Yes. I would love to see the list of bureaucrats imprisoned under similar regimes for non-emergency use of this "emergency only" access. Due to sophisticaed data compression, I feel confident that I can store this list in a zero-byte file.
"Is it time for the government to roll out legislation that will enforce safety standards for car computers as well?"
Here's a suggestion: make the maker of the car liable for successful remote-takeover attacks (not involving physical access). For actual damages. No matter what kind of waiver or "user agreement" the user is asked to sign (in fact, make those explicitly *illegal* if they attempt to subvert this, except in the case of experimental vehicles of very limited numbers). That way the lawyers would squash the "bright ideas" of the marketing guys, until there's security technology that management is willing to bet the company on. And, oh yes, if the government asks for a "remote kill switch"? Have the *government* be liable in court for abuse of it. That'll probably shut down *that* bright idea, too. For a little while.
This will probably retard things like self-driving cars for years. And that wireless access point in your car would for sure no longer be able to talk to the car itself. But I believe this would be a good thing. And if cars come, from now on, with only three indicator lights, that's a shame. But probably worth it. I don't like the idea of Unknown Hackers doing to highway traffic all over the country what they did to Sony's IT.
I'd come down hard on the last line as still relevant.
/*
* If the new process paused because it was
* swapped out, set the stack level to the last call
* to savu(u_ssav). This means that the return
* which is executed immediately after the call to aretu
* actually returns from the last routine which did
* the savu.
*
* You are not expected to understand this.
*/
(credit to http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/...)
And yes, let me forestall a lot of comment -- as the link above mentions, the code associated with this comment in the v6 UNIX kernel was wrong.
"...but the news is promising if in fact it will bring more information to the information-starved masses of North Korea".
I don't see why the existence of ".kp" domains will bring more information to the folks in North Korea, any more than the words "Democratic People's Republic" in the country's official name would make it owned by the people, democratic, or a republic.
Labels have power, sure, but not always the way one hopes.
The bald guy with the coffee cup is named "Wally" -- don't expect him to get any work done. Don't piss off the lady named Alice -- she turns violent at times. Dilbert would be a nice guy for your sister to marry, but it's not going to happen. Steer clear of HR entirely. And, oh yes, it's not polite to mention your boss's pointy hair to him.
This has "IT Strategy by Partly Comprehended Magazine Article" written all over it.
I love Australia and New Zealand, but a consequence of pervasively metered internet service means that you must check what an AU/NZ hotel means by "internet access". As one of the bandwidth hogs who (for example) downloads podcasts and uploads pictures, I found that it was startlingly easy to hit some limits. Further, the limits can bite you.
When checking a hotel in a country like AU or NZ, be sure and ask:
Is there an upper limit on how much I can download/upload without an additional fee? Some AU/NZ hotels would solemnly assure me that all hotels have such limits and such pricing schemes -- but this wasn't actually true.
If I go over the limit, does internet access stop? What would I have to do if I want it to start up again? Bear in mind that you might not know when those video podcasts you subscribed to last month will all suddenly have new episodes, or when your boss will send you a gig or two labeled "Better look at this" -- and fees on the order of (as I recall) $0.10/megabyte can really add up when a gigabyte is involved!
For markets to work, both sellers and buyers must be sharp dealers when it comes to pricing. At least once I changed hotels when "unlimited internet" turned out to be "unlimited in the sense that there's no upper limit on how much we'll charge you." After that, I made sure to have a tediously detailed conversation about internet pricing when choosing hotels.
I think hotels *should* charge by the bit if they want to -- I just think that they'll have to get by without my patronage -- just like a hotel that wanted to charge extra for towels, by the liter for hot water and toilet flushing, and by the joule for electricity (including elevator rides!) would find me checking out quickly, or more likely, never staying there.
If you don't want this sort of regime, use your wallet to try to stop it -- hunt around, find hotels and service providers who say things like "No, we used to charge by the bit, but it turned out to be a source of bad feeling, and not worth the money".
It's not inevitable that we'll wind up with by-the-bit pricing -- but it's inevitable that bean-counters will try it. And, who knows? Maybe that is the way things should work. But right now, you have a choice.
>if you had something important, but the mention of it made those who were the supposed experts in the field run screaming, just how would you go about bringing the knowledge out into the open without getting quashed?
This is a simple, straightforward question, with a simple, straightforward answer. I'm told that in most areas in the US, you are allowed to sell power to the power utilities -- for example, if you have solar power, you can sell power back and "make your meter run backwards".
If you have something "really important", then borrow some money, build a small generation plant, sell some power. Use the money you get from selling the power to pay off the credit card company and to build a larger plant. Repeat.
Well before the time you're generating multi-gigawatt power (and maybe even before!) someone from the power company will politely ask you how you're doing it. Offer to sell them the answer. If they still pay no attention, then get options to buy a lot of local land, pump your output up to a couple of terawatts, and offer to refine aluminum for folks. Use the land options to buy the land and put in smelters and such. Offer to boost stuff into orbit with lasers. Offer to annihilate garbage by feeding it into ultra-high-heat furnaces and then separating the results with giant mass spectrometers, and sell the resulting pure elements on the spot market.
And if you want to bedevil people, simply deny that you're using cold fusion. Defy them to prove otherwise.
You will get rich, the local power company will be able to shut down its coal/nuclear/wind/oil plants, and, I promise you, people will be real curious how you're doing it.
On the other hand, if you just have a *feeling* that you've got something really important, when, in fact you don't *really* have something important, this won't work, and you'll have wasted nobody's time but your own. And, oh yes, the credit card company will want to be paid.
That's probably why frauds and cranks don't do this. The former know they won't succeed -- the latter learn it.
If you really want to sign such a thing, and you don't want to actually reveal
your inventions, try this:
Here's the list of my inventions:
Invention #1: described with specificity by a file the sha-1 hash of which is fe207a704564d25d6497a188af39a098513b5517.
Invention #2: described with specificity by a file the sha-1 hash of which is 1e0a7b6da52d265ba5a4cb5d720567071ff76e66.
Invention #3...
And so on. Make sure their lawyer comprehends this.
Back in the 1980's, I worked for a software company as a sysadmin. I got a lot of statements from users that happened to be wrong, so for three days, I kept track. Whenever a user would make a statement about what the computer had done, I did my best to find out if his statement was correct.
In those days, youngsters, we used ascii terminals rather like a single 'xterm'. Few people knew that these devices could 'scroll back'. This turned out to be the biggest single tool I used. When a user would say "It said this, and I did that", I'd scroll back, or check a log file, or do something else if I could. If what they said was inconsistent with these mechanical reports, I counted it as verifiably wrong. Otherwise, I just assumed it was probably OK.
I concluded that 40% of what users said about computer behavior in those three days was verifiably wrong. Sometimes it was wrong in a little way. Sometimes it was really, really, wrong.
I've no idea if this is still true: we're all a lot more used to computers and their ways. At the time, though, I realized that this is probably how a lot of magic tricks work: people think they know a lot more about what they saw than they really do.
I should emphasize that I don't think anyone was lying or really even that careless.
The Sysadmin truths I took away were: "Don't trust the details of user reports" and "Don't be mad at users for giving you the wrong information".
Since the report gets into PK and psychic phenomema and even claims that some of the stuff done in that area was "repeatable" (at the bottom of page 57, for example), it's worth mentioning that there is an attempt to see if such things are "real".
I thought this was mostly a very helpful comment, but I wish to cast some rhetorical light on one aspect of this question.
The poster says:
In general, a private citizen wouldn't have much need for the information so releasing to the public would essentially benefit a very small set of people/companies.
and
I'm not sure that I have a need to see it.
I would like to suggest that, while it's a legitimate philosophical question to ask, the question of whether a citizen "needs" some government information should not factor importantly into the evualuation of whether a law is good in a free society.
The problem is that a citizen's needs are a very poor index of what he should be allowed to do or to have. For example, I don't "need" a swimming pool, but I have one. If "need" were a criterion, almost nobody would have a pool, an SUV, eat out at restaurants, vote, be able to print a newspaper, be able to buy a newspaper, send their kid to private school, or, for that matter, read slashdot.
Our actions would be even more circumscribed if a self-interested government got to define the word "need".
It's clear to me, btw, that the original poster wasn't talking about "need" in this way, exactly. I just wanted to make sure that the notion of "need", once introduced, wasn't used without reflection -- that is, without my 2 cents being added in!
Now, how do I feel about whether government, having bought this information, should be compelled to disgorge this information? Why, yes! Government supposedly exists partly to internalize externalities of exactly this sort. If government doesn't wish to become the source for that information, perhaps it should contract with private parties for appropriate summaries, rather than the complete geographic database. Alternatively, a wise government might well conclude that its citizens, are, on balance, better off if they all have at least the potential ("need" or not!) to have this information for a nominal price....
IANAL, but it seems to me that if it's in a treaty, It doesn't matter much if it is a violation of your fifth amendment rights -- right there in the constitution (Article VI, Clause 2) it says:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
In other words, constitutional law is coequal with treaties. Under the rules of "statutory construction", all else equal, more specific recent rules trump more general older ones.
Now, the treaty, as I understand it, calls on us to make laws, which presumably would be trumped by the Constitution, but I wouldn't be sanguine -- we came very close to losing privacy for our encryption keys before 9/11 (at least on exported items) and it is now "a different world" to hear some of the pessimists talk.
It's funny how the folks in a profession really want mandatory certification, and the rest of us don't care. Of course, what this means is that there are a lot of "yes" calls to legislators, and few "no" ones.
A few years later, when the certification is required, the legislators and the folks in the field are richer (because certification can only limit the competition). While I'm sure there are plenty of good-hearted folks who want mandatory certification, the rest of us shouldn't forget that it confers some of the benefits of a monopoly on the Chosen Ones.
Voluntary certification, on the other hand, has the benefit of enriching mainly the certifiers -- but it's a happy springboard for making it mandatory, and once again Peter (the public) is robbed to pay Paul (the Certified).
You might object that anyone can get the certification, after a while. Um, no. The Certified, after a time, notice that they paid all this money and went to all this trouble, and the "other" folks are still entering the profession. We can't have that! And so artificial limits, subtle or blatant, are put on the number of newly certified folks. The ones already certified, of course, are grandfathered in.
This has happened a lot folks -- from Doctors to Social Workers to Hairdressers (!) to New York City Cabdrivers.
Don't be fooled by it -- in the end, the public pays if a monopoly (mandatory certification) is granted.
By the way, there are always good-sounding reasons to ask for certification, but they tend to be confused. If the certifying authority offered to pay for the mistakes made by those they certified, that might be worth something -- but that's not what the Certifiers normally advocate. It would be a service to the public rather than one more artificial trough with room for only so many snouts.
cold fusion and other "freepower"
on
Excess Heat
·
· Score: 1
I've found that there are a lot of folks interested in "free power". Typically, they imagine something about the size of a shoebox putting out a couple of kilowatts. People used to talk to me about how they'd seen plans for a gadget that would do this, or how they knew someone who knew someone who was hot on the track of this, and just needed some money for "a bigger test".
This is a common dream, and, who knows, may someday come true. For those who claimed there was already such a device, I had a good reply.
At the time (and I don't know how common this still is) Ohio had a law: the local power utility had to buy power from you if you offered it to them, at some prevailing rate (I think it was the wholesale rate).
If someone has invented such a thing, I would point out, they need not look for investors. They need not reveal their device's "secret". They should take their test rig, hook it up to the power company, and feed them a kilowatt or so. If that doesn't impress them, use the profit (it's all profit, right?) to buy a bigger setup, and feed them a megawatt. Keep scaling up, until someone comes calling. I promise -- someone will come calling!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. I would love to see the list of bureaucrats imprisoned under similar regimes for non-emergency use of this "emergency only" access. Due to sophisticaed data compression, I feel confident that I can store this list in a zero-byte file.
"Is it time for the government to roll out legislation that will enforce safety standards for car computers as well?"
Here's a suggestion: make the maker of the car liable for successful remote-takeover attacks (not involving physical access). For actual damages. No matter what kind of waiver or "user agreement" the user is asked to sign (in fact, make those explicitly *illegal* if they attempt to subvert this, except in the case of experimental vehicles of very limited numbers). That way the lawyers would squash the "bright ideas" of the marketing guys, until there's security technology that management is willing to bet the company on. And, oh yes, if the government asks for a "remote kill switch"? Have the *government* be liable in court for abuse of it. That'll probably shut down *that* bright idea, too. For a little while.
This will probably retard things like self-driving cars for years. And that wireless access point in your car would for sure no longer be able to talk to the car itself. But I believe this would be a good thing. And if cars come, from now on, with only three indicator lights, that's a shame. But probably worth it. I don't like the idea of Unknown Hackers doing to highway traffic all over the country what they did to Sony's IT.
* If the new process paused because it was
* swapped out, set the stack level to the last call
* to savu(u_ssav). This means that the return
* which is executed immediately after the call to aretu
* actually returns from the last routine which did
* the savu.
*
* You are not expected to understand this.
*/
(credit to http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/...) And yes, let me forestall a lot of comment -- as the link above mentions, the code associated with this comment in the v6 UNIX kernel was wrong.
For those who didn't recognize it, "TBOM" means, I think, "The Book Of Mormon".
"...but the news is promising if in fact it will bring more information to the information-starved masses of North Korea".
I don't see why the existence of ".kp" domains will bring more information to the folks in North Korea, any more than the words
"Democratic People's Republic" in the country's official name would make it owned by the people, democratic, or a republic.
Labels have power, sure, but not always the way one hopes.
The bald guy with the coffee cup is named "Wally" -- don't expect him to get any work done. Don't piss off the lady named Alice -- she turns violent at times. Dilbert would be a nice guy for your sister to marry, but it's not going to happen. Steer clear of HR entirely. And, oh yes, it's not polite to mention your boss's pointy hair to him.
This has "IT Strategy by Partly Comprehended Magazine Article" written all over it.
I love Australia and New Zealand, but a consequence of pervasively metered internet service means that you must check what an AU/NZ hotel means by "internet access". As one of the bandwidth hogs who (for example) downloads podcasts and uploads pictures, I found that it was startlingly easy to hit some limits. Further, the limits can bite you.
When checking a hotel in a country like AU or NZ, be sure and ask:
For markets to work, both sellers and buyers must be sharp dealers when it comes to pricing. At least once I changed hotels when "unlimited internet" turned out to be "unlimited in the sense that there's no upper limit on how much we'll charge you." After that, I made sure to have a tediously detailed conversation about internet pricing when choosing hotels.
I think hotels *should* charge by the bit if they want to -- I just think that they'll have to get by without my patronage -- just like a hotel that wanted to charge extra for towels, by the liter for hot water and toilet flushing, and by the joule for electricity (including elevator rides!) would find me checking out quickly, or more likely, never staying there.
If you don't want this sort of regime, use your wallet to try to stop it -- hunt around, find hotels and service providers who say things like "No, we used to charge by the bit, but it turned out to be a source of bad feeling, and not worth the money".
It's not inevitable that we'll wind up with by-the-bit pricing -- but it's inevitable that bean-counters will try it. And, who knows? Maybe that is the way things should work. But right now, you have a choice.
>if you had something important, but the mention of it made those who were the supposed experts in the field run screaming, just how would you go about bringing the knowledge out into the open without getting quashed?
This is a simple, straightforward question, with a simple, straightforward answer. I'm told that in most areas in the US, you are allowed to sell power to the power utilities -- for example, if you have solar power, you can sell power back and "make your meter run backwards".
If you have something "really important", then borrow some money, build a small generation plant, sell some power. Use the money you get from selling the power to pay off the credit card company and to build a larger plant. Repeat.
Well before the time you're generating multi-gigawatt power (and maybe even before!) someone from the power company will politely ask you how you're doing it. Offer to sell them the answer. If they still pay no attention, then get options to buy a lot of local land, pump your output up to a couple of terawatts, and offer to refine aluminum for folks. Use the land options to buy the land and put in smelters and such. Offer to boost stuff into orbit with lasers. Offer to annihilate garbage by feeding it into ultra-high-heat furnaces and then separating the results with giant mass spectrometers, and sell the resulting pure elements on the spot market.
And if you want to bedevil people, simply deny that you're using cold fusion. Defy them to prove otherwise.
You will get rich, the local power company will be able to shut down its coal/nuclear/wind/oil plants, and, I promise you, people will be real curious how you're doing it.
On the other hand, if you just have a *feeling* that you've got something really important, when, in fact you don't *really* have something important, this won't work, and you'll have wasted nobody's time but your own. And, oh yes, the credit card company will want to be paid.
That's probably why frauds and cranks don't do this. The former know they won't succeed -- the latter learn it.
In those days, youngsters, we used ascii terminals rather like a single 'xterm'. Few people knew that these devices could 'scroll back'. This turned out to be the biggest single tool I used. When a user would say "It said this, and I did that", I'd scroll back, or check a log file, or do something else if I could. If what they said was inconsistent with these mechanical reports, I counted it as verifiably wrong. Otherwise, I just assumed it was probably OK.
I concluded that 40% of what users said about computer behavior in those three days was verifiably wrong. Sometimes it was wrong in a little way. Sometimes it was really, really, wrong.
I've no idea if this is still true: we're all a lot more used to computers and their ways. At the time, though, I realized that this is probably how a lot of magic tricks work: people think they know a lot more about what they saw than they really do.
I should emphasize that I don't think anyone was lying or really even that careless.
The Sysadmin truths I took away were: "Don't trust the details of user reports" and "Don't be mad at users for giving you the wrong information".
The James Randi Educational Foundation has been offering a $1 Million prize for some time now to anyone who can repeat such phenomena under agreed-upon viewing conditions.
There's one-eighth of the budget right there -- if you can deliver the "desktop demo".
The poster says:
and
I would like to suggest that, while it's a legitimate philosophical question to ask, the question of whether a citizen "needs" some government information should not factor importantly into the evualuation of whether a law is good in a free society.
The problem is that a citizen's needs are a very poor index of what he should be allowed to do or to have. For example, I don't "need" a swimming pool, but I have one. If "need" were a criterion, almost nobody would have a pool, an SUV, eat out at restaurants, vote, be able to print a newspaper, be able to buy a newspaper, send their kid to private school, or, for that matter, read slashdot.
Our actions would be even more circumscribed if a self-interested government got to define the word "need".
It's clear to me, btw, that the original poster wasn't talking about "need" in this way, exactly. I just wanted to make sure that the notion of "need", once introduced, wasn't used without reflection -- that is, without my 2 cents being added in!
Now, how do I feel about whether government, having bought this information, should be compelled to disgorge this information? Why, yes! Government supposedly exists partly to internalize externalities of exactly this sort. If government doesn't wish to become the source for that information, perhaps it should contract with private parties for appropriate summaries, rather than the complete geographic database. Alternatively, a wise government might well conclude that its citizens, are, on balance, better off if they all have at least the potential ("need" or not!) to have this information for a nominal price....
In other words, constitutional law is coequal with treaties. Under the rules of "statutory construction", all else equal, more specific recent rules trump more general older ones.
Now, the treaty, as I understand it, calls on us to make laws, which presumably would be trumped by the Constitution, but I wouldn't be sanguine -- we came very close to losing privacy for our encryption keys before 9/11 (at least on exported items) and it is now "a different world" to hear some of the pessimists talk.
It's funny how the folks in a profession really want mandatory certification, and the rest of us don't care. Of course, what this means is that there are a lot of "yes" calls to legislators, and few "no" ones.
A few years later, when the certification is required, the legislators and the folks in the field are richer (because certification can only limit the competition). While I'm sure there are plenty of good-hearted folks who want mandatory certification, the rest of us shouldn't forget that it confers some of the benefits of a monopoly on the Chosen Ones.
Voluntary certification, on the other hand, has the benefit of enriching mainly the certifiers -- but it's a happy springboard for making it mandatory, and once again Peter (the public) is robbed to pay Paul (the Certified).
You might object that anyone can get the certification, after a while. Um, no. The Certified, after a time, notice that they paid all this money and went to all this trouble, and the "other" folks are still entering the profession. We can't have that! And so artificial limits, subtle or blatant, are put on the number of newly certified folks. The ones already certified, of course, are grandfathered in.
This has happened a lot folks -- from Doctors to Social Workers to Hairdressers (!) to New York City Cabdrivers.
Don't be fooled by it -- in the end, the public pays if a monopoly (mandatory certification) is granted.
By the way, there are always good-sounding reasons to ask for certification, but they tend to be confused. If the certifying authority offered to pay for the mistakes made by those they certified, that might be worth something -- but that's not what the Certifiers normally advocate. It would be a service to the public rather than one more artificial trough with room for only so many snouts.
This is a common dream, and, who knows, may someday come true. For those who claimed there was already such a device, I had a good reply.
At the time (and I don't know how common this still is) Ohio had a law: the local power utility had to buy power from you if you offered it to them, at some prevailing rate (I think it was the wholesale rate).
If someone has invented such a thing, I would point out, they need not look for investors. They need not reveal their device's "secret". They should take their test rig, hook it up to the power company, and feed them a kilowatt or so. If that doesn't impress them, use the profit (it's all profit, right?) to buy a bigger setup, and feed them a megawatt. Keep scaling up, until someone comes calling. I promise -- someone will come calling!