, just the basics. I do expect Joe Sixpack to know about Windows and preferably the existence of alternatives, about a hard disk and what it does and how big he should want it, what a processor speed roughly means and whether he would need 1GB or 2GB or 4GB of memory for his needs. I don't expect him to be able to install an operating system, hunt down drivers to make it all work, partition the hard disk in the process, care about whether it is NTFS or FAT or whatever, and be able to know what the information on a blue screen means. I don't know how the internals of my digital camera work, but I do know what the megapixel and zoom functions mean for example. But if there is a problem with it I go back to the shop.
To add the obligatory car analogy: I don't know how an internal combustion engine works, but I do know what it means to have say a 1.6 diesel engine in your car. When something about the car is broken I call my garage, I'm not trying to have it fixed. I know I have to add fuel, have to check oil now and then (though in modern cars that's also less and less), and how to add water for the windscreen sprinklers (dunno how you call those things in English). That's enough.
100 years ago you would have to be able to fix your own car: they were new technology, quite rare, and for a select audience only. Cars were technically simpler at the time which also helped a lot. The same for computers. 20 years ago we were working with DOS, people owning a computer and actually being able to use it could normally also install the OS, and do low-level operations. That is not necessary anymore.
When a computer breaks down and can not start up anymore it is often NOT trivial to figure out what is wrong. An error message is not always caused by the direct error: some minor corruption in your video driver, and then the image on your screen starts playing up. Or is it really the monitor that is not good? It's not that easy.
OK time to stop, I start rambling, I think the point is clear.
Try explaining that to Joe Sixpack. When Windows doesn't work for whatever reason, the computer is "broken" and needs to be taken to a shop for repair. They can not tell the difference between broken hardware or broken software (and software hick-ups may of course be caused by broken hardware that still mostly functions - it is not always that easy to tell, even by experts).
Self-destruct is imho a very apt description.
Maybe it should be used more. Then more people would feel the pain of being infected. Of those 100,000 computers I can not imagine they can actually use the data of more than a handful of people for serious crimes. All the rest of the people is not affected until the malware disables their computer.
They would still only go after hard disks that are known to have contained interesting information. Dragnet scanning like was done for TFA doesn't sound feasible at all with zeroed disks.
Assuming such a drive can be recovered in the first place, it will not be a trivial task to do. AFAIK there are currently no commercial offers to recover such a disk, so it may be so that the government/CIA/MI5 are be able to, it's then for sure really really tough.
And why should they in the first place? Enemies that want to keep their data secret will use encryption for a start, and then presumably destroy disks physically when disposing of them. It is easier to kidnap someone and get the information that way.
Exactly what I was thinking.
OK the US military has some mighty expensive wars to finance, but I doubt they are this short on cash that they would have to sell hard disks on e-bay of all places. Instead of simply tossing them in a shredder. It is not that they are worth much or so.
I would expect that this is a drive from some employee's personal computer who took home data (either on USB or copied it to his home computer over the VPN) to work on it, and later sold his hard disk on eBay.
Well, as the saying goes: in the land of blind, one-eye is king.
In other words you do not need to be very competent to do a job. Being able to do it, and being more competent (less incompetent) than the average Joe is enough.
Euhm... you mean... there are other computers than Windows computers out there?
I totally agree. Having a botnet on your government's computers is enough of trouble already I'd say. It's quite sad that even governments can not keep their computers safe.
If you are talking about legal requirements here then it should say something like "the device originally comes with a built-in imaging device". Not something ambiguous like "supports a camera".
Then pretty much all laptops fall under this. They all support cameras. If not built-in they will via the USB port. Even my seven-year-old SonyEricsson phone (T69i or so, I forgot the type number) supported a camera: an external click-on one, but designed specifically for this phone.
That point is totally moot as has been pointed out before in other comments: patching is not an option. At all. It is usually not allowed for a start. Any changes to the system, even as minor as a small patch, would require full re-certification of the whole system. And that will last many many patch-Tuesdays, and cost a lot of money.
This IS the patch. Just that it's so broken it has to be replaced.
The big corps that really need IE6 for their broken internal sites are maybe 30% of the total Internet users. And 10-15% of the consumer web sites such as ebay and youtube (assuming employees are doing most of their surfing from home - not sure if that's a safe assumption though). Thus IE6 may soon slip under 30% market share with such an aggressive update policy, and it becomes too small of a market share to specifically build sites for. IE7-8 and FF become the standard, more modern features will be used, and with a little luck IE6 users find themselves with a so much outdated browser that they can not access the sites anymore, or that a lot of the rich content doesn't work anymore which does work at home, and within those corps they start demanding upgrades. That can only be a good thing, even if it is to the more standards compliant IE8.
Even more interesting: I recall from other stories on /. (sorry, too lazy to look up links) that even in "compatible mode" it breaks many IE6-specific web sites. Which I'd say is a good thing.
And these regular updates of IE will break even more web sites that still check for specific versions of a browser, and require one to use IE5.5 or IE6, but refuse IE7. I'm quite sure there are still some of those around.
All in all more versions of web browsers is good. All may have different quirks, but I can understand a web developer check for two, maybe three browsers or subversions, but if there are three different IE versions with all their unique quirks, each having 40% market share, plus FF, plus Safari, plus the rest, then the only thing a developer can do is code to standards. They can not maintain subversions anymore. That is for sure a good thing: for the developers (less work) and for the users (it doesn't matter anymore which browser one uses).
The KillerNIC can not do this independently of the host like this device can. With Microsoft's prototype you can put your main computer to sleep (not off) and it continues to download.
The smart bit I see is the interaction: the take-over of the network state by the NIC from the main PC and vice versa, and the transfer of torrent files (this of course includes the downloaded bits and so), current connections, and whatnot. That is quite cool and afaik not done before.
So this one for a change appears to be a real innovation by Microsoft. Good to see that those thousands of smart guys can now and then pull off something that at least on the surface is innovative. They should do that more, seriously. Maybe Microsoft should, like e.g. Google and Philip's Natlab of old, give all their research employees a day a week full freedom to work on their own pet projects.
That is exactly what any self-respecting BOFH would do. Except that he would find a way to have the boss pay for the materials as well. Double.
Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)
Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk.
That were, at the time, very serious computing resources, but nothing special for a university to have available. Nowadays this will be the same: just add a zero or two for to the specs. It is even something that a normal start-up with venture capital funding can afford, start up a little smaller and it becomes living room material. 1000/1000M Internet is readily available even for consumers, so even bandwidth is not a problem. For starting up there is no need to index "the Internet", just a large enough chunk of it. 5-10% will do for starters, really, almost all you want to know is there already, just the more obscure stuff not but that will come automatically in time. Even Google is indexing only a part of the Internet, and I wouldn't be surprised if it is only about 50-70% of all the pages available.
It may have become harder to enter the search market than it was, but certainly not undoable. Sergei and Larry started this at their university as research project, using stuff they had sitting around there. No reason why it can not be done again that way.
Google at the time had a.o. AltaVista to contend with, at the time the number-one search engine. It was set up by some college students in their dorm room, who had a better idea about searching/indexing web pages, and managed to implement that idea. Then it went live from a single computer for their friends. Who told their friends, and soon the whole campus used them, etc.
Google never advertised their service, it was pure word of mouth. They just got better results than the competition. And they got started of course in a geek environment, so the first word got out and spread quickly.
Good chance that the "next Google" starts up just like that. Hell, I bet The Pirate Bay started up that way. Craigslist did so at least - just a guy called Craig who started a local classifieds page for friends and friends of friends.
Yes the stakes are huge but just throwing money at the problem generally won't get you far, I would say good chance it gets you doomed even as big money often takes away the focus from the innovation that is needed.
Alpha, however, will probably be a worthy challenger for Wikipedia and many textbooks and reference works. Instead of looking up basic encyclopedic information there, users can just go to Alpha instead, where they will get a direct answer to their question, as well as a nicely presented set of graphs and other info.
So this means we just get the straight answer in the future. No more thinking for yourself, no more understanding where the answer comes from, no more critical thinking about the validity of the answer. E.g. TFA mentions that the answer to how many Internet users there are in Europe includes the factoid that there are only 93 in Vatican City. Is this true? Well it must be because Alpha gives it, right? Or maybe it is not true? But why would it be not true and what would be a more realistic number? How many people do really live/work in Vatican City, for example? How does this relate to the number of Internet users?
An encyclopedia search will give one heaps of background information that is highly relevant to the question, and gives a lot of understanding about the answer. It makes the answer more than just a number.
For example if one would look up the question "what is the national flag of the USA", the answer is of course "the stars and stripes", and may include an image. But now I happen to know there is a story behind it: why this number of stars, and that number of stripes, and those colours. I bet this will be in Wikipedia's answer but not in Alpha's answer.
Search engines like this sound really interesting to me, and can be very useful, though it will never replace textbooks and encyclopedias. There is just so much more to answer to a query than just a straight number. And there are so many questions that can not be answered that way, such as "why is polcarbonate so much more temperature resistant than polyethylene?" for example. The full answer to this question includes details about the chemical make-up of the two polymers, and how polymer chains work. That is what textbooks are for.